America is complicit in a historic massacre taking place before our eyes
Our money, our weapons, and our approval means there will be no washing our hands of this
It was no surprise. Just when the Biden Administration needed a new war to come along and pull their chestnuts out of the smoldering failure that is Ukraine, they got one. It all started on October 7 with a strange and unlikely surprise attack, ostensibly conducted by the Palestinian paramilitary group Hamas, from inside the walls of the (normally) most heavily surveilled and barricaded open-air prison in the world. I’m speaking of Gaza, of course.
Continuously occupied by the Israeli military from 1967 until 2005, when they withdrew to rely upon barricades, blockades, “no-go” buffer zones to keep the population subdued, the 141-square-mile Gaza Strip is almost exactly the size of Detroit (the city, not the metro area). But whereas Detroit has a little over 600,000 people, Gaza is home to about 2.3 million people, the vast majority of them barely eking out a living and unable to leave.
It’s essentially an Israeli-controlled slum. I say this not to add to the dehumanization of the Palestinian people that has become commonplace — there are pockets of Gaza that are beautiful — but repeated bombardments by Israel over the years using sophisticated American weapons has reduced many areas to rubble, or shanty-town pockets built in previously bombed-out areas.
For many people who live there and in the West Bank, the other Palestinian enclave in Israeli-occupied territory being slowly absorbed by Jewish settlements, their heritage is a bitter one. By the time the Palestine War ended following the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, 400 Palestinian towns and villages throughout what had become Israel had been depopulated or wiped off the map to make way for new Israeli towns. 700,000 people — 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs that had inhabited what became Israel — had been made homeless refugees, either having fled the violence or been driven out. This historic oppression, and all that’s followed in the years since, is referred to as the “Nakba” by Palestinian Arabs. It’s a word that’s not spoken in polite society in Israel.
A minority of Arab residents were able to remain in what became Israel, and today 2.5 million Israeli-Arab citizens — most of them Muslim or Christian — comprise roughly 20% of the country’s population. But fears of a growing Arab population in Israel proper periodically cause the very right-wing political establishment there to panic and adopt policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic dominance over the country and increasing isolation and control over Gaza and the West Bank.
When members of Hamas and other Palestinian paramilitary organizations like Islamic Jihad get fed up with the pressure in Gaza, they periodically lash out with waves of crude rocket attacks that don’t pose a threat of widespread loss of life but do kill and damage or destroy property. In the past, Israel has responded disproportionately. In 2014 after Hamas launched a wave of rocket attacks with little real effect, Israel responded with a heavy bombardment that killed thousands in Gaza, but far fewer than have been killed so far in the current conflict.
October 7 was an exponentially more serious and deadly development. It was also very odd. Videos showed the use of paragliders and drones to take out or simply fly over modern Israeli defenses. The bulk of the Israeli military were very late to engage, apparently having been pulled from the area around Gaza and moved north. Whatever the real story is of the attack’s origin, at the end of it 1,200 Israeli citizens and soldiers were killed and many injured. Images and videos showing the panic and carnage were hard to watch. Over 200 were reportedly taken back into Gaza as hostages. Remnants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, many of them apparently hard to distinguish from fleeing Israelis, remained in the country to battle with Israeli forces for days, an outcome that would have been inconceivable just a few days before.
Israel’s political and military establishment seemed in disarray and confusion for days. But when they finally pulled it together, the latest in a series of heavy bombardments began for Gaza. As of this writing, over 11,000 Palestinians, unable to leave Gaza, have been killed, including many thousands of children. This is being done using American weapons and logistical support (the US has admitted to operating drones in the skies over Gaza), not to mention US and European political cover for the genocide Israel is waging against these people (there’s no other word for the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands).
Images and videos coming out of Gaza have been both heartbreaking and enraging. The broken bodies of men, women and children have streamed into overwhelmed hospitals at a steady pace. Bloodied, dust-covered kids have drawn their last breaths in the rubble of their homes or on the floors of hospital corridors while others tremble in wide-eyed shock. Many of them are so gruesome and explicit I can’t post them here.
I condemn the attacks that took 1,200 Israeli lives. And I condemn the barbaric reaction of the Israel government and military who have bombed hospitals, ambulances, and residential buildings relentlessly since then, wiping out 11,000 lives and counting. I condemn Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s taking of hundreds of Israelis hostage. And I condemn Israel’s prior arrest and imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians, many of them and their families oblivious as to why they were arrested because Israeli law allows administrative arrest without explanation. Are they not also hostages?
My condemnation and disgust with Israel’s actions are greater for several reasons. The historic background shows them to be the oppressor of the Palestinian people. They created and maintain the conditions that keep the Palestinians destitute and virtually imprisoned, and their constant building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank further balkanizes and isolates the Arab populations in an area which, according to decades of UN resolutions and US policy, is supposed to be set aside for a Palestinian state.
But most of all, I condemn Israeli actions more than Palestinian ones because Israel does it with my taxpayer dollars using weapons my country’s arms manufacturers get rich off of. For decades we have aided Israel, a modern, wealthy country, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Many of those billions have flowed into the coffers of Boeing and Raytheon and General Dynamics. I’m supposed to feel good about that because some of my money is ultimately flowing back to the US into the bank accounts of these bombmakers.
Or I’m supposed to feel good about it because Israel is populated by God’s chosen people living out a destiny granted to them in biblical accounts thousands of years ago before modern states and modern international humanitarian law existed. I’m supposed to pretend that the modern state that was created in 1948, carved out of land that mostly belonged to others, is uniquely immune from international law because it has a direct tie to an Old Testament-era kingdom that I’m supposed to view as a fulfillment of prophecy.
Or I’m supposed to feel good about it because it’s somehow justified due to the historic crime that was committed against German Jews that rightfully created so much sympathy for their plight and hastened the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine.
Well, two wrongs don’t make a right.
“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” - Malcolm X
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.