The genocidal state of Israel


Just before we got shut down, I posted a video by Shaun that condemned all the atrocities committed by both sides in Israel and Gaza (it didn’t dissuade the Islamist fanatic who got us censored). Now I’m going to do it again. Cody thoroughly documents the genocide and lies perpetrated by the Israeli government.

It’s depressing. Don’t watch it you don’t want to be outraged by injustice.

It just affirms my concern that Israel has become an evil rogue nation. And we still send them arms?

Comments

  1. Snarki, child of Loki says

    1945 to 2025: USA defeating fascists to electing a fascist.
    1945 to 2025: Genocide of jews to Jewish state committing genocide.

    I don’t like this timeline.

  2. robro says

    If Josephus is to be believed, it would not be the first time a Jewish state…or titularly Jewish state…committed atrocities against its neighbors. Obviously, there’s no reason to think the victims of genocide are immune to committing genocide. Sadly, the existing Jewish state is little more than a projection of Euro-American colonialism in the Middle East using the blood and sweat of a desperate people against another desperate people.

  3. says

    Theocracies are enemies of civilization. It doesn’t matter what nature of “theocracy” one is talking about, ranging from current-day-controlled-by-the-most-powerhungry-orthodoxy-enforcing Israel to Iran to Indonesia to the Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires and farther back. Theocracy is particularly pernicious when it gets mixed up with “ethnicity” and religion-by-descent, as in former Yugoslavia. Remind me: Didn’t we have some war-crimes trials there that devolved to various purported “national origin” complaints that unpacked to religious orthodoxy? More to the point, didn’t we learn anything?

    Apparently not as to the latter.

    Civilization requires that one be able to criticize one’s friends for errors, and occasionally give them the silent treatment when they won’t acknowledge those errors (while, of course, acknowledging one’s own imperfection and working to get better, meaning much more than just striking “three-fifths of all other persons” and pretending it was never there). One wonders if the current polity called “Israel” is intentionally testing this. A number of other countries are so far around the bend of outright theocracy that they can’t see civilization in their rearview mirrors; the theocratic elements in Israel apparently want to join that club.

  4. Hemidactylus says

    Israel propagandists brag about making a desert previously devoid of capable people bloom. Read Mark Twain as a census expert. Hence Zionists are self-sufficient. So we pull the plug on aid to them. Full stop. They can take care of themselves. They made a desert bloom or go boom.

    Why should we continue to support Nutty Yahoo’s attempt to hold power by blowing powerless people to smithereens?

    Maybe also they deradicalize their kooky settlers in Judea and Samaria the West Bank.

    And deradicalize Jerry Coyne who is now a rabid MEMRI propagandist. (Hi John).

  5. John Morales says

    Jaws,

    Theocracies are enemies of civilization.

    Maybe. But that’s not Israel.

    Israel is a colonising power whose territory is what it colonises.

    A hegemonising expander, a conquering power.
    Displacing populations, taking over the territory.
    Started the process in 1948, been going on ever since.
    Basically, other than Russia, the last colonising power that uses conquest at this point in history.

    There’s not even a terra nullius fig-leaf — nah, the idea is to replace the native Palestinian inhabitants, steal their land, steal their possessions, evict them from the land. By the million, hopefully.
    No bones made about it.

    Fuck up their lives to the maximum extent possible, make their lives as miserable as possible, use their hegemony to arbitrarily incarcerate and abuse Palestinian people in the last remnants of the land they had back before the 1948 conquest.

    It is very, very obvious what is going on. A zero-sum game.

    (And I can’t but help think there’s an element of ‘we were hammered and abused and tortured; let’s be the hammerers and the abusers and the torturers this time, while we can’ in their apparent attitude)

    Point being, Israel is most obviously not a theocracy. Israel is Jewish as an excuse, but more as a cultural marker than as religious.

    No matter how much leeway they give their religious loonies (and it ain’t cheap!), it’s still just a hegemonising state which uses religion as the McGuffin for its purposes.

    cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Israel#Religious_self-definition

    A Gallup survey in 2015 determined that 65% of Israelis say they are either “not religious” or “convinced atheists”, while 30% say they are “religious”. Israel is in the middle of the international religiosity scale, between Thailand, the world’s most religious country, and China, the least religious.[14]

    (I’d go as far as to say the USA is more of a theocracy than is Israel)

  6. Hemidactylus says

    John Morales @5
    Apparently you are unacquainted with Israeli West Bank settlers and far right parties who force coalitions to keep power.

