Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Israeli troops enter Nablus, West Bank on August 19, 2024. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]
Promises of “absolute victory” in Gaza are nothing but “gibberish”, according to Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant’s comments were not meant to be public, but somehow were leaked and published by Israeli media on 12 August.
The explanation of why Benjamin Netanyahu is pursuing a losing war in Gaza has been largely confined to the prime minister’s personal interests, not least the avoidance of corruption trials, preserving his extremist government coalition and avoiding an early general election. Still, none of these rationales explain the absurdity of continuing with a war which, in the words of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is “The worst failure in Israel’s history.”
What else could explain Netanyahu’s motive for the war? And why are his most crucial government allies, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, determined to prolong it? The answer may not lie in Gaza, but in the occupied West Bank.
While Israel is extending its failed military campaign in the Strip with no clear strategic objectives, its war on the West Bank is driven by very clear motives indeed: the annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory and the ethnic cleansing of large sectors of the Palestinian population. This is not only obvious through Israel’s daily actions in the West Bank, but also because of the clear statements made by Israel’s extreme far right government officials, including a commitment by Netanyahu’s own Likud party to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights and Judea and Samaria.” The latter, of course, is what Zionists call the West Bank.
An audio recording obtained by the Israeli group Peace Now conveyed the following remarks by Smotrich at a June 9 conference: “My goal is to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent, for God’s sake, its division… and the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
To do so, the far-right politician has assigned himself the job of “change(ing) the DNA of the system.” This “system” was put in place decades ago, following Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank in 1967. It began a slow but determined process of illegal annexation of Palestinian territories. The process included the establishment, in 1981, of the so-called Civil Administration.
This was and remains essentially a branch of the Israeli military.
However, it was described as “civil” as part of a government effort to convert a temporary military occupation into the permanent colonisation of Palestine. This entailed the practical annexation and continued expansion of the illegal Israeli Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land after the June 1967 Six-Day War.
The Oslo Accords in 1993-94 gave Palestinians nominal administrative control over small areas in the West Bank, designated as areas A and B. This necessitated the transfer of some of the Civil Administration’s responsibility to the newly-formed Palestinian Authority, based on the understanding that the PA will always prioritise Israel’s security. The arrangement allowed Israel to expand, unhindered, its illegal settlements in most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, tripling both the size and population of the settlements between 1993 and 2023.
As Israel’s colonial plan in the West Bank reached its zenith, Netanyahu sought in 2020 to reinforce Israeli gains with the annexation of more than 30 per cent of the West Bank. Due to international pressure and growing Palestinian resistance, however, Netanyahu postponed his plan, albeit with the understanding that “annexation remains on the table”.
Without much fanfare, though, Israel swapped its hope for a sweeping de jure annexation of the West Bank with de facto control, through rapid seizures of Palestinian land and the expansion of its settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.
Although the Israeli military is faltering in Gaza, the genocide is being used as a smokescreen to finalise Israel’s settler-colonial plans in the West Bank.
This process was dubbed by Smotrich in 2017 as a “victory by settlement”. Now in a position of power and with access to a massive budget, he is making his life’s goal a reality.
For Smotrich’s dream to be realised, he needed to revitalise the once central role of the Civil Administration. In May, he invented a new position called “deputy head” of the administration, granting the position to his close associate Hillel Roth.
Now both men have unparalleled and sweeping rights to expand the settlements. Since coming to power in December 2022, Netanyahu’s latest government has approved 12,000 new housing units for illegal settlements, while ordering the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes and other civilian infrastructure.
In the first three months of 2024, Israel declared nearly 6,000 acres of the West Bank to be “state-owned land”, and therefore made it eligible for settlement construction. The decision was described by the Israeli watchdog Peace Now as the “largest West Bank land grab in 30 years.”
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is already under way. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in the first half of 2024 alone, at least 1,000 Palestinians were forcefully displaced while nearly 160,000 were affected by home demolitions.
