In an AP photo attributed to Fatima Shbair, a bulldozer pushes the bodies of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel into a mass grave in Rafah, near the Egyptian border.
Out of context you could mistake the dead for area rugs waiting to be moved. They’re rolled up in blue plastic with thin rope ties at quarter-length intervals to keep them from unfurling. The ends are twisted like Tootsie Roll wrappers and cinched with more rope.
There’s a long, deep trench. Two men in medical gowns unload corpses from the bulldozer blade. Dozens of Palestinians stand and crouch on either side of the pit. Some are gathered on a nearby hill. The caption on the photo describes a “mass funeral.” Maybe the dead were militants. Or terrorists. I don’t know.
An AP article published alongside the photos said the UN and local workers arrived at the border crossing near Kerem Shalom with a truck carrying more than six-dozen unidentified corpses handed over by the Israeli military. The dead were apparently being held in northern Gaza. A health official in Rafah told the AP the smell from the truck was so bad that it couldn’t be opened “in a neighborhood where people live.” The bodies, he went on, would be investigated for evidence of war crimes.
“There are no magic solutions or shortcuts in the fundamental dismantling of a terrorist organization,” general Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, told the press, upon returning from Gaza this week. The war, he said, will continue for “many more months.”
More than 100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since Christmas Eve, according to the UN human rights office. Israel is fed up with the UN. After refusing to renew the visa of the body’s Palestinian humanitarian coordinator, Israel said visas for UN employees are no longer guaranteed and anyway won’t be granted automatically anymore. The UN, Israel said, is a “partner” to Hamas and “complicit” in terrorism.
Undeterred, the UN named former Dutch politician Sigrid Kaag as humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza. Kaag quit Dutch politics over the summer after being bullied and menaced by right-wingers. Mark Rutte’s government collapsed around the same time. Kaag’s party was routed last month in the same election that delivered a landslide victory to Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim platform. Kaag’s husband is Palestinian.
The Israeli military is barely trying anymore when it comes to talking around airstrikes on areas where Palestinians were told to shelter. Responding to a strike on a “safe zone” in Khan Younis that killed a woman this week, the IDF said it won’t hesitate to bomb areas it designated as safe for innocents in the event the military “identifies terrorist activity.”
I don’t think I’m off base to suggest the Israeli military, Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s far-right might’ve succumbed to something like paranoid bloodlust at this juncture. Calling the UN a terrorist conspirator and readily admitting to the deliberate bombing of areas the military itself designated as safe zones, underscores the urgent need for an intervention, which is to say The White House should demand a ceasefire. Without mincing words, this is an active genocide.
Nearly nine of every 10 Gazans is displaced and it shouldn’t be lost on the world that the homes from which they were driven over the past two months weren’t their homes, or at least not in an ancestral sense of the word. An estimated 25% of the population is starving. 60% of the housing units in what, if we’re honest, was just a giant ghetto in the first place, are destroyed. A major Gazan telecom said Tuesday that locals should expect another “complete interruption” of service. In previous instances of such outages, Israel was suspected of orchestrating blackouts, possibly to prevent Gazans from sharing their experience with the world. Again: If this isn’t an active genocide, I don’t know what is.
I realize this is uncomfortable for many readers. And I don’t care. Note even a little bit. It’d be wildly irresponsible for me to apologize for the IDF or, more to the point, to call this something other than what it is. There are a lot of people (including in high finance) who’ve staked their professional reputations on the idea that Netanyahu is running a clean operation, where that means a military campaign the primary goal of which is to dismantle a terrorist group, not to eradicate an entire population.
I’m not implicating the whole of Israeli society in this unfolding atrocity, but what I am saying is that some members of the Israeli government and the military are engaged in an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And let’s face it: This isn’t the first time Israel has engaged in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This whole situation is the result of a giant ethnic cleansing campaign perpetrated 75 years ago.
