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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2023/12/11/israel-hamas-war-civilians-biden/">theintercept.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">This Is Not a War Against Hamas</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Jeremy Scahill - December 11, 2023<br></div>
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<img width="440" height="293" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GettyImages-1836738927.jpg?resize=1200%2C800" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">
<p class="gmail-caption">Palestinians cry beside the bodies of their family
members at Nasser Hospital after Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis,
Gaza, on Dec. 10, 2023.</p>
Photo: Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images
<p><span>The events of</span> 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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/world/middleeast/us-israel-tanks-ammunition.html">approval</a>
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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-appears-to-push-back-on-irresponsible-us-claim-hamas-refusing-to-release-raped-hostages/">suggested</a> they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/12/white-house-walks-back-bidens-claim-he-saw-children-beheaded-by-hamas">claimed</a> to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/26/biden-white-house-divisions-israel-gaza/">unverified</a>
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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<img width="440" height="293" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GettyImages-1838646068.jpg?resize=1200%2C800" alt="(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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">
<p class="gmail-caption">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.</p>
Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
<h2 id="gmail-h-israel-s-dystopian-gameshow"><strong>Israel’s Dystopian Gameshow</strong></h2>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had
made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/gaza-palestinians-residents-nowhere-safe-israel-war/story?id=105449623">repeatedly</a>
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 <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-evacuation-map-idf-resumes-airstrikes/">message</a>
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 <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/9/photos-israel-bombs-gaza-areas-it-called-safe-zones-for-palestinians">said</a>
Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting
between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for
survival.” Blinken <a href="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">attributed</a>
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 <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/blinken-palestinian-civilian-safety-imperative-envisions-durable-peace-2023-12-10/">said</a>. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ty4JjcsOIw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>.
“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 <em>believes</em> 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. </p>
<p>Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent <a href="https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">investigative report</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="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">Sky News</a>.
“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. </p>
<p>Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz <a href="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">reported</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<img width="440" height="293" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/GettyImages-1796655350.jpg?resize=1200%2C800" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">
<p class="gmail-caption">Bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks are placed in a mass grave in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Nov. 22, 2023.</p>
Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images
<h2>No Path of Resistance</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/12/02/intercepted-gaza-war-israel-hamas/">Intercepted</a>. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”</p>
<p>Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no
legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized <a href="https://www.btselem.org/publications/202112_unwilling_and_unable">nonviolent demonstrations</a>,
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 <a href="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">boasted</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/buying-quiet-inside-the-israeli-plan-that-propped-up-hamas/">facilitating</a>
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 <a href="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">told</a> his Likud comrades in 2019. </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-president-says-no-innocent-154330724.html">declared</a>.
“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.” </p>
<p>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 <a href="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">said</a>
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. </p>
<p>Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/14/israel-gaza-history/">mowing the grass</a>”
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.</p>
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