Supporting the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline requires pretending Israel is not perpetrating a genocide, says Norman Solomon.
Palestinians with the corpses of people killed by Israeli airstrikes outside the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip, on Oct. 9, 2023. (Bashar Taleb, Palestinian News & Information Agency for APAimages, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Norman Solomon
Common Dreams
Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.
In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, put deep moral evasion on display.
Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”
Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
“It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide.”
Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent — underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers.
Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization that “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”
Those statements “by people with command authority — state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers — and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”
Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.”
Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza — using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians — has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.
On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”
It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.
A growing number of congressional Democrats — still way too few — have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election.
Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.
This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.
For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish.
On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.
“This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.”
That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.
While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”
J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.
It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in June 2023 by The New Press.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
What really gets me is why the ICJ is taking so long with a marked decision of genocide of the Palestinian people.This in spite of the now chair of the ICJ being a devoted zionist Christian ,which has always been a contradiction in terms in my estimation.
Norman Solomon still believes that the Democrats are any different. He forgets that it was Biden’s genocide. Anyone who supports the capitalist parties is living in the dark.
For the West, geopolitics and the needs of international capital always trump human rights. Always.
Actually the msm never mentions the Zionist movement at all. Maybe if people got a clear understanding of what that means they may begin to think differently.
If we are talking about America, perhaps we should begin the discussion about how and why America fails to really acknowledge its previous genocides. Modern America does not really deny the extermination of the people who were here before Columbus found his empty continent and made it bloom. But, it doesn’t really acknowledge it either. It was the past. Lets move on. Lets concentrate on the future. Let us not dwell on the crimes of the past.
Until, they move on to their next genocide, and you realize that they didn’t really regret the previous ones. It had made them rich and powerful. They just didn’t like the bad PR.
They deny it’s a genocide BECAUSE it’s a genocide.
Unfortunately, you really don’t answer the question, why? You sort of allude to the answer in your statement, “That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza”, but fail to address the question directly.
The reason “why” is because admitting that Israel is committing genocide would force us to close down the weapons pipeline and cut into the profits of the arms industry.
Let’s call a spade, a spade.
A question we all need to ask repeatedly: –
WHAT IS A GENOCIDE?
OR
DEFINE GENOCIDE.`
Many media, and political, outlets claim that there is no genocide happening to Palestinians yet nobody ever states what they mean by genocide.
All Zionists are de facto pro-genocide, and should be recognized as such. Chuck Schumer seems to claim they were provoked to be pro-genocide. But it doesn’t matter WHY they’re pro-genocide. They ARE pro-genocide. We must all acknowledge that.
Those prone to compromise their votes for domestic issues might be well advised to consider what these foreign policies indicate about their respective “least worst” parties.
Both Democrat and Republican officials support the attempted extermination of Palestinians based on race and creed. That should present a remarkable contrast to the sorts of “safe space” and DEI politics by which Americans often imagine that they can distinguish the major parties.
Wherever you are, your government is principally an opponent, probably your primary opponent. When you concentrate on issues that are peripheral to the consolidation and application of power, you concentrate on the opponent’s periphery. Peripheral matters are easy to lie about, and the lies can change with the next poll.
By contrast, the policies that retain power remain and extend. The primary concern of any given individual might be with an issue that is peripheral to the larger government, and there is nothing unreasonable about this. But hopes in these directions will not be fulfilled while the foreign policy eats resources to centralize power and extend slaughter. While government is loosed to slaughter, steal, and lever its mafia connections to topple governments, there shall be ever less money for education, for healthcare, for regenerative agriculture; there shall be ever less respect for domesticity, for open debate, for tolerance and kindness and appreciation.
The US actions in Syria, in Ukraine, in Israel, and elsewhere are a bit like a patriarch who spends the family’s butter-and-egg money to go out whoring and drinking whisky and then to burn the neighbors’ barn down in celebration. It doesn’t gain a lot of trust and empathy, and it means that we have to make other arrangements for our own needs.
Btw – what is the status of the suit before the ICJ re the charge of genocide – what, and how long, does it take for them to go from “it’s a plausible genocide” to “yup, it’s a genocide!”
Trump scores an A+ at “pretending”.
He pretended to release Epstein’s files. He gave us an incompetent airhead Bondi making a big splash about … nothing.
He is pretending to deport illegals – remember 15 to 30 million illegals came in the last four years. To deport even 15 million would require deporting over 300,000 illegal aliens per month for 4 years. We’ve been hosed.
It’s no wonder he’s pretending there is no genocide — the man is obviously a complete fracking psychopath. A psychopath that needs to stand before a tribunal.
Just one follow up. Regardless of whether the US itself does accept the jurisdiction of the ICC, indictments should be issued against any and all US individuals responsible for US complicity in the genocide.
And the question should be…WHY is the entire ‘civilized’ West OK with allowing the Zionists go get away with it?
Here’s a rather simplistic resolution to this endless madness in Israel and Palestine: The U.S. should insist on a ONE STATE solution, i.e., everyone has full and equal rights. Of course, that would mean some gnarly business of settling issues such as illegal land grabs, but wouldn’t it be preferred to seeing children murdered, by the thousands? The U.S. has poured countless billions into Israel, and for all that, the whole region is one the verge of total war. I’m sick of American foreign policy being unduly influenced so that some religious fanatics can live out a Biblical fairy tale of a Promised Land. WW III is waiting in the wings, and we better wake up, and soon.
Why would anyone combine the words “civilized” and “west?”
Europe made its wealth by a regime of forced labor from its peasants. Then it used that wealth to expand and conquer a lot of the rest of the world. It justified its genocides by saying it was “bringing civilization to the savages.” But, it one looks at it with open and honest eyes, it was obviously the European Elites who were in desperate need of civilizing. Europe was bringing its Dark Ages to the rest of the world. as there was never a renaissance that ever changed the brutal attitudes of their elites. They only learned to tolerate science and art, and used the art to art-wash themselves.
The European Elites are good at spreading a lot of bull about how civilized they are. But their hands are always dripping with blood when the clap at their opera, and the castles are built on hills of skulls and bones.
Mass hypnosis by the corrupt mainstream media.
These denials are not just to justify the present shipment of arms to Israel, but also of everything else US has done to date to facilitate the genocide. For the US to admit it is genocide- something the whole world already knows, even America’s vassals- would be an admission of US participation in the genocide inviting legal consequences- e.g., legal findings of US guilt by the ICJ, even if only in an advisory opinion, or an indictment by the ICC, notwithstanding the exercise of US power and leverage to sabotage these institutions.
Exactly right. The likes of the idiot Schumer and others are living in denial of reality. Something is wrong with their brains.
Indeed, we are witnessing ethnic cleansing… a Gaza holocaust. Trump once referred to it as “murder”.