Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.
Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt.
The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.
The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire.
It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.”
The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing. [Ed.: Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on Palestine, has spoken of “genocidal” statements by Israeli officials. Here a professor who directs Holocaust studies says Israel is committing genocide.]
Raz Segel is an Israeli who directs the Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University.
He says that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that Israeli leadership openly displays the special intent to commit genocide against International law. pic.twitter.com/6Ru8ru7lQE
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 24, 2023
The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 6,546 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias.
The U.S.S. Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles last Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel.
Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank.
At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office.
Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners
“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”
Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.
Leave Gaza or Die
The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier has been redeployed to the Persian Gulf. (U.S. Navy, Ruben Reed)
The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region.
The U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.
Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest.
It has given Gazans two choices – leave Gaza or die.
Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera.
Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.
A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.
The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid tracks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.
Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza.
Long War Ahead
The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.
When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.
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Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion, including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled.
Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.
Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.
Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned:
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted.”
Left to Rot in Sinai
Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel.
During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes.
They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce.
They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.
Palestinians Squeezed Out
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on Oct. 9. (Creative Commons/Naaman Omar apaimages)
Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked.
Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem.
Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between January 1, 2009 and 7 October 7, 2023, according to data from the U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Since the October 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.
Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.
Erase the Memory of Them
Israel makes no secret about its intentions. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.”
Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”
The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops. “Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live. Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
Terminate Military Aid
Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class?
What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?
“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”
Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter.
We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel.
Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
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Hey, Fight Back against Fasc-theid… the stakes: weapon$ $ale landgrab (plus supporting disinfo)… classic human conflict naturally follows.
So who are the ”Human Animals” now Netenyahu?
“Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.”
As Carolyn wrote, there will never be such an embargo. That is obvious. But if you are going to indulge in wishful thinking, then don’t bother with an embargo. A simple phone call from Biden or Blinken would suffice to halt Israel in its tracks. The claims that Israel manipulates the US ruling class is just so much gaslighting.
The ‘Human Cattle’ diatribe has been a repeat of all the other Zionist mass murder practices and machines currently on view. It has of course been the latest in such imperial rampage: circa 1948-2023. We are after all dealing with those ‘human cattle’ who deign to be termed as humans.
Prior to this those ‘lesser breeds without the law’ living mainly in Africa and East Asia are needed to be reminded of their station, quite ruthlessly. For example: It was asserted that the native brain differs materially from the European brain, and there is a definite racial inferiority in quantity as well as quality in the actually brain tissue.” This was written as late as 1937. ”The British Empire and the Backward Races.” This was par for the course by the likes of white elite who frankly treated the poor and lower orders as ‘human animals’. The treatment meted out to the unfortunate Palestinians was n doubt kept under wraps for the next massacre.
The only thing that will put a stop to the egregious sins and criminality of the U.S. and Israel is for the rest of the world to shun us, refuse to do business with us or accept any payment for commercial exchange in U.S. dollars. Only by destroying the economic power of the two countries will justice finally be served. Speaking as an American citizen and military veteran who served my country for 28 years, I am sorry to say that that day can’t come soon enough. I realize the hardship it will entail for me, my family and other hard-working Americans, but I see no other way to bring my troubled and reckless country to its knees in an attitude of contrition, humility and repentance than for America to complete its decline into perdition, but without the economic means to further its imperial project. A nation may be a liberal representative democracy or an imperial hegemon, but not both. Civil liberties and the public welfare die when a nation insists on being boss of the world. Our founders knew that, cautioned against it and their warnings are not only unheeded but unknown to our citizens, who have no knowledge of the past and no clue about the future. Ignorance is dangerous; arrogance is fatal. I pray daily for justice, speak out when I can, and consult my faith, but I have no illusions that people of wisdom, good will and compassion are able to change the tragic and disastrous course of the U.S.and the racist state of Israel. Our leaders are fools and our political system has utterly failed to be a corrective to our worst impulses and propensities. Humility and repentance is the only way forward for a nation that thinks itself “exceptional” and “indispensable.” If we will not change by internal process then change will be imposed from beyond our borders. That is an immutable “law” of human history, and no nation, no matter how powerful, can escape it.
