Updated: 1/10/24
According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor since October 7th, the Israeli military has killed over 27,000 Palestinian civilians, including more than 11,000 children, 6,000 women, and at least 104 journalists, and these numbers continue to rise. How many more dead will quench their thirst for blood?
Israel has dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza over the past seven weeks, more bombs than the U.S. dropped over the course of a year on Afghanistan, a country roughly 1800 times larger than Gaza. The state is targeting schools, refugee camps, hospitals, and entire civilian families. Mondoweiss reported on the 13th “Israel is ordering over one million civilians to flee their homes. This is genocide and ethnic cleansing“.
On October 17th, a UNRWA school in al-Maghazi refugee camp where 4000 people were taking refuge was bombed by the Israeli air force. On the same day, the Al-Ahli Hospital, run by the Episcopal Church, which was serving as a refuge for displaced, injured, and dying Palestinians was mercilessly bombed by Israeli forces after ordering them to evacuate. Between 200 to 300 people were killed in the airstrike according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
On October 19th, the world’s third oldest Church, Saint Porphyrius in Gaza was bombed in another Israeli airstrike, killing 150. Both attacks were reported as “blasts” by Western media to obscure the source of the attacks. Israeli officials blamed Hamas but two days later they admitted it was their own doing. On October 31st, Israel dropped six one-ton bombs on the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing 400. On November 5th it was bombed again.
Hospitals, ambulances, doctors, other medical personnel are regularly bombed by Israel in violation of international law with no repercussions. These types of attacks, however, have increased dramatically. The WHO reported on November 20th there have been 335 such attacks since October 7th,[i] killing at least 68 medical personnel and destroying 25 ambulances.
The same day Al-Ahli Hospital was attacked the Pentagon reported the “steady flow of weapons” to Israel from the United States will continue. The US provides $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year, more than any other country, and the Biden administration just announced they are requesting an additional $14 billion in military aid to Israel and $60 billion for Ukraine, a state that incorporated the Azov Battalion, a Neo-Nazi paramilitary, into its National Guard. The Azov Battalion was ironically co-founded by Natan Khazin, a former IDF solider, and funded by Israeli billionaire, Igor Kolomoisky.[ii] The Israeli state has also sent arms to Ukraine and trained the Azov Battalion.[iii] Their belief in white supremacism is what binds them and overwhelms the antisemitism of Azov. They are natural allies as they see Arabs and the non-white world more broadly as a much larger enemy. As Mintpress news reported last year “Israel’s system of racial supremacy is viewed with great admiration by many white supremacists, who seek to model their own system along similar lines.”
On October 18th, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to establish a temporary ceasefire so that humanitarian aid could be delivered to Gaza. It was the only member of the UN to vote against it. At a press conference Biden even said he has “no confidence” in the number of deaths being reported in Gaza. The Ministry responding by publishing 212 pages of the names and identification numbers of all of the victims. Much like Israeli officials, Biden is attempting to erase Palestinians from existence, denying the horror they are suffering is occurring at all.
Nearly half of the country’s population consists of children, so the deaths of so many children are inevitable when Israel insists on indiscriminately bombing the population. Mintpress news reported on October 20th, “Palestinian children in Gaza writing their names on their arms with the to help doctors identify their corpses in case if they are killed in an Israeli airstrike.” The utter disregard for human life and bloodthirsty callousness on display is inconceivable. This is not a war between Israel and Hamas. It is a genocide against Palestinians.
Gazan American physician, Dana Elborno, wrote on October 17th that “In my career as a Gazan American physician, I’ve delivered 1,000 babies. Israel has killed that many children in a week. We are now at a point where Gazans have asked that we turn our prayers from survival to praying that their death is quick, praying that they not get trapped under rubble alive or die of thirst.”
Comments from Israeli politicians, police, and military personnel make their racist, genocidal intentions very clear. For example, during a Knesset session on October 16th, Palestinian lawmaker, Aida Touma-Sliman, called on congress to “get the civilians out of the circle of blood…Jews as well as Arabs, Israelis as well as Palestinians,” reminding members “A child is a child.” The so-called “liberal centrist” Israeli politician, Ben-Ari, began shouting in response, “There is no symmetry. There is no symmetry!” She later addressed the Knesset, repeating her remarks, adding “The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves.”
