[ Israel is bombarding Gaza, slaughtering civilians en masse and
vowing to turn it into a “city of tents” following this
weekend’s horrific violence. An immediate cease-fire to end the
cycle of bloodshed couldn’t be more urgent.]
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EVERYONE SHOULD BE CALLING FOR A CEASE-FIRE IN PALESTINE  
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Branko Marcetic
October 11, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Israel is bombarding Gaza, slaughtering civilians en masse and
vowing to turn it into a “city of tents” following this
weekend’s horrific violence. An immediate cease-fire to end the
cycle of bloodshed couldn’t be more urgent. _

Destruction in Gaza,

 

It was clear from the moment the news came in that we were about to
witness a bloodbath.

For years, the Israeli government has made a habit of responding to
provocations from Hamas — and even nonviolent protests by ordinary
Palestinians pushing back against Israel’s occupation — with
brutal force against innocent civilians. Since 2008’s Operation Cast
Lead, the death toll of Palestinians and Israelis (before the latest
casualties) is 6,407 to 308, respectively, according to UN statistics
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a reflection not just of the vast gulf in military resources and
support between the two, but the Israeli military’s indiscriminate
bombardment of residential areas in Gaza, one of the world’s most
densely populated areas.

There was no doubt we would see something still worse in the wake of
Hamas’s latest attack, which was unprecedented in its severity. This
weekend saw the group that governs Gaza breach the border and assault
more than twenty locations in southern Israel, murdering more than two
hundred concertgoers at a nearby festival, killing civilians in scores
of towns, and taking as many as 150 hostages
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children. The Israeli death toll sits at at least 1,200, with 2,400
wounded, a horrific loss of life.

What has followed has made that tragedy worse: the ongoing,
indiscriminate slaughter of innocent Palestinians by Israeli forces.
The Israeli military has killed more than nine hundred
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in the Gaza Strip so far, including at least 140 children, and wounded
five thousand, two-thirds
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whom are children and the elderly, as Israeli jets rain bombs down on
anything within sight: houses, apartment buildings, mosques, health
facilities. Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning for
Gazans to leave the territory is a cruel joke, given that at the best
of times, Palestinian movement is tightly controlled and restricted by
Israel and given Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant’s swift
declaration that “nothing is allowed in or out” of Gaza.

This is collective punishment of a population for the actions of their
government, an unambiguous crime under international law, and made
even harsher by the Netanyahu government’s decision to heighten the
already sixteen-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza: “no fuel,
electricity, or food supplies,” according to Gallant. To justify
this unjustifiable policy, Gallant used shockingly — but at this
point typically — racist language, that “we fight animals in human
form and proceed accordingly.”

Even worse is to come, with multiple reports
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an Israeli ground invasion is next. “We are going to change the
Middle East,” Netanyahu chillingly remarked
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no doubt relishing his new role as a war leader after a political
crisis dented
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public standing. An Israeli security official has said that once the
Israeli military is through, no buildings will be left standing in
Gaza, which “will eventually turn into a city of tents.” This is
unambiguously the language of war crimes, and to characterize it as
simply the Israeli state “defending itself” or concerning itself
narrowly with apprehending Hamas leaders is implausible and insulting.

It should go without saying that if the crimes of Hamas against
Israeli civilians are unacceptable and indefensible, then so is
Israeli’s bombardment of Palestinian civilians — state terrorism
no different, for instance, from Russia’s destruction of Ukrainian
civilian infrastructure and residential areas, and behavior that, at
least in theory, a state that holds itself up as a beacon of democracy
(as Israeli officials often do) shouldn’t be stooping to.

“Clear Responsibility”

What Hamas did over the weekend was appalling. There is no
justification for killing civilians en masse, including on the basis
that they live under a government responsible for crimes and
atrocities. But it is misguided to paint the massacre in Israel as
simply the bloodthirsty actions of a group irrationally bent on
another people’s destruction.

On Sunday, _Haaretz_, Israel’s paper of record, placed
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responsibility” for Hamas’s violence on Prime Minister Netanyahu
for appointing extremists to top positions, trampling on Palestinian
rights, and having “completely failed to identify the dangers he was
consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of
annexation and dispossession.”

The far-right Netanyahu government is stocked
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religious extremists alongside the authoritarian, unscrupulous prime
minister himself. Besides attempting
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domestic power grab, Netanyahu’s ministers have more or less
openly said
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territory belongs to Israel, and his government has acted as such: it
has transferred administration of the occupied territories from
military to civilian leadership, signaling
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to annex them, and expanded
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settlements.

