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| A photo via The Intercept |
Jeremy Scahill:
“From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his ‘great, great friend’ Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.
Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.
Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to ‘self-defense’.
If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been ‘justified’ in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in ‘self-defense’ as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily.
Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7.
You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support.
Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed… Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead
But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza.
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So far so good, Jeremy. Here is where short-sightedness interferes with going further into the analysis:
“The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. ‘Look, this could be over tomorrow’, Blinken said December. ‘If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered’. That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles.”
With or without Blinken, Biden and his ilk, U.S. would support Israel, as it did before. Here is where the analysis should go further by addressing the origin of the Israeli state, Britain’s role and then the U.S.’s role in protecting and supporting such a state, the role of the Israeli state in the Middle East, the class structure in the U.S. and the lobbies, the arms industry, American capital, etc. Today, the context is of a geopolitical struggle with states such as Russia and China and the ‘normalisation’ process disrupted by Hamas’s operation. A disruption of reestablishing favourable ‘stability’ whose end is the continuation of plunder and capital accumulation.
Major Western states such France, Britain, Germany and the U.S. have a history of colonialism and genocide. Today, they have a new ‘mission civilatrice’ cloaked in ‘the free world’, ‘liberal democracy’, ‘fighting terrorism’, ‘human rights’, ‘the fight between democracy and authoritarianism’, ‘our values’, ‘aid’ …
Jeremy is wrong in individualising the issue of power relations and ignoring class relations, domination and oppression across countries and states. These features have been part and parcel of the major Western regimes whether France under ‘the Socialists’, the U.S. under the Democrats or Britain under Labour.
Furthermore, the notion that the U.S.-led war against Russia via Ukraine, the war and invasion of Iraq, ‘the war on terror’, the class wars at home, dispossessions, exploitation and economic oppression and domination, the war on refugees, the destruction of the eco-system … are separate from the war on the Palestinians is myopic..
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