Finance Minister of Israel, Bezalel Smotrich, referred to 2 million residents of Gaza as “Nazis.” Israeli Knesset member, Limor Son Har Melech, tweeted there are “no innocents in Gaza.” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said, “As long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands — the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” Israel treats the hostages as political bait but clearly does not care about them. If they did, they would not indiscriminately bomb Gaza with the hostages there. 50 have already been killed by Israeli airstrikes. Israeli Major General, Giora Eiland, told Israeli media, “creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal. Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist. ”Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything…I ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip. No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” On October 27th Netanyahu compared Hamas to the Amalekites from the Bible. In this Biblical myth God commands King Saul to “go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” This parallel is made in attempt to justify the same annihilation.
These comments are egregiously racist and dehumanizing. They are not the comments of a “nation defending itself” but of a state intent on exterminating a race of people. They cannot possibly believe Palestinian children are somehow all guilty of terrorism. Perhaps they don’t consider their own ethnic and religious hatred comparable to antisemitism because they don’t regard Palestinians as human beings. Their degrading comments alone have fatal consequences abroad. For example, on October 14 six-year-old Palestinian-American, Wadea Al-Fayoume, was stabbed 26 times in his home in Illinois by his racist landlord who also stabbed and choked his mother. On November 25th, Palestinian American students, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were all shot unprovoked walking to Hisham’s grandmother’s house for dinner. This would not have occurred without the constant stream of pro-Israeli propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians broadcast from the US.
On October 13th, Israeli PM Netanyahu gave 1.1 million residents in north Gaza an impossible demand to “evacuate within 24 hours.” Even during peacetime, Egypt allows very few Palestinians to cross its borders. Israel has also terminated supply of all water, medicine, electricity, and fuel in Gaza, making escape even more unrealistic, and millions of Palestinians are at imminent risk of death and displacement. On October 21st Netanyahu told Palestinians “everyone who hasn’t evacuated from northern Gaza to the south might be treated as a member of a terrorist organization.” “Your presence in Gaza valley increases your chances of death.” The end goal for Netanyahu is likely to permanently annex North Gaza.
The people of Gaza have nowhere to go. Gaza only shares borders with Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea and neither state want them crossing their borders. Gaza has no airport. Israel prevents Gazans from leaving by boat. Calling an “evacuation order” is a public relations strategy effective on people who think there’s an option for Palestinians to evacuate. The IDF knows there’s nowhere to go. They are ensuring there is nowhere to go. If they were honest, they would call what they are doing ethnic cleansing. On October 27th, Gaza lost connection to the internet due to Israeli airstrikes on their infrastructure, making communication with the outside world nearly impossible. They don’t want the world to see their genocide.
This escalation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its ethnic cleansing was catalyzed by one of the deadliest retaliatory attacks by Hamas in recent years that unfortunately employed many of the same terrorist tactics Israel has used for decades. On October 7th Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, sending rockets into Israel, breaching Israel’s apartheid wall, and killing 1400 Israelis, including hundreds of civilians at a music festival in Re’im.
The people of Palestine did not vote for the attack on Israel by Hamas. It was planned by the organization in secret. Palestinian civilians have nothing to do with it and yet they are being collectively punished for it. Biden stoked the flames calling it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. He also compared the attack to the attacks on the world trade center on September 11th, claiming it was “like fifteen 9/11s” in proportion to Israel’s population. As Jeremy Scahill pointed out, “If Biden applied the same logic to the number of Palestinians killed by Israel since this war began, that would be more than 400 September 11s, with no end to the killing in sight.”
Of course, attacks on civilians are never justified. However, there are some extremely violent and brutal settler “civilians” who inflict the same terrorism that the Israeli state does without having any official authority and face no repercussions from any authorities for doing so. This is why Hamas feels justified to attack them. But they must recognize there are also people born in Israel who oppose and protest the occupation, face repression for speaking out, and simply do not have the resources to leave. Of course, attacks on them are not justified, and it is unlikely Hamas is naive enough to believe their attacks on Israeli civilians would help the people of Palestine. They had to recognize the disproportionate brutality Israel would inflict on Palestinian civilians in response because it is always their response. This is reason enough to condemn the tactics of Hamas.
