When has killing more Palestinians ever resulted in better security for the Israeli society?
Already in its third week, Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed more than 5,600 Palestinians, injured thousands more, and displaced more than one million. Despite calls from some quarters for a ceasefire, there seems to be no end in sight for the suffering of Gaza’s two million residents.
Having long embraced the dehumanisation of the Palestinians, Israeli society is filled with rage and the primordial drive for revenge over the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas fighters on October 7.
This blind fury is now channelled into a genocidal drive by the narcissism and extremism of one man: Benjamin Netanyahu, a doubled-faced, pathological liar, who has done everything and anything to stay in power.
Netanyahu’s arrogance, corruption and callousness are to blame for the country’s political and military failures that led to the October 7 attacks. He thought he could just transform all of historic Palestine into a Greater Land of Israel, by making the occupation of the Palestinian territories permanent and keeping millions of Palestinians in an open-air prison in Gaza and segregated bantustans in the West Bank – all with no repercussions.
On October 7, his arrogance finally caught up with him, because arrogance breeds stupidity. Hubris turned into humiliation, and the fiasco into farce, or as Israelis say, using Arabic words, the fashla (failure) turned fadiha (scandal).
And while Israel’s military and intelligence heads have accepted responsibility for their failures to prevent the attacks, Netanyahu has refrained from taking any responsibility, even though most Israelis blame him for their national tragedy.
Instead of resigning, the shamed and shameless prime minister cum wartime leader has gone on to wage a sadistic war with no clear strategy or endgame.
In his genocidal offensive, Netanyahu has been aided and abetted by his former Western detractors, who until recently were expressing “concern” about his plans to undermine Israel’s judiciary, through his coalition of fanatics and fascists, in order to stay out of jail.
First and foremost among them is US President Joe Biden, who went from snubbing Netanyahu for much of the year to embracing and shielding him from the wrath of Israelis and Arabs alike.
Biden has committed America to Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza, offering American arms, tactical assistance in urban warfare, and diplomatic leverage. He has ordered the deployment of two aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean to protect Israel and deter the likes of Iran from intervening in the conflict.
Likewise, European leaders, who had also given Netanyahu the cold shoulder for much of the year, are now clamouring to show their support for his government and his war on Gaza. They have refused to call for a ceasefire and continued to justify the mounting Israeli war crimes as an exercise of “the right to self-defence”.
Israel’s Western stooges love to evoke international law in all the wrong ways. Israel, indeed, has the right to self-defence, but not to defend its decades-long brutal military occupation, long enabled by Western powers. It is rather the occupied and victimised Palestinian people living under the Israeli racist system of apartheid that have the right to resist their tormentor under international law.
The ongoing genocidal war – spearheaded by a failed prime minister and supported by his morally suspect Western allies – is not one of self-defence; rather, it is a war of self-deceit. Israel falsely believes that it could attain security by the sword.
But when has killing more Palestinians ever resulted in better security for Israeli society? It never has; it never will.
Imposing a hermetic blockade on Gaza and unleashing a bombing rampage to pave the way for a land invasion, Israel will face dangerous regional blowbacks. In its genocidal drive, it may, as some fear, drag the US into World War III.
Sensationally and falsely comparing Hamas’s attacks on Israel with those carried by al-Qaeda on the United States in 2001 will not help. The “war on terror” the US unleashed on the world killed even more Americans than the 9/11 attacks did, along with hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim victims. It sowed chaos that more war and more troops could not stop for the past two decades.
If anything, the “war on terror” proves that war crimes, collective punishment and other violations of international law do not mitigate extremism; they perpetuate it as they fuel the cycles of violence – something UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism Fionnuala Ni Aolain emphasised during a recent news conference focusing on the Israeli war on Gaza.
As the Israeli army commits more war crimes against the Palestinians of Gaza, Israelis need to have a good look at where colonialism and occupation have gotten them. Perpetual Israeli oppression, racism and killings of the Palestinians have created the conditions for greater instability, extremism and violence in Palestine and the region.
A genocidal war on Gaza will not bring peace and quiet to the Israeli society, nor to those in the West abetting it.
Marwan Bishara is an author who writes extensively on global politics and is widely regarded as a leading authority on US foreign policy, the Middle East and international strategic affairs. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing Hous
Comments
12 responses to “Israel’s war of self-deceit”
Biden, Blinken and supporting neocons generally have belligerently painted themselves into a corner, from where they cannot back down. War is now locked in:-
• … because of their rush to Congress demanding $105B.
• … because of the beligerant public statements of Biden, Blinken, Graham and Haley.
• … because of their beligerant statements to the entire world from the UN Security council.
• … because of the placement of not one but several aircraft carrier groups in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.
• … because of the co-operation they demanded and got from Britain, Germany and the Netherland, which each sent aircraft carriers.
This same commitment from the West also locks Israel in. Netanyahoo has no room to back down either.
Will Hezbollah launch a major attack on Israel? Will it be backed by Iran or by Syria? Will Russia be drawn into the war? China has now sent six (6) warships into the Black Sea, and they are armed with anti-ship missiles. Will China be drawn into the war?