The Israeli war on the West Bank has come at a high price in Palestinian blood. As of 12 August, at least 632 Palestinians had been killed with 5,400 wounded in the West Bank alone, according to the Ministry of Health. When the war on Gaza is over, the war on the West Bank will grow more intense and bloodier, but with the clear strategic goal of annexing the whole territory, even though the International Court of Justice resolved on 19 July that Israel’s “annexation and… assertion of permanent control” in the West Bank is illegal.
To avoid an even greater war and genocide than that which is taking place before our eyes in Gaza, the international community must use all available means to enforce international law and bring to an end Israel’s brutal, genocidal occupation of Palestine.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich speaks during a rally in Sderot, Israel on October 26, 2022. (Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is what Israelis rioted to protect, what the Knesset debated—the right to rape Palestinians,” said one critic.
While human rights groups called for an investigation of a leaked recording apparently showing Israel Defense Forces reservists gang-raping a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military base and detention center, Israeli leaders including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Wednesday also furiously demanded a probe of the video—not to seek justice for the victim, but rather to find and punish whoever leaked it.
Smotrich took to social media Wednesday to call for “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world, and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”
Israeli media on Tuesday aired footage in which Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists are seen attacking a Palestinian man at Sde Teiman while trying to hide their actions with shields.
According to Israeli media reports, the victim was hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage.
My god – there is video of IDF soldiers raping the Palestinian man at the Sde Teiman torture camp.
This is what Israelis rioted to protect, what the Knesset debated – the right to rape Palestinians. https://t.co/Li868EXDBK
Nine alleged assailants—who include members of Force 100, the military unit tasked with guarding Sde Teiman prisoners—were arrested last week in connection with the attack. A mob of far-right Israelis including senior government officials subsequently stormed two military bases in an attempt to free the suspects.
While many Israelis condemned the alleged rape, others rallied around the accused reservists. Smotrich described them as “heroic warriors.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called them “our best heroes.”
Far-right Israeli lawmaker Zvi Sukkot—who took part in last week’s riot—joined Smotrich in demanding an investigation of the video leak.
“Leaking and disclosure of investigative materials is a criminal offense that harms the proper legal process, the rule of law, public trust, and the principle of justice,” he said Wednesday.
Israeli media reported Wednesday that two of the accused reservists lied on polygraph tests when asked if they had sodomized the prisoner.
Numerous Israelis continued to express support for the accused rapists. Israel Today political reporter Yehuda Schlesinger said Wednesday on a popular morning show that “I don’t give a rat’s ass what they do to Hamas man.”
"The only thing that is a problem for me here is that it's not a regulated policy of the state to abuse the detainees, because, first of all, they deserve it, and it's great revenge… maybe it will serve us a little more a a deterrent…"
“First of all, they deserve it,” Schlesinger said of the abuse at Sde Teiman and other Israeli military prisons. “It’s great revenge that we need to give them.”
“It’s just a shame that we don’t do it in an institutionalized way, as part of regulations for torture of prisoners,” he added, “because then the next guys who think about doing another October 7 will say, ‘Do you see what they’re doing to [us] in Israel?’”
Etan Nechin, the New York correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, accused the media of being the “main culprit” that “has normalized the most extreme voices, letting genocidal brutes, racists, and messianic zealots into Israeli’s TV sets.”
Some American media critics drew attention to the scant coverage of abuse at Sde Teiman in the U.S. corporate media.
“U.S. taxpayers continue to support this military and its torture camps,” Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer wrote on social media. “How is this not front-page news?”
In the United States—which supports Israel’s war on Gaza with billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover—State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a Wednesday press conference that “there ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee. Period.”
“It is appropriate that the IDF in this case, has announced an investigation, has arrested a number of people who are alleged to have been involved, and I won’t speak to the outcome of that investigation, but it ought to proceed swiftly,” Miller added.
