Israel has isolated a prison city that they built, and is destroying it with all of the residents still in the city.
Pretty much every country on earth is trying to stop this atrocity, except the US, which is paying the bill for it to occur. The US is not paying the bill by requesting the money in the normal way. The US president has [in fact] twice gone around the congress, and sent Israel free weapons using 'discretionary funds'. It is further interesting that the American president has access to sufficient secret money to fund the killing of 2 million people.
The prime minister of Israel announced after oct 7 that the entire city would be punished for the attack on Israel. That the residents were not human, and should be wiped out like insects. He figured this out because 3000 of the residents broke into Israel, raped and killed 1200 Israelis, and hauled 240 Israelis back to Gaza to experience the bombing that would surely follow.
There are some other facts that were not immediately obvious:
1. the Israelis were having a giant music festival within sight of a prison city were the folks who used to live in Israel are imprisoned. There were originally .75 million Palestinians forced to flee their homes in the 1948 Nakba event, and they form the backbone of the 2.1 million that currently live in Gaza.
2. It is hard to categorize the invasion. The Palestinians are prisoners. Rural farmers who used to live in small towns and grow olives and raise flocks. They are concentrated in a city within sight of their families' stolen properties and their families' demolished homes. They are under occupation, and have been for 75 years. It is such a long occupation that generations have grown up in this prison city. They have been starved and bombed throughout the 75 years to suppress them. The Oct 7th attack is more like a prison riot. You can see it in the body cam footage captured by some of the fighters. They were acting manic, like participants in a prison riot. Technically, it is not terrorism for members of an occupied or conquered group to break out and take action against their occupiers.
3. The invasion was not very successful. 3000 fighters entered, and managed to kill 1200 Israeli partiers and kibbutzniks. More than 1200 of the invaders were killed in the process. About 1500, or roughly half of them, returned to Gaza with the 240 Hostages. So, including the hostages as deaths, it was about even. It was a drastic overreaction to begin to destroy Gaza with all 2 million residents inside the city. 2 million is also 2000 * 1000. So, we can make the event 500 time smaller, and think of what we would have done. Picture a town nearby with a population of 4000 souls. 6 fighters from this town of 4000 came to your house to harm your family. you were actually able to kill 3 of them, and they killed 2 of your family and kidnapped a third member, and dragged them back to the town of 4000. the town is then at 3998 with the 3 killed fighters subtracted and the one new captive added.
Would you turn off the power to the town with the residents trapped in there, stop all food shipments, and bomb the town from the air until it was destroyed completely?
I think not! you would not automatically imagine that all 4000 of the residents were in on the attack. Certainly elderly people and very young children had not been part of it? There are probably 1000 able bodied men in the town. Would it be OK to round them up, handcuff, blindfold and strip them naked, and march them all off to prison after a good beating? Now, realize that it is not an ordinary town, but a prison of ordinary families that were forced from their nearby farms, and locked up for no crime at all 75 years ago.
There is the long drawn out spectacle of the genocide. The original invasion occurred quickly, in a single day. Following the single day, there have been 3 months of US planes bringing US bombs over the prisoners of Gaza, and dumping their loads onto both the helpless citizens and the Hamas fighters. They have repeatedly killed clearly marked press workers, including US citizens. They have bombed hospitals and ambulances and UN aid workers, and shot some of the Israeli hostages who had escaped and were trying to surrender to soldiers. In short, the response is way out of proportion, and is not really responding only to the oct 7 attack. The genocide is actually part of the cycle of abuse from Nazi to Jew to Palestinian.
The background and leadup to the conflict is confusing. when the pre - israeli soldiers who carried out the Nakba in 1948 are interviewed at the present time, they sound like Nazis. There is the German accent, and the hateful language of ghetto liquidation. There is the clear dehumanization of the natives that accompanies any ethnic cleansing. This takes away some of the confusion. As recent victims of ethnic cleansing, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were subconsciously looking for a people to make homeless, concentrate into a small area, starve and murder.
I was raised by Jewish survivors, Who escaped Germany and came to the US. My family made dress clothing and hats in Germany after running a series of Inns in Lithuania. Then, they made dress clothing and hats in New York city, and eventually set up a printing company on 6th avenue near Penn station. My parents and grandparents taught a fear of being concentrated or Ghettoized. Of being rounded up and starved or shot or gassed on some kind of maniacal assembly line.
I recognize that it is up to survivors and their offspring to end the cycle of genocidal killing. The worst thing that you can be is a murder-crazed survivor looking for payback. I am still reeling from hearing the Prime murderer of Israel giving us his Hitler impression on world TV. If we do nothing, the surviving Palestinians will be looking for the next group to receive this continued blessing of race murder.
Finally, i would like to bring this 'war' home for US citizens. The nearest thing that we have to an occupied part of the US is native American reservations. We also forced the natives from their land, and told them where they could live unmolested. We also did some 'Indian giving' where we sent natives to a spot, but then wanted that spot for some reason, and sent them further west. The Mormons were treated in a similar manner. Driven west until they found land that would not soon be badly needed by the US. Both groups faced massacres and armed disagreements with the US military. And, both groups were eventually let free, and allowed to be ordinary citizens of the US.
The Palestinians are not being let free, even after 75 years of very difficult occupation. They do not look different from Jews. Certainly less difference than is seen between the average white settler and the typical native American. In fact, a Palestinian looks like a starved and frightened Jew with an elegant nose. Likewise, an Israeli looks like a fat and wealthy, long nosed Palestinian. If we could make up with the natives here in the US, it seems likely that long nosed and short nosed middle easterners can get along fantastically well in time. It is no longer permissible to remove native Americans from land when a white person wants it. In fact, the US has adopted some native words, and some respect for native religions and viewpoints. We also eventually came to see eye to eye with the Mormons. The US has elected officials that are native American and LDS. There were decades of strife with either group, but luckily, the differences were worked out without murdering every single one of them.
Instead of bringing warships to the gulf and giving the Israelis as many bombs as they need, we should stop paying for their over reaction. As i found out, the original fight was about even, with a similar death toll for invaders and for Israeli festival goers and farmers. The Hostages were treated about like the thousands of Palestinians who were rounded up and imprisoned as payback. the 32,000 dead in Gaza should not be increased to a million by hunger and disease and more US bombs and tank shells. The Israeli government is kill crazed, and must be stopped via a US intervention before ww3 starts automatically. the UN has already decided this, with the US being the main outlier.
The attacks on ships carrying weapons and supplies that will be used to murder civilians are justified. They are the sort of economic sanctions that may be applied by a poor nation. By arming and defending the months long genocide, we are almost more guilty than Israel. Most recently, we have started to bomb in Syria and Iraq because 3 occupying US soldiers were killed in a raid on an unwanted military base in Jordan. Jordan is not our ally, and a US military bases in an enemy country is subject to attack at any time. We have gotten accustomed to being the unopposed world bully, with more military bases than every other country combined. I fear that we are about to receive a world class beat down if we fail to gain any humility.