“Will China be drawn into the war?”
We are ALL already drawn into this mercenary globa£i$$d warmongering.
It is the continuation of feudal warlordism to enslave the tillers of the soil and claim-jump the Earth’s resources that goes back to our animal origins as territorial bipeds seeking to maximise our simian-troop/anthropoid-tribe hunting grounds, magnified by the glory-hunting Mars-worship and ‘eye-for-an-eye’ vendetta ideology, industrialisation and applied sciences of mass slaughter of percieved enemy competitors for those resources.
China and Russia have suffered the consequences under European white supremacist pi££aging along with imperial Japanese fascism fed by such as Teddy Roosevelt (whose family wealth was built, like so many, on the opium wars married to ‘mi$$ionary’ KKKri$tian subversion) and are doubtless cranking up their preparations to meet the Nato ‘coalition of the wilful’ bent on full $pectrum dominance’ under their PNAC road map.
The megalomaniac hubris at the core of this in$atiab£€ greed is driven by presumptious rationalisations of these primitive instincts and its collectivism makes it impervious to objective reason, hence the ‘forked-tongue’ contradictory double-speak of our misleadership with their squirrel instincts for hoarding, blind lemming dash to self destruction, and ostrich burial of their heads in the quicksands of mutual reinforcement of idiocy.
The Greeks used to term ‘idiot’ for one so engrossed in their own individual interests they were unfit for public life and incapable of thinking in terms of the common social welfare.
I’m hoping the Russian and Chinese peoples are pragmatically sane enough to minimise their responses to current provocations and steer humanity through the Scylla and Charybdis straits.
With our current technologies of slaughter, particularly since the Hiroshima starting pistol was fired, the mU$hroom shroud has been hanging over our induced somnolence.
We seem to be at crux point…either humanise inclusively, or follow the dodo and leave the planet for some intergalactic archaeologist to scratch her head over should a more successful attempt be made at evolving an intelligent biological life form when the radioactivity subsides.
Thanks for one of the best replies ever!
“… revenge of the killing of Israeli civilians bay HAMAS fighter” is a misleading statement lifted out of Netanyahu criminal propaganda. An article by Robert Inlakesh on ICH tells other story.
Tragedies born new Tragedies. Arrogance destroy us. This needs to STOP
https://philosophyofgoodnews.com/2023/10/13/arogance-destroy-both-the-jew-and-goy/comment-page-1/#comments
There have been large protests across Australia in support of Palestine. Despite this, we now get the news from our pathetic puppet prime minister (pppm) Anthony Albanese:- “The Australian Government has deployed additional ADF personnel and aircraft to the Middle East as part of Operation Beech. Operation Beech is Defence’s support to the Australian Government response to the Hamas-Israel conflict.” Australia is definitely not a sovereign nation.
One question for the author of this article. How do you know that 5,600 Palestinians have died in this conflict so far? I have read different articles all telling different numbers as to how many have died. Its takes years to find the truth after a conflict has ended. Just look at what occurred during World War I and II.
“Why news outlets and the U.N. rely on Gaza’s Health Ministry for death tolls” – Washington Post:- https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/24/gaza-death-toll-palestinian-health-ministry
Netanyahu is a religious fanatic with nuclear weapons. The President, Prime Minister and Defense Minister OF ISRAEL are openly calling for genocide of the Palestinians and the US ambassador to the UN says Israel has the “responsibility” to defend itself. Why not break out the nerve gas, mustard gas, napalm and cluster munitions to smite them all? Did Hitler feel he had the responsibility to defend Germany when he Started WW2?
In fact it was England and France that declared war on Germany that became WWII. Previous to that the Jewish world council declared war on Germany. After the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933 the English hired Polish mercenaries that murdered (depending upon whose estimate) 80,000 ethnic Germans. Germany ordered the Jews out of Germany and the ones that had the wherewithal to leave did so. Others were placed on ships etc and sent out of the country with the remaining placed in concentration camps similar to the ones that the US placed Germans, Italians, and Japanese. As Germany lost the war and wherewithal to provide food, medicine, etc to people in the camps and estimated 250,000 died of disease, dehydration, starvation.
Woopy:
Your reply is correct regarding World War II. Though, the number of ethnic Germans killed in Poland before World War II was about 60,000 based on the document I have. There is so much incorrect information regarding World War II. Germany did not start World War I or II. The total number who died in those camps came to 271,304. I have a copy of the document.
Disadvantaged, thanks for your reply. Over time lies become truth. It’s fairly easy to learn the truth now, especially with the Internet helping us but the propaganda over a period of several decades seems to create deep seeded beliefs that are close to impossible to change. There’s information that Germany tried to create a peace treaty with France and England but like the situations in Ukraine and Palestine it was refused. As many of us know Palestinians are not terrorists however the US media via Israeli squatters has promoted the idea that Palestinians are terrorists most people in the US believe that lie like they believe Russia is a terrorist state. The good news is that reality will soon slink into Washington DC about many things. The question is how will reality affect the socio/economic structure of unreality that now exists. There might be some heavy duty turmoil.