The maniacal alliance between the U.S. and Israel has exposed the sham of Western democracy and the illusion of international law, writes Margaret Kimberley.
Palestinians in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on Oct. 9, 2023. (Naaman Omar, Palestinian News & Information Agency, or Wafa, for APAimages, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Margaret Kimberly
Black Agenda Report
Iran’s missile attacks on Israeli military targets were the result of a year of provocation. Months of restraint ended when Israel escalated its war on the rest of the region in Lebanon.
Showing that its willingness to commit cruel acts knows no bounds, Israel detonated hundreds of electronic pagers and handheld radios to kill and injure thousands of people. The atrocity was followed by the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah which also killed hundreds of civilians.
While Iran’s leadership is portrayed as a group of deranged terrorists, it is Israel and the U.S. who worked together to ethnically cleanse Gaza before turning their attention to Lebanon. It is Iran which showed restraint before undertaking any military action. Ultimately the U.S. is responsible for the loss of life and for the destruction of all norms of international law.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood began on Oct. 7, 2023. The act of resistance was met by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) who killed hundreds of their own people in incidents of so-called friendly fire or even the Hannibal Directive, which requires the killing of Israelis in danger of being taken captive.
But the world was told only that the anti-Zionist resistance were terrorists who acted out of hatred of Jewish people. Lurid and now debunked stories of mass rape and killings of children were used to generate support for Israel.
The U.S. reacted predictably, with President Joe Biden even traveling to Israel in person to deliver his blank check to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Second Nakba
This past year has been a second Nakba, a catastrophe for the Palestinian people as the IDF have killed an estimated 186,000 people. The U.S. and its allies have been steadfast in supporting Israeli war crimes and in censoring those who are in opposition.
Nakba 2024: Palestinian families are forced to flee en masse as Israeli occupation troops advance on Jabalia Refugee Camp
Ethnic cleansing, genocide, and systematic infanticide, made possible with US-UK-EU weaponry and political cover
More Gaza coverage:… pic.twitter.com/VXQrXS8U24
— Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) May 12, 2024
As the slaughter continued the international bodies that are tasked with preventing and punishing war crimes and genocide have proven themselves to be mere stooges of the United States.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is controlled by the United States and so refuses to act under its mandate and issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials.
[See: ICC Prosecutor Seeks Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu]
Likewise the International Court of Justice (ICJ), tasked with enforcing international law, has also proven itself to be useless. South Africa stepped up when no other nation would and charged Israel with genocide but the ICJ, like the ICC, excels only in delay and foot dragging when it should be acting as its charter demands and uphold the precepts of international law.
Although millions of people around the world have registered their outrage in mass protest, the slaughter continues. Israel acts with impunity because the United States is its enforcer and accomplice.
The United States political duopoly has outdone itself in a display of spineless servility. The Biden administration and bipartisan leadership invited Netanyahu to address U.S. Congress for the fourth time and acted as if they were held hostage with endless standing ovations and applause for his every word.
Presidents of Ivy League universities were set up in a congressional show trial to be made examples of. The presidents of Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania have all resigned their positions despite their willingness to succumb to Zionist demands.
[See: Zionist Suppression in Congress]
College students engaged in peaceful protest and were met with force as wealthy donors and craven administrators demanded that they be arrested, expelled, harassed and denied employment opportunities.
Weakness of the West Laid Bare
Protesting Netanyahu’s visit to U.S. Congress in Washington on July 24. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The nations of the collective West have exposed themselves. Any pretense of democracy and freedom of thought or action are just shams. The weakness of the international order has been laid bare. Israel has assassinated resistance leaders with whom they claimed to be negotiating and scuttled negotiations to free the hostages it claims to care so much about.
Like bullies everywhere, Israel is emboldened by displays of weakness and gleefully targets journalists and their families for assassination, uses starvation as a weapon of war, and torture and sexual assault are quite literally celebrated and defended.
All of these crimes are well documented, and are defined as war crimes by the Geneva Conventions yet they go unpunished.
Having gotten away with mass murder in Gaza, Israel turned to Lebanon as the site of ever-increasing criminality and the expansion of a war it has sought for decades. Booby traps such as the exploding pagers are also forbidden by international law, as are any methods of collective punishment of civilian populations. But without any force willing to take action the escalation continued unabated.
Israel dropped 2,000 pound bombs on apartment buildings in order to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, daring Iran to respond and providing a pretext for destroying that country. Even worse, Netanyahu gave the orders for these attacks while in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. If the United Nations followed its charter Israel would have been expelled from that body long ago.
