If Zionist ideology ever fit into the modern world, and I will leave this an outstanding question, it no longer does.
Die-in protest of the Israel Independence Day celebration, Washington, D.C., May 23, 2024. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
I do not know how it is in your household, but in mine we have developed the practice over the past nine months of reciting to one another the most appalling of the news bulletins from Gaza that come our way from a great variety of sources. It is rather miserable to think life has come to this, reading aloud daily accounts of atrocities, but there is no turning away from the depths to which terrorist Israel has dragged the whole of humanity.
The subtext of each of these recitations is, “Can you believe this is happening? Can you believe the U.S. participates in this? Can you believe this is normalized?”
It is indeed difficult to believe the things we read of are part of life in the third decade of the 21st century, and may this remain so: When it is no longer difficult to read or watch videos of the Israelis’ merciless barbarities, the Zionist army will have bombed and bulldozed our consciences as thoroughly as it has any Gazan or West Bank village.
Over the weekend my partner told me she had read something that was simply too much even for our recitation routines. It was a piece Politico had published on July 19, and it had arrived courtesy of Jonathan Cook, the estimable British journalist.
“We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable” was written not by journalists, but by two American surgeons who had volunteered last spring for humanitarian work in Gaza by way of the Palestinian American Medical Association. Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon who practices in Northern California.
“I haven’t been able to mention this until now,” my partner began, her voice cracking. Then, holding back tears, she told me about the Politico piece. She related the stories of two Palestinians the American surgeons treated during their time at the European Hospital. The European Hospital sits at the southeastern edge of Khan Younis, the city in central Gaza where the Israeli Occupation Forces earlier directed Palestinians to evacuate, then bombed, then left, and now, Khan Younis having been resettled, is now being bombed again.
Screenshot from Tasnim News Agency footage of an ambulance on Oct. 7, 2023, operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, after it was heavily damaged by an Israeli military airstrike. According to the report, at the time of attack the ambulance was in front of Nasser Hospital, carrying three injured people. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Here are the stories.
Juri
One is about a 9-year-old girl named Juri. She was malnourished, unconscious, and in septic shock when Perlmutter and Sidhwa came upon her at the hospital. They operated immediately, and when they did, they found, among other things, she was missing part of a femur and most of the flesh on one thigh. Her buttocks were cut so severely her pelvic bones were exposed. As they proceeded, maggots fell in clumps from Juri’s body.
“Even if they saved her,” my partner said, “she will live a life of severe disability and constant pain.”
Tamer
The other story concerns a nurse who was serving at the Indonesian Hospital last November when Israeli terrorists raided the facility. Tamer, a young man with two children, was assisting the orthopedics staff in the operating room at the time. When he refused to leave an anesthetized patient, an Israeli soldier shot him point blank in the leg.
After the orthopedics team treated him, leaving external rods to stabilize his leg, terrorist soldiers went to his room, dragged him away, and held him —somewhere, Tamer did not know where — strapped to a table for 45 days. No medical care, one glass of juice most days, though sometimes not even that. His bone became infected — this is called osteomyelitis — and he was beaten so severely one eye fell out of its socket.
Perlmutter and Sidhwa:
“Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.”
The Politico piece is illustrated with many photographs taken by Feroze Sidhwa. One showed Tamer during his treatment just after he was shot: a strapping, vigorous man lying in a hospital bed. Another showed Tamer after he returned from his 45 days in captivity: emaciated, looking 20 years older, stripped of all vitality, his face set in what psychiatrists call flat affect.
“When it is no longer difficult to read or watch videos of the Israelis’ merciless barbarities, the Zionist army will have bombed and bulldozed our consciences as thoroughly as it has any Gazan or West Bank village.”
My mind snapped as my partner offered summaries of these two stories. “That’s it!” I shouted. “It’s impossible to go on this way any longer.” I began asking in desperate tones what someone trying to be human can do while a nation run by terrorists disgraces all of those now living but for the Palestinian people and the Perlmutters and Sidhwas who give of themselves to them. I thought of Randy Kehler and all those honorable people who started the famous — back then, anyway — tax revolt during the Vietnam War. I thought of Camus and his invocation of Sisyphus: the futility of all action, the necessity of any.
I eventually returned to the headline atop the Politico piece. Yes, what Perlmutter and Sidhwa saw was unspeakable, there is no arguing this. If you read what they have written, and I urge everyone to do so, you must brace yourself for your reaction to it, as my own case may suggest. These two surgeons saw unspeakable things during their time in Gaza, but now they speak of them. And when they speak of the unspeakable, there is the potential for transformation in what they say. We must not miss this. We must not fail to see the power of language when put to its highest purpose.
“What can we do?” is surely a question on the minds of millions of people as apartheid Israel proceeds with its genocide in Gaza — and now escalates its criminal conduct in the occupied West Bank. What makes this question so serious a conundrum is that the Gaza genocide and America’s direct participation in it have pushed in our faces the reality that, American democracy in ruins, there are no mediating institutions any longer available to us through which to express our will.
As I sat to write this, Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian journalist, sent around a message posted on “X” by someone going by ThePryingEye, who makes a point that simply takes my breath away. “What is happening in Gaza is awful,” ThePryingEye has it, “but asking people to give up what they need to survive for morals is an unfair card to play. People are suffering here already, and when it can possibly get worse, it’s not that people don’t care about Gaza or we are selling the[sic] out for a taco.”
I hope my editors and readers will forgive my French, but what kind of fucking drip would say such a thing? ThePryingEye is, first, the lumpen exemplar of Western humanity’s long decline into moral slovenliness and what I call consumer nihilism. In this I would love to learn ThePryingEye’s idea of what people “need to survive” — apart from tacos, of course.
But there is something else here we must not miss: Whoever this pitiful person is, he or she is the victim of decade upon decade during which power has cynically abused language and images to strip eyes of the ability to see, ears of the ability to hear, minds of the ability to think, and — these most of all — tongues of the ability to speak and bodies of the ability to act. ThePryingEye is exactly how this is intended to turn out: a taco-eating dolt perfectly at home with “Nothing” as the answer to “What can we do?”