I’m done searching for polite ways to describe this. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed (in myself) for having hesitated. For the past two months, I tried to show the proper amount of respect for Israel’s grief, and more to the point, I engaged in all the obligatory acrobatics editorially. By “obligatory acrobatics,” I mean you had to adopt a certain deferential line to avoid being ostracized. That line mandates that anyone writing on the conflict has to apologize for the unfolding slaughter in Gaza by reference to the psychological trauma of the Holocaust and the extent to which Hamas’s murderous rampage on October 7 recalled that trauma.
Nobody wants to be branded a “Nazi,” or a “terrorist” or to be accused of insensitivity vis-à-vis October 7, so everyone keeps apologizing, tacitly or otherwise, and even people who aren’t apologizing add all kinds of caveats which could be construed as exculpatory. Caveats like, “Well, it’s horrible in Gaza, but what options does Israel have?”
While we’re apologizing, innocent Gazans are being blown apart, incinerated, buried alive under concrete and those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones get limbs amputated with no anesthesia and all sorts of other horrors which I’m not supposed to document because it’s disrespectful to Israeli grief.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of waking up every day to pictures of all the women and children who died in Gaza while I was asleep. And I’m completely exhausted with desecrating their graves by pretending they weren’t murdered in cold blood with help from your and my tax dollars.
The world needs to put a stop to this. If Joe Biden fails to intervene (and soon), he doesn’t deserve your vote. Or anybody else’s.
Thank you.
As a native New Yorker, I’ve learned not to speak my opinions of Israel and this conflict that has existed my entire life. Thank you for doing so so blunty.
Thank you for finally saying it out loud.
The fact that the horror in Gaza hasn’t ended and grows worse is incomprehensible. The fact that WE are participating in it, sustaining it, is soul crushing.
When Israel explains that they bombed a location where there were dozens of innocent Gazans on the excuse that they had intelligence that there was ONE Hamas official present, they have obviously dehumanized the Gazan people. They never would consider slaughtering dozens of Israeli citizens to kill one Hamas target. They are also quick to accuse anyone who openly disagrees with Israeli policy of being anti-semite. The US needs to stop supporting this genocide in the UN Security Council by being the lone veto in support of this madness.
Thanks for coming out.
I might be ready for a Post about the way the Main Stream Media covers all this .
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you.
Early on I asked myself “What’s your number?”, imagining a Rorschach question everyone would ask themself. How many innocents can die in Gaza before I decided, in my own heart, that Israel had eroded away whatever moral authority they held at the beginning of this war? One? 1000? 10,000?…. 2 million? Israel crossed my number early in this mess.
This is one of the many reasons I subscribe. You’re probably at the age and financial security level that you don’t need to mince words. You don’t have to appease anyone. If subscribers don’t like what you’re saying, they can unsubscribe. I have no doubt that your thousands of followers will continue to support you…..No soup line for you.
We all know of one Jewish leader who would be singularly appalled by what those who live in the land of his birth are doing to their fellow humans, the Jew called Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary from Bethlehem.
Who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem?
On 22 July 1946, the Irgun Zvai Le’umi, a Jewish terrorist organization, bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, was bombed in a terrorist attack by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization the Irgun Zvai Le’umi.
And now those bastards are running the country.
Am I the only reader dismayed by serious, smart, well-educated people accusing those who have been explicitly targeted for genocide of being engaged in genocide? I’m losing hope for the survival of civilization.
That’s the whole point, my friend. That’s the whole ironic tragedy. You think people who have been subjected to genocide aren’t capable of committing it themselves? Have you stopped to consider the very real possibility that being a victim of genocide in fact raises the chances you’ll commit genocide yourself?
The apartheid system in Israel is tacitly predicated on the notion that the Jewish people’s response to the Holocaust was to become, as one Israeli Palestinian put it last month, “powerful overlords.” It often feels as though the rage from the Holocaust gets put off on Palestinians. That’s part of this. Anyone who crosses Israel is incurring the wrath of a people who live with the legacy of the Holocaust. That’s a terrible wrath and if it isn’t checked, it’s capable of horrible things including, ironically, genocide.