Critics noted the IDF’s chronic failures to credibly investigate its alleged crimes. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din said in late 2022 that less than 1% of Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza were indicted over the previous five years.
The Israeli Supreme Court on Wednesday took up a petition by rights groups seeking to close Sde Teiman, where widespread—and sometimes deadly—torture has been reported. Last month, Israel’s High Court issued a conditional order seeking to shut down the prison in response to the flood of reports of torture there.
Former prisoners including children and Israeli whistleblowers at Sde Teiman—often called “Israel’s Guantánamo Bay”—have described rampant torture and abuse at the facility, which is used to imprison Palestinians captured in the Gaza Strip. According to their testimonies, prisoners have been raped, electrocuted, mauled by dogs, burned with cigarettes, severely beaten, starved, and subjected to 24-hour shackling sometimes leading to amputations.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said this week that at least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October.
More than 1,100 Israelis and others died during the Hamas-led attack on October 7, during which more than 240 other people were kidnapped. Israel’s response—which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case—has left more than 142,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international officials.
Smotrich suggested earlier this week that it is “moral and justified” to starve 2 million Palestinians to death. So far, at least dozens, mostly children, have died from malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of medical care in Gaza amid Israel’s crippling assault and siege.
dizzy: It’s difficult to argue that they are not Fascists when they commit the very crimes created immediately after WWII to address Fascism, to ensure “never again” and quote Fascist Adolf Hitler. It’s difficult to see that supporting countries are not aiding and abetting and complicit in genocide and war crimes when such blatant calls for such crimes are and have been made.
Israeli far-right Zehout (identity) political party chairman Moshe Feiglin gives a joint press statement with Prime Minister and Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu (unseen) in Ramat Gan, near the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv on August 29, 2019. (Photo: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
“In what kind of society can one openly advocate policies modeled on Hitler’s conduct? In a society that feels complete impunity due to America’s protection,” one foreign policy expert said.
Former Israeli Knesset member Moshe Feiglin quoted Adolf Hitler as he called for Israel to resettle the Gaza Strip and create a “Hebrew Gaza.”
Feiglin, who quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party to found the right-wing Zehut Party and plans to challenge Likud in Israel’s next elections, made the comments during a panel discussion on Israel’s Channel 12 that was shared on social media on Sunday, as Middle East Eye reported.
“We are not guests in our country, this is our country, all of it…” Feiglin said, adding, “As Hitler said, ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left.’ We can’t live here if one ‘Islamo-Nazi’ remains in Gaza.”
On @N12News Israel's most watched news show, former Likud MP Moshe Feiglin invokes ***Hitler*** to justify Gaza resettlement:
"As Hitler said, 'I cannot live if one Jew is left,' we can't live here if one 'Islamo-nazi' remains in Gaza."
Feiglin’s remarks earned widespread condemnation on social media.
“In what kind of society can one openly advocate policies modeled on Hitler’s conduct?” asked Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “In a society that feels complete impunity due to America’s protection.”
Former Greek Finance Minister and leader of the pan-European leftist political party DiEM25 Yanis Varoufakiswrote that “the evidence of genocidal intentions is mounting” and asked, “When will the ICC [International Criminal Court] act?”
Israel has killed at least 37,337 people and injured 85,299 in its war on Gaza since October 7, when Hamas carried out a lethal attack against southern Israel, killing around 1,100 people and taking more than 240 hostage. Prior to the attack, Israel had maintained a 16-year blockade of the narrow enclave.
South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, citing the vast destruction of its bombing campaign as well as statements made by high-level Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu, that portray all Gazans as complicit in the October 7 attacks. Several human rights experts and scholars have also concluded that Israel is committing genocide.
This is not the first time that Feiglin, who served in the Knesset from 2013 to 2015, has called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
“We need a different prime minister who is willing to stick his neck out to win. Zehut will provide, whenever elections happen, such a candidate,” he told supporters in January, according to Middle East Eye. “For us, the war in Gaza is not merely a defensive war. It’s a war of liberation, the liberation of the land from its occupiers.”
