By Mick Hall
Mick Hall in Context

A former senior U.N. peacekeeper says Israel is targeting U.N. forces in Lebanon to avoid violations in international law being recorded and to force them out of the country.

Retired Irish officer Kevin McDonald says intimidation of United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) soldiers in the country reflects an Israeli imperative to prevent the world from knowing how its ground invasion is unfolding and he expected it to increase dangerously.

McDonald had served as a peacekeeper in south Lebanon over a 20-year period, where he witnessed U.N. peacekeepers being targeted and killed by Israeli forces. He told In Context that Israel was now deliberately undermining not just the laws of war, but also the very basis of international humanitarian law.

Over the past two weeks there have been several direct attacks on UNIFIL peacekeepers, injuring several soldiers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the UNIFIL to withdraw from its 29 posts located across south Lebanon “danger zone,” a call so far rejected by the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) and UNIFIL troop-contributing countries.

Israel began its invasion on Oct. 1 but has come up against stiff opposition from Lebanese Shia resistance group Hezbollah, which has carried out attacks on Israel since Oct. 8, demanding it cease a genocidal onslaught in Gaza. Israel has so far killed approximately 2,500 people in Lebanon, the vast majority of them civilians, as it continues to bomb towns and villages, as well as the Lebanese capital Beirut.

“Looking at how things are developing with the levels of intimidation, it may well be that one of the Israeli aims is to get UNIFIL, not just out of the frontier area, but out of the country,” McDonald says.

UNIFIL said the IDF “deliberately demolished” a watchtower and the fence surrounding its Marwahin post on Oct. 20 (local time). It followed an incident on Oct. 16, when a Merkava tank fired at peacekeepers near Kafer Kela, damaging another watch tower.

“The Israelis have gone from a low level of intimidation to a much more kinetic level of intimidation, like they used a laser range-finder to laser the observation post before firing a tank round at it to make sure they had the right range settings on the tank,” the former commandant says.

In the most egregious violation of U.N. premises, two IDF Merkava tanks blew up the main gate of a U.N. position in Ramyah and forced entry in a dawn raid on Oct. 13, after three platoons of IDF soldiers crossed the Blue Line. The Israelis repeatedly requested the base turn its lights out, before leaving after UNIFIL protests that U.N. peacekeepers were being put at risk.

Hours later 15 peacekeepers at the post suffered skin irritation and gastrointestinal reactions. McDonald put the incident down to artillery fire, a deliberate act to cause a smokescreen.

“I’ve been involved with that and that stuff is noxious. It really is. It’s not gas in the sense of tear gas or CS gas or anything like that. But it is particularly noxious,” McDonald says.

Deliberate attacks on U.N. compounds are breaches of international law and violations of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701.

The day before the U.N. position had also sustained damage from shelling, while IDF soldiers blocked a critical UNIFIL logistical movement near Meiss ej Jebel. On Oct. 12, a peacekeeper at UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqoura was hit by gunfire.

The attacks were condemned by 40 of the 50 nations that supply troops to the UNIFIL mission, including China, India, France, Italy and Spain.

An IDF standoff with Irish peacekeepers earlier at post 6-52 close to the border with Israel heightened diplomatic intensions between Israel and Ireland, with Irish President Michael D Higgins condemning Israeli requests for U.N. peacekeepers to leave their posts as “an outrageous threat.”

[See: IDF in ‘Outrageous Threat’ to Irish UN Troops in Lebanon]

Israeli tanks and a D9 bulldozer used to build an earthen berm were positioned adjacent to the post as the IDF took up firing positions against Hezbollah. The forces left after high-level diplomatic talks between U.N. officials in New York and the IDF.

McDonald said he did not believe the IDF positioned itself there because they thought Hezbollah might not fire back.

 “Another way of looking at it is that by intimidating the Irish out of it, then they could take it over and of course there’s bunkers there, which are better than earthen berms,” he said.

“But I think the more logical reason is, these guys and girls in the post are the eyes and ears of the international community, and the Israelis don’t like their actions to be viewed by other people or broadcast to the world. I think that’s what happened.”