Let’s replace every reference to Israel with the words Turkey and Azerbaijan, and every reference to Gaza/Palestine with Armenia /Artsakh and you have a carbon copy of what’s happening on the ground. The only difference is that all public and journalistic outrage for the latter was and is being suppressed. In the end analysis, public awareness for the Palestinian plight isn’t worth a hill of beans in the halls of power or battleground. There is nothing gratifying in that realization for the willfully forgotten Armenians. Even more insulting is that the Christian Right avidly supports Israel and has turned its back on Armenia—the first Christian nation. Peace and justice in the afterlife seems to be the only thing one can wish for.
Customary humanitarian international law, which applies to all nations, holds that “[t]he use of starvation of the civilian population as a method of warfare is prohibited.” hxxps://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule53 (.)
Siege warfare *in a war between nations* is permitted but Israel’s Manual on the Laws of War explains even were it the case (it is not) that the prohibition of starvation “clearly implies that the city’s inhabitants must be allowed to leave the city during a siege.” (Ibid., § 137. ). Of course, Egypt did not cooperate on this. But that is an obligation that is on Israel, not Egypt. So it is plain that even were one to posit that Gaza is a nation, Israel is violating its own law here. Legally, it would have to allow Gaza civilians into Israel.
But we are not dealing here with a war between nations. Gaza is legally Occupied Territory, as recognized by the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, and the UN Security Council. Israel, as the Occupying Power has a, non-delegable duty under the Fourth Geneva Convention to protect and care for the civilians in the Occupied Territory of Gaza. For example, in the section entitled Provisions Common to the Territories of the Parties to the Conflict and to Occupied Territories, we learn for example that:
ART. 29. The Party to the conflict in whose hands protected persons may be, is responsible for the treatment accorded to them by its agents, irrespective of any individual responsibility which may be incurred.
ART. 31. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties.
ART. 32. — The High Contracting Parties specifically agree that each of them is prohibited from taking any measure of such a character as to cause the physical suffering or extermination of protected persons in their hands. This prohibition applies not only to murder, torture, corporal punishment, mutilation and medical or scientific experiments not necessitated by the medical treatment of a protected person, but also to any other measures of brutality whether applied by civilian or military agents.
ART. 33. — No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949), hxxps://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.33_GC-IV-EN.pdf (.)
Since when have the US or Israeli government given a toss about international law? Never. They bend it and break it at will and no one does a damn thing about it.
If you listen, Sec. of State never uses the term “International Law”.
He cites the “Rules Based International Order” which is a made-up phrase
meant to be confused with “International Law”. But the former refers to
what the US invokes — ‘Rules’ made by the US, applied selectively, and
subject to change without notice.
Putin gave a similar reply to a Russian reporters question a few weeks ago. He said it was impossible for foreign governments to follow the United States “International rules based order” for two reasons:
1. The “rules” are never put in writing, the US just makes them up as time goes by.
2. Even if the US vocalizes a “rule” whenever it desires the US will depart from the “rule” and simply say that there are new “rules” in effect.
For a foreign government, its like they’re dealing with 12 year old kids who make up sand lot ball game rules which not only change from day to day, they change as the game progresses. Madness in DC. But to their credit, the US has been 100% compliant to the International Rules Based Order.
As Israel’s highly skilled, utterly mendacious official propagandists keep reminding us, “Hamas uses civilians as human shields.” Very much in the same fashion that the British Government used London’s East Enders as human shields when the Luftwaffe bombed the hell out of the Docklands during The Blitz. Or like the way the Soviets used human shields when the Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad’s tractor factory.
In other words, much of the global media apparatus is busy blaming the (Palestinian) victims for being “in the way.”
It’s absolutely scandalous, the way such Orwellian usage of the English language “normalizes” Israel’s ongoing atrocities.
I fear it’s too late.
“Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion, including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled. ?—————– NO, you want to have a war, then you pay for it. And not one drop of American soldiers blood either…
Israel has known for many moons, this day was a coming, and they also knew they needed to stock up on arms, and such. Why didn’t they? Because they knew the US would foot the bill!
The D-Rats and the Deep State, Military, never met a war they didn’t like! Absolutely, unacceptable!
It isn’t just “D-rats”, as you well know. Both parties are marching in lockstep to this insanity. Both parties are morally and ethically bankrupt. Anyone voting (R) or (D) from this point on is thick.
“The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.”
I don’t know exactly what Mr. Hedges means by this; rot, as in literally left to die there, or given some basic provisions/housing long-term rot. I can attest though, that the Sinai is an inhospitable place once you get away from the Mediterranean coast. I travelled from Cairo through the Sinai to the Red sea and apart from St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai there is nothing. It was a welcome sight to see the sea after nothing but desert. So the question remains, where will Egypt put these refugees? How will they provide for them?
“Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?”
This is the mysterious question. Why is the west so afraid/beholden of/to Israel?
I’ve been wondering that too, why is the bond there so unbreakable? Money? Blood oaths? Or is there something else? Whatever it is they are exposing themselves more than ever as the sick bastards they are. It’s getting harder for them to spin their madness, as we can see and hear in the PR war taking place across the media landscape. More people than ever before are not buying the bs.
“It’s getting harder for them to spin their madness,”
Exactly J. The latest Israeli delegate at the UN is one “sick bastard” as you say. He likes to regale us all with macabre details of the (unsubstantiated, unless you believe Biden/Netanyahu) assault on the Israelis by Hamas on 7th October. And that is really all he can focus on. Because at the end of the day, the misery, suffering, humiliation and imprisonment the Palestinians have endured over decades, pales into comparison of the deaths of the Israelis on 7th Ocober.
I also would like the answer. Might check the personal bank accounts of congress. Start with Biden.
Can it be so simple Charles. Or is there something else, as J Anthony asks. It’s baffling.
(I see how easy it is though, to start “conspiracy theories”. LOL)
What the lunatics in Israel and the US don’t seem to realize is they are further isolating themselves from the world. I suspect any leaders who support what Israel is doing will not remain in office. Biden is toast. Trump will hopefully seal his fate as well if he supports this genocide.
The message must be clear and loud that we do not consent to this mass murder of Palestinians and will not vote for anyone who does. If necessary, we need to shut Washington down. I’m serious.
I agree wholeheartedly, everyone must act out and speak up to whatever degree possible. USAmericans are so used to their privileged bubble, thinking they are not affected by all this this hardly inclined to play a part, much less care, in putting a stop to this. How? I don’t know. Any little thing we can. A good start is countering the bs narrative being pushed, that the October 7 attack by Hamas was out of the blue. If you have friends, relatives or any associates that are susceptible to the propaganda, help them get it straight. It is the masses acquiescence to this insanity that enables it to go on as much as anything else.
Shut it down!!
Exactly right, Carolyn. Israel is not defending itself. It is massacring an entire nation – a nation that welcomed them in 1948. Muslims lived peacefully with Israelis and Christians until Israel decided to inflict its own holocaust. You would think Israeli leaders would not inflict on others what was so horrifically inflicted on them that Palestine had absolutely nothing to do with.
Chris is being naive here. The United States will never enact an arms embargo. That would take away the profits to be made by the weapons manufacturers who have all of Congress on their bribery payroll. The Democratic Party is just as much a bloodthirsty war party as the Republicans and it is ridiculous to pretend there is any difference. The myth of a difference between the uniparty factions has got to be declared dead.
When Israel says it “has a right to defend itself”, it doesn’t mean what those words usually mean when expressed by someone who is being attacked. What Israel means by that phrase is “Israel has the right to invade and occupy Palestine and murder Palestinians and is exempt from all constraints against ethnic cleansing and collective punishment recognized by ordinary human beings”. Nothing to do with defense. All to do with murderous aggression. Apparently “the chosen people” means the same thing. Exempt from civilized behavior.