I have considered that were I the victim of atrocities I would want my enemies to all be dead. Israel might well kill tens of thousands of Palestinians before the current round of violence is over, but they are not engaged in genocide. Their enemies are.
Palestinian Liberation Organization supporters on campus in the 1970s were enraged about many things, including that Jordan had expelled Palestinians. But they focused their hatred on Israel. They wanted Palestine (not defined) to be free of Jews. I wouldn’t have thought that would be a constant on college campuses, but here we are.
So, if you were the victim of an atrocity, you can kill as many people as you want to kill and not have to worry about being labeled genocidal? That makes no sense. What does make sense, though, in light of your comment, is your username. It’s apt.
If you are resorting to personal insults, you may not be winning the point. But I do thank you for responding.
There’s no “point” to argue. What you said doesn’t make any sense. And you don’t seem to realize it. Here: If someone shoots me in the leg today for no reason (i.e., I’m wronged, and egregiously so), do I get to then shoot all of my enemies in the leg later with impunity? No, of course not. If I do that, I’ll go to jail. If you’re arguing semantics — i.e., that the race-based extermination of the Palestinians doesn’t count as “genocide,” but has to be classified as something else, like simple “mass murder,” because the people doing the exterminating were themselves once exterminated based on race — then I don’t know how to go about responding to that. It’s too stupid to be true. I can’t believe that a human being with the capacity to think would make such an argument. What I’ve learned from this exchange is that I either i) shouldn’t respond to you in the future because it’s a waste of time, or else ii) I should just remove all your comments because you’ve demonstrated an accidental penchant for embarrassing yourself, which I hate to see you do. I don’t know which avenue I’ll go in the future, but if I choose option ii), let me say “you’re welcome” preemptively. Now if only you could hire me to walk around with you in public and say “Joe, that’s ignorant, don’t say that,” you’d be all set.
Generally speaking, folks, I won’t be generous in 2024 with my responses to comments. I tried “nice guy” in 2023 and it wasn’t especially effective. In any sphere.
I’ve seen this line of reasoning several times by people comparing Gaza to Dresden. Their reasoning seems to be that the destruction was worse in Dresden, and also that the Nazi’s, like Hamas, are the ones to be blamed. I mean there was no reason, other than terror and death, for the second wave of incendiary bombs in Dresden.
So it goes.
Joe, no one can go back far enough in history with any accuracy, and determine which tribe hurled the first insult, rock, spear etc…
So why try? Seems like the only way forward, for civilization that is, is to forgive and move on down the road. Deciding today, that killing innocent people is wrong, and figuring out a way to
avoid it, seems the only logical and humanistic approach to a problem with an “enemy”.
Call me naive? I say you’re not thinking creatively. Call me a pacifist? You’re getting closer.
Call me a realist and you got me.
I agree that killing innocents is wrong. But the notion that Israel is engaged in “the race-based extermination of the Palestinians” is an exaggeration. If Israel prevails in this conflict, there will still be Palestinians. If Hamas were to ultimately prevail, there would be no Israel and no Jews in the Middle East. In deference to H, for whom I have great respect, I will refrain from making further comments on this website.
Nobody should have any “respect” for me. I’m not here to be respected or admired. I’m not a good person (I’m an honest, diligent person, but that’s something different from “good”), and I’m not a statue (although I’d like to be one day, after I’m dead). I’m just a guy who knows a little bit about a lot of things in a world where other smart people know a lot about a little. The former is better. And yes, you (and anybody else) can absolutely expect to hear it from me when I’m lamenting the indiscriminate killing of 15,000 (and counting) women and children, and somebody suggests I might be wrong. I’m not wrong. Well, not about this anyway.
LonginTTH- I completely agree with your post
Amen brother. The idea of victims become perpetrators is a strongly-accepted explanation of how child abusers are “created” so it would seem the Holocaust (or other war traumas) could be similarly unmooring notwithstanding the generational gaps in the case of the latter. Not surprisingly, the whataboutism virus has spread to this conflict in that atrocities and vengeance are being cited as perfectly acceptable rationales for even more/worse atrocities and violence. But the scope of what’s truly right and what’s truly wrong in the world is inexorably shrinking in this whatabout environment, further clouded by misinformation and double standards, leaving behind a muddy mess of what’s worse and what’s “worser” as our only guideposts.