In an October 2023 interview with Al Jazeera, he also advocated for the “complete destruction of Gaza, before invading it… Destruction like Dresden and Hiroshima, without a nuclear weapon.”
Zehut’s 2019 platform included the cancellation of the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, according to Haaretz.
“Don’t talk to me about international law, because there is not such a thing. You know, the minute you use the word ‘Palestinian,’ you stop saying the truth. Because there is no Palestinian nation, and they know it,” Feiglin said that same year.
Other currently governing Israeli politicians have also called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in January that the Israeli government should “encourage the migration” of Palestinians out of Gaza.
Later the same month, Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attended a right-wing conference calling for the “resettlement” of Gaza.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, speaks during a rally with supporters in the southern Israeli city of Sderot on October 26, 2022. (Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)
One advocate responded: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza.”
Israel’s forces have killed at least 36,224 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in less than eight months, and far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday threatened to similarly attack the illegally occupied West Bank.
Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, shared on social media a video he recorded in Bat Hefer, following similar posts a day earlier. The Times of Israel reported that the minister’s comments came after Palestinians’ gunfire from Tulkarem in the West Bank toward the Israeli settlement.
“Our message to the neighbors beyond the fence in Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Shuweika, and Qalqilya: We will turn you into ruined cities like in the Gaza Strip if the terror you are exerting on the settlements continues,” Smotrich said in Hebrew, according to a translation from Al Jazeera.
NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy pointed out that not only is Smotrich an advocate of illegal Israeli settlements—he has a home near Kedumim—but also “his role as finance minister means he oversees budgets, like police and army.”
Smotrich threatens to turn several West Bank cities to rubble like Gaza
His role as finance minister means he oversees budgets, like police and army.
His far-right coalition's keeping Netanyahy in power.
Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns of the U.K.-based Medical Aid for Palestinians, said of Smotrich’s remarks: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza. Starting with the refugee camps and Area C communities (to a certain extent it has already begun).”
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 500 Palestinians in the West Bank.
Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States, issued a statement about multiple recent events, including the minister’s comments.
“Every day, we see Israel’s far-right government targeting civilian infrastructure vital to the lives of ordinary Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank,” Hooper said. “This ongoing destruction has one goal—to make life unbearable for the Palestinian people and to force their removal from the land of Palestine.”
The group further pointed out that the devastation in Ramallah followed Israeli forces bombing a pair of encampments in and near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, attacks that killed dozens of Palestinians displaced by the war—which over 30 countries have argued to the International Court of Justice amounts to genocide.
Smotrich has come under fire for other statements since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 7 attack. Just last month, in what critics called blatantly genocidal language, he advocated for “total annihilation” of Gaza.
In January, Smotrich said that the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would be a “humanitarian solution” and “a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where, four minutes away from our settlements, there is a hotbed of hatred and terror, where there are 2 million people who wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the state of Israel.”
Smotrich made similar remarks before the current escalation, declaring in March 2023 that an entire Palestinian town should be “wiped out” by Israel and that “there’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
A Gazan man kisses the foot of his dead baby, killed in an Israeli strike (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
Amidst the ongoing, unfathomable slaughter, hunger, maiming, razing in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s “voracious death machine,” its leaders now openly vow “total and utter destruction” by what they still grotesquely call “one of the most moral militaries in the world,” murdered newborns and all. But the hypocrisies and protests mount. “One of this genocide’s aims is to drown us in our own sorrow,” says one of Balfour’s “savages.” Part of their resistance, in turn, “is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza.”