One does not have to support Hamas or Israel. There is no dichotomy. Hamas has support in Palestine in large part because 90% of Hamas funds go to “social, welfare, cultural, and educational activities” like running relief programs, funding schools, including ones for women, orphanages, nurseries, mosques, sports leagues, healthcare clinics for orthodontics, pediatrics, post-surgical care, as well as soup kitchens. It’s also worth noting Hamas generally targets Israel’s military and male settlers and avoids women and children, which cannot be said of the Israeli military.
Despite Israel’s rhetoric, Hamas was not founded out of antisemitism. Since 1948 Israel has been stealing Palestinian land, transforming what little is left into an open-air prison, restricting travel, trapping the population under constant threat of airstrikes, raping, caging, torturing, and killing men, women, and children. Meanwhile, it has the gull to claim it is “defending itself” when they encounter any resistance. Hamas was founded in reaction to the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine. In my ways Israel was responsible for the rise of Hamas. According to a Wikileaks cable, former Israeli intelligence chief, Major General Amos Yadlin, told US ambassador to Israel, Richard Jones, that they wanted Hamas to take over in 2006 instead of more moderate, centrist political parties like Fatah because with Hamas in power they could regard Gaza as a hostile state and thereby more easily justify destroying it. Netanyahu wanted Hamas to take over for the same reason. They never wanted a diplomatic solution.
Unfortunately, as stated Hamas resorts to many of the same terrorist tactics (albeit on a much smaller scale) that Israel has inflicted for decades, and this does nothing but increase the intensity of Israel’s terrorism. Many Americans have no sense of this history. They just hear the Western media narrative that Hamas (unprovoked) is terrorizing Israel because they hate Jews. They pretend the common people of Palestine who are just trying to peacefully survive are somehow behind the terrorism of Hamas, and this is used as a justification to punish them all collectively.
The centrist narrative in Western media is just as misleading. Centrists flatten and whitewash the lopsided reality by portraying Israel and Palestine as somehow equally responsible for a vicious cycle of violence. But Palestine and Israel are by no means equal. Israel is the colonizing nation. Palestine has no air force, no navy, no land army, nor advanced weaponry. Israel has the most well-funded military in the middle East. They have fleets of fighter jets from the US and some of the most advanced weapons on the planet.
The violence would stop if Israel withdrew from West Bank and Gaza and began respecting human life. The violence, however, would not stop if Hamas became nonviolent. Israel would continue to humiliate, harass, steal land, rape, poison, maim, and kill with impunity because like all colonizing states it is hungry for more land, capital, and the blood of those it deems inferior. Israel is in control, not Hamas. Occasionally, Hamas makes successful attacks that Israel cannot prevent but Israel still dictates nearly other aspect of this conflict and how Palestinians live. Israel has killed 20.8 times more Palestinians (32.5% of whom were women and children) than Palestinians have killed Israelis since 2008 according to the UN.
To understand the roots of Hamas, one must study the Nakba. In 1948 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, thirty six percent of the total population of Palestine, were expelled from their homes and 400 to 600 villages were sacked. At least 5,000 Palestinians were killed and 78% of Palestine was seized and declared the state of Israel. A top-secret military document dated November 25, 1948, entitled Operation #40 outlines the mission: “expulsion of Arab villagers from the mentioned villages and denial of their return once again by demolishing their houses. Burning down the villages and destroying the stone houses” and “surveying the refugees ways of movement and laying mines in these routes.”
The day of Nakba, which literally means “disaster” or “catastrophe,” on May 15 1948 commemorates the day of the illegal Israeli land grab and the 1948 Palestinian exodus that occurred during the war. “Absentee property laws” passed by Israel transferred the ownership of about 2 million acres to Israel. Many Palestinians didn’t flee and were named “present absentees,” an obvious contradiction, so that Israel could steal their land anyway. In 2009 Israeli ministers approved a draft law banning commemoration of the Nakba. Punishment for violation of this law is up to three years in prison. This is just one of the many Israeli attempts to erase Palestinian history and existence and replace it with a completely Zionist narrative. We are now witnessing a second Nakba.
