As Israeli apologists love to point out. Israel is held to a different standard, and they are absolutely correct. Western governments have a long history of atrocities, war crimes, and violations of international law. The US and Western powers can act with impunity because who can do anything about it? They can bomb brown babies anywhere in the world and never pay a price. There are inevitably unintended consequences and blowback, just not any consequences of the legal kind. Who is going to drag Bush and Cheney before the ICJ for Iraq?
We rightly take Russia to task for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. But the US has been the Putin of Latin America for years. Graduates of the notorious School of the Americas went on to stage coups and become dictators and death squad commanders. Democracy was snuffed out all over the continent, and autocratic US stooges were installed at a horrific cost to local civic society. America the beacon of peace and democracy? Not for our neighbors to the South.
Of course, the picture we paint of ourselves is all unicorns and rainbows. Our PR presents Western civilization as a shining example of democracy and human rights, and for at least some of us, that is what we aspire to. We are baffled and indignant when many in the developing world don’t see us the way we see ourselves
After decades of carefully whitewashing Israel for Western audiences, the rise of Netanyahu brought a willingness to let it all hang out: no more political correctness, no more hiding the racism and plans for ethnic cleansing. Israelis dispensed with the BS and started saying the quiet part out loud. No more pretending to want negotiations or a two-state solution or being OK with having to live with Palestinians.
On a dark October night in 1995, Netanyahu stood on a balcony overlooking Jerusalem’s Zion Square. A banner reading “Death to Arabs” had been unfurled before him. An inflamed crowd of tens of thousands stood below him. Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister at the time, was pushing for a negotiated settlement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and this was a protest organised by the Oslo Accords’ rightwing opponents.
That was the kick-off party for the guy who became the longest-serving PM in Israeli history.
Israelis have been marching for decades, chanting “Death to Arabs.” On Jerusalem Flag Day, they march through Arab neighborhoods chanting, “We will burn your villages.”
In July 2015, Israeli settlers firebombed a Palestinian family’s home in the village of Duma, killing three people. 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned alive in the fire. In the “Wedding of Hate” video posted on YouTube:
guests are shown stabbing a photo of the toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, who had died in the Duma arson attack. The same video contained scenes of guests, armed with guns, knives and Molotov cocktails, chanting a song with the words from the book of Judges (16:28), "O God, that I may be this once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes", replacing "Philistines" with "Palestinians"
The lawyer for the murderers of the toddler was Itamar Ben-Gvir, now a minister in the Israeli government. Ben-Gvir, for years, had a picture of Baruch Kopel Goldstein on his wall. Goldstein was an American-born Jewish terrorist who killed 29 and wounded 128 Muslim worshippers in a mosque. These are not isolated incidents. Since the start of 2023, at least 507 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,769 injured by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank. Even before Gaza, this has been the deadliest year for Palestinians in decades.
Put a uniform on these racist thugs, who celebrate burning babies alive and send them into Gaza knowing they can kill anyone with impunity, and what do you think the result will be? Can anyone say with a straight face they wouldn’t target children? From the description of the numerous sniper attacks in Gaza that have killed children, the Israeli snipers target the youngest children in a group first.
Shameless Gaslighting
Absurdities are normalized and repeated as the standard wisdom when it comes to Israel. In Israeli speak, the occupier is the victim, and the brutalized occupied are the aggressors. When asked about the obscene number of civilians being killed, we hear that “it could all stop tomorrow if Hamas would lay down its arms.” In other words, we will stop murdering your women and children when you submit to our demands. Imagine if such a thing came out of the mouth of a Palestinian.
Or the old standby, “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields.” Any Palestinian can tell you that Palestinian civilians are useless as human shields. The IDF would not hesitate even a nano-second to murder 100 civilians to kill one Hamas fighter. The most dangerous place for a Hamas fighter to be in Gaza would be in a crowd of women and children. On the other hand, for the IDF, Palestinian civilians make excellent human shields, and they have used them regularly, including using children.
Finally, we have: “We have to eliminate Hamas before we talk about peace.” Hamas is a para-military force that engages in terrorism, just like the Israeli Religious Zionist settler para-military. No one is saying we have to eliminate the settler terrorists before we talk about peace - despite the fact that their crimes are just as heinous as Hamas. The IDF is a state military that engages in war crimes and the mass slaughter of civilians; no one is saying we have to reform the IDF and prosecute everyone responsible for war crimes before we talk about peace. The reality is that war criminals like Netanyahu and Sinwar are going to have to be part of the negotiations, and negotiation and a ceasefire should be the priority over more senseless slaughter.
Why is Biden furious with Netanyahu?
Maybe not for the reason you might think. I very much doubt it has anything to do with the number of Palestinian children that are slaughtered; what US President ever gave a shit about that? When 33 Israeli children were killed on October 7th, Biden was on a plane to Israel immediately. That’s great, but the IDF and settlers killed more than 81 Palestinian children and maimed many more in the nine months leading up to October 7th. There was no Presidential plane trip for that — not even a peep out of Biden that I know of.
