President Joe Biden’s appeal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel “avoid more mass displacements and civilian deaths” is tacit admission that, to this point, Israeli forces have done nothing of the kind. Aid agencies are utterly overwhelmed trying to deal with the displacement of 80% of a population of 2.3 million. Not satisfied with the devastation of the northern half of Gaza, Israel ordered evacuations in areas in the south of Gaza that are already overrun with with refugees from the north. Israel then proceeded to bomb those areas including that around the European Hospital where tens of thousands of refugees had sought shelter.
Despite attempts by U.S. officials and U.S. press to pretend that the Israeli aerial bombardments, missile strikes, and drone attacks are all carefully executed to avoid civilian casualties, the Palestinian death toll has already passed 18,500, (more than 65% women and children) with many thousands more unaccounted for. The Israeli military claims that “thousands” of those killed were militants. You see, the Israeli military can tell through the rubble of a collapsed building, which bodies were civilian and which were militants.
What sort of war is it in which one side suffers casualties exceeding 18,000, while the other suffers 116 in its military. What sort of war is it when one side is armed with tanks, armored vehicles, planes, missiles, and drones, all state of the art (and supplied by our government), while the other has little beyond small arms. Brings to mind the Nazi’s “war” on the Warsaw ghetto. Annihilation, terror, and the destruction of infrastructure is Netanyahu’s whole purpose — render Gaza a wasteland and, by pressing an utterly one-sided war that completely uproots the lives of all the people living in Gaza, make life as unendurable for all Palestinians as possible.
Since it is fairly certain Israel will never actually get away with incorporating Gaza into the Israeli state, Netanyahu wants to make sure Palestinians will never be able to live there either. His goal, now racing to completion: Reduce Gaza, in its entirety, to rubble. U.N. human rights chief, Volker Turk said civilian suffering was “too much to bear.” Well, not for America’s politicians. Republicans and Democrats alike, stand by nodding and shrugging, a very few murmuring faint protests, the rest in craven silence, all endlessly pandering to Netanyahu’s swinish coalition, fully, utterly complicit in the humanitarian outrage that is being committed there, trembling with fear that reprimand of any Israeli policy might result in them losing votes next election; trembling, and sure to vote to allow Israel continued access to the most powerful and sophisticated weaponry in the world, all in the name and at the expense of the American taxpayer.
Netanyahu is guilty of war crimes, he and his entire cabinet, but the American government is fully complicit. Netanyahu, his supporters, and Hamas are all peas in a pod, each every bit as brainlessly vindictive as the other, all thriving by keeping hatred and vengeance alive. So I suggest we find a large abandoned ship and put all the followers of Hamas on board with Netanyahu, all his colleagues, supporters, and all the West Bank squatters, each armed with a baseball bat; tow the ship out in the Atlantic and abandon it to let them go at one another. The rest of the world could breath a sigh of relief to be rid of them. The Israelis and Palestinians who remain behind will have the opportunity to work out a peaceful settlement for themselves, free from the fanatics in their ranks who have made peace impossible for more than seventy years.
Stephen Hussey lives in Greenfield.