His comments echoed Irish Defence Minister Micheál Martin’s last week, who said Israel was attempting to “give itself a free reign” in Lebanon.

McDonald has good reason to believe this, based on his experiences nearly 20 years ago in the border village of Khiam, when a GPS-guided 1000lb bomb was dropped from an F16 jet on top of a clearly-marked and well-established U.N. compound, killing four soldiers.

The IDF, who at the time were suffering unsustainable losses in Israel’s 33-day conflict with Hezbollah, claimed its attack on the U.N. compound on July 25, 2006, had been an accident.

McDonald said: 

“The khiam patrol base was at the end of a long ridge, just south of the town of Thiam and it overlooked the Hula Valley. The Hula Valley is a big, wide valley and it’s the only large manoeuvre space along the frontier with Lebanon where you can kind of manoeuvre a division of tanks prior to moving into Lebanon.

“My gut feeling is there were two reasons for that attack. One was to stop our guys reporting on Israeli movements in Lebanon, which is what they’re required to do as military observers. They report violations.

“I think the second one was giving the finger to the international community, because at that stage they were like a schoolyard bully that got beaten and were lashing out, at schools, mosques, hospitals, petrol stations, anything. So, they do have a certain wariness of people observing what they’re doing. And of course, there’s no one in Gaza to observe what they’re doing, apart from the Palestinians.”

At the time of writing, the IDF had killed at least 130 journalists in Gaza since Oct.  7 last year, as well as killing 228 UNRWA staff, targeting its hospitals and schools and other facilities of U.N. organisations. No Western journalists have been allowed into the Gaza strip to observe Israel’s military onslaught, a campaign The Lancet medical journal back in April said could have killed 188,000 Palestinians.

“I do think that they would like to see UNIFIL, especially those small operating positions close to the frontier, of which there’s about 20 along the length, and the rest of what we call ‘depth positions’, like the battalion headquarters to the rear, gone,” McDonald says.

“So, the pattern of intimidation may get worse.”

McDonald published his own detailed account of the Khiam base attack in Peacekeeping on the Edge, as reported by West Asia war correspondent Robert Fisk. It underlined how vulnerable U.N. peacekeepers were, a situation that hasn’t changed since and may have even gotten worse.

He wrote that complaints were raised with UNIFIL, United Nations Truce Supervisory Organisation [UNTSO], and top officials at the U.N. headquarters New York who received false assurances from the IDF that strikes around the base would cease that day.

The observational roles played by U.N. soldiers today at posts like 6-52 are what continues to make them vulnerable to similar attacks, something gravely concerning McDonald. Post 6-52 was one the Israelis themselves had requested be built in 2000, due to it being considered “key terrain,” having a vantage point over settlements in northern Israel.

The fact such posts have reinforced bunkers offers no safety to U.N. peacekeepers, given Israel’s use of modern weaponry.

McDonald points out the Khiam post was completely destroyed by the Israelis while unoccupied 20 years earlier and had been rebuilt with a fortified steel and concrete bunker under a two-storey building, with walls and ceiling a metre-and-a-half thick.

“It still managed to kill the four U.N. soldiers,” he said. “A bunker buster missile I guess does exactly what it says on the tin.”

Israel’s military hardware is what makes UNIFIL’s mandate of protecting civilians almost impossible to fulfill. It has the authority to use force if it comes up against hostile actions, but UNIFIL peacekeepers are no match for an Israeli army backed by the West.

[See: UN Troops in Lebanon Can Shoot Back at Israel]

“It’s very hard to protect civilians when you’re faced with an onslaught of one of the most modern armies in the world, with all the high-tech jets, artillery, naval artillery, all that kind of stuff,” McDonald said.

“The armed peacekeeping force isn’t going to be able to do that. It’s very easy for people who don’t know exactly what UNIFIL is capable of and exactly what its mandate is like, to believe they can.”

This was underlined most notably in April 18, 1996, when 15 IDF artillery shells landed in a U.N. compound near Qana, killing 106 civilians who had been sheltering there and injuring at least 116 others.

Israel is continuing to bomb Beirut, as well as towns and villages sheltering displaced Shia communities, its Dahiya doctrine of targeting civilians creating terror among Lebanon’s general population. It is a doctrine seemingly backed by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while largely ignored by other Western officials.

McDonald describes how Israel attempted to use similar types of collective punishment in hope they would turn on Hezbollah in the past and how it ultimately failed.

“I was there initially in 1984 when the Israelis were occupying a large portion of south Lebanon. I was there in 1993 where there was a seven-day war ‘Operation Accountability’ and I was there 1996, when there was also a seven-day war, ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath.’ And both of those two wars were, we say, ‘stand-up’ wars, where the whole idea was to intimidate the Lebanese people to get out of their homes, based on the idea that that would force them to turn against Hezbollah.

“But of course, all it did was turn them into Hezbollah supporters. They also wanted to create a refugee crisis that would force the government of Lebanon to take firmer action against Hezbollah, which is difficult because Hezbollah is a political party… It’s also a welfare organisation with schools and hospitals and mosques and stuff like that, so it’s deeply embedded in society.”

It mirrors tactics employed in Gaza with genocidal intensity since Oct. 7, waged partly as a means of encouraging division and loss of Hamas support among Palestinians and partly as means of ethnic cleansing. The latest large-scale strikes over the weekend on homes in the north Gazan town of Beit Lahiya left at least 87 dead and 40 wounded.

Attacks on Lebanon and military harassment of U.N. forces have served to distract from the ongoing actions of Israel in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled to be a plausible case of genocide.

McDonald believes Israel is undermining such instruments of international humanitarian law and the very foundations of the U.N. itself.

“They’re undermining international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict nearly on an hourly basis in Gaza and in Lebanon,” he says.

“They have not signed up to the International Criminal Court. They’ve barred U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres from entering Israel. There’s definitely a policy where it suits them to have no accountability under international law.

“Then, of course, we should use international law against their perceived enemies and threats, but you know, ‘how dare you hold us accountable?’ Whether it’s a stated policy or an unstated policy, it’s definitely a policy that the U.N. should be undermined at every chance that they get.

“They need to remember however, when UNIFIL was created, it was created with the agreement of both sides to the problem — Lebanon and Israel. So, if they want to pull out of that contract they’ll have to fight that case in the court of public opinion.”

McDonald is not the only one who finds Israel’s deep antipathy towards the U.N. ironic, given it owes the post-war world consensus body gratitude for voting it into existence, a move the wisdom of which is now being openly questioned, at least in its current form.

The ICJ itself ruled Israel in flagrant violation of international law over its annexations of Palestinian land and seemingly condemned its policies as a violation of the prohibition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

It was reported last week that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is seeking to expel Israel from the United Nations General Assembly using the same procedural methods that succeeded in denying apartheid South Africa diplomatic credentials to represent the country in 1974.

Earlier this month, Saul J Takahashi, professor of human rights and peace studies at Osaka Jogakuin University, argued complete expulsion was necessary to protect the very basis of the international order. He wrote:

“There is a pressing need to hold Israel accountable, not only for its longstanding violations of international law, but specifically for its longstanding refusal to abide by its Charter obligations.

“In the face of this recalcitrance, the U.N. must move towards expelling Israel from the organization, not only because the U.N. exists to uphold international law, but also to maintain the U.N.’s integrity as an organization.”

Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald.

This article if from the author’s Substack, Mick Hall in Context

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

BY Jonah Valdez

EARLIER THIS YEAR, two Harvard medical historians published an article on a leading American medical journal’s willful ignorance of Nazi atrocities in the 1930s and ’40s. The article found that the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the nation’s longest-running and most prestigious medical publications, either chose not to cover the Nazi regime’s racist and antisemitic health policies, mass killings, and medical experimentation, or, in one case, praised the Nazi health care system for its approach to public health.

The New England Journal of Medicine convened a symposium on Wednesday where the authors, Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Allan M. Brandt, could present their findings — and Abi-Rached took the opportunity to call the journal out for repeating its mistakes today.

