Israel Treats Gaza and the West Bank Like the Wild American Frontier
Acres of land for every Israeli settler, and a handsome bounty for every Palestinian scalp.
What use is the force of moral suasion in the face of naked, murderous power? As a beleaguered people documents their own genocide in real time for the whole world to watch, what is the purpose of decrying Israel’s unforgivable crimes when the end result is just a bombed wasteland cleared of all Palestinians? Tell me, please. As hospitals are besieged, blindfolded men are shot in the head, people are run over by tanks and troop transports, babies are buried beneath rubble, ambulances are bombed, children watch their parents murdered in front of them, little girls are blown to bits and scattered against walls, journalists are assassinated, care workers are prevented from helping the wounded, families are executed, doctors perform amputations on their own children without anesthetic, millions are starved to death, and the survivors are corralled into smaller and smaller killing cages, we rub our hands, tell each other in somber tones that it’s all very complicated, document the fall as best we can, perhaps, and consign ourselves to the eventual reality of a proud and courageous people having succumbed to their decimation at the hands of a fanatical “civilizing” conqueror, the now mostly pacified survivors drinking away their days on their small reservations.
What the United States is to the Native Americans, Israel is to the Palestinians. It is the same project of lies, propaganda, theft, rape, murder, and genocide all dressed up under encomiums to civilization and religion and liberal values. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota said, “but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.” If this is what our vaunted Western values wreak, forever and ever, then they deserve to be torn asunder.
Israel arms and defends its settlers as they dispossess Palestinians of their homes. Let me say that again. Israeli settlers, many of whom are American citizens, can be given guns by the Israeli state as well as police protection in order to throw Palestinians out of their homes in the occupied West Bank. One recalls the time when U.S. governments gave rewards for every “Indian scalp” and guaranteed acres of land for any settler who could homestead on it.
The term “occupied” here is an important one. The land which was seized by Israel in the 1967 war is considered occupied territory under international law. This means that it is illegal to build settlements within those borders. It means that Palestinians have a right to return to their homes. And it means that Palestinians have a right to resist their occupiers, including through armed force. This is all clearly stipulated under international law. Sadly, given Israel’s real power to carry through on its zealous project of land theft and murder, international law means jack shit. There is no hope of a two-state solution anymore because Israel has been stealing all of the land and controlling all of the resources for decades. All of the political and military power lies in Israel’s hands. No state for the Palestinian people can happen without the will of Israel.
The United States — by continuing to fund and arm the Israelis even after the International Court of Justice recently ordered Israel to prevent the genocide of Palestinians — is a full partner in Israel’s genocide. Liberals such as Joe Biden and the party he represents only wish to put a kinder face on the Zionist project. They claim to “have concerns” about civilian casualties while the shipping of American death machines and ammunition to Israel continues unimpeded. The shallow cant of liberal values should have been exposed for what it was a long time ago: justifications for evil. This is not the first genocide we have been involved in, and so long as we maintain our misplaced faith in our illegitimate institutions, it won't be the last. If all of this doesn’t end in another round of Nuremberg trials for the perpetrators (meaning convictions and hangings), then, as the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz once noted: “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
Astounding falsehoods about October 7th have been levied by Israel in order to demonize the Palestinian people. It turns out that there were no forty beheaded babies, even though the dementia-ridden Biden said he saw photographic evidence of such. No Israeli child was cut out of its mother’s womb. No baby was put in a microwave. No dead children were hung on clotheslines. No holocaust survivor was killed. And the allegations of mass rape committed by Hamas on October 7th are crumbling by the day. But the lies of Israel and its apologists only need to be stated once for them to take hold, such is the indoctrination of the supplicated Western societies. The same has been true in every conflict the world over. Native Americans were treated as subhuman savages getting in the way of progress. The German Huns were accused of raping and pillaging Belgian citizens during WWI. The Japanese were painted as inhuman beasts undeserving of the usual laws of warfare during WWII. The Viet Cong “doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.” Saddam Hussein murdered babies in incubators. Hamas uses human shields. And so on. When your only concern is for the total destruction of your enemies, no lie is too big.
