Genocide: the last chapter

Lord of the flies: by Mr Fish

Palestine is on my mind. On yours too, I dare say. In her post today – Israel … As Perpetual Aggressor And Perpetual Victim – Caitlin Johnstone writes on how:

Israel [can] go all-out in committing mass atrocities and apartheid abuses while Zionist oligarchs like Miriam Adelson openly purchase western governments without having to worry about the damage it does to their public image, because any response to the damage it does to their public image can be reframed as “antisemitism” and used to advance their interests even further by stomping out civil rights.

People demonstrate against Israel’s genocidal atrocities? That’s antisemitism — those protesters need to be silenced, arrested, and deported. People object to blatant Zionist influence in their governments? Antisemitic conspiracy theories; we need more hate speech laws and internet censorship. Palestinians take up armed resistance against their oppressors? Israel is the victim of unprovoked attacks from Jew-hating Arabs …

… Israel is backed by the propaganda machine of the western empire — the most powerful weapon of mass psychological influence ever devised. If the western political-media class were not constantly running cover for Israel’s crimes and helping Zionism spin all opposition to Israel as antisemitism, Israel would not be able to pull off this freakish cognitive straddle where it is simultaneously both the aggressor and the victim at all times. ¹

There are those (not all antisemitic and some, like Jeffrey Sachs, Jewish) who say Israel rules the US (hence the West at large). I see two flaws here. One is use of a sound premise – viz, that US policy in the region, including its trail of regime-change carnage, benefits Israel – to draw an unsound conclusion. Yes, US policy does benefit the colonial settler state – a beachhead in the Middle East – to the detriment of most Americans (and over the long term most Israelis) but US foreign policy is not set by most Americans, is it? It is set by elites who rule an oligarchy masquerading with fast diminishing plausibility as a democracy. And for reasons given in US Neocons & Israel’s far-Right, those elites benefit from a powerful and expansionist Israel. ²

The other flawed argument is related. Voices I take seriously, like Sachs and John Mearsheimer, say lobbying groups like AIPAC own US government, making it political suicide for politicians to speak out against Israel. That’s a two part claim, of which only the second part is true. Who can deny the Israel Lobby’s power? (I’ll get to a UK example shortly.) But to cite that power as proof of Israel’s capture of Washington misses the truth that beneath a fading chimera of democracy, governance in the US-led West is on sale to the highest bidder.

And Israel is by no means the highest bidder. It is equally political suicide to propose measures, however laudable, which would harm the margins of the arms for profit sector, health insurance, big pharma and so on. Here’s a Brian Berletic quote I frequently use: ³

People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three. [Edited]

Again, this is not to deny Israel’s clout – see Al-Jazeera’s The Lobby, four episodes of under 30 minutes – but to view it through the wider lens made available by (a) disentangling ‘national’ from class interest and (b) understanding that the US and collective West as a whole are not truly democracies but arenas wherein powerful factions within ruling elites assert their at times competing claims.

Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

Chris Hedges – Let’s stop pretending America is a democracy

We’ll hear more from Reverend Hedges in a moment. In the meantime, and at risk of labouring the point, to view the Israel lobby in perspective is not to deny its power. Steel city reader Dave Hansell alerted me yesterday to a Skwawkbox piece on how a UK Zionist group, The Board of Deputies for British Jews, pushes a systemically craven BBC ⁴ into doing its bidding.

Pro-Israel pressure group ‘demands control’ of BBC’s Gaza coverage

Board of Deputies exists to ‘advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing’ and is telling the BBC how to cover Israel’s genocide in Gaza – though of course that word is not used

Israel lobby group the ‘Board of Deputies of British Jews’ (BoD) has said it met the BBC with its demands for changes to its coverage of Gaza and expects them to implement these in less than a month.

The BoD’s constitution says its purpose is to ‘advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing’, but the group still feels entitled to dictate what is fair coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – though of course that word is never used and is already avoided like the plague by the cowardly broadcaster.

Despite the terror of the BBC and other broadcasters of offending or challenging the UK Israel lobby, the BoD expects the BBC to:

• • commit to a review of its coverage, which is to be ‘independent’ but must, of course, satisfy the BoD
  • a ‘requirement’ for the BBC never to mention anything to do with Gaza information provided from within Gaza – for example the huge numbers of deaths inflicted by Israel’s targeted bombing of children, families, hospitals, schools, journalists, medics, paramedics, emergency workers, food queues and aid workers – without qualifying those numbers by ‘informing’ viewers that the information is from a ‘proscribed terrorist group’
  • demanding that the BBC translate the Palestinian word for Israeli as ‘Jew/Jews’ – Palestinians use the word ‘Yahud’ because they usually do not recognise the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation by naming it
  • sacking BBC staff for a single instance of what amounts to offending the Israel lobby – a number of presenters have already lost their jobs under similar circumstances
  • promising to jump to attention if the BoD or other lobby groups complain – or ‘rapidly addressing editorial breaches’, in the BoD’s Orwellian language
  • ‘addressing’ the apparently unevidenced ‘serious deterioration in the health and wellbeing of Jewish [BBC] staff’ and their claimed ‘pervasive sense of hostility and isolation’ in a broadcaster where whistleblowers have accused their employer of quashing coverage of Israeli atrocities and living in terror of an angry call from the Israeli embassy – again, the supporters of Israel are the victims for supposed hurt feelings, not the hundreds of thousands being slaughtered, maimed and starved by the occupation in its efforts to purge them from Gaza.

There’s a self evident connection between the above, and Caitlin’s comment …

Israel is backed by the propaganda machine of the western empire — the most powerful weapon of mass psychological influence ever devised. If the western political-media class were not constantly running cover for Israel’s crimes and helping Zionism spin all opposition to Israel as antisemitism, Israel would not be able to pull off this freakish cognitive straddle where it is simultaneously both the aggressor and the victim at all times.

As to the price paid by Palestinians for that morally insane collusion of Western governments and media in mass murder – and using all means, including criminalisation, against those of their citizens who stand up in protest – I leave the last word to Chris Hedges, writing yesterday:

The Last Chapter of the Genocide

This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially bobby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sweage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Carry on reading at Chris Hedges’ substack …

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1. Another steel city reader, Alain, today alerted me to Susan Sarandon’s quoting Caitlin Johnstone late last night at a rally for Mahmoud Khalil, facing unlawful deportation from the US over his Pro-Palestinian work. More on Mahmoud Khalil here.
2. “US policy does benefit the colonial settler state” … I should qualify my remark. Europe’s Christian Zionists – many of them antisemitic, like Winston Churchill – in the early 20th century had an alignment of interest with the first wave of Jewish Zionism. Ditto between America’s Christian, Jewish and secular Zionists on the one hand, Israel’s religious and secular far Right on the other. But not only are ordinary Americans excluded from that alignment of interests. So are ordinary Israelis; citizens of a stolen land in the grip of end-times fanatics. It’s hard to see this ending well.
3. For the context of his rejection of the Israel-rules-the-US thesis, see Brian’s podcast of October 15, 2024, 42:50 to 45:00.
4. BBC as systemically craven?  One, the Beeb relies on licence fees set by politicians who themselves fear the editorial fulminations of the Mail, and/or are in bed with Murdoch et al. Two, the BBC’s upper echelons are establishment men and women, disproportionately public school (which for the benefit of non Brits means the very opposite) and Oxbridge.

   In Noam Chomsky’s now famous 1996 BBC interview with Andrew Marr, the latter objects:

   How can you know I’m self censoring?

   To which Chomsky replies:

   I don’t say you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I am saying is that if you believed something different you would not be sitting in that chair.