In the world of patronage, it doesn’t get much worse. The United States is at Israel’s elbow—it is a cobelligerent: In actively sustaining Israel’s armed forces, and running diplomatic interference for its politicians; America is acting as Israel’s “principal sponsor,” complicit in war crimes, signaling to the Jewish State that it will let it continue to its evil endgame.
As I ventured in January, the issuance of the equivalent of a legal cease-and-desist or a restraining order against a violent offender, Israel, is urgent and long overdue. It’s already too late for Gaza as a habitable landmass.
While progressives lauded the International Court of Justice (ICJ), my perspective about the Court’s indecision, some months back, was dimmer. (Disgust, actually.) Unfocused as I was on legalistic definitions of genocide; it was obvious to me that, what was indubitably mass murder and ethnic cleansing—crimes that are in process and ongoing—had to be stopped right away. A violent offender, a serial killer, must be stopped; not cautioned and observed!
Were the International Court of Justice an effective and just organization it would have issued some sort of binding cease and desist order, some manner of restraining order, if you will, instructing the Israel Defense Forces to stop its depredations.
Another international tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), had “issued, in March of 2023, warrants of arrest, no less “for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine,” one of whom was Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, president of the Russian Federation, who was being sought for war crimes. With respect to Israel, the inept International Court of Justice appears compromised.
For in a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also extend to the collective. Immoral acts that are forbidden severally cannot be sanctioned collectively. If the citizen must not murder; neither should The State, any state.
UN SECURITY COUNCIL CEASEFIRE IS BINDING
A Security Council resolution not defanged by the US could have included a call for diplomatic, military, political, and economic sanctions, the freezing of Israeli assets, the deployment of a protection force, and the establishment of a tribunal for future prosecution.
In its uncontested superiority, the United States has asserted, moreover, that the UN ceasefire resolution is “non-binding.” “Completely false,” fumes international law expert Graig Mokhiber, in an interview, March 26, with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” And I paraphrase Mr. Mokhiber:
It is black-letter law in the U.N. Charter that all members of the United Nations are bound to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. The Charter, in Article 25, and in subsequent decisions of the International Court of Justice, has made it indisputable that Security Council resolutions are binding for all member states.
Not only is the last ceasefire resolution binding, but it opens up an opportunity, given that Israel is in breach of it, to table a resolution for enforcement under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which “empowers the Security Council to orchestrate … collective actions … through a Military Staff Committee.”
A Security Council resolution not defanged by the United States could include a call for corporeal action: diplomatic, military, political, and economic sanctions, the freezing of Israeli assets, the deployment of a protection force, and the establishment of a tribunal for future prosecution.
If left to the rudderless Europeans and Americans—they’ve done not a thing to stop what Ron Unz has termed the first televised mass murder in history—it is for a heavenly tribunal that we will be waiting.
Scars will knit, but the dead don’t rise, and spry young limbs won’t grow back. More than ten children lose their legs daily by the IDF. Spare a thought for the lot of these children hobbled for life, for the US and world leaders have not.
Again, these judicial and political knaves and curs (with apologies to the canine community) could have cut off the supply of munitions to the culprits. (Some have. God bless Canada for placing an embargo on the export of kayaks and maple syrup to Israel.) Without Americans (you and me, the taxpayers); Israel would not last a day in its brave battle against mothers and their babies. To repeat: We could hobble Israel’s offensive by the imposition of sanctions and boycotts, by freezing Israeli assets worldwide, as was done to Russians. Arrest warrants could have been issued, as the International Criminal Court had for Russians.
In essence, stop murdering and maiming Palestinians, no conditions attached.
ANNIHILATION, NOT WAR
Israel’s war is not a war by any known definition.
A ceasefire is called upon in war. This is not a war.
Ceasefire is defined as “an agreement, usually between two armies, to stop fighting in order to allow discussions about peace.” Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is not a war by any definition. These are not two armies arrayed one against the other. This is no war between opposing warrior forces. There is no parity here.
Why is Gaza 2023/2024 not a war?
If combat veteran Alan Shebaro, U.S. Special Forces, fails to convince you with his experience, I will follow with fact, law and reason. Listen to Shebaro tell it to a Texas City Council in McKinney:
“I know war. What is going on in Palestine right now is not a war. It is the dehumanization, it's the genocide, it's the ethnic cleansing of a specific people to take their land. This is wrong ... I’ve seen horrible things, but this [Gaza] takes it to an entirely new level.”
Does any military man half-decent swallow the lie that, in its orgiastic annihilation of Gaza, Israel is fighting another army fair and square?! Also a misnomer is the phrase “military operation.” It mocks out of meaning any linguistic convention that attaches words to the things they signify.
Valor was thus lost, not stolen, when, on October 24, 2023, Colonel Jack Jacobs, a retired US Army veteran—and a man who valiantly spoke up against the invasion of Iraq (ditto)—noodled on about Israel’s “expanding ground operations.” Once a principled voice, Colonel Jacobs lost respectability, right there, for there is no military operation an upstanding military man can get behind in Gaza, where easily 80 percent of the casualties are innocent civilians.
Hip to this last fact is U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In a quickly retracted statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress, on February 19, “that more than 25,000 women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7.”
The Pentagon later “clarified” that estimate, insisting that, because the figure came from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, not U.S. intelligence; it was unreliable. During that February congressional hearing, Austin had been asked how many Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel. “It is over 25,000,” he had reflexively blurted out: This, according to the Pentagon, was but a monetary lapse of reason.
US bafflegab contradicts what I referred to, on January 4, as the “your lying eyes” standard, to use Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto:
“As they were turning Gaza into Dresden on TV, before our very eyes, Israel’s quicksilver state propagandists were also telling us, their American funders, that ‘this is not happening. …Who are you going to believe? Democratic Israel, or your ‘lying eyes’?’ I believe my ‘lying eyes,’ thank you very much. Those ‘lying eyes’ speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. … [And the numbers of dead, injured and displaced] are deemed ‘broadly reliable,’ by all reputable humanitarian, aid-rendering organizations worldwide, backed as they are by the science of satellite and radar.”
Let us indulge Secretary Austin’s already out-of-date estimate, in order to establish here that Israel’s “operation” is not a military operation behind which any military man worth his salt can stand:
Assume that 25,000 is the number of women and children murdered by Israelis, although it is more, not less, considering that thousands are buried beneath the rubble and more souls are being assassinated as we speak: To wit, in the 24 hours following the Security Councils’ vote, 76 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza.
IF 30,000 is the total—men and women, combatants and civilians—murdered heretofore; then women and children make up 83.3 percent of this total. (25,000/30,000) *100
IF 32,000 is the total number of souls slain to date; then the percentage of women and children is 78.1. (25,000/32,000) *100
IF a total of 33,000 human beings were slaughtered; then the percentage of women and children among them is 75.5. (25,000/33,000) *100
And if the number killed rises to 35,000, as it has, and the number of women and children assassinated is, by some miracle, held constant—their percentage would still constitute (25000/35000) *100= 71.4.
Israel’s war is not a war by any definition.
Unctuous UN ultimatums notwithstanding, as of March 21, Netanyahu had vowed to continue his evil clown’s campaign—so “handsomely equipped to fail” I observed in November—executed by a corrupt, clownishly inept and consistently depraved army.
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