The real problem for Biden is not how many Palestinians die; it's that Bibi refuses to give Biden even a fig leaf. He refuses to make any serious effort to pretend that he cares about civilian casualties. He starves the population and then targets a humanitarian convoy of the loved and well-known WCK in the most obvious and “we can get away with anything” manner. Biden and his spokespeople are left without any cover. They are made to look like clowns forced to make excuses no one believes for the inexcusable. Biden looks weak and ineffective as he allows the tail to wag the dog. Bad look going into an election. But why should Bibi care he would love to see Biden lose.
Israel apologists, even here at Daily Kos, complain that the West gets to commit war crimes with impunity. They give multiple examples going back to WW2. Why can’t we murder brown children and commit war crimes with impunity too? Aren’t we a “Western” nation? It’s a double standard; it’s anti-semitism!!! They can’t understand why Israel can’t do what their Western Allies have been doing for years. While it may not be the slam-dunk moral defense of Israel, they think it is; it is based on an accurate assessment of Western behavior.
The Egyptian-American comedian Bassem Youssef said that Israel has corrupted the West morally for 100 years. With all due respect to Bassem, I think he has it all wrong. Israel hasn’t corrupted the West; the West was always morally corrupt. Israel’s lack of self-awareness and refusal to stop pretending has screwed up the misinformation campaign that was keeping this whole charade afloat. Israel has lost the plot, and it's putting Western leaders in a bind. But what do you expect when the Israeli equivalent of MAGA now runs Israel? Imagine Majorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, and Lauren Bobert running the show, and you have to defend their actions. That’s the nightmare Biden and his spokespeople are living.
The US is in a position of unmatched power, and with great power comes great responsibility. I could point out dozens of countries doing evil, as I’m sure commenters will do (squirrel!), but we are not actively enabling them with a tsunami of funds and arms.
Just when you think we have progressed from our violent and horrific past, we discover that, sadly, humanity hasn’t advanced at all. I was cheering on Biden, admiring his successes against all odds, thinking we were advancing and headed for a better place. I wrote several stories on DKos gushing about President Biden’s accomplishments.
Then came Gaza. Suddenly it began to look more and more like Uncle Joe’s folksy empathy was just a cynical shtick. The callousness and cruelty of the President's actions in the Gaza genocide belied any BS talk about “concern” for civilian deaths, at least not if the victims were Arabs.
The White House Iftar dinner is an annual reception held at the White House and hosted by the U.S. President and the First Lady to celebrate the end of Ramadan. According to CBS News, It had to be canceled after a tense closed-door meeting with Muslim community leaders. The president reportedly showed shockingly little empathy for the deaths of Palestinian children.
“He kind of went back to that and said, ‘You know, I hear what everybody’s saying, but like, think about the young people that were killed on October 7.’ And it kind of dismissed the over 30,000 people dead in Palestine,”
A Palestinian-American ER doctor who recently returned from Gaza walked out in protest after handing a letter to the President from an 8-year-old orphaned Palestinian girl named Hadeel that read, “I beg you, President Biden, stop them from entering Rafah.”
Yes, I know Biden finally had enough of being made a fool and forced Netanyahu to throw him a bone in their last phone conversation. We shall see how substantial a change, if any, that actually represents. I hope it's not just about requiring Bibi to coordinate the optics better. Instead of Bibi making jackasses out of Biden’s spokespeople every other day. Pelosi's call for a cessation of arms transfers!!! I did not see that coming. This could be the beginning of the dam breaking and an actual change in policy. I hope so.
Netanyahu is Starting a War with Iran
Netanyahu has bombed an Iranian embassy and taken out senior Iranian officials. That’s an attack on Iranian soil, a declaration of war. Israeli embassies are being evacuated, and GPS is being blocked across Israel in order to disrupt incoming missiles and drones. Nuclear-armed Israel is provoking and preparing for a wider war. A war Netanyahu arrogantly assumes he can drag the US into. The US has let Iran know it had nothing to do with the embassy bombing, Americans will not be willing to die in a war Netanyahu chose to start, and no US President will get elected who suggests that they need to.
If Biden can’t restrain him, Bibi and his thugs may cross so many red lines and become such a liability that Western leaders will start thinking that their alliance with Israel is more trouble than it is worth.
Bibi is playing a dangerous game, and as always, he believes he is a lot smarter than he actually is. That's how October 7th happened. Anything is possible now, and it is unlikely to be good. Biden actually has an excellent plan for Middle East peace, but he will have to run over Netanyahu to make it happen. Based on Biden’s performance thus far, I don’t see that happening. Israel seems to be Dark Brandon’s kryptonite.
A journalist asked Gandhi, “What do you think of Western civilization?” He responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”1 Israel has prided itself on being the solitary outpost of Western “civilization” in the Middle East. We are getting a good look now at what that means and what we have been enabling.
Israel is holding up a mirror to ourselves, and a lot of us don’t like what we are seeing.
the small print:
1. It has been pointed out that the story about Gandhi may have never happened. But it is the perfect line to illustrate the point whether or not Gandhi actually said it.