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Make no mistake about it: Israel is not fighting a war of self-defense in Gaza; it is waging a war of ethnic cleansing, extermination and genocide.
Chris Hedges makes a strong case that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza:
The exhaustive 84-page brief submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide is hard to refute. Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate killing, wholesale destruction of infrastructure, including housing, hospitals and water treatment plants, along with its use of starvation as a weapon, accompanied by genocidal rhetoric from its political and military leaders who speak of destroying Gaza and ethnically cleansing the 2.3 million Palestinians, makes a strong case against Israel for genocide.
A ruling of genocide is a stain that Israel - which weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its brutalization of the Palestinians - would find hard to remove. It would undercut Israel’s insistence that Jews are eternal victims. It would shatter the justification for Israel’s indiscriminate killing of unarmed Palestinians and construction of the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza, along with the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would sweep away the immunity to criticism enjoyed by the Israel lobby and its Zionist supporters in the U.S., who have successfully equated criticisms of the “Jewish State” and support for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.
Over 23,700 {25,000 now} Palestinians, including over 10,000 children, have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas and other resistance fighters breached the security barriers around Gaza. Some 1,200 people were killed – there is strong evidence that some of the victims were killed by Israeli tank crews and helicopter pilots that intentionally targeted the some 200 hostages along with their captors. Thousands more Palestinians are missing, presumed buried under the rubble. Israeli attacks have left over 60,000 Palestinians wounded and maimed, the majority of them women and children.
Thousands more Palestinian civilians, including children, have been arrested, blindfolded, numbered, beaten, forced to strip to their underwear, loaded onto trucks and transported to unknown locations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [Netanyahu is NOT Moses] equated Gaza with Amalek, a nation hostile to the Israelites in the Bible, and cited the Biblical injunction to kill every Amalek man, woman, child or animal. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated, as the South African lawyers told the court, that everybody in Gaza is responsible for what happened on Oct. 7 because they voted for Hamas, although half the population in Gaza are children who are too young to vote. But even if the entire population of Gaza did vote for Hamas this does not make them a legitimate military target. They are still, under the rules of war, civilians, and entitled to protection. They are also entitled under international law to resist their occupation via armed struggle.
The Biden administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt what, by its own admission, is Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including “dumb” bombs. It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. It insists it upholds the rule of law while it subverts the legal mechanism that can halt the genocide.
Cynicism pervades every word Biden and Blinken utter. This cynicism extends to us. Our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office. On any other issue this might be the case. But it cannot be the case with genocide.
Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand unequivocally with Palestinians and the jurists from South Africa. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
The sheer amount of death and carnage Israel has inflicted upon Gaza (with Biden’s blessings) dwarfs any and all military conflicts during the 21st century.
The killing of civilians in Gaza is at a scale unprecedented in recent history, monitoring groups have said, as Israel continues to pound the besieged coastal enclave more than three months into the war.
Britain-based charity Oxfam said on Thursday that the daily death toll of Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza surpasses that of any other major conflict in the 21st century, while survivors remain at high risk due to hunger, diseases and cold, as well as ongoing Israeli bombardments.
“Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, which massively exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years,” Oxfam said in a statement.
For comparison, the charity provided a list of average deaths per day in other conflicts since the turn of the century: 96.5 in Syria, 51.6 in Sudan, 50.8 in Iraq, 43.9 in Ukraine, 23.8 in Afghanistan, and 15.8 in Yemen.
Oxfam said the crisis is further compounded by Israel’s restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, where only 10 percent of weekly food aid that is needed gets in. This poses a serious risk of starvation for those who survive the relentless bombardment, it said.
(Source)
Beyond that, hundreds of Palestinians who have been murdered by Israel are American citizens. Can you imagine any other country on earth murdering hundreds of American citizens within a three-month span and the U.S. president and Congress sitting back with absolute indifference?
The thing that makes this unimaginable horror so horrible is that it could end overnight—if America’s evangelical pastors and churches would stand up with a loud, united voice and say, “STOP THE SLAUGHTER!”
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982 and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He has won many prestigious awards, including Israel’s top prize of journalism, the Sokolow Prize in 2021, and the Olof Palme Prize of International Human Rights in 2016; the Peace Through Media Award in 2012; the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for Cultural Dialogue in 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and the Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996.
Here is what Levy said on April 10, 2015, in a speech entitled The Israeli Lobby: Is It Good For the US, Is It Good For Israel?
When I got first the invitation to come here, the first words were, “Israel lobby.” I said, “Wow, they invite me; AIPAC is inviting me.” And then I said, “That's the chance of my life. That I'm going to come there to Washington and to tell them, ‘Listen, with friends like yours, Israel does not need enemies.’”
I think that if it wouldn't be [for] the Israel Lobby, Israel would have been today a better place to live in. Israel would have been a more just place. And I think that if it wouldn't be [for] the Israel Lobby, the United States would have been a better place and a more democratic place.
And still, by the end of the day, we are dealing with an enigma, because nothing can really explain it. Nothing can explain how administration after administration, legislators after legislators are going in the very same way which contradicts American interest in so many cases, which contradicts international law, human rights, moral values, you name it.
Can it be only this small group [of Israeli lobbyists], as powerful as it is, is it the full explanation?
You really need to watch Levy’s complete address.
Levy’s question is answered with “No, it is NOT merely AIPAC and the J Street Israeli lobbyists that are influencing Washington’s politicians to blindly and robotically support the Zionist agenda in Israel; it is the massive numbers of America’s evangelicals who are the most powerful and influential force for Zionism in the world.”
The callousness of the Israelis for human life—especially the lives of the Palestinians—described by Levy in his speech is replicated by evangelicals in the U.S.—their professed belief in the teachings of Christ notwithstanding.
This means that the more than 25,000 Palestinian deaths—many of them Christian Palestinians—lie directly on the doorsteps of America’s evangelical pastors, preachers and churches.
Thus far, only the Houthis have come to Gaza’s defense. And, of course, the U.S. and Great Britain are running interference for Israel against the Yemenis with missile attacks—all under the cover of deceit and deception. The rest of the Arab world has thus far sat back on their indolent backsides and watched their fellow Arabs be incinerated, content to rake in the blood money from Washington, D.C.
Again, all of this torture, starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide are the result of the enthusiastic complicity of America’s evangelicals. And all of the enthusiastic complicity of the evangelicals comes from the false prophecy doctrines invented by John Darby and Cyrus Scofield known as Prophetic Dispensationalism, aka Christian Zionism.
For those newer to this column, I again provide the links to the Israel and Prophecy packages I have delivered that expose the devilish doctrines of Christian Zionism and that exalt the truth of Christ’s New Covenant, which includes understanding the truth about Biblical Israel and the truth about Biblical eschatology.
Here are Israel Packages One, Two and Three.
Here are Prophecy Packages One, Two and Three.
© Chuck Baldwin
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