Category: Israel and/or Palestine Page 6 of 10

So, at this point basically all hopspitals in Gaza are shut down, forcibly, or just barely running. None of them were proved to have any significant Hamas presence beyond that would be expected by the fact that Hamas is Gaza’s government. (Does the US have a presence in American hospitals?)

The obvious point here, is that if you want to kill the most people possible, hospitals are bad since they keep people from dying.

Then there’s this beautiful bit:

Israeli General Giora Eiland’s weekly call for genocide: “The international community warns of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from it, as hard as it is. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Strip will hasten victory”

I mean, I admire the honesty.

It’s clear that the Israelis want to remove every Palestinians from Gaza if they can, and if not to confine them to an even smaller area. Convincing other countries to take them has proven difficult, and they’ve floated plenty of ways, including a bunch of countries taking 50K each.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want it to continue, and even more of it, please consider donating.)

If no one will take ’em, killing ’em gets rid of them too.

Given the food embargo, the water embargo and the power embargo, it’s hard not to think that Israel’s goal is to kill as many civilians as possible and they’ve also destroyed something around 90% of the housing stock: completely uninhabitable.

If it looks talks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. If everything you’re doing a reasonable person would know would kill tons of civilians, you’re probably trying to kill tons of civilians.

Anyway, one of the questions Israel supporters love to ask is you support Israel’s right to exist.

No, not any more. Once you cross that genocide line, your legitimacy is lost.

(Actually, I’m not sure I accept any government’s legitimacy any more, but Israel has walked way farther over line than most.)

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Update: A little image showing what happens when food is cut off:

Well, this is what I pointed out would be the problem the minute Israel cut off all water and electricity then went and bombed the power and water infrastructure.

Also have widespread diarrhea. This is just what WHO has seen in their shelters, w/o the internet and with all the bombs they don’t know what’s going on with everyone else.

The current disease trends are very concerning. Since mid-October 2023, over 33,551 cases of diarrhea have been reported. Over half of these are among children under age five—a significant increase compared to an average of 2000 cases monthly in children under five throughout 2021 and 2022. 8944 cases of scabies and lice, 1005 cases of chickenpox, 12635 cases of skin rash, and 54,866 cases of upper respiratory infections have also been reported.

It’s just going to get worse, a lot worse:

Lack of fuel has led to the shutting down of desalination plants, significantly increasing the risk of bacterial infections like diarrhea spreading as people consume contaminated water. Lack of fuel has also disrupted all solid waste collection, creating an environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transmit diseases.

Meanwhile, most people are living on almost no water. They can’t make bread any more, even if they had flour, so there’s very little food. Stories of people not eating so that what little food they have can go to their children are common. Lines for what food there is can take all day, and fights are becoming common.

None of this is unexpected. Netanyahu and Genocide Joe are responsible.

If Turkish President Erdogan is sincere about wanting to help, there’s a simple way to do it. Send a squad of military cargo planes with pallets to drop (ie. with parachutes) into Gaza. Tell Israel that if they are shot down, it’s an automatic declaration of war: pass a bill saying that before the planes go.

Meanwhile, the real part of the genocide has begun. It was never about killing them all with explosives, most will die from disease, hunger and lack of water.

Donors and subscribers make it possible for me to write, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

I don’t believe the 1,400 number for casualties from the Hamas attack. I suspect less civilians were killed than Israel claims and that many who were killed were killed by Israeli fire (there were plenty of reports of Israeli military not exercising fire control when civilians were around.) I also don’t believe accusations of widespread rape by Hamas. Certainly 40 babies weren’t beheaded.

Israel has lied a ton, while Gaza casualty numbers are generally taken as understatement. Indeed, Israel has stated 20K civilians casualties at least once, twice what Gaza is claiming, which makes sense, since so many people are buried and counting is hard in the middle of a massacre.

This stuff will eventually be worked out, long after it matters, but I’m going to lay down this marker. This doesn’t mean I believe Hamas killed no civilians or children, or that there were zero rapes. I just don’t believe the Israeli numbers.

Donors and subscribers make it possible for me to write, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

Let’s spell this out in the simplest terms possible.

Israelis came to a land with its own native population. They wanted to live in the land and the land was not very large. (Israel is a small country.)

That required that the people who were already there be removed.

This was done in stages. Some of the early parts were done by buying the land, generally from landlords who didn’t live in Palestine, then evicting the natives. Most of it was done with violence, starting with the Nakba.

The project of Israel is to create a Jewish religious-ethnic state where there hasn’t been one in nearly two thousand years.

The locals people also breed faster than Israelis.

This means they must, again, be removed. There are two ways to do this. You can get them to move away from the land you want, which is known as ethnic cleansing, or you can kill them, which if done in large enough numbers against a specific group is known as genocide.

Israel’s project is intrinsically one of ethnic cleansing, with the possibility of genocide.

That’s how it was designed.

This is why I support a one state solution, in which Israel becomes a secular state with everyone having citizenship. As long as it is a “Jewish” state, ethnic cleansing will always be the goal, at least until it is completed.

Israel cannot be redeemed until the basis for its existence is changed.

This doesn’t make Israel unique, many if not most states were settler states at some point, with more or less ethnic cleansing (sometimes they just made the conquered people the lower castes, as with Normans in England or Aryans in India).

We now believe that ethnic cleansing and genocide is bad and that it shouldn’t be done any more. (Or we say we believe that.)

When Israelis say “you oppose what you yourself did” they aren’t wrong. But that’s like saying “well, you murdered a bunch of people in the past, why can’t I murder people now?”

At the end of the day, however, this will be determined not by what is moral, but by balance of force. For a long time the Israelis had the most force, the question is if they still do.

If they do (with America and Europe’s help) then they will keep moving towards their project.

If they don’t, then the best they can hope for is a single state solution. All other end states for them are worse.

Donors and subscribers make it possible for me to write, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE