US complicity in Gaza genocide
MUHAMMAD MAHMOOD
Published :
Jul 06, 2024 21:30
Updated :
Jul 06, 2024 21:30
Palestinians walk in a market of the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, on June 20, 2024 — Xinhua photo
The total number of Palestinians dead now exceeds 38,000, of which more than 15,000 are children. The number of casualties is well above 120,000 with most of the 2.3 million Gaza population displaced. According to a statement issued on June 19 by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, close to 70 per cent of Gaza's water, sanitation facilities and infrastructure have been totally destroyed or damaged, leading to the spreading of infectious diseases. According to the Wall Street Journal, by mid-December last year, almost 70 per cent of Gaza's 439,000 homes and half of its buildings were destroyed or damaged. Now the situation is far worse.
Even before the current war, the Gaza strip was blockaded by Israel for 17 years, turning it into an open-air prison. In fact, the Israeli blockade rendered the impoverished Gaza strip virtually "unliveable", a term used by the then UN special rapporteur Michael Lynk in 2018.
70 per cent of Gaza's population are refugees. They along with about 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland of historical Palestine during the Nakbain 1948. The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of about a million of Palestinians in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade American and European people into believing that these never happened. These Palestinians in Gaza are survivors of massacres and ethnic cleansing.
With the blessings of the British who ruled Palestine from 1917-1948, Palestine was formally partitioned, establishing Israel, a Zionist white European colonial settler state, what was meant to be a Palestinian one, thus turning Europe's longstanding problem of anti-Semitism into Palestine's Zionist problem.
In fact, Zionism, a white European colonial movement with white supremacist and fascistic ideologies spearheaded a drive to colonise Palestine with the active support from the UK. The 1917 promise (Balfour Declaration) given by the British of a "national homeland" for European Jews was a British colonial project promising a European ethnic group land in the Arab Middle East in Palestine.
Before the Balfour declaration was made public, it had been submitted and approved by US President Woodrow Wilson, in early 1918. It was also publicly endorsed by the French and Italian governments. Finally in 1948 with the blessing of the British rulers of Palestine at that time, Zionists were successful in establishing a racist colonial settler apartheid state in Palestine and named it Israel.
The policy of ignoring the historical context by the West in general and the US in particular has given rise to the current phase of the conflict. In fact, the UN secretary general pointed out that the October 7 attacks had a historical background.
Israel began its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza on October 27 when the Palestinian resistance group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7. Before starting the ground invasion of Gaza, Israel had launched one of the most destructive bombing campaigns in modern history. It is the active US support for Israel that emboldend Israel to undertake this genocide in Gaza.
The Wall Street Journal in an article titled "The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced into Security Zones" reported a US and Israel plan to create fenced off geographic islands in Gaza to be guarded by the Israeli army. For Israel, "the final solution of the Palestinian problem" lies in all Palestinians in Gaza, either killed or exiled.
The US backed Israeli genocide in Gaza is now aimed at complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. A leaked Israeli Ministry of Defence intelligence document six days after the Hamas attack calls for the forced transfer of the Gaza Strip's 2.3 million Palestinians to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
To achieve that objective the US continues to send weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in Gaza in violation of the ceasefire order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited to address a joint session of the US Congress on July 24 even when the International Court of Justice is reviewing a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, and crimes against humanity and murder.
According to Reuters, the US has sent 14,000, 2000-pound bombs to Israel since October for use in Gaza to enable Israel to continue with its genocide in Gaza. Thes bombs can destroy entire city blocks and can kill people up to 1,200 feet away. By sending these highly destructive bombs for use in impoverished densely populated urban areas, the US is knowingly aiding Israel to carry out planned genocide in Gaza.
Despite mounting international criticism of Israel's genocidal military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the US is continuing to fund, arm and politically and diplomatically supporting Israel's policy of genocide in Gaza. Recently, in a joint statement by 12 former US government officials said that the Biden administration was violating US laws through its support for Israel and finding loopholes to continue shipping weapons to its ally Israel.
These former officials further added that "America's diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to Israel ensured our undeniable complicity in the killing and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza."
Strangely enough, a very poor country like India now under the leadership of a Hindu supremacist prime minister Narendra Modi is also cashing on Israeli genocide in Gaza by exporting arms and ammunitions to Israel despite India's claim that it believes in dialogue and negotiations, not war.
According to The Wire, an Indian news media outlet, the Modi government licensed a shipment in January 2024, the very month the ICJ ruled that some of the acts committed by Israel in Gaza appear to fall within the provisions of the Genocide Convention. According to Al Jazeera, in the aftermath of Israel's bombing of a UN shelter in the Nuseirat camp in Gaza, a video of the remains of a missile reveals a label that clearly read: "Made in India."
The pattern of US support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding. During and following the 1948 Palestinian war after the partition, most Palestinians were driven out of their land. In fact, for decades the US has been providing unconditional support for Israel by using its UN Security Council veto on numerous occasions to shield Israel from international accountability.
The Jewish groups such as Haganah to Irgun, and the Stern Gang actively used terrorism to create fear among the Palestinians. Terrorism carried out by these groups in the 1940s played a significant role in creating the conditions that facilitated the founding of Israel, and the consequent creation of an Arab-Palestinian diaspora. In fact, Zionist terrorism was at the core of the idea of Israel.
The US was the first country to grant Israel recognition on May 14, 1948 and played the leading role in mobilising votes in the UN to recognise the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. Zionist militias and the Israeli army destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages. Israel also appropriated 78 per cent of the territory of Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem following the 1948 war. It was a catastrophic destruction and ethnic cleansing of Palestine and her people in1948. The 1967 war provided Israel with opportunity to further expand its territory including East Jerusalem.
The US also engineered the Oslo Accord and the Abrams Accord which are attempts to further consolidate Israel as the colonial settler state in occupied Palestine with the support of major Arab states as the British did with the collaboration of Hussein bin Ali Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca to colonise Palestine thus paving the way for the creation of the colonial settler state leading to Nakba (catastrophe) to befall the Palestinians.
Israel with the support of the US and its European allies appears to be more emboldened than ever before to escalate its genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Yet, after fighting nine months to eliminate Hamas, their fighters within Gaza still manage to inflict serious casualties on Israeli troops and destroy tanks and personnel carriers.
Not only the international community failed to end the genocide in Gaza, but it also failed to delink humanitarian aid from political and military objectives. The Palestinian people themselves alone have always remained the source of resistance against the colonisation of their land. Now chances are a united Palestinian armed resistance will continue to grow and further strengthen to liberate their land.
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