When we face at last the reality that we have been deprived of any institutional means to mediate our politics, it follows that we are forced back upon ourselves. And when we become self-reliant in this way, it will come to us that, as Perlmutter and Sidhwa have very clearly demonstrated, there is power in language, in speaking of the unspeakable.
“When they speak of the unspeakable, there is the potential for transformation in what they say. We must not miss this. We must not fail to see the power of language when put to its highest purpose.”
I am not at all surprised that the Israelis and the Biden regime — along with the Germans and others — have radically escalated their long-running attack on clear language, most obviously but not only in their patently nonsensical effort to condemn as “antisemitic” even simple expressions of sympathy for Palestinians. Isn’t the objective here obvious? Isn’t it plain that these people understand the power of language and the necessity to control it if Western populations are to remain in ThePryingEye’s condition?
Among the many striking things in the Politico piece, two now come to mind. One is Perlmutter’s and Sidhwa’s description of their Palestinian colleagues: Many were jaundiced, suffering from hepatitis, malnourished; all were physically and mentally unwell, and — most striking, this — devoid of all empathy for those they were treating. “Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die,” the two Americans write, “and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.”
The other image I mention here confirms this impression: It is a photograph of a wall in the pediatric wing of the European Hospital, where one of Perlmutter and Sidhwa’s Palestinian colleagues has scribbled: “#Gaza We don’t care anymore about anything.” An illegible signature follows.
Isn’t this the kind of thing we read in accounts of Holocaust survivors? Giorgio Agamben went long on just this topic in Remnants of Auschwitz (Zone Books, 1999), wherein he examined the reduction of those in the camps to dehumanized ghosts — psychologically destroyed, many of them beyond retrieval.
“I will be satisfied if Remnants of Auschwitz succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century,” he wrote in a preface, “and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way — perhaps the only way — to listen to what is unsaid.”
Let us take some inspiration from the Italian philosopher and correct some terms while understanding others differently. This is my reply to “What can we do?” It is to refuse any longer to let our opinions and our expression of them be either policed or self-policed. Perlmutter and Sidhwa can liberate us in this way if we let them.
Giorgio Agamben, 2009. (Et sic in infinitum, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Read their piece again if you need to do so, think about what these past months of terror have done to Gazans, then join me in asking what we are not supposed to ask: Is what Israel is doing in Gaza worse than the Holocaust? I insist we now pose this question instead of flinching from it. Waiting to die? Getting it over with? I am not much for keeping scorecards of atrocity-committing regimes, but there seems an argument that the Reich’s camps were less terrorizing than the Israeli camp called the Gaza Strip.
After reading Perlmutter and Sidhwa, I went back to that remarkable essay Pankaj Mishra published last March in the London Review of Books, “The Shoah After Gaza.” I wanted to read again of all those prominent Jewish writers and thinkers, many of them Holocaust survivors, who rejected the Zionist project in the early years after its inception.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who won the Israel Prize in 1993, warned 25 years earlier of “the Nazification of Israel.” Jean Améry, the Austrian writer, after reports of torture in Israeli prisons began to surface in the 1970s:
“I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.”
And then the case of Primo Levi, the famous survivor of the camps and author of, among other things, If This Be a Man, his account of his time at Auschwitz. A couple of years into the regime of Menachem Begin, who was not Israel’s first terrorist prime minister and not the last, Levi dismissed the Zionist project altogether. “The center of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back,” he wrote, “must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.” He later told an American audience, “Israel was a mistake in historical terms.”
To turn back. I stand with Levi. I take courage from him and conviction from Perlmutter and Sidhwa to say now in the clear language we can admire in these three: Israel, an artificial construct misguided from the first, has to go. Some way or other it can no longer be permitted to exist—not as it is now constituted, and not in any hopeless notion of a two-state solution. We cannot tolerate the unceasing, systematic, criminal cruelty of a human population to which Israel has committed itself. Only a single, secular state that recognizes the equal rights of all has any promise of civilizing the Zionist presence in the Middle East.
Pankaj Mishra at PalFest 2008. (PalFest, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
I do not know how the project of ending this failed experiment may begin, but it should be set in motion as soon as possible. I see nothing shocking in this judgment once the paraphernalia of geopolitics is stripped away and the fraud of marking this thought down to “antisemitism” is dismissed. Eliminating the Nazi regime was a global project on the grounds of sheer humanity. Again, I am not much interested in precisely how Israel stacks up against the Reich, but we must acknowledge the similarities now such that the same principle obtains.
It will be 46 years this November since the U.N. passed Resolution 3379, wherein the General Assembly “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” I am struck once again at the clarity of language that was once prevalent in public discourse and conclude that the immediate project is to recover it. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 after the U.S. applied heavy and extensive pressure among the General Assembly members. “And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism,” George H.W. Bush said as he introduced the motion, “is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II.” It is interesting to note how the Holocaust was leveraged, even then, in a way I have always thought a dishonor to the 6 million victims.
Bush got one thing very right that day. “To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself,” he said. It is many years later now, and Israel’s conduct in the interim seems to me to prove out this equation. This is the diabolic things about the Gaza atrocities. The Israeli military does not understand its operation there as cruel or immoral or in any way wrong. As Israeli leaders make clear again and again, they believe they are righteously doing God’s work.
“To turn back. I stand with Levi. I take courage from him and conviction from Perlmutter and Sidhwa to say now in the clear language we can admire in these three: Israel, an artificial construct misguided from the first, has to go.”
Here is Bibi Netanyahu reacting to the International Court of Justice’s judgment last week, perfectly obvious in itself, that Israel’s occupation of all Palestinian land— not just the West Bank — is illegal.
“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor Judea and Samaria, our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.”
This remark, openly defiant of decades of international law, openly indifferent to the legal commitments Israel made at its founding and many times since, can be read as a useful prelude to Netanyahu’s monumentally dishonest, reality-warping speech Wednesday to a joint session of Congress. His reiterated dismissal of the ICJ’s ruling — “utter and complete nonsense” — takes a minor place among the Zionist leader’s offensive distortions. Civilian deaths in Gaza have been minimal, the Israeli army should be commended, not criticized, Americans demonstrating for the Palestinian cause “stand with murderers” and are “Iran’s useful idiots,” the Palestinians are comparable to wartime Germans and Japanese: Netanyahu’s hour-long speech was end-to-end with this kind of thing.