“Is the silence of the journal regarding the pulverization of the health care system in Gaza, and Israel’s relentless attack on health care workers and the creation of a public health and humanitarian disaster and the weaponization of starvation similar or different to its silence during the Holocaust?” Abi-Rached said toward the end of her talk, joining the symposium virtually from Paris. “What explains the erasure of the predicament of Palestinians in the pages of the journal? What do we mean by the political determinants of health if we precisely ignore the plight, the health, and well-being of marginalized and vulnerable populations?”

Abi-Rached, who recently fled the Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon, where she grew up and had been teaching, questioned why the journal has yet to publish any articles about Palestinians and Gaza.

During her talk, Abi-Rached cautioned that the destruction in Gaza is a part of “a significant erosion” of the international humanitarian laws and framework born out of World War II and after the atrocities of Holocaust. She then noted that no one should be surprised that her paper with Brandt, published amid the war in Gaza, had “elicited such strong reactions among medical doctors, public health experts and other healthcare personnel, and the wider public, who were rightly appalled by the silence of the journal regarding the suffering of Palestinians.”

She said that it is the role of historians, medical journals, and universitiesto speak out and raise such questions to reckon with both past and present, referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as “the most glaring and moral crisis of our time.” 

“What is happening today in Gaza is unprecedented. It far surpasses the violations of medical neutrality seen in El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine,” Abi-Rached continued. “We are witnessing today the same deliberate and systematic targeting of health care personnel, not only in Gaza, but also in Lebanon where the conflict has moved and shifted.” (“Medical neutrality” refers to the principle of preserving access to medical care during times of war.)

Abi-Rached’s remarks arrive at a moment when many in the medical community are speaking out about atrocities carried out by the Israeli military, largely led by medical workers who have treated patients in Gaza’s hospitals over the past year. 

Most recently, Feroze Sidhwa, a surgeon who worked at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, for two weeks in March and April, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times based on the observations of 65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saw patients during the war. Doctors provided X-ray images showing bullets embedded in the skulls and spines of patients. Many reported that they repeatedly treated children, often under 12, shot in the head or chest. Pro-Israel critics dismissed the evidence as “digitally altered or completely falsified,” and The Times took the unusual step of publishing a note saying that the paper stood by the reporting after doing “additional work to review our previous findings.”

Throughout the war in Gaza, the Israeli military has targeted hospitals in repeated airstrikes and ground operations. Earlier this week, 19-year-oldPalestinian student, Shaban al-Dalou, was seen burning alive while hooked up to an IV drip after an Israeli airstrike on Al-Aqsa Hospital set fire to the tents of hundreds of displaced people sheltering there. 

More than 800 health care workers have been killed in Gaza in the past year, and the majority of its hospitals have either been destroyed by Israeli strikes or are struggling to operate due to a lack of resources amid the ongoing blockade of medical supplies. 

In Lebanon, where Israel recently intensified its attacks by unleashing widespread bombs and airstrikes, about half of its medical centers and clinics have been closed due to structural damage or their proximity to bombardments in recent weeks. 

BI-RACHED AND BRANDT’S article, “Nazism and the Journal,” received wide attention after its publication in March, including coverage by the New York Times. Even at the time, the article’s omission of Israel’s war in Gaza and its inability to draw through lines from the Holocaust and what experts have called an unfolding genocide of Palestinians generated pushback from other medical experts. 

After Abi-Rached’s talk on Wednesday, applause broke out from the crowd of several dozen in the conference room of the school’s Countway Library. 

Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, responded to Abi-Rached’s remarks by acknowledging that the journal has yet to publish any works about Gaza. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t publish on Gaza,” he said, adding that he is open to the idea. Yet he mentioned that it has been challenging to find a unique voice on the topic.

“To my mind, it’s not enough to say, ‘Attacks on hospitals are bad.’ That’s been said everywhere, we’re not a unique voice in saying that. It’s not enough to say that medical neutrality is an important value,” Rubin said. “So what is it that we can say that will change people’s thinking?”

