COMMENT: Israeli Genocide of Palestinians
Recent events in the Gaza Strip demand the strongest possible condemnation
Note: I am going to begin sharing here occasional comments on politics and current events. To get things started, I’m posting two such comments I had previously shared on Facebook. This one was written on May 11th, 2021.
This should be said loudly and often, but especially right now: the Israeli government is a genocidal regime engaged in an explicit and decades-long program of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. There has never been and there cannot ever be any legitimate moral justification for such deliberate, indiscriminate, sustained, and systematic state-sponsored oppression and extermination of a population.
Under Israeli occupation, millions of Palestinians are forced to suffer miserably in what Noam Chomsky—himself an Ashkenazi Jew and self-described traditional (i.e., anti-Jewish supremacist) Zionist—calls “the world’s largest open-air prison.” Indeed, the United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned Israel for its abominable mistreatment of Palestinians dozens of times since that body’s formation in 2006, and the UN Security Council’s condemnations of Israel’s illegal neocolonialist settlement practices date back at least to 1979. To my knowledge, these Israeli crimes against humanity represent the second-longest ongoing conditions of apartheid in the modern world, exceeded only by China’s occupation of Tibet.
Americans bear a particular moral obligation to speak out on this matter, since the contemporary Israeli government (especially as led by the neofascist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu) essentially operates under suzerainty of the United States empire. Joe Biden, for one, openly acknowledged this fact when, in 2013, he said that “if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our [i.e., the United States government’s] interests were preserved.”
In other words, Israel functions as America’s enforcer in the Middle East; hence, the United States government provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid each year. All told, the United States’ cumulative, inflation-adjusted foreign aid to Israel from that nation’s creation in 1948 to the present day amounts to nearly $150 billion—far more money than any other country has received during that same time period. And, as if to add insult to injury, while Americans’ tax dollars are being used by Israel to bomb Palestinian children, Israeli citizens enjoy the luxury of low-cost universal public healthcare—something folks in the United States, last among their compatriots in the developed world, can still only dream about.
All of this is to say: there is a thick and direct line between the United States and unjust Israeli violence toward Palestinians, and Americans of good conscience must demand the end of such atrocities and of their government’s assistance to any country that commits them.
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