Netanyahu addressing a joint session of U.S. Congress on Wednesday. (C-Span screen shot)
The Israeli leader’s markedly assertive oration was revealing, at the same time, of the psychological injuries that lie deep within the Zionist project. He offered a generous recital of the centuries of antisemitic persecution across Europe and, of course, the great, indelible hurt of the Holocaust. Netanyahu’s world is one of we-they, us-and-them. You can hear in his these sentences the Zionists’ addiction to permanent victimhood and (especially interesting to me) the paranoia attaching to the feeling, common among Israelis, that the Jews of Europe appeared weak and unmanly as the Reich sent them to the camps. “The Jewish people are no longer helpless in the face of our enemies,” Netanyahu asserted proudly — confirming to my satisfaction that the Zionist project is in one dimension unhealthily, even dangerously compensatory.
“Jerusalem will never l be divided,” Netanyahu declared — an assertion he made in just these words when he last addressed Congress nine years ago. “The land of Israel, of Abraham, Jacob, and Issac, has always been our home and it will always be our home.” There you have it, as baldly stated as possible: Zionist Israel has no intention of entering talks of any kind to settle the Palestinian conflict and insists that the Old Testament is the only law it will observe.
And here we come to Netanyahu’s true purpose in Washington this week: It is to bind the U.S. fully into the Israeli cause even as it reaches egregious extremes.
“We meet today at a crossroads in history,” he said. “This is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between barbarism and civilization.” This is beyond preposterous if you keep Perlmutter and Sidhwa in mind as true witnesses to history. But to go by Netanyahu’s reception Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. will buy his story and invest ever more deeply in it. I counted 72 ovations as this de facto war criminal spoke, all but seven of them of the standing variety.
The great majority of those in Netanyahu’s audience, let us not forget, have accepted one or another form of bribe from the Israel lobby. As John Whitbeck, the Paris-based international attorney, put it in a privately circulated note Wednesday afternoon,
“Anyone watching this spectacle could only conclude that the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent state, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel, with shared values rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind.”
Bibi Netanyahu is what Zionism sounds like in 2024. There is nothing in it to work with, nothing to honor, nothing to respect. If Zionist ideology ever fit into the modern world, and I will leave this an outstanding question, it no longer does. Intent on dehumanizing the Palestinian people, Zionists have succeeded in ennobling them while making themselves deformed creatures, nothing more or less than humans without humanity.
I do not seem to be the only one deeply affected by the Perlmutter–Sidhwa piece in Politico. Over the weekend Perlmutter gave a lengthy interview to CBS Sunday Morning, during which he reflected further on what he saw while at the European Hospital:
“All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined — 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined — doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza…. I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of 8-year-olds.
And then there’s sniper bullets. I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”
It is time to say certain things, readers. It is time to put aside the policing and self-policing of our views of the things we see and hear. Time to make good use of language to say what we mean. It is time to see in ThePryingEye all those “good Germans” who saw what was going on around them during the 1930s but turned the other way and went about their business. Time to say, “Actually, what we need to survive is to utter the truth and determine to act on it.”
This is the first thing we can do. Much stands to come of it.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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I Pay no taxes but social security. I vote only for peace candidates, I give money and canvas for ballot access, I meditate, pray and try to keep self righteousness at bay, knowing my own hypocrisy and capacity for anger and self-indulgence.. I advocate for peace and listen to people I disagree with. I have seen this coming for years but it still hurts like hell. The truth is that sometimes there is no answer, no way to take back the bombs, no way to feed the hungry, and only whatever light remains within matters. For that we may be thankful and with it we may build what love is possible in our brief life.
The Zionist project is pure blood-and-soil ethno-facism, modernizing and legally framing the Talmudic tradition of defining a ‘people’ or ‘tribe’ (a ‘race’, obviously) as being entitled by a deity to a land other people occupy and use. Calling criticism of this “anti-Semitism” is, in the first place, inaccurate, as the settler population are not, ‘ethnically’, semites; Palestinians more clearly fit that description. It could be described as being anti-Jewish; the jews I know through pro-palestinian advocacy are like the ‘good’ christains and Muslims I have met: they have not read their own religious texts, or don’t take them seriously. In any case, those texts are not the basis for moral guidance in relating to other people in the twenty-first century, especially not the Old Testament, which is openly and triunphantly genocidal and racist.
I’m getting really tired of articles that evoke Israel’s genocide while deflecting attention from the all-important historical context and the role of the US within it. We are told that America has “fallen under the control of Israel”, that its democracy is presently “in ruins”, or some other excuse is offered. Why don’t we just face the reality that genocidal wars like America’s in Korea and Viet Nam were never “mistakes”, and what Israel is doing in Gaza is not exceptional? It is what the capitalist ruling classes of the Euro-American empire have been doing worldwide for five centuries.
Didn’t Madeleine Albright explain to everyone who cared to listen that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was not too high a price to pay in pursuit of US goals? Was that not a model for Israel’s annihilation of Palestinian children? We are told that “the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent state”, having become instead “a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel”. I wonder when this remarkable transformation took place. Was it before or after the settlers in North America were cheerfully exterminating the indigenous population (to paraphrase de Toqueville)? Before or after the Atlantic slave trade’s rape of Africa and its inhabitants? Before or after the death by organized starvation of millions of inhabitants of Ireland and Bengal? Before or after the murder of a million Indonesian “communists”?
By what magic are those events, and so many events like them, not part of “the modern world” into which Zionism apparently “does not fit”? Are Zionism and Nazism twin evils to which which nothing else in modern history can be compared? What are we to make of a purported analysis of Zionism in which words like imperialism, capitalism, or ruling classes, don’t appear even once?
“I’m getting really tired of articles that evoke Israel’s genocide while deflecting attention from the all-important historical context and the role of the US within it.”
We suggest you familiarize yourself with the long body of work at Consortium News, and with this writer, Patrick Lawrence.
Thank you- now we need a huge Voluteers for Peace Movement, which dwarfs all which have come before and not just to stop the atrocities and barberism of Zionist Israel and it’s partners in Barbism and Genocide such as it’s faithful Primary Partner and a few others including Britain, France and Germany – even Sweden. The U.S., England and France all supported Hitler’s Germany via Banks and Corporations. They wanted Germany to defeat the Soviet Union. “We have never been the shining light of freedom and democracy and have left a trail of Blood and Tears around the World, using our youth as pawns to destroy and occupy.