Israel killed 2000 Lebanese in 2 wks,
targeting healthcare workers & paramedics in Beirut.
With US’ bombs, Netanyahu is exporting his “mow the lawn” doctrine of genocidal mayhem…he/his backers want to reshape the ME by regime change, creating a Greater Israel by military force. https://t.co/bS9l9TjIEm— Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal) October 3, 2024
Israel has no fear of repercussions or consequences. Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have all pledged loyalty. Regardless of the Election Day outcome, Israel can be sure that the U.S. president and Congress will give it free reign to do as it pleases.
It is possible that Netanyahu favors Donald Trump as the next president, making Biden’s acquiescence not just criminal, but incompetent as well. It is likely that Iran’s response was expected and Israel will press for and get U.S. permission for some other act of aggression.
A presidential election will take place in just five weeks, as corporate media coverup for Biden and fail to provide any meaningful information about these crises. Millions of people are being asked to make a decision while both parties argue over which one is more supportive of Israel.
A different world must emerge after this year from hell. The United States cannot be allowed to run roughshod over humanity and bring the planet to the brink of disaster. Confronting the super power is no small task but the world’s survival depends upon it.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter , Bluesky , and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at [email protected].
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It is a comfort and relief to read these words, that there is sanity and logic (and a heart!) to be found in spaces like The Black Agenda Report and other kindred spirits around that are also honest media sources. This kind of talk is what those in charge mean to silence and disallow to be published or aired, if they can manage to squelch it. The congress calls it antisemitism and (if they get their way) a crime. Please continue your noble work.
The Zionist right wing isn’t even a good bully. It’s merely an adjunct to the neocon project to keep the U.S. as unipolar power by every means possible. That this is also profitable (at least in the short term) is reason enough for the econopathic neolibs to go along with the horror of never ending wars.
The political ruling class clearly doesn’t care what we lessers think. We’re only to serve as economic and/or actual cannon fodder for their grand designs. The world’s obscenely rich 1/10th of 1% is used to buying whatever they want, such as public officials and private armies. They’re not concerned about the economic race to the bottom or ecological destruction. Why stop before all possible profits are wrung out of low wage workers and the Earth’s resources? They think they’ll be fine on their megayachts and private island refuges. They don’t seem to realize that eventually they’ll need to restock supplies like food and fuel. As well as repairs and the know-how of mechanics.
The same is true for the U.S. itself. But we workers installed the moats around their exclusive castles and we know how to drain them. They aren’t going to be able to wallow in luxury forever while the rest of the world starves, or burns, or dies in their wars. If people in Israel are able to think past the present moment, they’ll realize no country is an island. Even the U.S. and its seemingly powerful bullies. The Zionists have tied themselves to the losing side morally and strategically. So has every government, like in W. Europe, and every individual pretending the obvious isn’t true.
Margaret Kimberly is one of the best political analysts out there. Thank you for posting this. Her take on the sham elections are spot on as well.
Amen Margaret. Millions should be in the streets of this country demanding an immediate arms embargo. It is a testament to the narrative managers as Caitlin Johnstone has accurately named them, that so many people still believe the lies. What’s it going to take? People hit by natural disasters in the US are being left to fend for themselves. Florida is about to get slammed on Wednesday. But Washington is too busy committing crimes against humanity all over the planet to help its own citizens survive devastation. We are in real trouble.
Israel has proven to the world that no acts of depravity is beyond it, and that it and a majority of its citizens are totally evil, celebrates torture and murder in glee, and holds the rest of humanity in contempt.
While USA has proven itself to the world that it is hypocritical in always claiming noble-sounding things, condemning others of crimes that it otherwise support Israel to commit, and utterly subservient to Israel.
They must be stopped.
The genocide and war crimes are on our TV screens and the likes of the Islamophobic BBC still portray Israel as victim and anything related to Hamas and therefore the Palestinians as “abhorrent” etc etc. We know who’s abhorrent, and it’s neither Hamas nor the Palestinians (nor Hezbollah, nor Iran for that matter).
What the year after Al-Aqua flood. October Surprise event breakout from “the world’s largest open air concentration camp” shows, once and for all, is that the benefactor U.S. regime answers only to itself and the laws it promulgates, in total disregard, not only of the best-life interests of the global community, but of it’s probable utter extinction from the one planet we must share, as one humanity!