The litany from Israel’s mass killing, “monstrous and largely indiscriminate,” to date: Almost 35,000 dead Palestinians, including well over 14,000 “ungrievable” children; more than 77,000 wounded, half children; at least 17,000 orphans, 5,000 children whose limbs have been amputated, thousands more buried under rubble, a child killed or injured every 10 minutes; hundreds of dead journalists, doctors, teachers, poets, aid workers, academics; most homes leveled, along with 400 schools, 12 universities, over 30 hospitals; starvation levels “the highest ever recorded.” Thanks in part to $26 billion more the U.S. just awarded Israel, its “most decisive vote of confidence in genocide since the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” the hellfire still rains down. Each day, the count grows: Air strikes kill 22, mostly children, kill 20, mostly children, kill 13, nine of them children, kill eight children and two women from one family, kill three women and six children. Fathers sob over small bodies, mourning “a world devoid of all human values.” A strike killed a man, his very pregnant wife, and their three-year-old; doctors saved the baby. A sniper killed a West Bank man for going up on his roof; days later, his wife named their new son after him as their toddler played in sand strewn with his father’s blood.
When upright IDF forces retreated from Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals after mindlessly pulverizing them, rescue workers uncovered mass graves – up to 400 bodies in one, over 200 in another – of bodies mutilated, beheaded, hands tied behind them. The IDF detain medics, block Red Crescent ambulances, storm hospitals and attack staff even as new victims “pile up,” bloody and stick-thin, in rubble-strewn facilities with no supplies. “You can’t imagine it unless you see it,” says an Egyptian doctor working in the north. His most haunting memory: One orphan, an arm amputated, a leg broken, almost entirely burned, “constantly asking where her father, mother and siblings were.” Say other doctors, Gazan and foreign, of amputating limbs without anaesthesia, delivering babies at risk of starvation, laboring beneath the relentless noise and threat of drones where there is “no safe plae, even in our minds,” “We are alive, but we are not OK.” One Gazan doctor recalls a broken fellow-psychologist, leaning his head on his knees, in tears. “He asked me what he was supposed to do, where he was supposed to go,” he said. “I had no answers to give him.”
Still, Israel, “whose founders longed to be a light unto the nations,” persists in its “gallop into the abyss” by blocking food aid and facilitating “catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation,” a preventable famine “unprecedented in modern history.” Rights workers say Gaza’s entire population of 2.2 million do not have enough available calories; half are on the brink of starvation; a third of Gazan infants are acutely malnourished. In Rafah, where half of Gaza has taken shelter, dazed people spend their days “in a perpetual state of survival,” seeking or standing in line for water and food. The trickle of aid is grossly inadequate, and often fatal: Having survived an air strike that killed 17 relatives but only wounded him – “God saved him,” said his grandfather – Zein Oroq, 13, was killed when a pallet of beans, rice and other food dropped by an unopened parachute hit him in the head; the stampede of people “were also hungry” and didn’t stop for him. When a pharmacist mother of three, displaced six times, got a text message of an UNRWA food voucher, she stood in line five hours to get two eggs. En route home, crying, she met her 70-year-old aunt who had lost her husband and two chiuldren in an airstrike. She gave her one egg; at the tent, “We divided the egg into portions to share.”