I agree
Another commenter seeking to deflect and “whatabout” … I’m getting really tired of it :) …
That the US and other western empires have huge problems in the past and present does not impact the facts that:
– the current destruction of Gaza is exceptional. If you don’t believe it, read the Politico article. This is Biblical level genocide.
– the control of Israel over the US Congress is uncanny and difficult to explain as it seems entirely against both common national interest as well as the interests of the masters of the universe (TM).
Zionism is primarily an example of colonialism married to 19th century European nationalism and a virulent ethno-theocracy … a very uniquely bad combination.
I agree. Nothing I wrote was intended to deflect, but to add more if the Truth – the fact that the unavailable atrocities carried out by Zionist Israel also gas the full economic, political and Military support to continent until they “finish the job” of unspeakable horrors. The U.S. and Zionist Israel have been joined at the hip for a very long time now, which includes some strong support from U.S. Jewish Citizens and strong opposition to Arparteid Israel and the atrocities carried out on the people of Gaza and the West Bank along with dispossession of their homes, land and water. The U.S. and Israel have been partners in these horrors for decades. None of this makes Jews safer – quite the opposite.
Thanks for writing this. No more self censorship! How many are silencing themselves because they don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations or risk anything? We must stop the American-Isreali genocide of Palestinians even if it offends and makes Zionists crazy.
utterly unbearable, the atrocities, the pain, the despair,
the disrespect, the indifference, injustice, unfairness!
not to mention traumatization for life and way beyond.
truly tragic – and painfully intentional, too – is the fact
that MSM hardly ever show us PICTURES of the destruction,
of utter de-humanization, of boundless and unfathomable
brutality, of lust for revenge, of hypocrisy and double-standardry.
pictures might sway public opinion fast …
[until they become all too unbearable to see.]
and while in the south millions of people are dying of
unnatural causes, the north is celebrating olympic games …
Apparently Congress is about to get it’s non debated war with Iran.
Those who welcomed this evil Zionist into our Congress and those who continue to vote to send money and bombs to Israel are as evil as the top Zionist and his cohorts in their evil acts against Palestine. I am so ashamed of them all.
As Netanyahu got into his now rehearsed stand-up routine of abject barbarism – the assembled mob were the usual hoi poli cheering him on for all that they were worth. I can’t think of anything which matches this repulsive performance. It must go down in history as the all time aversion of human degradation. Words fail one!
The difference between Hitler and Netanyahu is that Hitler never received a standing ovation in the Congress.
Congratulation Patrick.
Thank You, Mr. Lawrence.
Your natural desire to express your humanity allows the voiceless to realise we are not alone in similar sentiment.
In a time when spin-doctors are trying their best to convince us all that water suddenly isn’t wet anymore, people such as yourself do us all a truly great service.
I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
My suggestion wouldn’t be the first time the UN has allowed or even supported drastic military action against a criminally destructive and unrelentingly rogue nation and in some cases against even a merely unpopular in the West nation):
Since illegal settlements have apparently become the cancer at the heart of Israel’s long term determined genocidal behavior simply destroying that cancer would seem to be a more practical solution than destroying Israel piecemeal until it has decided to be a civilized member of the world community. No other appropriately quick solutions come immediately to mind: simply wringing our hands doesn’t seem to be accomplishing a damn thing (even when just attempting to change our country’s determination not to cut off Israel from any support).
I do recognize that the UN tries to avoid use of that level of military force but letting that reticence keep it from doing so in emergency situations like this one which it has allowed to develop over many decades pretty much defines the UN as irrelevant.
The U.N. Security Council has the power from the U.N. Charter to authorize military action but it would need the assent of all five permanent Council members and as the U.S. is one of them it would never happen against Israel (which is also nuclear-armed).
I’m very well aware of both, but since the UN created this disaster and has failed to rectify it (beyond only nominal recognition of it that lacks any real teeth) for over a half century it’s responsible for doing so no matter how many of its less central precepts it has to bypass in the process. The locations of Israel’s nuclear deterrents are undoubtedly known and if apparently necessary could be destroyed in preparation for this. If a ‘coalition of the willing’ is necessary so be it if such a coalition is willing to step up to the plate in order to fix a very central part (along with many other very central parts) of the world we all have to live in. Allowing rogue nations to hold that world as hostage is unacceptable even if some significant destruction is required to fix them: seems to me like the General Assembly which represents the large majority of this world’s human population should make that decision.
That is up to the Security Council. There is a lot of confusion about what “the U.N.” is. It is made up of different parts. The U.N. agencies that deal with refugees; global health; labor; aviation, etc. The secretariat, made up of international civil servants and the Security Council, General Assembly and Economic and Social Council. The secretariat and the agencies act on the mandates of the General Assembly and the Security Council. The Security Council is charged with enforcement action and that is dependent on the assent of the five permanent members with veto power. So one of those countries can block the entire operation of “the UN”, therefore it is only governments and sometimes only one government that is responsible for inaction, and yet “the UN” fulfills its scapegoat function and takes the blame.
My heart is pounding and I’m still shaking as I write this comment. That’s the power of journalism–to tell the truth even when it is sheer horror and to make us readers feel it. That’s how it becomes real; to pry the story away from safe analytical language or superficial rationales and throw it down before us.
Being an investigative reporter in war zones inevitably means nightmarish PTSD, an old friend who was one told me. Even to report on the reports does. This person and I were friends with a guy who was a lobbyist and ran with the same political crowd we did. The guy was Jewish, a WWII vet who’d been among the American troops dealing with Nazi concentration camp survivors. A young Jewish woman survivor had no living relatives and nowhere to go. So the guy arranged to marry her and thus got her into the U.S. They stayed married and had two kids. Their son, a ’60s-’70s idealist, went to live on a kibbutz in Israel.
Over time, the son was less and less pleased at what he witnessed. He came back to the U.S. to go to law school, then returned to Israel where he served as an attorney for minority rights, especially for Arab Israelis. Including the one he married, to the delight of his mother and father, who had known injustice first hand. The son’s daughter is in grad school in NYC and as both Jewish and Palestinian, has been active during the demonstrations.
