By Jay Janson
Global corporate capitalism led by the hegemonic state, the United States, is a fundamentally immoral and irrational system. In capitalism, both states and corporations are designed to maximize short-term power and profits for the super-wealthy corporate elite. [1]
For two and a half months, Israeli military forces, with the full backing of the US government, have dropped more than 40,000 tons of explosives—the equivalent of more than two nuclear bombs—on Gaza destroying residential buildings, hospitals, schools and refugee camps and deliberately targeting hundreds of medical workers, journalists, teachers and other civilians for assassination. [2]
At least 20,000 Palestinians have been killed and 54,000 wounded, the majority women and children. Many more face death in the coming weeks, as Israel lays siege in the south and deprives Gaza’s 2.2 million people of food, water and medical care. Hunger and disease are rapidly spreading through their makeshift shelters.
US vetos have blocked international calls for a ceasefire. The US government is fully supporting Israel politically, financially and militarily.
A recently leaked Pentagon document stated that US “security assistance” was arriving in Israeli on a near-daily basis. The US has delivered 36,000 rounds of 30mm artillery shells, 1,800 M141 Bunker-buster bombs and other munitions to Israel in late October alone, according to the document. [2]
Under the rubble, alongside the buried bodies of children, Palestinian rescue workers have found bomb fragments with the manufacturing codes of Boeing and other US defense companies. There is unchallengeable evidence that the Biden administration and both corporate-backed U.S. political parties are just as guilty as the Netanyahu government for perpetuating the greatest war crime of the 21st century.
Why all this death and destruction? Because corporate war investors ruled America needs to be assured of its continuing to have that US armed powerful Israeli military outpost in the midst of the oil rich nations of the Middle East. Something America established in 1946 when American power over an incipient United Nations of only 56 nations, produced the genocidal stratagem of torching the Holy Land with a phony, never expected nor intended to be implemented resolution for a crazy quilt partition of Palestine into six noncontiguous areas; the Arab areas entirely noncontiguous; the Jewish areas contiguous by a thread; the designated major area for Jews containing more Arabs than Jews, and meant to immediately provoke a civil war prepared for and expected by the Colonial Powers supported and well armed Revisionist Zionists leadership. With the announcement of the UN vote for partition (adopted by a vote of only 25 in favor versus 32 against, abstaining or absent), the fully expected bloodshed had begun. The partition resolution awarded the proposed Jewish State 51% of the land even though Jews owned only 6% and made up only 33% of the population. [Map of the UN proposed partition at Click Here ]
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Western Media Never Questions Why U.S. Well Armed Israel Could Not Just Defend Itself Instead of Claiming It Must Destroy Hamas and Murder Tens of Thousands of Women and Children.
Is there a risk for U.S.A. that the Israeli tail might be waving the America dog?
The destruction of Gaza’s homes and buildings makes the 2.3 million citizens of Israeli prison-enclosed Gaza homeless. Without food, water, fuel electricity and sanitation infrastructure, the survivors will be forced to leave. (Neighboring Egypt and Jordan are well aware of the increasing threat of having to care for more than two million impoverished Gaza refugees seeking asylum.)
Once Gaza is obliterated has become a desolate and de-populated land, while the West Bank Palestinian land is further settler colonized beyond the half million Israeli settler enclaves already making life difficult for Palestinians, Israel will be close to its goal of eventually having complete control and ownership of all the land that once was the British Mandate of Palestine. Then Israel could expel the Arabs from their last enclave in East Jerusalem.
Haaretz, Israel News, Nov. 5, 2023
Rabbi at Israeli Military Training Base Says ‘Whole Country’ Is ‘Ours,’ Including Gaza and Lebanon.’
The Israel-Hezbollah conflict is intensifying! Could Netanyahu decide to settle old scores with Hezbollah and even Iran while U.S. aircraft carriers are committed to defend Israel?
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Western Media Ignores Palestinian Fight for Freedom & Israeli Killing to Continue Its Murderous Illegal Occupation & Colonization.
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Western Media Hides Truth Palestinians Fight for Freedom & Israel Kills to Continue Occupation & Colonization
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Western Media Questions Gaza’s Future Never Israel’s Illegal Occupation & Colonization of Palestine
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Turkey’s President Erdogan calls Israel a ‘terror state’, criticizes the West and calls for Israeli officials to be tried for war crimes. Has said that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Nov. 1, 2023 Aljazeera
Israel in its supporting CIA-overseen Western media[3] have concocted grotesque fables to present Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages in order to justify its horrific genocide in Gaza.
Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group.
These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West, and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot.
In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has leveled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel.
Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.
Many of the claims about 7 October have been shocking beyond belief, such as stories that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”
As to Israel’s using the Israelis killed in the Hamas Oct 7th attack to justify the Israeli response of murdering at the time already 12, 500 Palestinian civilians, resent investigations find that a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition, making it very difficult to distinguish between Israelis and Hamas attackers. Since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles, Kalashnikov rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many or most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots, who reported that they had blasted anything that moved.
Israel admits apache helicopters fired on their own civilians running from the Supernova music festival.
“The pilots realized that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian… The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets.” [4]
Last week the BBC and others led again with stories of systematic Hamas mass rapes on 7 October. Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims are being obstructed by Israel.
The media’s amplification of Israel’s version of 7 October continues to breathe life into the Israeli case that wrecking Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified
Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place
Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired.
Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in at least some of the killings attributed to Hamas.
The Israeli military has finally conceded that it had killed its own civilians on October 7 “in immense and complex quantity”.
Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan:
“There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.”
How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks?
Shelled by Israel
Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed.
She has repeatedly explained to the Israeli media what happened.
According to Porat’s account to Kan radio on 15 November, the Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages – either planning to use them as human shields or as bargaining chips for an exit.
The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up.
Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house.
In Porat’s account, when she asked why this had been done, “they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house”.
The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions.
Survivor of Kibbutz Be’eri incident reveals harrowing details of Israeli forces’ assault
Hadas Dagan, the only survivor of the Kibbutz Be’eri incident on 7 October, has broken her silence, recounting the horrific events. During the Israeli forces’ arrival, a fierce exchange of gunfire ensued, followed by missile strikes. Amidst this chaos, Dagan recalls the children’s desperate screams for help. Her testimony brings to light the targeted assault on civilians by the Israeli army, including her partner Adi, who was killed in the attack. Dagan vividly describes the terrifying moments,
A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent.
Hatsroni and her aunt, Ayalan, were both incinerated. It took weeks to identify their bodies.[5]
Confused pilots
Porat’s testimony is far from the only source showing that Israel is likely to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the civilian deaths that day – and for the burned bodies.
The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said: “Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants.
The Ynet news website cited an Israeli air force assessment of its two dozen attack helicopters in the skies above the Nova festival: “It was very difficult to distinguish between terrorists and [Israeli] soldiers or civilians.” Nonetheless, pilots were instructed “to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence” with Gaza.
Pilots emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again.
Challenge to official story
Although they are rarely given a voice, Palestinians have their own, alternative narrative of what happened that day – and parts of it are being bolstered by accounts from Israeli sources.
In this telling, Hamas long trained for its breakout, and with a strategic aim in mind. The goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages.
The aim, according to this narrative, was to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges.
To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.[6]
Your 92 year old writer, is unable to stop thinking of the mass of fellow civilian human beings and their children being murdered, maimed and starved in Gaza with the weapons and munitions supplied by my government.
Seems like minded people, especially fellow Americans, should make this a topic of conversation among family, friends and co-workers, for none of us are safe from future crimes of our government.
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.” Leonardo da Vinci
“To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.” –Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Archbishop of South Africa Desmond Tutu
America will not be ruled by corporate investors in war dis-informing and shaming its citizens by U.S. genocidal military crimes in other peoples countries forever. The whole world is getting fed up with it.
The vast majority of Humankind in the Global South cannot but be aware of having suffered genocide and military occupation by U.S./NATO similar to that being suffered by Palestinians today.
Ih our space age of instant world wide communication the five centuries of White race rule of planet Earth will come to an end.
There are more Chinese than the total population of U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. There are also now more Indians than Chinese and more Africans than Indians. Imagine how this human majority feels about this continuing American hegemony.
End Notes
1. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/07/16/us-corporate-elite-killing-democracy-and-planet
2. World Socialist Web Site
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/21/cdxa-d21.html
3.“Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times
4. https://middleeastmonitor.com/20231030-report-7-october-testimonies-strikes-major-blow-to-israeli-narrative/… 4.
5. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0tKA-stHb0/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=5d0d1e79-4f79-4d93-ab5a-803ed391531e
6. ‘Why is the media ignoring evidence of Israel’s own actions on 7 October?’ By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net . Via Middle East Eye
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989.
22 December 2023
Source: countercurrents.org