[News] Israeli election ad boasts Gaza bombed back to "stone ages"

Anti-Imperialist News news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jan 22 12:21:36 EST 2019


https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-election-ad-boasts-gaza-bombed-back-stone-ages 



  Israeli election ad boasts Gaza bombed back to "stone ages"

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> - 21 
January 2019

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Benny Gantz <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/benny-gantz>, the 
former Israeli army chief, is bragging about how much killing and 
destruction he committed in Gaza in a series of campaign videos for his 
new political party posted on YouTube and social media over the weekend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Hg3j7OQwY5I

Gantz hopes to replace Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister in 
elections scheduled for April.

One of the videos, above, shows drone footage of a devastated 
neighborhood in Gaza in August 2014, following Israel’s 51-day assault 
on the territory.

The video’s title includes the words “Parts of Gaza were returned to the 
stone ages.”

Against the swell of dramatic music, captions on screen announce, “6,231 
targets destroyed,” and “1,364 terrorists killed.”

The ad then claims that this carnage brought “3.5 years of quiet.”

A second video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEUQId3oTNo> displays a 
kill-counter on screen racking up bodies until the number 1,364 is 
reached. In the background Palestinians are seen conducting funerals.

The video is another depraved celebration of killing.

All the videos contain the words “Only the strong win.”

And they close with Gantz’s campaign slogan “Israel before everything,” 
which could just as well be translated as the Trumpian “Israel first.”


    Admission of war crimes

In fact, the 2014 attack on Gaza, which Gantz commanded, killed 2,251 
Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, among them 551 children, 
according to an independent investigation 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/balance-un-gaza-report-cant-hide-massive-israeli-war-crimes> 
commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council.

More than 11,000 Palestinians, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children, 
were injured with almost 10 percent suffering permanent disabilities.

Thus according to the independent report, fewer than 800, or about a 
third of those killed, were combatants – far fewer than the 1,364 
“terrorists” about whose killing Gantz brags.

This means that Gantz considers Palestinian civilians to be legitimate 
targets – effectively an admission to war crimes.

That is potentially useful information for the human rights lawyers who 
are suing Gantz and another top Israeli officer 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/netanyahu-challenger-benny-gantz-faces-dutch-war-crimes-case> 
in a Dutch court for slaying six members of the family of 
Palestinian-Dutch citizen Ismail Ziada 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/ismail-ziada>.

A key finding of the UN-commissioned report was that the mass 
destruction and killing inflicted by Israel, often amounting to war 
crimes, “may have constituted military tactics reflective of a broader 
policy, approved at least tacitly by decision-makers at the highest 
levels of the Government of Israel.”

A third video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pLIvtsWVQU> brags about 
the 2012 extrajudicial execution 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/why-doesnt-israeli-press-office-share-byline-new-york-times-gaza-coverage> 
of Ahmad al-Jabari, a Hamas military leader in Gaza.

The final video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCBEEI0YGao>, after 
three others celebrating slaughter, presents Gantz as a statesman who 
hopes for “peace.”

According to opinion polls 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/netanyahu-s-top-challenger-launches-campaign-revealing-long-awaited-election-slogan-1.6849611>, 
Gantz’s brand new Hosen Le Yisrael (Israel Resilience) party stands to 
win about 13 of the 120 seats in Israel’s parliament.

Polling also shows that 31 percent of Israelis favor Gantz as prime 
minister compared with 42 percent who view Netanyahu as more suitable.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party is predicted to come out on top with about 31-32 
seats.


    Variation on a violent theme

Gantz’s campaign slogan “Only the strong win” is a variation on an 
infamous tweet from his main rival Netanyahu, who last summer declared 
that “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history 
while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.”

    The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while
    the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected,
    and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made
    with the strong.

    — PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) August 29, 2018
    <https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/1034849460344573952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

Miko Peled, activist and author of /The General’s Son/ 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-miko-peled-sets-record-straight-palestines-dispossession/11950>, 
said of Gantz’s new ads that it would be “hard to imagine a more violent 
neo-fascist campaign than this one, by the new kid in Israel’s 
elections, war criminal general Benny Gantz.”

    Would be hard to imagine a more violent neofascist campaign than
    this one, by the new kid in #Israel
    <https://twitter.com/hashtag/Israel?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
    elections, war criminal general #BennyGantz
    <https://twitter.com/hashtag/BennyGantz?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>.
    All about death, destruction, power. And all he did was kill people
    who never had an army. https://t.co/dkUyepYoTz

    — Miko Peled, (@mikopeled) January 20, 2019
    <https://twitter.com/mikopeled/status/1087022632304816136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

It is “all about death, destruction, power,” Peled added.

Indeed in that respect Gantz, like Netanyahu, is accurately reflecting 
the desires and fantasies of an Israeli public that views the 
willingness to shed the blood of defenseless Palestinians caged in 
ghettos after decades of expulsion and military occupation as the truest 
measure of leadership.


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