Israel will continue its mass killing to achieve its immediate goals, but in
the long run the blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state.͏
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Extermination Works. At First.
Israel will continue its mass killing to achieve its immediate goals, but in
the long run the blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state.
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| Chris Hedges |
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| Oct 14 |
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Extermination Nation - by Mr. Fish
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If
Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the
genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of
depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a
charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die
from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will
achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,255 people have been killed and over
one million Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a
failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the
United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over
proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and
carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.
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Netanyahu considers plan to starve northern Gaza's civilians
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Photos: Deadly Israeli strike on hospital tent camp in Gaza
Israeli jets bomb a camp housing displaced Palestinians on the grounds of
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Ba...
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving
Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch
Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served
in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine
that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this
doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and
did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in
Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the
Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial
weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the
long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates
adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it
terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former
Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the
next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and
Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created
Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush
administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S.
had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of
food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including
500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator
in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal”
because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982,
were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York
City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia,
Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to
Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow
Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits?
Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen — Israel’s worst
campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the
cover of war — to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version
of the Armenian genocide?
I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the
two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of
blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it.
And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of
dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable
barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic,” “we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State
Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” we
will “never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a
nation.”
Subscribed
Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights
the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the
infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking
and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and
United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are
being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists
are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out
continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities
have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has
attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where
peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded. This tactic
replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N.
Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica. The Serbs, who had cut off food
deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and
starvation, overran the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before
massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.
These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not
only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered
northern Gaza since the beginning of this month.
Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate.
400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the
evacuation of hospitals — Israel is also targeting hospitals in Lebanon —
deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those
attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed schools that serve as
shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp into a free fire zone. As usual,
Israel continues to target journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Fadi Al-Wahidi,
who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition. At least 175
journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed by Israeli
troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns
that aid shipments to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. “People
have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of
famine persists,” it notes.
The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on
southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will
be famine.
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian
refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such
catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent
so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing
the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it
will work.
Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained openly that
international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians,
“even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by
the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused
of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The
bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs
— decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic
class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic
Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into
rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be
in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just
as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political
rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on
television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila
Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in
1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the
nation.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years
to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and
venerates mass murderers.
We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our
genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws,
militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – what the sociologist James
William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon.
Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its
intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an
effective form of deterrence.
We, like Israel, as Nick Turse points out in “Kill Anything That Moves: The
Real American War in Vietnam” deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured,
raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including
children.
The slaughters, Turse writes, “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate
policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.”
Many of the Vietnamese — like Palestinians — who were murdered, Turse relates,
were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture and
savage beatings. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny
barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while
inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water;
the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal
injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or
hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were
subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones,
battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten.
Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated,
burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails,
baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even
subjected to mock executions.” Turse found — again like Israel — that “detained
civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and
regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in
daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid
for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals
without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”
“After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of
widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary
publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few
academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so
extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all
other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with
big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and
combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S.
government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the
real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the
genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s
bloodlust is our own. As ProPublica reported, “Israel Deliberately Blocked
Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken
Rejected Them.”
U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that
prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at
least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with
a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in
ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new
animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way
genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone
live in the diaspora. Over 5 million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as
most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and
fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to
456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled
the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S.
into despised pariahs.
Israel and the U.S. will probably win this round. But ultimately, they have
signed their own death warrants.
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