As a diligent non-religionist, however that may be termed in real life, I have no dog in this fight. But I am already tired of being called an antisemite for merely citing actual basic history and a handful of empirical current observations that can be made without dispute — efforts far short than you have made here and in many previous posts. Seems to me Israel has picked the horse it wants to ride on and will only be brought to heel by the US, and specifically by Biden, and the witholding of our dollars and materiel. In the face of growing global horror, Israel seems to have doubled down into obfuscation and intransigence, particularly its announcing (needlessly) that its special military operation will continue through all of 2024, as if peace were were merely hoped-for rate cuts when inflation was still above the target rate.
Between Gaza, the Ukraine and the US election, wishing someone a happy new year already seems a fools’ errand. And glad you took it as far as imperiling support for Biden. This lifelong Democrat would ordinarily never give a second thought to not supporting Biden in a general election. But as far as I am concerned, we are nearly equal partners with Israel in this and the only ally that can stop them. But not sure how much this will actually cost Biden since the Republican alternative is likely to be worse in this respect. Worse and worser. The credo of our times.
Thank you so much for finally saying publicly what I have been thinking for at least a month. Unfortunately, the US created this monster the Israeli state, and has enabled it to do the the evils it has been doing since 1948. To me, the quote that describes this situation is “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” Friedrich W. Nietzsche
My Jewish wife is equally outraged by what is being committed by her tribe.
A ceasefire is never the answer. Victory must be achieved by one side or the other.
Thank you.
I don’t think there are any easy answers.
Netanyahu contributed to the current crisis. And presently, he amplifies the destruction. He’s not a good guy.
On the flip side, Hamas are definitely not the good guys. Their actions on October 7th were barbaric. Their actions since that time, are equally bad. They have been using civilians as human shields. Additionally, they’ve been hoarding the food shipments.
Of all the available bad options, I think Biden is doing the best that he can.
I can assure you, however bad Biden is, Trump is worse.
Trump will always be worse. Trump is in a category, all of his own.
The world is made better by those willing to evolve their opinions in the light of day – in the interest of speaking what they believe to be right.
Human conflict might never truly end (peacefully at least) in the absence of candor and intellectual honesty.
I don’t agree.
Clearly, some Israelis, including officials, very much want to commit genocide. Worked well enough for the USA, after all. But they are being restrained.
In practice, what we’re seeing is mass murder. Ethnic cleansing isn’t even appropriate since there is nowhere for the Gazans to be expelled to… And I don’t think Israel is particularly keen on taking the Gaza strip for itself.
Just a propos of nothing – the level of death it took to break the Germans out of Nazism. “In 2005 the German government Suchdienste (Search Service) put the total combined German military and civilian war dead at 7,375,800, including ethnic Germans outside of Germany and Austrians. This figure includes 4.3 million military dead and missing, 500,000 killed by strategic bombing, 300,000 victims of Nazi political, racial and religious persecution, 2,251,500 civilian dead in expulsions and 24,300 Austrian civilians”.
This was more than 10% of the prewar population and the around 5 millions dead German soldiers were around 30-35% of the 18-50 male population.
This is what it takes to get a population to give up on a political dream they really like.
Fred, the Reich had the most powerful army on the planet. Hamas had to use motorized paragliders to get over a fence. I’m not sure this is apples to apples.
By the end, they weren’t (the most powerful army on the planet) and that didn’t stop the USA and the USSR from entering Germany and making sure its fever had well and truly broken. And that took a heck of a lot of extra killing that wouldn’t have been necessary if the USA or the USSR had gone for the cease fire option proposed by Goebbels.
Sometimes, the killing is the point.