Now, here are some facts: Israel has bombed Gaza to ruins — hospitals, universities, apartment blocks, mosques, international agencies, nonprofits, U.N. schools — and murdered approximately 30,000 people in the process, nearly half of whom were children. Young children have been targeted and shot in the head by Israeli snipers. Israeli officials have called Palestinians “human animals” and “barbarians.” The Israeli Defense Forces have knowingly bombed and shot their own civilians as acceptable collateral damage. Premature Palestinian infants were left to die in Gazan hospitals after they were bombed and raided by the IDF. The IDF has used human shields in Gaza. Palestinian women have been kidnapped and raped by IDF soldiers and Israeli officials have raped Palestinian children. The IDF is looting and pillaging Gazan property en masse. The IDF facilitated the massacre of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, including some pregnant mothers whose infants were ripped from their wombs. Since October 7th, many of these acts of barbarity have been proudly filmed and shared by Zionist forces on social media because they know that they will never suffer any consequences, just like our American war criminals never do.
The term “fascism” is a much overused word these days. So I will leave it to an Israeli journalist, Lia Tarachansky, to describe the fascist nature of the Zionist state:
To explain the fascism in Israel, it’s not that easy because honestly I don’t let myself think about it that much. It’s so depressing and so terrifying that I usually repress my thoughts about it. But if you really want me to define it, then I’d tell you that it’s not just the anti-democratic laws, it’s not the consensus for occupation, it’s not the massive right-wing coalition government, it’s not watching the people who ask questions and think critically being interrogated by the [secret police]. What it really is, is a feeling that you have sitting on a bus being afraid to speak Arabic with your Palestinian friends. It’s a feeling when you are sitting there having dinner— what you feel when you’re alive here. It’s the essence of what this society is. And the closer we get to the brink — and everyone is feeling that we’re getting to the breaking point — the worse it gets.
As our lawmakers continue to overwhelmingly vote to give billions of our tax dollars to a murderous ethno-nationalist state, I ask again, what use are our protestations? Our lamentations? Our earnest appeals to authority and morality? Is it simply to say that we weren’t totally complicit? That we demonstrated our hearts were in the right place? That we felt bad watching a Palestinian child expire before our eyes on our computer screen? Cold comfort for the Palestinians seeing every single member of their family vaporized in an instant.
As every Palestinian death represents another irrevocable failure on our part, the best I can say is that every action carries a flame. We can never really know what we inspire. Lord knows most of the people who set themselves on fire in protest of the Vietnam War are now long forgotten. And their deaths didn’t stop U.S. soldiers from murdering 5 million Vietnamese. But that’s not really the point. We don’t do such things because we will succeed, as much as we’d like to. We do it because it is right. In the West, there are those who are currently blockading arms shipments to Israel, defacing the buildings of weapons manufacturers, disrupting the meetings and speeches of complicit politicians, staging symbolic acts like die-ins, boycotting Israeli goods and other companies that do business with Israel, lobbying for universities to divest from the apartheid regime, and going on national television to decry the hypocrisy of establishment media. All of these acts are needed and welcomed. But it’s never enough. Even as the Houthis in Yemen blockade international shipping lanes and attack Israel-bound vessels in solidarity with the Palestinians, Western coalitions bomb these fighters in order to continue the necessary traffic to a genocidal state. Naked power is winning.
It’s just, it’s hard for me to accept that all we’re really doing here is making the chapter in the history book slightly less horrific by proving that we tried. It’s hard to watch a people be obliterated in real time and know that part of my income from my own labor went to paying for that piece of shrapnel that pierced that child’s skull. Here I remind all of you that America is still, relatively speaking, a free and open society, and that Osama bin Laden explicitly cited the use of American taxpayer dollars on its military as one of the reasons why every U.S. citizen is complicit in the immiseration of the Palestinian people. If you’d like to prove people like him wrong, then do something about it.
A note to subscribers since there have been some new people to this newsletter, I would suggest you check out these two previous pieces I have written on Palestine since October 7th:
They give much more context than I provide here.
(Also, some of you may notice that there aren’t many citation links currently in the above article for all of its claims against Israel. That’s because it’s currently past 3am and I don’t feel like trudging through the many videos of war crimes to provide all the necessary citations. But rest assured, the evidence is not difficult to find, and I will insert those hyperlink citations as soon as I get some rest.) — Behold the now-inserted hyperlinks.
Also, if you’re someone who signed up for this newsletter because you watched my video appreciation of The Band’s Garth Hudson, that’s awesome! You should know that a person’s cultural interests such as music tastes and attire should have little to no bearing on their material politics (if you think otherwise, that just means your politics are shallow and useless). I am an unapologetic leftist, so in addition to the odd bit of music criticism, you can also expect much critique of the dastardly American empire from this newsletter. Sorry if you just came looking for more analysis of Americana music.
Thank you for reading. Also, here’s a reminder that you can pay for this newsletter :)