Israel falsely portrays itself as a state established for Jewish refugees of the Holocaust as an attempt to justify their own Holocaust. But Israel wasn’t established as a state until three years after WWII during the Nakba. Aggressive colonization of Palestine predated the state of Israel and the Holocaust over the course of decades. Jewish paramilitaries like the Hagana that frequently bombed entire Palestinian families were the seeds of the Israeli state. In 1937 the Nazi Gestapo armed the Hagana, and the Hagana later became the core of the “Israeli Defense Force”. Today, Israel expels refugees from other countries, detains them in the desert, and sterilizes them. Far from a refuge for refugees, Israel is a settler colonial state that much like Nazis espouse the supremacy of certain race of people and like the Nazis they are committing genocide against a people they deem to be inferior.
Holocaust survivors like Dr. Hajo Meyer have compared the tactics they saw Nazis use with Israel’s. Meyer stated in an interview that Israel has “given up everything that has to do with humanity, with empathy, for one thing: the state. The ‘blood and soil,’ just like the Nazis.” Even the dehumanizing rhetoric Nazi Germany used to describe Jews is very similar to Israeli’s rhetoric about Palestinians, referring to them as “rats” or “animals.”
Zionists during WWII collaborated extensively with Nazi Germany, signing the Haavara Agreement, and even supporting the Nuremburg laws. Today, Netanyahu has allied with white supremacist and antisemitic leaders, such as Viktor Orban. What they have in common is more significant than what separates them: a desire for control and supremacy. Both Zionism and Nazism espouse the supremacy of certain race of people, and they both use religion as a justification for genocide.
The Israeli state feels it has a right to replace dark skinned Arab peoples with light-skinned peoples. Israel likely gets more sympathy from many white Americans not just because of pro-Israeli propaganda but because they see themselves in the victims of Hamas as Israeli Jews are light-skinned. Brown Palestinian children maimed, covered in white phosphorus, and killed evoke less sympathy, especially from white conservatives. It is likely the same reason Ukraine gets so much more sympathy from white Americans than any war-torn country with people of color. (That is not to say Ukrainian civilians targeted by the Russian military don’t deserve sympathy and support. Of course, they do. The Russian government is the aggressor in the conflict and it is motivated solely by a desire for more territory and geopolitical control. However, the situation has many differences one being Ukraine was experiencing a civil war before being invaded by Russia.) According to a 2014 poll conducted by the Pew Research center, 47 percent of whites blamed Hamas for the conflict and only 14 percent blamed Israel, whereas 35 percent of Hispanic people sided with Palestinians and only 20 percent with Israel. 27 percent of Black Americans blamed Israel and 25 percent blamed Palestinians. (Large portions of people blamed both groups or said they didn’t know.) With the latest Israeli atrocities, hopefully at the very least public support for Palestinians will increase.
Palestinian opposition to Zionism had (and has) nothing to with antisemitism but with a desire to keep their homes, to avoid being displaced or replaced, and to govern themselves. It is colonialism Palestinians stands against, not the immigration of Jewish peoples. Israel’s occupation and genocide, on other hand, is rooted in hatred of Arab people.
Like the Nazis, Israel doesn’t just kill its victims. It treats Palestinians as subhuman the way Nazis did the Jews, Soviets, Romani, Poles, queers, handicapped, and dissidents. They steal the organs of dead Palestinians. They incarcerate 500 to 700 children per year under military law (some of whom are kept outdoor cages during a winter storm in 2014). They torture and attack civilians with chemical weapons like white phosphorus. They withhold the bodies of victims from their families and freeze them to prevent autopsies. They use explosive ammunition and dense inert metal explosives on civilians. They imprison them with their Nazi-like apartheid walls and in their Draconian prisons. They hold them at degrading checkpoints and restrict free travel. They prevent construction material from entering Gaza so they cannot rebuild homes destroyed by Israeli bombs. They kill pregnant Palestinian women, and bomb hospitals, mosques, UN centers, schools, and residential buildings.