There are … ummm … ideological differences between a lot of the people and nations currently calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and Joseph Goebbels. This is exactly what I was talking about in the article. If you call for a ceasefire, you’re Joseph Goebbels. Admittedly, there are a lot of things I don’t know about myself. I’m learning everyday. One thing I’m pretty sure of, though, is that I’m not Joseph Goebbels.
I was making the inverse comparison, comparing Hamas to Nazis. But the ideological difference is hardly the point.
The point is that, when people hold an idea very strongly (like, say, Israel must be destroyed and Palestine retaken by Palestinians) and have shown themselves willing to fight to the extent of their abilities (whatever those are), it’s going to take a lot of mass murder for them to let go of that idea.
Comanches used to think they could beat back American settlers. How did the US convinced them otherwise?
With genocide, Fred. The US convinced them with genocide.
Or – what about Al Qaeda? Even after 9/11, it’s clear AQ and Afghanistan/the Taliban government were never going to amount to a threat to the USA… Yet the USA invaded. The casualties are hard to tally but direct and indirect they run into the several hundred thousands… Clearly disproportionate. And yet the US was defeated b/c it could not countenance what it would take to really put down the Talibans…
Though, to be fair, I think the Talibans won’t be interested in spreading holy war again anytime soon. So, in that respect, a victory of sorts for the USA.
There was no way to defeat the Taliban, Fred. If you know anything about Afghanistan, you know that. If “victory” was destroying the Taliban, then victory was always impossible. There was no amount of force that could’ve prevailed there unless the US wanted to colonize the place and treat everybody there like the Native Americans. The Taliban is like the mountains. They’re part of the damn landscape. Trying to eradicate them is like saying “We’re going to rid this place of rocks.”
That’s nonsense. Genocide is always an option and one fairly easy to implement with modern technological means. The objections are purely moral, legal and reputational, not practical.
But as I said, the US didn’t need to get anywhere near killing all the Pashtuns to convince the Talibans (imho) that AQ and, more generally, exporting terrorism is a bad idea. As I said, that’s a victory of some sorts.
No, Fred. Genocide wasn’t an option in Afghanistan, even if the US wanted to throw out all the objections you mention. I don’t know precisely what you mean by “modern technologies,” but the only way to do what you’re saying would’ve been for the US to colonize the place at scale (which is obviously ridiculous) or else nuke it. The US military couldn’t have just “rounded up” the Taliban. We tried that. And it was hard. Turns out they know the terrain and aren’t afraid of… well, anything, really.
It doesn’t matter. Your sole purpose for commenting has, for years, been to disagree with me, typically not fundamentally and not in a wholesale way, but on the margins, and it always unfolds the same way: It’s a back-and-forth that plays out between 11:00 AM and, say, 1:00 PM US ET, it always takes me three to five responses to remember that it’s pointless, and then after the third (or fourth or fifth) response, I roll my eyes, stop and go back to what I was doing. So, if you’ll excuse me, I think this is number four of five.
I brings back to mind a quip from a Russian general who had led troops when the Russians tangled with the Taliban. When the US sent troops into the country he commented something like “We could not win even though we did not concern ourselves with little niceties like civilian casualties. There is no way you will prevail.”
Sigh. H, I have so much respect for your work, but, man, you’re just wrong.
Let’s start here: We need to get past this idea that death totals – military or civilian – are somehow morality benchmarks. For example, the act of a neo-nazi who walks into a synagogue and kills 3 parishioners is objectively more evil than the actions of the Allied armies in WWII who killed millions fighting the Germans.
Hamas is pure evil, a concept I am confident we do agree on. While you are correct that Hamas and the Third Reich are “not apples to apples,” that comment fails to imagine how Hamas serves as a tip-of-the-spear proxy for Iran and other countries/fighting forces who are much more formidable adversaries. Just as China is closely watching the outcome of what happens in Ukraine, so too are the Iranians watching what happens in Gaza. The Israeli’s aren’t just fighting Hamas. They are fighting all the others that wish to destroy them. These enemies are truly existential threats to Israel, and labeling Israel’s actions as Genocide fails to imagine the consequences of what it would mean to Israel if they did not destroy the evil they are confronted with. If the strategy of that enemy then is to mix in with the civilian population, and hide and fight from population centers, schools and hospitals and etc, what should Israel do about it?