Last month’s targeted killing of sevenWorld Central Kitchen aid workers in a well-marked convoy – “it was very clear who we are and what we do” – seemed a sort of turning point: In what some called “a story of Western racism.” The deaths of white foreigners, who “risked everything to feed people they did not know and will never meet,” caused an outcry that many, while not diminishing their generous courage, couldn’t help but note: “We need not delude ourselves that (media) would have run the story on its front page had the dead carried Arab names, (when) countless Palestinians, equally heroic and innocent, have been slaughtered by Israeli forces’ actions in the same way.” The workers – a Palestinian, Australian, Pole, three Brits and a dual US-Canada national – were “the best of humanity,” saidWCK founder and chef José Andrés. “The seven souls we mourn today were there so that hungry people could eat,” he said at a remembrance. “There is no excuse for these killings.” Angrily rejecting Israeli claims of “mistakes” – “the perpetrator cannot be investigating himself” – he argued “the death of one humanitarian, one child, one civilian is too many.” “This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel,” he said. “At this point, it seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”
In the midst of Israel’s far-right “Kahanist Spring,” its political and military leaders are astonishingly unshy on that genocidal score. This week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly called for “total annihilation” of Gaza: “There are no half measures – Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat…’Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek’…There is no place for them under heaven.” Echoing fellow war-monger Itamar Ben-Gvir – “God forbid, Israel does not enter Rafah, God forbid, we end the war” – Smotrich is so opposed to “strategic concessions” that would mean “the surrender of the State of Israel,” he’s threatened to boltNetanyahu’s coalition if he doesn’t invade Rafah: “I will pursue my enemies and destroy them. We should deliver the decisive blow.” “In any normal country,” notedHaaretz’ lead editorial the next day, five minutes after his remarks (Netanyahu) would have convened a press conference, fired the minister in disgrace, and publicly declared (that) people with such a worldview have no place in the Israeli government.” Instead, in Netanyahu’s Israel, “the leader of the far right is openly advocating genocide, but there’s not one person in the government willing to stand up and say ‘enough’.” Because, in Netanyahu’s Israel, it apparently never is.
The grisly evidence is everywhere. On Friday, the eldest daughter, two-month-old grandson, and son-in-law of beloved Palestinian poet and mentor Refaat Alareer, assassinated last year in a targeted airstrike that also killed his brother, sister, and her four children, were reported killed in another strike in Gaza City. “I have beautiful news for you,” wrote illustrator Shaima Refaat Alareer to her slain father after giving birth. “Do you know you have just become a grandfather? This is your first grandchild, Abdul Rahman…I never imagined I’d lose you so soon before you got to meet him.” Heartbreak upon heartbreak, much like the murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who became a symbol of the carnage visited upon Gaza when she called for help – “I’m so scared, please come” – while trapped in a car with dead relatives under Israeli fire; weeks later, her decomposed body was found alongside them and an ambulance crew sent to rescue her, because in Netanyahu’s Israel, nothing is still ever enough. “For too long, Palestinians have been lectured about the value of human life and dignity,” says Gazan AFSC worker Yousef Aljamal of the “deafening international silence” on Israel’s atrocities, “only to discover that the value of their lives and their dignity are exceptions to the rule.”
Finally, though, the horrors have “struck a chord” on American campuses with the largest student anti-war protests since the end of the Vietnam War. Nationwide, dozens of solidarity encampments have sprung up, from UCLA to New York’s NYU and Columbia University, where protesters unfurled a banner renaming the historic Hamilton Hall “Hinds Hall,” for Hind Rajab. Insisting they’ll remain “inescapably visible,” students cite the hypocrisies and contradictions “between what our governments say they stand for in terms of democracy, human rights, freedom, and (the) actions they are supporting in Gaza” – ostensibly promoting human rights but enabling genocide, supporting free speech but siccing violent police on peaceful protests, etc. Some schools – Northwestern, Johns Hopkins – have successfully negotiated compromises, like agreeing to review college investments in return for limiting protests; laudably – “This is democracy at work” – Brown agreed to a formal divestment vote from Israel. Still, the “unhinged” response by many school administrations and riot-geared law enforcement, including a Strategic Response Group meant to combat public unrest and “counter-terrorism,” aka young people opposed to genocide, has been blasted as “an authoritarian escalation.”