    Not your great-grandfather’s Betar Herut. Jabotinsky would be horrified by Bibi.

  7. John Morales says

    Hemidactylus:

    Apparently you are unacquainted with Israeli West Bank settlers and far right parties who force coalitions to keep power.

    Whatever makes you imagine that is somehow “apparent”?

    (Oh, this should be good. Go on. Quote me, if you dare!)

    Not your great-grandfather’s Betar Herut. Jabotinsky would be horrified by Bibi.

    Not my piece of shit, either.

    Again: Israel is not a theocracy. Not even slightly.

  8. John Morales says

    [me, 8 October 2023]

    operabuff,

    the new state of Israel in 1948

    A new state, indeed. In what was British Palestine before that.
    So they took the place over, no?
    Before, it was British Palestine, after it was Israel.

    From 1948, until Israel captured the West Bank and the Golan Heights in 1967 (a war that Israel did not start)

    So the West Bank and the Golan Heights remain conquered territories.
    Homelands to people who now are conquered people.

    It’s a complicated situation.

    Mmm.
    Seems pretty straightforward to me.
    Conquered, oppressed people get angry and lash out.
    (But then, so does the Ukraine war)

    Thing is, this has been going on for basically my whole life. And it is not Israel that suffers most from these episodic breakouts of fighting and resistance.
    Weird how the Palestinians are yet to give up, given that asymmetry of suffering, no? Well, no. And every single time, another generation of children is duly traumatised and alienated and angered. An occupied people.

  9. John Morales says

    Silentbob, maybe you see, maybe you don’t, but you sure are bullshitting and not actually addressing what I actually wrote. Typical for you.

    Oh, I see. So it’s an ethnic cleansing state, not a theocratic state, so not an enemy of civilization.

    What? No.
    Quote me.
    Don’t just put words into the straw dummy’s mouth, actually quote me.

    Go on. Try.

    Quote me. The person to whom you ostensibly address your misrepresented claim.
    Try to sustain your bullshit that I claimed that somehow those three things are mutually-exclusive, or that I even slightly hinted at the third.

    Bah.

    Yet again:
    Israel is a colonising power whose territory is what it colonises.

    A hegemonising expander, a conquering power.
    Displacing populations, taking over the territory.
    Started the process in 1948, been going on ever since.
    Basically, other than Russia, the last colonising power that uses conquest at this point in history.

    There’s not even a terra nullius fig-leaf — nah, the idea is to replace the native Palestinian inhabitants, steal their land, steal their possessions, evict them from the land. By the million, hopefully.
    No bones made about it.

    Fuck up their lives to the maximum extent possible, make their lives as miserable as possible, use their hegemony to arbitrarily incarcerate and abuse Palestinian people in the last remnants of the land they had back before the 1948 conquest.

    It is very, very obvious what is going on. A zero-sum game.

    (And I can’t but help think there’s an element of ‘we were hammered and abused and tortured; let’s be the hammerers and the abusers and the torturers this time, while we can’ in their apparent attitude)

    Point being, Israel is most obviously not a theocracy. Israel is Jewish as an excuse, but more as a cultural marker than as religious.

    No matter how much leeway they give their religious loonies (and it ain’t cheap!), it’s still just a hegemonising state which uses religion as the McGuffin for its purposes.

    BTW, it’s absolutely standard Israeli propaganda that nobody (to speak of) lived in Palestine prior to Zionist settlement.

    Nope. Not even slightly.

    The actual (but bullshit) claim is that “Israel” somehow predates “Palestine”, and that it was only after that when that land became primarily Arab. Like, more than a thousand years ago.

    There was never ever any pretense that it was unpopulated land, as in Australia.

    But hey, do try to actually adduce something to that effect, which you claim is “absolutely standard”.

    (And no, nothing whatsoever to do with MT)

  10. Silentbob says

    Sometimes I think people don’t quite appreciate the scale of the Nakba. Three quarters of a million Palestinians were forced off their land in the Israeli “War of Independence”. That’s a shitload of people today let alone in 1948.

    For perspective, that’s roughly twice the US death toll (military and civilian) from World War II.

    These people were refugees, not casualties, but still. From it’s earliest days, Israel was not fucking about.