Detained Palestinian children are also repeatedly threatened with rape to force false confessions and to implicate those the IDF wants to punish. One 15-year-old boy, Ahmad F., had food smeared on his genitals by IDF soldiers so that a dog would eat it off him. Fathi Mahfouz, also 15 years old at the time he was kidnapped by the IDF, explained he was electrocuted and hung to a cross by the IDF. No lawyers are ever present during forced “confessions” and Israeli military courts have conviction rate of 99.74% for Palestinian defendants according to the military court’s own annual report. Meanwhile in 2012, out of 103 investigations opened into offenses perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in Palestine, not one resulted in a charge according to research by the Israeli legal advocacy group Yesh Din. Palestinian children don’t just suffer the trauma of arbitrary arrests, injuries, and deaths. They are also regularly woken up in the middle of the night during raids and asked which bed they sleep in, asked for IDs, and photographed to map their location. The IDF also interrogates children to gain information about leaders of nonviolent protest movement against the occupation.
Israel shares many similarities to South Africa during its apartheid era. There are Jewish only roads. There are two different systems of “justice” based on ethnicity. Palestinian Arabs (and even some Israeli Arabs) are tried in military courts while Israeli Jews are tried in civilian courts even when they commit crimes in Gaza or the West Bank. All forms of political activity have been criminalized by Israel, including handing out leaflefts and raising the Palestinian flag, and travel is restricted only for Palestinians, not for Israelis. From 2000 and 2007, an estimated 16% of pregnant women had to wait at Israeli checkpoints for periods for more than two hours, resulting in 68 women delivering at checkpoints, 35 miscarriages, and five maternal deaths.
For a state that was supposedly founded to give Jewish refugees a home, Israel treats non-Jewish refugees and immigrants with nothing but disdain. For example, The Guardian reported in February 2013 that Ethiopian women immigrating to Israel are injected with birth control, Depo-Provera, without their consent or knowledge in many cases in transit camps in Ethiopia and again when they arrive in Israel every three months in Israeli clinics. The Guardian noted, “The phenomenon was uncovered when social workers noticed the birth rate among Ethiopian immigrants halving in a decade.” Jajaw Bimro, a Jewish Ethiopian who immigrated to Israel and refused to serve in the IDF told the San Francisco Bay View some immigrants have even had their blood thrown in the trash when they donate. Immigrants also face discrimination in many Israeli workplaces. Many members of the Knesset describe immigrants and refugees in Israel as “infiltrators” and this is even codified in laws like the “anti-infiltration law” passed in 1954. The law was amended on January 10, 2012 to legalize imprisonment of immigrants for up to three years without a trial.
The targets of racism in Israel aren’t limited to Muslims, Palestinians, or Africans. There is even racism among Jews directed at Jews of different origins. For example, Mizrahi Jews were housed in tent cities upon their arrival in Israel, their heads were shaved, and they were sprayed with DDT. Today, there is still economic disparity between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews. Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews have also been excluded from some schools and segregated in others. Further, 13% of Israel’s land is owned by the Jewish National Fund, which will not lease or sell any land to Arabs, including Jewish Arabs. Israel’s Law of Return also makes Palestinian refugees ineligible for citizenship.
It is easy to feel powerless to stop these atrocities. But if enough people in the US begin to see past the pro-Israeli, anti-Arab propaganda, politicians will have to respond. The US is Israel’s biggest supporter politically, militarily, and financially. If the US had not voted “no” on the UN resolution for a ceasefire, children would not be dying in Gaza right now. We must do everything we can to put pressure on the US government, media empires, and Israeli lobbies like Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that churn out right-wing, pro-Israeli genocidal propaganda. The income from our labor is being taxed to fund this genocide. We can stop this. We can take to the streets, take direct action against companies and states that supply Israel with weapons, as well as boycott and divest from these companies. We can also donate to charities and groups that are providing aid to Gaza on the ground, such as Baitulmaal, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Palestine Red Crescent Society, Islamic Relief USA, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, Middle East Children’s Alliance, and the U.N.R.W.A. Educating friends, family, and others about the situation is crucial as well to fight the propaganda. As Holocaust survivor, Dr. Hajo Meyer pointed out before his death the lesson from the Holocaust should not be “never again for Jews” but “never again for anyone.”
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(The featured image was published by Roshdi Sarraj who was just killed in an Israeli airstrike.)
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