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 30, 2024
Speaking of: Netanyahu, meanwhile, clings to the rabid, rigid rhetoric he’s used since Oct. 7, declaiming his “iron-clad determination to achieve the goals of our war” against “an outrageous assault on Israel’s inherent right to self-defense” by “barbarians” and “genocidal terrorists,” which evidently include newborns, six-year-olds, entire families and thousands of children, journalists, doctors, aid workers and other innocents. Reportedly worried the ICC may soon issue arrest warrants for himself and other Israeli leaders as “war criminals,” he’s made the “very unusual appeal” to families of the hostages – whom in his venomous investment in war he’s declined to free when he repeatedly could have – “asking” them to lobby Hague officials not to arrest him. Posting a surreal speech with, “You have to hear this to believe this,” he argues “trying to put Israel in the dock” for genocide would be “an outrage of historic proportions,” the “first time a democratic country fighting for its life according to the rules of war is itself accused of war crimes,” “fueling the fires of anti-Semitism already raging on campuses” and, by targeting “the democracy called Israel, (the) targeting of all democracies” in their fight against “savage terrorism and wanton aggression.” Yes: phantasmal pot/kettle.
As he harangues, lest we forget, the head of UNICEF just declared of the harrowing conditions in Gaza, “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.” A UNICEF spokesperson began an op-ed with, “The war against Gaza’s children is forcing many to close their eyes. Nine-year-old Mohamed’s eyes were forced shut, first by the bandages that covered a gaping hole in the back of his head, and second by the coma caused by the blast that hit his family home. He is nine. Sorry, he was nine. Mohamed is now dead.” In central and northern Gaza, surviving Palestinians seeking to return to their homes have found “only ruins, and the smell of death…The streets have turned to sand….It is not fit for life.” And still they are terrorized: Rights groups say the IDF is luring returnees into the open with recordings of cries and screams to be shot at by snipers or drones. At Nuseirat refugee camp, a 35-year-old “son of this city” found only “mountains of rubble.” Yet Gaza, he insists, has risen before: “I will wait for the water lines to be extended in the area, and I will put up a tent and sleep in it with my children.” Says another former resident, “We will teach our children in tents, under the sun, and anywhere else.”
“What does the liberation of Palestine mean?” asks philosopher Judith Butler, when “the grief over Jewish lives lost is very often humanized and memorialized in ways that Palestinian deaths are not.” Simply, she offers “a vision of cohabitation,” that Palestinians and Jews and other inhabitants of that land find a way to live together. Either next to each other or with one another, under conditions of radical equality,” where occupation is dismantled. As a Jew, she also dismantles the myth that Jews, having suffered genocide, cannot be enacting genocide: “There is nothing that keeps a people who have suffered massively in life from afflicting massive suffering on others…There is nothing in the history of the world that precludes that.” Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, newly installed as Glasgow University Rector, has seen and lived that reality. Except for himself, all his forefathers were born in Palestine, a land given away by Arthur Balfour, a former Glasgow rector who in his 46-word declaration announcing British support for Palestine noted, “A survey of the world (shows) a vast number of savage communities.” After a lifetime as a war surgeon, said Abu-Sittah, students at the school once headed by Winnie Mandela reached out to him, and “one of Balfour’s savages” was elected.
“Students understood what we have to lose when we allow our politics to become inhuman,” said Abu-Sittah of what he views as a vote of solidarity with too-long-ignored Palestinian suffering. Citing “the ravening beast” that is “the genocidal erasure of a people,” he argued Gaza is the “axis of genocide” by western powers: “The quadcopters and drones fitted with sniper guns – used so efficiently (one) night at Al-Ahli hospital we received over 30 wounded civilians shot outside our hospital – today in Gaza will be used tomorrow in Mumbai, Nairobi and Sao Paulo.” For those who have “seen, smelt, and heard what the weapons of war do to a child’s body,” have “amputated the unsalvageable limbs of wounded children,” have witnessed the “othering” by which many would be horrified by “the barbarity” of Israel killing 14,000 puppies or kittens, but not children – for all those, somehow, he urged hope. “When powerlessness is at its most acute, the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, complicatedly matters the most,” he said. “It is your world to fight for. It is your tomorrow to make.” Dedicating his address to dead family and colleagues, “but mostly to our land,” he ended with the words of Bobby Sands: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”
