29 December 2023 12:00 am Views - 601
A child cries as people mourn loved ones killed during Israeli bombardment at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP
The US could have prevented the Ukraine war if only it had allowed Ukraine to act independently and in terms of its national interest rather than the interests of the United States and its Western allies. At the behest of the US, Ukraine, in the early days of the war, rejected Russia’s overtures for a win-win solution because the US wanted a war to destabilise and impoverish Russia.
Similarly, the US could have prevented Israel’s Gaza war, which is being presented to gullible people worldwide as a response to the Palestinian resistance force Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7. The war was pre-planned. The longer the war continues, the greater the political survival of Israel’s hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of extremists who believe the world revolves and the rest of humanity exists to serve Israel. The war is needed for the Zionist extremists to implement their plan of depopulating Gaza and annexing it.
The pro-Zionist Biden administration is part of this plan. It allows Israel to continue with its inhumane war. Washington does not appear to be genuinely concerned about the Palestinian death toll in Gaza. More than 21,000 Palestinian civilians, including 10,000 children, have been killed. The death toll equals more than 3.2 million Americans in terms of the US population.
Israel’s outrageous war against the Gaza people includes using starvation as a weapon. A report released last week by 23 UN and nongovernmental agencies said the entire population in Gaza was in a food crisis, with 576,600 at catastrophic or starvation levels. Israel’s motive appears to be the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by making it an unlivable land without hospitals, electricity, infrastructure, and livelihood facilities.
Given this horror, the US endorsement of Israel’s genocide is as inhumane as Israel’s motives, if not revolting.
The world order becomes demonic or devoid of humaneness when world powers defining the world order show callous regard to the loss of human lives and are not moved by the cries of hapless Palestinians who are being mercilessly killed in full view of the world.
The United Nations was set up to bring about a peace-led world order where humanity’s well-being and human rights are assured. The UN Genocide Convention, the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly, signifies the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the atrocities committed during the Second World War.
But the treaty is being reduced to a worthless document. The US is sanctifying Israel’s genocide in Gaza with its assurance to the Zionist state that it will not be held accountable for war crimes, however gruesome they are, and whatever the death toll is.
The US has had Zionist-friendly presidents, but none has descended to as abominable levels of Zionist servitude as the Biden administration.
When more than 20,000 people were killed in Israel’s four months of attacks on Lebanon in 1982, US President Ronald Reagan decided enough was enough and Israel should stop the war. But when the then-Israeli government did not listen, Reagan ordered a halt to the sale of F-16 fighter jets and cluster ammunition to Israel.
Then take the case of President John F. Kennedy, who had running disputes with the then-Israeli government over its secret nuclear weapon programme. Kennedy wanted Israel to tell him whether it was producing nuclear weapons, and when the Zionist regime dilly-dallied and played with semantics in its response, an angry Kennedy set a deadline for Israel to say yes or no to his simple question. But before the deadline, Kennedy was killed, and it remains a mystery as to who planned his assassination, as the killer was killed by another killer who later died of cancer in prison.
Unlike Kennedy and Reagan, the present US president, Biden, has no gumption to stand by humanity. Instead, the US president appears as the overseer of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, throwing open the doors of the US arsenal for Israel to take whatever weapon it wants, though he issues half-hearted appeals to Israel, urging it to minimise civilian deaths. No wonder he has earned the moniker ‘Genocide Joe’ in some social media circles.
Israel’s baby-killing war has exposed not only Washington’s double standards and its dubious claims that its politics and policies are value-based but also the so-called Islamic State, alias ISIS. The self-styled defender of Islam, the group that tries to legitimise its terror in the name of Islam, is nowhere to be seen in the defence of Gaza, let alone issuing a statement.
Its silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza only confirms that it is a creation of Israel or a pro-Israeli Western intelligence outfit, probably the Central Intelligence Agency. During the Syrian war, Israeli jets acted as the air force of ISIS, often taking on Syrian, Hezbollah, and Iranian military positions. It is also claimed that the US government paid FBI agents to pose as ISIS supporters online to encourage gullible sympathisers to join the terror group.
The war has also exposed Israel’s defeat. The war is now three months old. Yet, Israel has failed to annihilate Hamas even with the use of hundreds of 2000-pound (907kg) bombs and the military support of the US and some morally bankrupt European nations. Hamas is just a militant force, with some 30,000 active members. It has no anti-aircraft guns, short-, medium-, or long-range missiles, fighter jets, cluster bombs, or tanks. Yet, it has destroyed hundreds of Israel’s state-of-the-art Merkava tanks and killed an unknown number of Israeli soldiers. The Israeli Defence Forces say they have lost about 500 soldiers in the Gaza operation. Hamas, however, claims it has killed 1,600 Israeli soldiers and demobilised some 700 Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week, an analyst quoted military sources as saying that the number of Hamas fighters killed in the war was much less than what Israel claimed in media statements.
With the US not showing any genuine concern about the Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza and now also in the West Bank, and with the so-called Arab states—some of whom are ridiculed by the Arab masses as Arab Zionists—doing precious little to use whatever power they have to stop the war, the dawn of 2024 is likely to be greeted by the sounds of bombs and the cries of children in Palestine.
With the dawn of 2024 only a few days away, hope remains scarce for peace-starved people due to the appalling stance of Israeli, US, and like-minded world leaders over the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and other global problems such as climate change.