  11. John Morales says

    So, Hemidactylus. Again, but different, contrary to how what is supposedly apparent to you:
    Me, https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/12/14/a-slight-correction/#comment-2204840

    In BBC news feed (plain text capture):

    How Israel jails hundreds of Palestinians without charge
    Human rights groups say Israel is abusing a security law inherited from the British to strip due process.
    Released Palestinians allege abuse in Israeli jails
    Inside West Bank district under lockdown since Hamas attack
    West Bank Palestinians hit by surge of Israeli settler attacks

    Oh, and “Israel Gaza: UN General Assembly demands immediate ceasefire”
    (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67699508)

    Sometimes I think people don’t quite appreciate the scale of the Nakba. Three quarters of a million Palestinians were forced off their land in the Israeli “War of Independence”. That’s a shitload of people today let alone in 1948.

    FFS! Me, above:
    “There’s not even a terra nullius fig-leaf — nah, the idea is to replace the native Palestinian inhabitants, steal their land, steal their possessions, evict them from the land. By the million, hopefully.
    No bones made about it.

    Fuck up their lives to the maximum extent possible, make their lives as miserable as possible, use their hegemony to arbitrarily incarcerate and abuse Palestinian people in the last remnants of the land they had back before the 1948 conquest.

    Of course people appreciate its scale!

    (But then, your personal problem with me makes you not able to acknowledge you see what I actually write)

  12. John Morales says

    In the news: https://www.nrc.no/news/2024/february/joint-ngo-statement-eu-and-member-states-must-sustain-funding-to-unrwa/

    Published 29. Feb 2024
    Palestine
    In light of the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the Israeli advance on Rafah, the last refuge for more than 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, the undersigned aid organisations are deeply concerned about the current and potential future suspension of funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The suspension of funding by donor states to the main aid provider for millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the region, at a time where famine is looming and disease outbreaks are worsening, will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza.

    We urge the EU and Member States to take note that other aid agencies cannot replicate UNRWA’s central role in the humanitarian response in Gaza, and amidst the current crisis many will struggle to even maintain their current operations without UNRWA’s partnership and support. Considering the urgency of the situation, if the funding suspensions are not reversed, the risk of a complete collapse of the already restricted humanitarian response resulting in preventable loss of lives in Gaza becomes even more likely.

    (Norwegian Refugee Council)

  13. John Morales says

    [patterns]

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/09/head-of-unwra-says-he-followed-reverse-due-process-in-sacking-accused-gaza-staff

    “UNRWA staff accused by Israel sacked without evidence, chief admits

    Philippe Lazzarini says summary dismissal of nine employees was ‘reverse due process’ after Israel’s claims they aided Hamas attack”

    and

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/01/unrwa-funding-pause-employees-october-7-hamas-attack-claims-no-evidence-un

    “Israel yet to provide evidence to back UNRWA 7 October attack claims – UN

    Allegations against 12 employees led major donors to suspend funding to UN Palestinian agency despite hunger crisis in Gaza”

    In the news: Israel Not Complying with World Court Order in Genocide Case

    (The Hague, February 26, 2024) – The Israeli government has failed to comply with at least one measure in the legally binding order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in South Africa’s genocide case, Human Rights Watch said today. Citing warnings about “catastrophic conditions” in Gaza, the court ordered Israel on January 26, 2024, to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian aid,” and to report back on its compliance to the specific measures “within one month.”

    (Many, many more of those, for decades now)

  14. KG says

    John Morales is quite right: Israel is not a theocracy, although ultra-orthodox groups have gained control of significant areas in which they enforce their rules on others, and privileges such as exemption from conscription; and the ongoing land theft on the West Bank is often justified in religious terms. But there is no general enforcement of Sabbath observance, kosher food laws, circumcision, or other aspects of Judaism that would be expected if it were a theocracy. Instead, it is, explicitly, an ethnostate: any Jew, regardless of religious belief, has a right to immigrate to Israel, while Palestinians ejected in 1948 cannot return; and it was legally defined in 2018 as “the Nation-State of the Jewish People”, within which only the Jewish people have the right to national self-determination.

  15. cartomancer says

    When did the US (and the UK, and the rest of the European former colonial powers for that matter) ever see an evil rogue state they didn’t want to send arms to? Or, rather, to sell arms to?

  16. Silentbob says

    @ 16

    It seems to have been almost forgotten to history that Israel’s original patron was the USSR. (Then France.)

  17. cartomancer says

    The excellent Yanis Varoufakis puts it plainly and provocatively – How much Palestinian blood will it take to wipe away Europe’s collective Holocaust Guilt?

