Before Our Very Eyes

The US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza

“Before Our Eyes”

The genocidal US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza underway since last October 7^th  has been happening in full view. It’s chilling.. As Jennifer Lowenstein wrote in The Progressive last December:

“Withering scenes of mass destruction play out before our eyes: blazes of orange-and-black bombing raids flash day and night, up and down the Gaza Strip; emergency crews pull—barehanded—parents and children, dead and alive, from under concrete ruins of blasted apartment buildings. Few bulldozers help because there is no fuel with which to power them; water is dirty and food scarce; electricity is gone, except that which can be obtained from backup generators. Hospitals overflow with the dead and wounded, the latter often treated without anesthesia and with vinegar instead of alcohol or iodine, and wrapped in bandages made from torn clothing, ragged and bloody.”

The Institute for Policy Studies’ longtime Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis noted last November that:

“half of the housing units …in Gaza were completely destroyed in the first month of the war. There’s nowhere for people to live. All of the people who out of desperation followed the Israeli demand that they move to the south have moved to the south, which is still being bombarded, and where there is no place for them to go. There’s no housing, no shelter, no security, no food, no water. There is no place safe in Gaza.”

Nearly four months later, as spring beckons, the carnage continues to unfold in front of humanity. More than 80 percent of all Gazans have been displaced.  The latest post-10-7-23 Palestinian casualty count is 29,606 killed and 69,737 injured.  Roughly 1.5 million Gazans – more than half of Gaza’s population – are now concentrated in southern Gaza’s Rafah City, parts of which are being bombed. “Let's see,” a radical historian writes me:

“30,000 or so confirmed deaths from direct military action, say 15,000 buried under the rubble, in a population of 2.1 million or 2.14% of the population, equivalent to 7,214,400 in the US. No functioning hospitals; all universities attacked and some (all?) destroyed; nearly the entire housing stock either damaged or destroyed; few deliveries of food allowed by Israeli authorities. Famine and preventable disease will soon take uncounted lives, surely in the tens of thousands or even more. And Biden does absolutely nothing, while the entire world looks on in horror.”

Nothing to stop the horror, that is – quite the opposite (see below).

“The Situation is Catastrophic”

It’s difficult to keep track of the atrocities.  OhI can't keep up with the sadistic, soul-numbing, and relentless slaughter.

Two days ago, Al Jazeera reported that “Israeli attacks across central and southern Gaza have killed more than 100 people in the last 24 hours.” We learned that Palestinian bodies were scattered across roads after Israeli jets targeted a section of Rafah.

“At least 24 people were killed in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah region when Israeli forces shelled a residence where displaced people were sheltering.,” Al Jazeera reported.

Yesterday I read this:

“A two-month-old Palestinian baby has died from starvation in northern Gaza, according to media reports, as Israel is accused of using starvation as a weapon of war. At least 10 people [were] killed in overnight Israeli shelling of a home in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia; dozens killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza, according to media reports. The UNRWA warns of diseases spreading due to unsanitary conditions in Gaza: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has said shelters in the besieged coastal enclave are severely overcrowded. ‘Clean water is scarce. Solid waste is accumulating. Spread of diseases is on the rise,’ UNRWA says in a post on X. ‘The situation is catastrophic, but UNRWA teams continue working to provide critical aid.’”

And today this:

“Famine is stalking Gaza as aid agencies struggle to deliver food to the north of the enclave, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has warned. Humanitarian aid has not reached people in northern Gaza for more than a month, Philippe Lazzarini said on Sunday…warning against ‘looming famine.’  the UN official said the situation is becoming a ‘man-made disaster.’ …At least 500,000 people are facing famine while nearly the entire population of Gaza, 2.3 million people, is experiencing acute food shortage, figures from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) show.”

In other news, the United Nations warns that Israel’s threatened ground invasion of Rafah City will be a humanitarian catastrophe, putting more than 600,000 children at grave risk.

Twenty-Five Eyes for One Eye

The scale of the ongoing massacre, displacement, and siege mocks the vengeful Biblical promise of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (Leviticus. 24:17-22). Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israeli occupier settlements killed 1,160 people. Since “Al Aqsa Flood” (Hamas’s name for its criminal October operation), Israel has exceeded this murder count twenty-five-fold. Who knows how many Palestinians Tel Aviv and Washington will slaughter before the latest Zionist Nakba concludes – 50,000, 100,000…more?  Just 238 Israeli soldiers have perished in the “war on Hamas,” Israel’s official name for its historically ironic infliction of a Holocaust on the people of Gaza.

More than half of the Gazans slain by the United States and Israel since 10-7 are women and children. With US arms, funding, and protection, Israel is wreaking genocidal havoc like the vengeful and sadistic Jehovah depicted in the Old Testament and Torah, to the delight of its powerful Judeo-fascist right wing, with whom its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allied.