I am sure from here, the Anti-Israel set will devolve into a rant about occupation and apartheid and resistance and how Jesus was a Palestinian…whatever. Israel has a right to exist and October 7th was and remains an existential threat. This isn’t about a strong military power wiping out a weaker military power. This is about ending that existential threat in its tracks, no matter what it takes. The insistence on labeling death counts as genocide, purely based on absolute totals completely misses this.
In the meantime, if the world wants to see what Genocide looks like, all we would have to do is transfer Israel’s military power to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and we would see genocide. Israel and all its population would wiped out relatively quickly….and then I promise you they would start looking for other Western targets that did not align with their values to kill next.
I’m so tired of this: “I have so much respect for your work, but…” I don’t give a damn about anybody’s respect. You can take that respect and give it to someone who deserves it. That person isn’t me. I have some potentially distressing news for you: There’s no “good” and “evil” in this world. That’s bullshit. There’s no God, there’s no morality, there’s just animals. We’re animals. You know when someone cuts you off in traffic and you jokingly say, to your passenger, “Gahhh, I’d like to kill that guy!” Well guess what? You’re not actually joking. You just think you are. If there was no social contract, there’s a pretty good chance you actually would “kill that guy.” Why does Israel have a right to go back and push 750,000 Palestinians off their land and call it Israel’s land, then put them in ghettos and blockade them and bomb them and rob them of their humanity? Why? Why did Israel have a right to do that? If I used to live in your neighborhood and I decide I want to come back and live there again, and that your presence in that neighborhood isn’t consistent with my vision for it, can I come back and kick you and your family out by force because my God said it’s ok? No? Why not?! My God’s better than yours! Why did European settlers have a right to murder Native Americans? Why? I guess that’s not genocide in your book either. Occupation and apartheid isn’t “whatever,” you silly idiot, it’s the miserable reality for millions of suffering innocents. Finally, you can save the implicit arrogance in this: “Sigh.” If anybody should be arrogant between me and you, it’s me. So, “sigh” that I have to explain this to you, because the chances that your intellect is on par with mine are about the same as the chances that a Gazan will have enough to eat today. (Not very good.)
Finally, go read this: https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/01/01/israel-to-withdraw-some-troops-as-half-of-gaza-starves/
Feel free to leave a misguided, naive, “the world is black and white” comment there too so I can summarily castigate it.
This “existential threat” argument always sounds curious to my uninformed ears, especially living in this country where we are about to grapple with the basic meanings of seemingly straighforward words like “office” and “insurrection.” To me, an existential threat is one that any objective observer would readily confirm. We already can’t agree on what constitutes genocide.
This sounds a lot more like the putrid “stand your ground” loophole that we have decided to install as a cherry on top of our lethal firearm sundae. “I felt threatened or feared for my life, so I went ahead and blew his brains out, as is my right.” But it’s no more than the Wild West if we apply that precept to both armed home invasions and, say, minor traffic incidents, just because in both cases threats were made.
Well, Hamas does have a formal written charter calling for the destruction of Israel. While words on paper alone are just that, when followed by an attack like Oct 7th, which itself was referred to by Sinwar as “just a rehearsal” it seems to me this passes the eye test.
I understand your point about it being a slippery slope, but in this context I do not see a grey area.
It seems inconsistent to me that some comments indicate the belief that even were the IDF to wipe out everyone in Gaza it would not constitute genocide as there would still be Palestinians elsewhere yet any notion of reclaiming a place in that part of the world by Palestinians, as in the 2 state proposal, constitutes a genocide against the Jewish people.
Are one People to be valued above another?
Sonoman, I don’t think that most people believe that a properly negotiated and agreed upon two state solution constitutes genocide of Jews. I don’t. The objection to a 2 state solution I think has more to do with whether it is in the best interests of Israel. But that’s a different conversation.