An example of how, despite a legacy of horrific persecution, it is possible to remain committed to justice and to truth.
Thank you for this reminder that Jewish heritage has a rich complement of honor and empathy that zionist cultists lack from long before Nazi atrocities gave them excuses to use when trying to enlist fellow Jews who came to Israel seeking a peaceful home rather than a militant cause. I’ve read enough about early 20th century zionism to appreciate the difference. Unfortunately decades of zionist propaganda have made the current state of Israel difficult to stand against (“What are you, a traitor?!”) when so many zionist cretins keep bludgeoning the less vehement population for support, just as decades of pervasive neocon/neolib propaganda (“Any questions about our behavior are downright unpatriotic!”) has kept so many in the U.S. population from challenging what the hell has happened to our country that prevents our feeling decent about living in it.
US elites’ #1 purpose is to bind US taxpayers. They have no other reason to exist. So when Bibi offers them bloody reasons to “bind” US taxpayers to endless Mideast wars, of course they eagerly applaud. US spends billions of tax dollars supporting only the most depraved persons on earth-Azov in Ukraine, jihadists in Syria, filling Idlib with Salafist jihadists, annexing one third of Syria for its own use, threatening to punish anyone who dares to help starving Syrian children, forcing Iranians and Venezuelans to starve via “sanctions,” about which US says, hey, we’re doing this to help you get mad enough at your government that you’ll overthrow them.
Every day since Oct 7th, I could feel a bit of humanity, myself included, die every single day. My heart bleeds tears of blood while my conscience screams while being crushed by the unspeakable atrocities that my eyes witnessed in every article and every photo and every video. We need to stop this, collectively or individually.
Cynic your heart isn’t doubtful.
Real Jews in Israel have reported (Haaretz)
how the “most moral army in the world” sicced
an attack dog on a young man with downs syndrome.
He tried to pet the dog! They left him there to
bleed to death and decompose for a week before
the mother could return.
Of course, the military said they would call a medic.
My husband and I also read the daily atrocities committed by the war machine, and we scream, we exclaim, we despair, and we become emotionally paralyzed by the question, “what can we do?” I used to think the military industrial complex would bankrupt us and thereby put themselves out of business, but that hasn’t happened. The tax base means nothing to them. The debt means nothing. A $36 trillion debt means nothing because there is no such money. They have spent money that never existed and never will exist. They are operating on credit, even though they have no credit. And so, a tax strike would mean nothing.
We can’t overpower them physically. Even if every American had a sharp, deadly pitchfork, plus our guns, we couldn’t stop them because we have armed ourselves against ourselves to the point where the national security state is untouchable, unfindable, and seemingly unstoppable.
They want us to see the atrocities against children. They want us to know they are craven. They want us to know they are Nazis, wearing insignia and carrying banners with swastikas in Ukraine. They want us to know who they are and what they do to people who stand up to them.
Could the Longshoremen put them out of business if they went on strike? Possibly. Would a national strike stop them? Possibly. But what I learned about the Russian Revolution is that what ended the war machine was that the soldiers turned against them, and what brought down the tsar was that his secret police turned against him. What I see beginning in the United States is that high level people are turning against the leadership of the State Department. That, along with American soldiers realizing their duty to the law and to their conscience, may be a way out of this military industrial dictatorship.
Exactly Linda! Once the rulers lose the military, it’s game over. Which is why they’ve developed back up in the private mercenary contractors. It’s also why they’ve sent our local police to Israel for training and militarized them. They have always known the public would turn against them once they figured out what the real deal is. We need a national strike ASAP. The problem is most people older than the millennials still get their news from the corporate media. This has to change before we can build a mass movement to bring down this corrupt oligarchy.
Excellent comments, Linda! But I agree with Lois that we need a nationwide General Strike of the working-class – those who depend on a paycheck or small business people who rely on the public purchasing their goods and services in order to make a living. That includes professionals, skilled, unskilled, and unemployed as well. United, we stand, divided, they win and it gets worse for the average person.
No work until our needs are met. But it takes unity and a plan of action which is not easy as too many people are in debt and afraid to lose their jobs.
“…..when I sat in the International Court of Justice and heard Israel’s lawyers tell lie after lie to justify or excuse the Gaza genocide, I could feel I was palpably in the presence of evil.
At least in the Hague you could also feel and indeed observe that most people in the courtroom – including the majority of the judges – were repulsed by the evil.
Yesterday that same evil, and the same lies, was manifested in the US Congress by Netanyahu, to an audience which glorified, reflected and amplified that evil…..” – hxxps://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/07/the-presence-of-evil/
Excellent essay by Lawrence, as always.
As an aside, Steven Pinker (the world renowned evolutionary pschologist, Harvard golden boy, likely soft Zionist) has been going on and on over the past ten years about “the better angels of our nature” and how the world has become a safer, less cut throat and dangerous place since about World War II.
Israel’s heinous and barbarous conduct since last October seems to border on perhaps disproving the great Pinker’s beloved thesis.
Here’s a question. Do the Jews have a right to their own special state? Let’s pose a similar question. Do the Baptists have a right to their own special state? How about the Mormons or Episcopalians or the Christian Scientists or the Buddhists, or any other religious group. Should we make the US a “Christian” state that discriminates against all who are not Christians? If the answer is not yes to each of the latter questions, then how is it that we justify a special state just for the Jews?
Being a strong proponent for the separation of church and state, I cannot condone any religious group having its own special state. For that reason, I believe that the decision to turn Palestine into a Jewish state was wrong.
19 July 2024
By Jonathan Cook
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one hidden from western publics
Women and children are being targeted intentionally, say Israeli whistleblowers. From ground troops to commanders, the rules of war have been shredded
hxxps://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-07-19/israel-soldiers-gaza-testimonies/
“Is what Israel is doing in Gaza worse than the Holocaust? ”
There is a universal belief that it is more humane to put an animal out of its misery than it is to let it suffer. Another way of saying this is that a quick death is much better than a slow and painful death. In that sense, what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians is, in fact, worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews.
I know I will be branded as an anti Semite for recommending this article to family, friends and acquaintances with high praise for the author. However, that but it is an insignificant price to pay even if only one of them reads it and finds the possibility of a reasonable solution to the Israel Palestine conflict in its conclusions.
Gideon levy has absolute brutal article, linked on anti war,com: :israel has lost what remained of its humanity”
brutal from israeli press: hareetz, very true, no vestige of humanity reamains in israel and the clapping seals in congress endorse,support it
hxxps://archive.is/hnAe2.
I wept when I first read that doctors’ report on Politico. I wept again reading your article. What have humans become? Is this the future we dreamt of as young people? NO!
I have read the Perlmutter–Sidhwa article in Politico, which I encountered initially at Moon of Alabama (moonofalabama.org). The closest comparison I can make is to the feeling I had when I read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” back in the 1960s: a deep sorrow and a deep horror. What I feel happening in Gaza is an Hiroshima in slow motion, and that makes it even more sorrowful and even more awful.
A hard part, for me, is that I do not feel I can do much about it directly. Which is, for me, a function of the global media organization: we are presented, every day, with horrors about which we have practically no influence. The net result is to increase emotional arousal and at the same time to decrease personal agency, leading, I believe, toward the kind of emotional blunting described in the hospital workers living in Gaza. Which is, as I see it, a self-preserving response in the face of chronic trauma.
What is to be done? For one thing, I separate myself now and forever from the idea of a Zionist state. I used to believe that a solution was possible but now I perceive that the program was, all along, to extirpate all the non-Jews from Eret-Israel, but without stating so in the open. The Jews never had a holy title to Jerusalem and they do not have one now. It is a 19th century invention. And whatever persecutions the Jews have suffered in the past are in the past. The past holds no title on the present nor on the future. The present is of course a product of the past, but that is not a possessive relationship; the presuent grows out of the past, and the future grows out of the present. The past is past.
My personal relationships with Jews are not changed. Some I know are friends, some are relatives, and some are antagonists. I do not disown any of them; that would be a betrayal of myself. Because my relationships are part of who I am, and without them I am diminished.
But with regard to the nation that calls itself Israel, I will have no commerce and no relationship. Ever. And the sooner it ceases to exist, the better for us all.
Separate the Jewish mafia (AKA Israeli lobby) from the US government. The government , NGOs, charities, non-profits, educational system, media, entertainment, and legal system are all heavily infiltrated and have been since the assassination of JFK. And call it what it is. European Jews are not Semites. Religious texts hold no weight in law. And European Jews are converts–not related to the Jews of the Levant. Many Palestinian Christians and Muslims are. No god wrote any religious texts. Humans did. Male humans at that.
None of this would be possible if the West did not propagate racism against Arabs, Muslims, Middle Easterners or even Southeast Asians, as it has done since the mid-1800’s.
In any case, we are not powerless. We can always speak out. And bear witness. Watch your diction carefully. Don’t use euphemisms. Call it what it is. Always.
I recognize many Western Jews today are appalled and want nothing to do with Israel. Keep saying so loudly. But the fact is your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents contributed hugely to the establishment of this jackal state. You need to acknowledge this fact publicly. I have a great deal of sympathy for you. But you need to speak out. I call the Israeli lobby the Jewish Mafia because that’s who pushed for the creation and establishment and feeding of the state of Israel all along. And they have killed a lot of people to protect the truth now evident from coming out. And they continue to kill people, which is part of the reason our Congress behaves the way it does. And many of the billionaires are related to this mafia one way or another. So research where their wealth comes from. And boycott. Boycott, boycott, boycott. High tech and computers are a major source of hidden funding of Israel, and private citizens, including very low-income ones, send untold billions to Israel every year on top of all the money the US government sends. In fact, they probably send more than the US government. This must stop. We have to overturn Citizens United which allows this to happen in overdrive. And many states invest in Israeli bonds. This needs to stop.
FYI, Netanyahu has been a US citizen, twice. I expect he will apply for citizenship again (and be granted it) when he is facing prison time in Israel, which is inevitable, unless someone takes him out first.
Speak out and boycott and keep connecting the dots. Israel is going to self-destruct. This is the danger the US faces as well. Israelis gave the far right all the rope with which to hang themselves. The US is heading the same direction. Learn from Israel’s mistakes. You won’t be equivocating about tacos when that happens. I am quite sure.
Anyway, this was a terrific article. About time someone said this. Israel never should have been created. And it has no right to exist. It never did. Its creation had nothing to do with “the Holocaust”. It started before Hitler was even in power. And it wasn’t a religious movement. It was a secular colonialist Zionist supremacist one.
None of us is helpless. You clearly can read and write. Do so. Most of us can speak. Do so. All of us spend money. Do not do business with any entity that is involved in Israel. That will bring it down very quickly (and has been–actually Israel was in financial trouble a year before Hamas breached the prison walls). It’s the perfect run-around a government that is controlled by the Jewish mafia. So use it. Don’t use their tech. I dare you.
Thank you, Patrick Lawrence for this analysis, rejecting the fascism, propaganda, and corruption of Zionism.
The tragedy of Zionism is that they followed the Nazi model of elevating aggressive tyrants in self defense.
The Zionists claim that the story starts when they were last attacked, not when they began the attacks.
The Zionists deny everything in their history of primitive tribalist tyranny against the Palestinians.
They are trained to claim that they are survivors of the Nazi death camps, of whom no survivors remain.
The Zionists claim that we must all give them all they covet, or be accused of genocide against Jews.
They make the absurd claim of land rights where every branch of humanity has the same claim.
The root causes are:
1. Our excessive social and economic dependency upon tribes;
2. The failure of the US and the West to exclude the corruption of money from elections;
3. The failure of the US and the West to exclude the corruption of money from mass media;
The solutions are:
1. Public and mass media education to identify tribes, and to avoid social dependency upon them;
2. Constitutional amendments prohibiting election activity or funding beyond limited individual donations;
3. Constitutional amendments prohibiting mass media activity beyond limited individual donations.
Phew! What a bombshell of an article, Patrick! I did see the Politico article the other day, and had stomach cramps after reading it, already knowing full well what the Zionist admirers of the Waffen S S austerity camp guards have been inflicting on the Palestinian people for 76 years, and NOW, with the Israel Lobby money controlled Congress and the White House, condone the Holocaust in Palestine – yeah, Holocaust – as genocide is too mild a word in my limited lexicon.
The brutality of the Israeli Jews are worse than the Final Solution water-less showers or by firing squads, both, of course are wrong, as murdering people is wrong to begin with, but money talks loudly, and when you control a nation’s money supply, much of big corporate media and the entertainment industry and will support, with dark money and perks to those politicians who will sell their souls for “thirty pieces of silver”, you can control the narrative in the mainstream corporate establishment, which is why honest and courageous journalists and independent media websites need to be supported with our financial donations if we want to hear the truth on subjects they write about and published on.
My question is: why does the so-called “international community” willing to let the extermination, torture and everything Mr. Lawrence talked about in this sad but poignant article wiling to ignore it?
Because the U.S. demands it of them. And openly threatens to hurt or destroy them if they take action on behalf of the Palestinians. This has been the case since 1948. Or, perhaps, much earlier than that. Until BRICS weakens the U.S. further, this will continue to be the case, especially since the American public still is not vociferous enough.
Here’s an article that claims deaths in Gaza (by all causes) could be 489k: https://www.ianwelsh.net/palestinian-deaths-in-the-gaza-conflict-are-probably-close-to-half-a-million/
The uncomfortable reality is that Israel intends to ethnically cleanse the WB and Gaza, particularly Gaza. They have moved from a gradualist approached they started in the 90s to something more dramatic. The reality is that the Western propaganda organs won’t cover the genocide and the people of the West don’t want to know about it just as no on wanted to know about Hitler’s plan for the Jews (and others). We also need to understand that when a Jew or (worse) a Christian claims to be a Zionist (at this point in history) they are really saying they love Nazis.
We also need to keep in mind that most Israelis approve of killing or displacing the Palestinians from their land and thus they are clearly culpable even more than the Germans because they viscerally hate Arabs as dirty, uncivilized, non-human savages who only understand violence–I had an argument a few years ago with a couple of retired American Jews from the intel community who argued that not only Arabs but Iranians are uncivilized savages.
It is amazing that we fought Nazis in the forties and now we vigorously support them in Israel and Ukraine.
Patrick, your opening paragraphs captured what we have been feeling right along with you. You managed to put words to something that is difficult to describe.
I want to repeat a request I made a couple of times in the past. ICC silence ever since the warrants were requested by Khan is baffling. It’s not as though the prosecutorial arm hasn’t had plenty of time to prepare then, and already has ample verified reports about what has been occurring for the longest time.
My request: is there anyone who might “leak” or be familiar with their proceedings? Is there any explanation for what to me is a quite cruel and unnecessary delay? Of special interest might be: does it seem that the senatorial threat letter sent to ICC members is having its effect? All in all, is it time for us to understand that ICC does not have courage and is worthy of itself being taken to another court on a finding of complicity? What shall we do: shame them? Ignore them? Curse them? Request that the UN etc take steps to abolish the court? I mean, why let it posture as a court if it can’t move on this one?
This colossal failure to act, as you describe in your piece is inhumane beyond belief. Is Khan ready to expose them?
Damn, I have been hungry for some informed analysis on this for quite some time. I’m sure many others–not only the victims–are climbing the walls as well.
Thanks for this Patrick. I agree, we need to use the power of language to turn the tide on this genocide. We need to use it to shame those who continue to look the other way into seeing clearly what is happening.
Let us expose the true intent of what is happening in Gaza and indeed everywhere the empire’s footprint is felt. I believe what this empire intends to achieve is its right to remove indigenous populations from their land by whatever means it deems necessary whenever they are in the way of corporate profits. Racism of course, plays a major role in the ease with which its main players mass murder innocent human beings.
What we are dealing with is a global crime syndicate. This truth must be made evident to those who wish to delude themselves that the US and the other NATO members are democracies. Overcoming their cognitive dissonance is a major obstacle. Which is why we cannot mince words when we articulate what is happening. Parting with long held illusions is painful which is why the first reaction when confronted with disturbing news about one’s core beliefs is to shoot the messenger. My experience has been that just planting the seed of truth can reap positive results. I’ve seen people who didn’t believe a word I told them transform their world view over time. Let’s plant those seeds everywhere.
I wish I lived in your “household.” Words give meaning to the
genocidal reality that otherwise human conscience will fall
asleep.
Israeli Zionism is what happens to Jews if they look to land for
their redemption (idolatry), instead of being truly Jewish and waiting,
in anxiety, for their Messiah, bringing peace and justice into the world.
Authentic Christians wait patiently.
Patrick, you have laid out as powerful critique of Zionism as I have ever read. I consider myself to be a reformed Zionist who stopped supporting Israel years ago. With the further evolution of Israel into a racist, fascist, genocidal state, I no longer see any moral case for its continued existence.
Did it have to be this way, was it inevitable from the start? Historians and philosophers will ponder this question far into the future, but regardless of the answer, Israel must now either radically transform itself or disappear. I would put my money on the latter. Political, economic and military forces against it are multiplying rapidly. The end game has already begun.
Unfortunately, the US and West, supported Israel’s increasingly extreme behavior continuously over 75 years. Israel has been given unlimited funding and weaponry for the duration of it’s existence without any consequence for it’s increasingly extreme behavior. The one small concession may have been under Carter. When continue to reward extreme behavior without any consequence what can one come to expect? Am afraid the hate may be too ingrained now for any form of compromise.
Yet another always eloquent sermon from Patrick Lawrence, describing and attempting to classify, by differentiating between the uncivilized and civilized, in so-called human civilization.
The majority of the paranoid Jews of the contemporary Israeli state, who claim that the Jews of Europe were weak and ‘unmanly’ as the erstwhile Nazi regime was shuttling them to the camps, are the very same ‘people of the book’ being blindly ‘shepherded’ by the descendent remnant of Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews, who had only found sanctuary in Palestine, and outside of it, at the close of WWII
The ‘indigenous’ Jews of Palestine, who had never left, lived and thrived there, for unbroken centuries, among their Semitic cousins. They were never hated to the degree global Jewry feels it is, today.
They knew nothing of self-hatred. This is nothing more than a post holocaust construct of European Ashkenazi minds.
If this is not a prima facie example of the mass paranoid, self-hatred these post colonial, cultural psychopathic killers attempt to engrave on any of us, who dare to criticize the policies of the Apartheid, zealous Zionist, anti-democratic theocracy, that Israel is, then what is?
Perhaps I’m less eloquent, and less of a wordsmith than P.L., yet this is the action of uncontained anger, in the written word!
For those open to further enlightement on the subject, a recommendation:
Avi Shlaims, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew
There is one major and important difference between the imperative of eliminating the racist and genocidal Nazi regime of Germany, and the imperative of eliminating the racist and genocidal Zionist regime of Israel: Nazi Germany did not possess nuclear weapons.
It’s also been said by someone in another site that the Nazis did not go so far as to destroy hospitals like Israel did and does. I’d be grateful if one can confirm/dispute that notion.
I despise these ‘animals’…
They are not animals because animals don’t behave like this. They are very human and they are the worst of humanity, but humans nonetheless.
As horrible as the facts presented in this article seem, the reality is worse. There has never been an evil greater or more infectuous than Israeli Zionizm circa 2024 and it has throughlly infected not only the United Staes but a great deal of Eorpe as well, unfortunately concentrated in the “leader class” which cares not one whit about democracy or liberty or truth or justice or even minimal decency.
As history is proving, in front of all of our eyes, as we continue to screed, ‘man unkind’ is turning out to be the most highly infectious disease.
The question to be asked: Is there a cure that will come about, in time to save us all?
“Black is black……”!
At the fear of jeopardizing my daily taco.
Corporations rely on that fear.
Congresspersons who who put their hands together for that scumbag netanyahu all fear it.
It does take courage to speak the truth in a public forum.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one’s fear.”
-Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon
“So I will tell you something. Listen, listen closely
of all that breathes and crawls across the earth,
our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man.
So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees,
he thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years.
But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times,
bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart.”
-Homer
The Odyssey (Fagles translation) (18.149-55)
Neoconism, fascism, and Zionism are ideological cancers that have metastasized in the body of humanity. They are all based upon the premise of “me first/me only” and are deadly to our continued survival as a species on this planet. US culture, especially in the last 30+ years, has embraced and cultivated all three. The EU and the Anglo-Saxon world in general are now following the US down this same dead-end path. It’s essential to eliminate these ideological cancers so that the human race and the world’s ecosystem together can survive and even thrive into the future. Otherwise, it will not.
Recognition of the unhinged, which imv most people are capable of, even if they say nothing directly on it, is essential to this assault on silence. Netanyahu now sounds like Hitler, desperate tones, the self-righteous rage, have reduced his rhetoric to ludicrous. You can’t shift all the blame for your torture programs onto the victims so easily. He’s cracking in my view, and this hideous reiteration of Hitler and Nero is on its last legs. Please continue to call out the stupidities in what he says.
We should remember that Israel was founded by the dehumanized ghosts — “psychologically destroyed, many of them beyond retrieval” and that nazi-ideology and dehumanization were the founding realities of this aggressive, murderous, colonial project made possible by post-holocaust guilt and opportunism.
I understand your point, but while it may appears logical to come to the conclusion you do (one I used to share), Ilan Pappe’s latest book Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, lays out the history of zionism and the founding of Israel that challenges your assertion. The long history of European anti-semitism, including of course its most grotesque expression in the Third Reich, was certainly a factor. But Israel’s “founding fathers” almost to a person had nothing but contempt for the survivors who they looked down upon as weak. In his book, The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Israel Shahak asserts that the roots of a dangerous Jewish supremacism are to be found within the Talmud and Judaism itself.
Since illegal settlements have apparently become the cancer at the heart of Israel’s long term determined genocidal behavior simply destroying that cancer would seem to be a more practical solution than destroying Israel piecemeal until it has decided to be a civilized member of the world community. No other appropriately quick solutions come immediately to mind: simply wringing our hands doesn’t seem to be accomplishing a damn thing (even when just attempting to change our country’s determination not to cut off Israel from any support).
I do recognize that the UN tries to avoid use of that level of military force but letting that reticence keep it from doing so in emergency situations like this one which it has allowed to develop over many decades pretty much defines the UN as irrelevant.
China just brokered a deal amongst the Palestinian factions. Perhaps our best hope is the resistance axis led by Iran China and Russia in countering US in the region.
The spectacle of an international gangster controlling the US Congress shows that America has been captured by organized crime.
We need an addition to the Constitution to prevent this from ever happening again.
First thought: that would probably require a serious insurrection. Jefferson himself would have approved, given his statements in the preamble and otherwheres:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is [the people’s] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…”
And elsewhere: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure… “
Given that Constitutional amendments often require a great deal of public support and endless debate shouldn’t it be easier (if that level of public support exists) just to vote the cretins who support this particular gangster out of office, which might also help eliminate a great deal of their other similar misplaced loyalty to factors other than their nominal constituents? Why be reluctant to create such a breath of fresh air that so many in the country seem to favor over our current fetid swamp because getting rid of our swamp creatures using what they try to convince us is a destructive hurricane may seem scary to the more comatose in the voting public?
The international community is mostly a kind of media phantasm. The holdout against restraint on Israel within the United Nations is the US with its’ permanent seat on the security council. The US won WW2 and has dominated Japan and Europe and much of Africa and South America with increasing power ever since. It is extremely dubious that even EU countries who have signed on to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice will honor that by arresting Israeli leaders in their countries as genocidal war criminals, though that may change with electoral politics. If you were to mean by the international community the majority of adult humans in the world and give them the responsibility to take care of this problem we would quickly see a multicultural Palestinian state with right of return for Palestinians and a vast shrinkage of Jewish land holdings. many Zionists would face criminal charges or a truth and reconciliation process as in South Africa, and many would flee. Zionism as an ideology would be a hate crime as Nazism is in Germany.
I think the laws are already in place, but if you read Whitney Webb or Ferdinand Lundgren, you will realize that crime is at the core of the American “experiment.” Hitler was right when he described the U.S. as a nation of gangsters. The people who aren’t gangsters often admire gangsterism, which is really depressing.
….while we also need solutions for the current humanitarian crises being perpetrated. unconditional cease fire, humanitarian aid, rebuilding infrastructure (water, gas/oil, shelters).