10-7 Was Provoked

The US mainstream media-politics culture has consistently fed the absurd sense that October 7 was unprovoked.  As Lowenstein noted three months ago:

“Al-Aqsa Flood… in part, sought revenge for the ‘desecration’ earlier this year of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli Jews who wish to construct a ‘second temple’ in its place, and for unchecked, daily assaults and pogroms against Palestinian villages by Jewish settlers in the West Bank. In 2022 alone, these attacks claimed more than 150 Palestinian lives, the highest death toll since the end of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2005. “

These were just the latest in a long history of bloody assaults reflecting Israel’s 76-year history of “dehumanization, concentration…persecution, murder, imprisonment, theft, and dispossession” in Palestine (Lowenstein).  The Nakba has rolled over the bones of Palestinians for three quarters of a century, maiming and prematurely ending more Arab lives than it is possible to properly calculate.

In 2012 and 2017,  the United Nations warned that Gaza would be “unlivable” due to vicious US-Israel-imposed  shortages of clean water, food, income, health care and other necessities.

“We Provide the Weapons, the Money, and the Diplomatic and Political Support”

I’m looking at a picture of “Genocide Joe” Biden’s United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield raising her right hand to register yet another United States veto of a UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and I am sickened.  I imagine her arm and mouth  dripping blood.

But of course, the US is not “doing nothing.” Uncle Sam is this fascistic genocide’s longtime imperial sugar daddy. As Phyllis Bennis told The Progressive last fall:

“The United States, at least since 1967 and somewhat before that, remains the chief enabler of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law, the laws of war, and now crimes against humanity. We provide the weapons. We provide the money. We provide, crucially, diplomatic and political support and protection so that Israeli officials, political or military, are never held to account in the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, or anywhere else.”

Why, because of the Israel Lobby? No, because Israel has long served the strategic interests of US imperialism within and beyond the oil-rich Middle East.

This is not “the Israel Hamas War.”  It’s not even really “the Israel War on Gaza.” It’s the one-sided  US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza. As Jennifer Lowenstein noted last December:

“Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military assistance in the world, having received more than $200 billion dollars’ worth of bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. Israel now receives $3.8 billion in military aid annually, and, on October 20, in the wake of Al-Aqsa Flood, U.S. President Joe Biden pledged an additional $14 billion in military aid…Hamas has an estimated fighting force of 15,000-30,000, while Israel has at least 600,000 active duty and reserve soldiers. Hamas’s annual military budget is estimated to be about $150 million, while Israel’s is $24 billion. Hamas has no regular standing army, navy, or air force; no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Israel has all of the above, in addition to paratroopers, special operations forces, armored personnel carriers, tanks, artillery, missiles, advanced fighter jets, helicopter gunships, warships, an ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system, drones, a suffocating seventeen-year blockade, and the backing of one of the most powerful militaries ever known to mankind.”

So What if Genocide Joe is Pissed at NaziYahu?

The decrepit Weimar warmonger Biden is said to be privately angry at Israel’s “over the top” response to the October 7 Hamas attack. It has been purposefully leaked that he’s called Israel’s genocidal fascist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “an asshole” three times, according to insiders. 

Great. So what? Who cares? Biden, who has said — both as a US Senator and since October 7^th — that the US would have “had to invent an Israel” (to advance strategic US imperial interests) if Israel didn’t already exist, has increased US arming and funding of the Judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel as it has turned what was already an open-air Palestinian concentration camp – the Gaza Strip  – into a full on dystopian Hellscape of mass death and destruction while (by the way) significantly escalating its murderous assault on Palestinians in the West Bank.  Biden continues to sicken the world by shooting down United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions backed by all of morally and politically sentient humanity.  He has pulled US funding from the leading United Nations relief agency serving Palestinian victims (the UNRWA).

It’s All Over Now, Biden Blue

A New York City lefty posted this on social media the other day: “Want people to vote for Genocide Joe? Then get in the streets to stop it. Otherwise you are complicit in genocide and Trump fascism.”

Make of that what you will. For what it’s worth, the blood-soaked warmonger and self-declared “Zionist” Biden and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s embrace of Israel’s genocidal war (made even more grotesque by transparently disingenuous and manipulative public relations efforts to make Biden sound concerned for ordinary Palestinians) was the quashing of the last glimmer of a flicker of a scent of a wisp of a chance that I can recommend “tactical “ and “lesser evil” Dem voting this year. In the words of Bob Dylan, “it’s all over now, baby (Biden) blue.”

I’ll go into more detail on this “lesser evil” problem in the next Paul Street Report