    Or, rather, Europe’s collective guilt over the Jewish victims of the holocaust. Because there sure as hell isn’t the same sense of sclerotic contrition woven through the post-war history of the continent over the other victims – the Roma, the disabled, Left-wing political activists, the LGBT+ community. Not that setting up an all-queer colonial state in, say, Egypt, and arming it to kick out the local Egyptians would be something anyone would want. Or a Roma nation in part of India. Or a Socialist State in Papua New Guinea.

    No, the fact is that the Israel project was a convenient thing to enact in order to perpetuate colonial control of the Middle East, particularly to provide a spearhead for American economic interests after the British grip on the region relaxed. That it could also help assuage European and American complicity in the culture that led to the holocaust was just gravy. What’s that you say? Long history of anti-Jewish racism in our midst? Why, all in the past old chum – we’ve seized a load of land where the Jews come from, don’t you know, and encouraged them all to bugger off there! Clearly no more work is needed addressing the fundamental cultural, structural and economic factors that led to this calamity in our own borders. No, all’s well from the Danube to the Atlantic now!

    Of course, Israel is now a nation state in its own right, with its own population, and as such it deserves the protections and rights of any other nation state. Dismantling it for the crimes it has committed is not an option, because if we did that we’d have to dismantle pretty much every other state in the world for the same reason, and its people have rights. But it does not have the right to colonise, to enact a genocide, to oppress a subset of the people within its borders. There is no justification for any nation to do that.

  18. drew says

    Israel has become an evil rogue nation

    That’s a good start, but why stop there? The US has been sending Israel funding and arms for . . . well, forever. This is a US-backed genocide.

    But why stop three? The US military fights for corporate profits and not any noble ideals. If we had noble ideals, we’d intervene in things like a genocide instead of sending aid and military “advisors” to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
    But why stop there? The US also uses torture as part of its foreign policy. And we’ve decided that Presidents can order the killings of citizens without trial.
    And speaking of foreign policy, there are sanctions. Those are meant to pressure countries internally to bow to the US. They literally never have that effect and often have the opposite one – hardening populations against the US. Because they really only hurt everyday people.

    But why stop there? The School of the Americas trains terrorists. All of the bogeymen we’ve fought wars with for decades have been US puppets, had US terrorist training, and/or been paid or armed by the US before we tired of playing with them and decided to fight.

    The US is not only the chief bully of the world, but the main terrorist nation. I’m less concerned that we fail to intervene than I am that we’re downright evil. And not the fun rawr kind of evil.

    Worse yet, these all-American activities are something with full-throated bipartisan support. So remember to vote for your favorite of two very similar fascist figureheads this November – your vote matters!

  19. says

    Because there sure as hell isn’t the same sense of sclerotic contrition woven through the post-war history of the continent over the other victims – the Roma, the disabled, Left-wing political activists, the LGBT+ community.

    A major reason for that is that there was never a serious nationalist/separatist political movement for either of those groups of people. It sure as hell wasn’t because the West — or the East — were really all that contrite about what happened to Jews.

    No, the fact is that the Israel project was a convenient thing to enact in order to perpetuate colonial control of the Middle East…

    Conspiratorial thinking is not our friend here. First, the creation of Israel was not the result of any sort of well-planned, thoughtfully-executed conspiracy — it was, in fact, exactly the opposite, possibly one of the hottest hot messes in the history of hot messes. And second, any US policymakers wanting to “perpetuate colonial control of the Middle East” would almost surely have considered working with pre-existing states to be the best way to do it — NOT by bringing a whole other state and people into it and provoking more hate and volatility. And, in fact, many US policymakers (and [shameless_plug] lots of political-science students, like my dad in his 1952 master’s thesis [/shameless_plug]) back then expressed exactly that opinion: that a new Jewish state would do US and Western interests more harm than good. Warmongering imperialists deserve at least some credit when their evil calculations turn out to be right.

  20. KG says

    So remember to vote for your favorite of two very similar fascist figureheads this November – your vote matters! – drew@21

    Aaaaand drew shows his usual ignorance and stupidity, failing as always to distinguish the usual imperialism of leading capitalist powers from actual fascism.

  21. Hemidactylus says

    John Morales @10

    Mark Twain’s account of Palestine in The Innocents Abroad has been misused by Zionist propagandists:
    https://marktwainstudies.com/encounteringtwaininpalestine/

    https://m.jpost.com/opinion/center-field-mark-twains-innocents-abroad-explains-our-israel-obsession-606228

    Yet this related phrase is a bit more contentious as to coinage and prevalence of usage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_land_without_a_people_for_a_people_without_a_land

    As for theocracy vs ethnostate I think KG @15 makes a good case for the latter.