This is all on top of the daily, unconscionable suffering that Israel
imposes on the Palestinian people: the control of their movement,
airspace, waters, and fishing rights
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which has led Gaza to be called the world’s largest open-air prison;
a more-than-decade-long blockade designed
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give Gazans the minimum nutrition possible without veering into
outright starvation; random, sadistic killings
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cripplings of protesters
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and even children
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Israeli troops; and the disgraceful, three-year
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by Israeli security forces against Palestinian worshippers at one of
the holiest sites in Islam, including at one point attacking
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funeral procession near the grounds of the East Jerusalem mosque.

The list could stretch on almost indefinitely. For decades
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Israeli policy has flouted international law, imposed crushing and
seemingly endless misery on the people of Gaza and the West Bank, and
condemned Palestinians to watch as the land of what’s meant to be
their future state is openly stolen
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impunity.

And then there’s Washington foreign policy and the actions, most
recently, of the remarkably diplomacy-averse Biden administration. Not
only has Joe Biden, like previous US presidents, alternated between
standing by and doing nothing about Israel’s brutality and
explicitly backing it — he’s exacerbated the situation.

Biden is in the process of trying to secure
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mutual security pact with Saudi Arabia aimed at normalizing relations
between the Gulf state and Israel, a deal that would effectively throw
Palestinians under the bus for good and builds on an earlier
initiative
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by Donald Trump. (Trump’s own Department of Homeland
Security warned
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by undercutting Palestinians, the push for normalization would end up
“encouraging violence” against Israel.)

Remarkably, in spite of all this, a parade
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US officials and media have declared in an almost coordinated fashion
that the attack by Hamas was “unprovoked” — implying that this
violence has simply come out of nowhere and has no relation to the
actions of the Netanyahu government — and that all there is to the
situation is Israel’s “right to defend itself
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(even if that means massacring children and other innocents).

CNN’s Dana Bash painted
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offensive as Pearl Harbor 2.0 without any wider context — perhaps
understandable given the deplorable loss of life, but it’s also a
clear journalistic failure to provide viewers a deeper understanding
of what was happening, one that subtly primes viewers to favor US
support for an indiscriminate military response over efforts
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arrange a cease-fire.

Such determined refusal to better inform the public only makes it more
likely that we will fail to take the steps needed to secure peace and
instead stay stuck in the perpetual cycle of bloodletting.

Winning a Cease-Fire

This isn’t a time for cheerleading. War is not a spectator sport,
and besides the taking of innocent lives in Israel, the main effect of
Hamas’s supposed “success
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has been to trigger another round of Israeli force, which has already
killed hundreds of Palestinians and looks set to kill many more, one
that from all indications is going to be far more vicious and
unrestrained than previous iterations — which is saying something.

The focus must be on securing a cease-fire, something that, as
Israel’s closest partner and primary military benefactor, the US
government, is in a prime position to do. Murdering thousands of
ordinary Palestinians isn’t going to bring back the lives Hamas has
taken — in fact, it will likely only put more of Israeli lives at
risk by further inflaming the conflict.

This is where pressure and messaging from activists in the United
States and the rest of Israel’s partner states should be aimed: at
pushing the US government and other states friendly with Israel to
restrain Netanyahu’s far-right government and recognize that the
only thing that will prevent the loss of further Israeli and
Palestinian lives is actually following through on an
Israeli-Palestinian settlement, ending Israel’s annexation plans,
and not treating Palestinian grievances as something the White House
can simply push to the side and allow to fester. As the events of the
past few days show, it plainly cannot.

Without such pressure, Washington will be the opposite of a
responsible actor. Rather than use its leverage to press for an end to
hostilities before more people die, the US government — despite
spending a year and a half of talking about the “rules-based
international order,” national sovereignty, and the illegality of
annexation — will back Netanyahu’s bloody retaliation to the hilt.

Already, the administration is “surging support” for Netanyahu’s
war effort, including providing munitions and repositioning
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ships and aircraft, and it is even, perversely, considering
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military aid to Israel with military aid to Ukraine — morally
blackmailing, in other words, hesitant left-leaning lawmakers into
facilitating Netanyahu’s killing of civilians by conditioning it on
another country’s defense against its neighbor’s aggression. (To
his eternal shame, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the top-ranking
US diplomat, quickly deleted
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tweet on Saturday night calling for a cease-fire.)

The situation right now in the Middle East is incredibly bleak. There
is a concerted effort to blind the US and broader Western public to
the deeper causes of this weekend’s horrific violence, and to their
potential solutions. What’s needed is a sober political strategy to
combat this rampant disinformation and to force US politicians, the
president included, to withdraw the blank check they’ve handed
Netanyahu and his coterie of extremists — a strategy that eschews
militant posturing for effective political communication that can
actually persuade the US public and win their sympathy. The absence of
such a thing will only make this situation bleaker.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in
Chicago, Illinois._

* Israel Palestine
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* Bombing civilians
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* Peace Negotiations
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* war crimes
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