US Aids and Abets Israel’s Gaza War Crimes and Its Apartheid Policy in Israel and Occupied West Bank
Even many American Jews are saying “Enough!”
The Biden administration has been binding itself every tighter to the repressive, increasingly authoritarian apartheid Netanyahu theocracy in Israel, making the US once again a lawless pariah state in the eyes of virtually all the nations of the entire world.
As the primary supplier of arms and ammunition to Israel since its creation in 1948, the US is in a position to bring to an immediate halt the criminal mass destruction of the captive population of Gaza and the ongoing slaughter, so far, in just eight weeks of war, of one-percent of the entire 2.3-million population of that walled-off ghetto of 2.3 million Palestinians.
Instead of doing that, Biden and his neoliberal cabinet of war-mongers have been making public pleas to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, politely asking him to please “be careful” while moving on from carpet-bombing northern Gaza to the similar mass destruction of southern Gaza, knowing that such a plea is only for show and will be totally ignored.
Biden’s position on Israel’s war crime of collective punishment of the entire Gaza population for Hamas’s Oct. 7 breakout attack outside the Gaza prison wall on nearby Jewish settlements in Israel, which killed some led to the killing of some 1200 Israeli’s and the kidnapping of some 230 hostages is simple. Whatever the Israeli military does is okay by him, as long the Israeli military shows concern about avoiding killing “too many” civilian Palestinians in the process of destroying Hamas.
The reality is that as many as nine civilians are being killed by Israelis US-supplied bombs, rockets, cannon shells, and assault rifles for every slain Hamas fighter, which clearly is not “showing concern.” But Biden isn’t really tgroubled, even by estimates that 70 percent of Israeli victims have been women and children..
His Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made it clear repeatedly that the US is not going to force Israel to stop its leveling of Gaza. The Biden administration has not once even acknowledged that what the weapons and ammo it supplies to Israel are already enabling is a huge and hideous war crime. The images of Gaza City, and now the battered cities in the south of Gaza too, doesn’t differ much from the images of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw after the Nazi’s finally, towards the end of WWII, similarly leveled it in what was later prosecuted as a war crime at the Nuremberg Tribunal after that war ended.
Indeed, when earlier this week the UN Security Council, voting on an emergency call by the UN Secretary General for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, the US alone blocked the measure by casting a veto, The rest of the Security Council members all supported the measure, save for Britain, which abstained from voting, but did not join the US in preventing its passage.
The US, which has never accepted the jurisdiction of the World Court with respect to itself, while calling on it to put the leaders of other countries in the dock, has committed many war crimes since World War II, including the carpet-bombing of North Korea, the invasion and bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the invasion of Grenada, Dominican Republic, Serbia, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and other countries. And while the number of civilians killed in some of those earlier never-prosecuted war crimes are vastly higher than the number of Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s war on Gaza, this particular war crime by Israel and the US stands out as the only mass murder being perpetrated against a captive population by its jailers. It is like a combination of a war and the Nazi obliteration of Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto. It is shooting into a proverbial barrel of small fish in order to hit and kill a couple of large carp.
Images of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto (Left) after its destruction by the Nazi Wehrmacht in April-May 1943 and part of Gaza City after the Israeli ‘Defense’ Force hit it with 6000 bombs and cannon fire in October-November 2023. (images from museum archive and an Aljazeera TV screen shot)
No wonder the US is so loathed around the world! Even America’s NATO allies, excluding the Brits whose government basically does whatever the US wants, are sickened by what is happening in Gaza.
The only heartening thing about this by turns depressing and infuriating situation is that after being moribund for decades, the US antiwar movement is showing signs of becoming a political force again, as Americans have been waking from their ennui and somnolence by this outrage. Led by Palestinians in the US and their supporters, who include a large number of American Jews, mostly young, but including elders and a number of rabbis among them), hopefully that movement can continue to regrow.
The conditions are ripe for such a change in national attitudes toward the US’s eight decades of a militarized foreign policy, and its barbaric willingness to arm and back brutal regimes regardless how callous and criminal their slaughter of civilians or even their own people. The costs of US militarism to American taxpayers top $1.3 trillion a year, and come at a time that millions in this richest country in the world live on the edge of homelessness and starvation, schools are crumbling, college has gotten out of reach for tens of millions of young people and Congress is showing no interest in preventing a collapse of the Social Security system and the privatization of Medicare. The only enduring areas of the economy showing economic growth are the finance and arms industry sectors.
Increasing numbers of Americans of all political stripes are tired of hearing bought-and paid-for Senators and Representatives tell them there’s no money to address such problems, especially while they are simultaneously shoveling money to arms makers and handing out free US weapons to Ukraine and now Israel to engage in wars that could lead to Armageddon or lend support to a theocratic state that practices apartheid and that is slaughtering people who simply don’t belong to the ruling tribe.
Something’s gotta give.