  22. rietpluim says

    Countries and nations are myths. Israel is based on a literal myth. I used to believe the two-state solution was actually a solution, but recent events have changed my mind. Israel is without precedent the greatest evil in modern history. It should be abandoned, the occupiers should go back to their countries of origin, the land should be returned to the original inhabitants, who should receive a generous compensation for 76 years of theft, murder and oppression, and every single person of power who ever supported Israel should be tried for complicity in genocide. No peace without justice.

  23. cartomancer says

    Raging Bee, #23,

    I had, it seems, overlooked the zionist nationalism of the first half of the 20th Century. Fair enough. The spearhead for US interests angle (which, we must not forget, is why Israel has been able to get away with what it has over the last fifty years, and the European powers are so cravenly behind it, lest they offend the US) can be chalked up as the imperalists’ adapting to circumstances on the ground.

    What most irks me, though, is that “the Jews must have a national homeland (i.e. an ethnostate), because it’s the only way to ensure their safety after centuries of European persecution” is brought up all the time as a serious and legitimate argument. On the flipside, when some bigot says (as they very often do) “Why don’t you gays all just move to a distant island together, away from the rest of us” it is derided as the homophobic silliness it is and given no serious consideration. They are exactly the same argument.

    In a way, I think this patronises the Jewish people more. It does, at least, recognise that to make progress and ensure safety and equality for LGBT+ people we’re going to have to change social norms and pass laws to do that ourselves, not farm the problem out to somewhere else. Jewish people are the victims of antisemitism (and other kinds of anti-Jewish racism), but it is our problem as Europeans to solve, because it is our culture and history that has created it. I am here counting Americans as offshoot Europeans, because their anti-Jewish sentiments come from that strand of their history.

  24. John Morales says

    In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/israel-settler-violence-sanctions

    This month, the US, British and French governments placed sanctions on more than 30 Israeli settlers for acts of violence and incitement against Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank. It was a historic move. Israeli and international human rights organizations have protested the lack of accountability for settler violence for years. Now these settlers, with documented histories of arson, theft, physical assault and destruction of property, will have their assets frozen, travel abroad restricted, and ability to do business constrained.

    […]

    I have personally encountered some of these individuals. In 2022, I volunteered for three months as a human rights observer in Masafer Yatta, a rural area of the West Bank where Palestinian residents rely largely on shepherding and agriculture to earn a living. I confronted two of the settlers in question, Yinon Levi and Ely Federman, on a near weekly basis, and watched as they attacked Palestinians – unprovoked – with my own eyes.

    Around the village of Zanuta, I witnessed Levi, Federman and their accomplices repeatedly attack Palestinian shepherds and their flocks with dogs and aerial drones. They would try to scare them into leaving their land, and then graze their own sheep and goats on the Palestinians’ crops. In the village of Susiya, I filmed Levi and others illegally building a road to a settlement outpost on private Palestinian land. Another video shows Levi operating a bulldozer, shoveling huge piles of dirt on to a road in order to block the only entrance and exit to the village.

    […]

    During my time in the West Bank, I repeatedly witnessed the failure of the Israeli army and police to stop settler crimes. In fact, on several occasions, as Palestinian shepherds and activists pleaded for help, the authorities either stood down or guarded the marauding settlers – to keep the settlers safe. And the culture of impunity for settlers goes way back. The Israeli watchdog group Yesh Din has been tracking settler violence since 2005, and they have consistently shown that fewer than 3% of cases of settler violence lead to conviction. More than 90% are closed without an indictment.

  25. says

    In a way, I think [Zionism] patronises the Jewish people more.

    My dad mentioned that in his masters’ thesis too: “Definition of a Zionist: someone who wants to send Jews away.” And it’s not really a coincidence that one US party is both the most consistently pro-Israel and the most consistently anti-Jewish.

  26. says

    John: Israel is also bringing in Jews from the US to take land away from Palestinians. Like, they can’t get enough of their own people to steal all the land they want?

  27. Carl Andersson says

    Here’s the thing, the palestinians? they’re about a step below neo-nazis in my opinion.So, you know until israel firebombs southern gazaor something nastier,, i’m cool with them going hungry until hamas releases their hostages

  28. StevoR says

    @ ^ Carl Andersson : Are you “cool” with Palestinian children in Gaza literally starving to death? Because at least fifteen of them have that we know if so far. probly more.

    Are you “cool” with what the IDF did to six year old child Hind Rajab and her family -and the paramedics sent to rescue her from the car she was trapped in with her murdered family members? See :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab