"We Have Your Back": Uncle Sam's Judeo-Fascist Creature

and the Nazi-Like Collective Punishment of Gaza

Speaking of fascism-denial, let’s talk about Israel. For years I have caught Hell from academics and other “intellectuals” for calling that nation a  – trigger alert – Judeo-fascist state.  How dare I paint the nation formed by Jewish people in response to the Nazi Holocaust with the brush of fascism, the politics of the Third Reich?!

I do so without qualms. From its  bloody, Nazi-like formation through ethnic cleansing and mass murder – the division and destruction of Palestine – in the 1948 “Nakba” (Arab for “catastrophe”)  to its seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and beyond, the ethno-religious occupation and apartheid state of Israel has treated the Palestinians as untermensch (“inferior humans”) and its Jewish population as the region’s ubermensch (“superior people”).  

Israel is a racist ethno-religious state founded upon the denial, displacement, and oppression of Palestinian humanity. Its leaders believe that the Nazi Holocaust entitles them to do anything they deem necessary to “defend the Jewish state.” The Holocaust is in their minds their open-ended excuse for massive crimes against humanity and international law.  They think the last century’s Holocaust against European Jewry gives them a blank check to inflict a holocaust on Arabs.

Look at what on what Israel is doing right now with the full support of the longtime Third World Fascism sponsor the United States. The Palestinian Gaza Strip that Israeli Defense Forces are invading – not for the first time (contrary to some Western reports) – as I write this is an Israel-constructed and Israel-imposed open air concentration camp. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency earlier this year:

“The Gaza Strip has a population of approximately 2.1 million people, including some 1.7 million Palestine Refugees. For at least the last decade and a half, the socioeconomic situation in Gaza has been in steady decline. ..A[n] Israel-imposed [and US-backed] blockade on land, air and sea was imposed by Israel following the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. There are now very few options left for the people of Gaza, who have been living under collective punishment as a result of the blockade that continues to have a devastating effect as people’s movement to and from the Gaza Strip, as well as access to markets, remains severely restricted….The blockade and related restrictions contravene international humanitarian law as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed…Food security in Gaza has deteriorated with 63 per cent of people in the Gaza Strip being food insecure and dependent on international assistance. The continuing intra-Palestinian divisions exacerbate the humanitarian and service delivery crisis on the ground. With 81.5 per cent of the population living in poverty, an overall unemployment rate of 46.6 per cent (48.1 per cent for Palestine Refugees living in the camps) at the end of the third quarter of 2022 and an unemployment rate of 62.3 per cent among youth (15-29 years, refugees and non-refugees), the already fragile humanitarian situation in Gaza threatens to deteriorate further. The economy and its capacity to create jobs have been devastated, resulting in the impoverishment and de-development of a highly skilled and well-educated society. Access to clean water and electricity remains at crisis level and impacts nearly every aspect of life. Clean water is unavailable for 95 per cent of the population. Electricity is available up to an average of 11 hours per day as of July 2023. However, ongoing power shortage has severely impacted the availability of essential services, particularly health, water, and sanitation services, and continues to undermine Gaza’s fragile economy, particularly the manufacturing and agriculture sectors.”

These are the ongoing “realities on the ground” in what I heard an MSNBC reporter in Israel call “the so-called open-air prison” that is Gaza. Gaza itself is a giant human rights crime.

Under the deranged leadership of the genocidal fascist Benjamin Netanyahu (an arch-authoritarian even in relation to own people), Israel has responded to the supposedly surprising and certainly horrific October 7 attack on its civilians by the reactionary Islamist group Hamas by ordering a great crime against 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel has enacted a state of siege on top of the already existing blockade: the shutting off of all Gazan access to food, fuel, electricity, water, and medicine.

Before I turned in two nights ago, the Zionist occupation and apartheid state had already killed 1900 Gazans.  Netanyahu had earlier in the day given a speech saying, "it's just the beginning.....it's just the beginning." Netanyahu has been spewing racist menace like some Old Testament warrior king for the last seven.  He has threatened to level Gaza,  promising "mighty vengeance" that will be remembered through the ages.

Israel has already attacked civilians in Gaza and Lebanon with the internationally prohibited chemical weapon white phosphorous, which “causes severe burns, often down to the bone, that are slow to heal and likely to develop infections” (Human Rights Watch). As The Washington Post explains, “fragments bury into a body and later reignite... Burns to 10 percent or more of a person’s body are often fatal.”

Israel is “only getting started” with the vindictive and racist infliction of Nazi-like collective punishment – illegal under international law – on Gaza.  It gave more than one million Gazans just 24 hours to leave their homes and somehow find somewhere and some way to survive in the southern part of the Strip before the Israeli Defense Forces roll in.

This morning I heard an N”P”R interview with a Gaza surgeon who reports that his hospital’s emergency room now recurrently fills up with more than 100 victims of Israeli bombardment. His hospital’s staff sleeps in the hospital since the flow of patients is too great for them to leave.  A doctor who recently left to check briefly on his family was killed along with his loved ones during a visit home. N“P”R also reported that Gazans are running out of drinking water as they try to flee south.  The hospital cannot evacuate because doing so would kill many of its patients.

This Hitlerian policy of collective punishment is a brazen violation of international law. It is being disproportionately inflicted on children: half of Gaza is less than 18 years old. The United Nations, the European Union, and numerous international aid groups have told Israel that the evacuation order is a vicious, disastrous, and criminal directive.

Ask Netanyahu and his new coalition government if they care. Numerous Israelis interviewed on CNN and MSNBC absurdly liken Hamas to the Third Reich, as if this Islamist terror group (contained inside the concentration camp) poses anything remotely like the power of the Nazi regime, which stood atop one of the world’s great industrial powers, Germany — a country that made two serious bids to become the mightiest nation on Earth in the last century.  

And they have the full backing of their sponsor – the world’s number one imperialist aggressor, the United States, the nation that won the inter-imperialist fight for global hegemony during and after World War II.  This is no surprise. Israel has from day one been a US imperial outpost in a critical and strategic (because oil-rich) region. Washington has “h[ad] Israel’s back” from the Nakba to the present day. Israel is by far and away the leading recipient of US military assistance, to the tune of $4 billion per year.

Israel’s latest crimes against Gaza are US-backed transgressions. Joe Biden has announced complete and “unwavering” support for Israel’s disproportionate and collectively punitive response to the horrific October 7 attacks.  He has sent his Secretary of State and his Secretary of Defense to Tel Aviv to offer full sympathy and support for Zionist terror. The Pentagon has given Israel new weaponry including criminal “cluster munitions,” designed to kill civilians and especially adept at maiming children. A sizeable US Navy war flotilla has arrived in the Mediterranean to warn off any regional actors who might try to protect Palestinians. As the Associated Press reported last week:

“U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Israeli leaders that ‘we have your back’ as he reaffirmed U.S. support in the first week of their war against the militant Hamas group … Asked about the likelihood of civilian casualties in Gaza, Austin said Israel has the right to defend itself and added that he has worked with Israeli forces over the years, ….Austin has spoken nearly daily with [Israel’s military head] and has directed the rapid shift of U.S. ships, intelligence support and other assets to Israel and the region. Within hours after the brutal Hamas attack across the border into Israel, the U.S. moved warships and aircraft to the region…The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group is already in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and a second carrier was departing Friday from Virginia, also heading to the region. .. the U.S. is providing intelligence and other planning assistance to the Israelis.”

The US war and entertainment media is on board with the leading US client state’s massively escalated slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Between drug commercial breaks, American cable news talking heads (kind of ) worry about civilian casualties but treat them as tragically unavoidable.  They continue to bombard American viewers with terrible, highly personalized and emotional stories from the friends and loved ones of Israelis victimized by Hamas’s October 7 attack. Reports on Palestinian victims of Israel’s Judeo-fascist response are comparatively sparse and much less personalized and evocative. Some dissenting voices critical of the siege and invasion do get a bit of air-time, but this is meant to better sell the US-backed attack.  

At one point last week, woke-imperialist MSNBC approvingly broadcast a retired US general who practically salivated as he said that “the Israeli Defense Forces [will] go into Gaza high and hard.” The former general told Iran to “restrain your creature Hezbollah.”  It is unthinkable that the network would bring on someone to tell Washington to “restrain your creature Israel” from killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of Gazans.