Yes they do. The Israel Defence Forces. With the chilling deliberation of men and women told since infancy that theirs is the world’s most moral army, their fight existential – if not biblically ordained – and their enemy a race of untermenschen.
They do shoot children, for these children are the little snakes.
This – shooting children, not the other stuff – is established to a level of proof which long ago crossed the standard legal threshold of beyond reasonable doubt. But before we get into that, let me for a third time invoke a piece Guardian Media Group saw fit to run in The Observer on the eve of the first anniversary of October 7.
The Observer, October 6, 2024. Click on the screenshot to access the piece
Mr Jacobson wrote of Western Christendom’s mediaeval blood libel, which held that every year on the Passover Festival marking the Israelite exodus from Egypt, Jews ritually baked bread with the blood of gentile infants murdered to order.
Countless Jews were slaughtered in pogroms and riots by peasants whipped to a frenzy – much as Protestant Huguenots were on St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572; much as today’s asylum seekers are targeted for running paedophile rings from hotels at taxpayer expense – by the blood libel.
But Jacobson is about to make a leap from incontestable fact to its very antithesis:
Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.
Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you. Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation.
Do you see a lack of specificity here? Or should I say, the gaslighting? The world, no thanks to IDF targeting of journalists, has seen the destruction of hospitals and schools. Has heard the assessment of “a plausible genocide” by the world’s highest court. Heard too these things defended – by an IDF whose HQ is in downtown Tel Aviv! – on the ground that wicked Hamas uses them as human shields.
(Which, by the way, would not be a valid legal defence even if it were true.)
Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you …
We’ll be getting to that in a moment, Howard.
Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation …
This is either incredibly obtuse or fiendishly clever. First, Israel’s far right leadership has shown in a thousand ways it no longer cares whether it is “despised among the nations of the Earth” so long as it has the material support of US regimes of red stripe or blue. Second, that biblical way of putting things is bad salesmanship when Netanyahu himself told the nation not three weeks after the Gaza breakout that:
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.
If the Amalek reference passed you by, get out your bible and take a peek at the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 15, verses 1 through to 33. What, you don’t got no bible? No problem: see my recent post, Israel as the end-times fanatics see it.
It seems to have escaped Howard Jacobson’s notice – or he’s knowingly peddling sophistry – that Israel is steered by a man himself a prisoner (one of several parallels with the Ukraine) of men and women in his regime who are not rational or, which amounts to the same thing, have seen as Richard Nixon once did that there may be method in a bravura show of madness. Men and women who couldn’t give a flying fuck what “the nations of the Earth” think.
Men and women who sense – however deludedly, as will be considered in my next post – that the prize of a Greater (Biblical) Israel is in the eschatological grasp of True Believers for whom October 7 was a literal God-send; a now or never constellation of circumstances favouring that paradigm leap from ‘mowing the lawn’ every once in a while to a final – and unabashedly one-state – solution of the Amalekite Problem.
Now attack Amalek, and destroy all they have. Kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child …
1st Book of Samuel, 15: 3
Not for nothing did Jonathan Cook – Why is the ‘liberal’ media peddling the vilest genocide apologism? – refer to Howard Jacobson’s piece as:
… one of the vilest in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s documented slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and antisemitic. It is pure genocide apologism. But worse is the fact the Guardian signed off his column. This isn’t the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print …
Yes, they do shoot children and here’s the evidence I spoke of. Over to Caitlin Johnstone, writing yesterday, October 10.
Israeli Snipers Routinely, Deliberately Shoot Palestinian Kids In The Head
The evidence is undeniable, the sourcing as solid as it gets. There are mountains upon mountains of rock solid proof that Israeli forces routinely, deliberately shoot Palestinian children in the head in Gaza.
There’s yet another doctors’ testimony about Israeli forces constantly shooting Palestinian children in the head, this one published in The New York Times.
The report, titled 65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza, begins:
I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.
“At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ I told him. To my surprise, he responded: ‘Yeah, me, too. Every single day.’
Numerous named medical staff who worked in Gaza then testify in the report about routine encounters with children who’d been shot in the head and chest by Israeli forces, as well as children and infants suffering from severe malnutrition and easily preventable infections.
Such reports have been coming out all year. Because Israel has not been allowing foreign press into Gaza, medical staff have in many ways become the de facto western journalists on the ground in the enclave — and they are all saying the same thing.
Back in July a group of 45 doctors and nurses who’d been working in Gaza signed an open letter to President Biden testifying that “every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them.”
“Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter continues.
Also in July, Politico published an article by two American surgeons named Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa titled ‘Nothing Prepared Us for What We Saw’: Two Weeks Inside a Gaza Hospital, which contains the following passage:
We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.”
Read Caitlin’s piece in full …
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