“And I am not sure what that is, and we would love to be able to create a unique perspective,” he added. “I don’t think we’ve seen that yet and that’s I think what we’re looking for.”

He also acknowledged the potential for pushback. After the publication of the issue on historical injustices, which included Abi-Rached and Brandt’s article, a number of readers canceled their subscriptions in protest, Rubin said. Gaza is even more fraught, he said.

“We’ve heard in the room that there are legitimate controversies that aren’t so clear,” Rubin said, referring to an earlier question from an attendee. 

Before Rubin spoke, one attendee, who said his family has lived in Israel since its creation in 1948 and whose daughter lost a friend during the October 7 attacks, argued that medical neutrality is being “destroyed by both sides” and pointed to Hamas’s rejection of medical services from the Red Cross, as required under international law. He also mentioned the allegation of Hamas using hospitals “as cover for military activities.” Israeli and U.S. officials often allege that Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as a shield, but the claims have been shown to either be exaggerated or unsubstantiated.

The attendee identified himself as a co-chair of the Jewish Employee Resource Group at Mass General Brigham, and added that a survey of Jewish staff at the hospital showed a quarter feel fear working in the hospital and more than two-thirds “feel unable to declare their fully authentic self while at work.”

“In both settings, we would love there to be neutrality around this, so that Jewish staff would not feel that, and similarly, in war, that health care facilities and health care was observed as a neutral space, by all sides, in context of conflict,” he said. 

Brandt, Abi-Rached’s co-author, answered by decrying what he saw as the erosion of the Geneva Conventions through the various conflicts across the globe and talked of the need to restore trust in such institutional norms. 

Abi-Rached then pushed back on the “both sides” argument from the attendee, arguing that his logic is “a bit dangerous.”

The idea that “by merely having combatants or militants being treated at the hospital, that this is enough of a justification or a pretext to bomb it, and by doing that cause even more harm — one should be reminded that this is precisely what fascists have been using historically as an argument,” she said, referencing a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini justifying his bombing campaign on Ethiopian hospitals in the 1930s.

Abi-Rached previously referenced the effects of Israel’s wars on the health care system in Lebanon in a Boston Review article published earlier this month. In the piece, she detailed the moments when dozens of patients from Israel’s pager bombings poured into the Beirut hospital in which she worked.

“We have become subjects in a morbid experiment,” she wrote. “New weapons are being tested, studied, and perfected on lives deemed expendable, with the approval of the most powerful democracies in the West.”

“Is the unfolding war part of the expansion of Eretz Israel, with more and more illegal settlements, driven by the messianism of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu?” Abi-Rached continued. “Could it be explained by the enduring trauma of the Holocaust that is still lingering generations later, with a disturbing transference of hate of Nazis onto hate of ‘Arabs’ who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in the first place?” 

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/new-england-journal-medicine-israel-gaza-hospitals/?

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost 

Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,255 people have been killed and over one million Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.   

In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation. 

Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this. 

Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal” because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”

Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.

Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits? Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen — Israel’s worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the cover of war — to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version of the Armenian genocide?

I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity. 

Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” “we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” we will “never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation.”

Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded. This tactic replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N. Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica. The Serbs, who had cut off food deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and starvation, overran the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys. 

These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered northern Gaza since the beginning of this month. 

Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate. 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the evacuation of hospitals — Israel is also targeting hospitals in Lebanon — deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed schools that serve as shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp into a free fire zone. As usual, Israel continues to target journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition. At least 175 journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that aid shipments to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine persists,” it notes.

The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will be famine. 

Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.

Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained openly that international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians, “even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.” 

What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.

This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis. 

The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation. 

Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and venerates mass murderers. 

We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.

Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence.

We, like Israel, as Nick Turse points out in “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children. 

The slaughters, Turse writes, “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.” 

Many of the Vietnamese — like Palestinians — who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found — again like Israel — that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.” 

“After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”

There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s bloodlust is our own. As ProPublica reported, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.” 

U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.

Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs.

Israel and the U.S. will probably win this round. But ultimately, they have signed their own death warrants. 

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/14/chris-hedges-extermination-works-at-first/

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