[News] This Is Not a War Against Hamas

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2023/12/11/israel-hamas-war-civilians-biden/>
This Is Not a War Against Hamas
Jeremy Scahill - December 11, 2023
------------------------------
[image: KHAN YUNIS, GAZA - DECEMBER 10: Palestinians mourn near dead bodies
of their relatives at Nasser Hospital after Israeli airstrike in Khan
Yunis, Gaza on December 10, 2023. (Photo by Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty
Images)]

Palestinians cry beside the bodies of their family members at Nasser
Hospital after Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Dec. 10, 2023.
Photo: Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images

The events of the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war
against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. On
Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the
world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for
an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy
circumventing congressional review to ram through approval
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/world/middleeast/us-israel-tanks-ammunition.html>
of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken
has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of
television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that
the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million
residents. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have
suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent
harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10. A month later, with the
death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured
the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and
that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a
tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s
events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood.

Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S.
news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to
the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. 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.

The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times
that even the Israeli military has suggested
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-appears-to-push-back-on-irresponsible-us-claim-hamas-refusing-to-release-raped-hostages/>
they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/12/white-house-walks-back-bidens-claim-he-saw-children-beheaded-by-hamas>
to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed
that unverified
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/26/biden-white-house-divisions-israel-gaza/>
allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and
publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this
is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to
exaggerate or stumble into gaffes.

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.
[image: (EDITOR'S NOTE: Graphic content) Wounded Palestinians are arriving
at Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital following an Israeli bombardment on Al-Zawayda
in the central Gaza Strip, on December 10, 2023, amid continuing battles
between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (Photo by Majdi
Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)]

Injured children receive treatment on the floor at the Shuhada Al-Aqsa
hospital following an Israeli bombardment on Az-Zawayda in the central Gaza
Strip on Dec. 10, 2023.
Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images *Israel’s Dystopian Gameshow*

The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any
way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian
population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period.
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.

Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials
playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what
has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the
population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1,
Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of
numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’s Arabic language website, it
encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to
monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone
to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is
nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its
participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and
your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell
an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health
care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut
down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that
is terrorizing them.

Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made
clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly
<https://abcnews.go.com/International/gaza-palestinians-residents-nowhere-safe-israel-war/story?id=105449623>
struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases,
the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One
such message
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-evacuation-map-idf-resumes-airstrikes/>
read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of
residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.”
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said
<https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/9/photos-israel-bombs-gaza-areas-it-called-safe-zones-for-palestinians>
Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between
ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.”
Blinken attributed
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-close-gap-israels-intent-resulting-gaza-death/story?id=105524365#:~:text=%22There's%20a%20gap%20between%20the,weapons%2C%20if%20it%20surrendered.%22>
the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between
Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I
think the intent is there,” he said
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/blinken-palestinian-civilian-safety-imperative-envisions-durable-peace-2023-12-10/>.
“But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated
when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians.
“It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people.
It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ty4JjcsOIw>. “But it’s not like the
Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more
civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a
residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not
doing that.” One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against
civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is
doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby *believes* the IDF’s intent
to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said
that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into
submission, death, or flight.

Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative
report
<https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/>
by
the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on
interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described
in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in
buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of
Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander.
“Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “When a 3-year-old
girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided
it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth
paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not
random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much
collateral damage there is in every home.”

As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s
pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent
with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to
justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister
has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no
Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The
U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium,
Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the
slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.

Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media
outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they
are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record
of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity.
Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli
propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is
otherwise.

Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days
of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing
blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These
claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men
have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one
particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers
and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down
their alleged rifles.

Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping
detainees. “Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially
during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might
not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News
<https://news.sky.com/story/israel-gaza-latest-us-steps-up-pressure-on-israel-with-visa-ban-as-un-tells-netanyahu-military-operation-has-to-stop-12978800?postid=6892292#liveblog-body>.
“We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially
suicide bombers with explosive vests.” Regev was asked about this clear
violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos
of prisoners of war. “I’m not familiar with that level of international
law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the
videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are
military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said.

Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz
reported
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-10/ty-article-live/israels-ground-offensive-in-gaza-deepens-as-arab-eu-leaders-push-for-a-cease-fire/0000018c-5187-df2f-adac-ffaf03700000?liveBlogItemId=1308272871&htm_source=site&htm_medium=button&htm_campaign=live_blog_item#1308272871>
that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in
the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives
or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security
sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even
this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.

So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an
immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to
play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.
[image: KHAN YUNIS, GAZA - NOVEMBER 22: People place the bodies of dead
Palestinians, who lost their lives during the Israeli attacks, in a mass
grave in the cemetery in Khan Yunis, Gaza on November 22, 2023. The bodies,
detained by the Israeli authorities, were delivered by Israel through the
Red Cross Organization to the authorities in Gaza. (Photo by Mustafa
Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)]

Bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks are placed in a mass grave
in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Nov. 22, 2023.
Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images No Path of Resistance

It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are
not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the
perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October
7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing
operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.

Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of
Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of
the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s
75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of
transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing
cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders
demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions
as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify
war crimes. “You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a
degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses
its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin
Rabbani recently told Intercepted
<https://theintercept.com/2023/12/02/intercepted-gaza-war-israel-hamas/>.
“It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of
inhibition.”

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
<https://www.btselem.org/publications/202112_unwilling_and_unable>, they
have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli
forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return,
killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later
boasted
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-03-06/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/42-knees-in-one-day-israeli-snipers-open-up-about-shooting-gaza-protesters/0000017f-f2da-d497-a1ff-f2dab2520000>
about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday
demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers,
they are killed or sent into military tribunals. 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.
Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to
address the grave injustices imposed on them.

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. One aspect of this should certainly probe
Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up
Hamas and facilitating
<https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/buying-quiet-inside-the-israeli-plan-that-propped-up-hamas/>
the flow of money to the group. “Anyone who wants to thwart the
establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and
transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-09/ty-article/.premium/another-concept-implodes-israel-cant-be-managed-by-a-criminal-defendant/0000018b-1382-d2fc-a59f-d39b5dbf0000>
his Likud comrades in 2019.

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. Israel’s president said as much on October 13. “It is an
entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared
<https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-president-says-no-innocent-154330724.html>.
“It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not
involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could
have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup
d’etat.”

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
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-close-gap-israels-intent-resulting-gaza-death/story?id=105524365#:~:text=%22There's%20a%20gap%20between%20the,weapons%2C%20if%20it%20surrendered.%22>
December 10. “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.

Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has
consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/14/israel-gaza-history/>” in
Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical
campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian
infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has
never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during
an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring
if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its
bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We
should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should
call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.
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