November
21, 2023
Americans
are funding a genocide and no one asked our permission.
We
are being dragged, unwillingly, into a war that is decimating a people. We are
being forced to become involuntary accomplices to mass slaughter.
Palestinians,
on the basis of their legal right against being wiped out, have filed a major
lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration for funding Israel’s
ongoing pogrom in Gaza, one that has killed more than 11,000 people, including
4,700 children. Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the
plaintiffs include Palestinians who have collectively lost at least 116 family
members to U.S.-funded Israeli military attacks.
The
U.S. has sent Israel a total of about $317 billion in inflation-adjusted
tax-payer money, which amounts to more than $4 billion annually. Almost all
that funding has gone toward the Israeli military. Israel is the largest
recipient of American foreign aid, receiving more money than what we give to
far larger, far poorer nations, ones that have a far greater post-colonial
claim to Western aid.
Now,
the U.S. Congress and the Biden administration want to give even more of our
tax dollars to Israel, specifically to continue bankrolling the unfolding
genocide. They are quibbling over the political strings attached to the aid but
are united in their desire to send the supplemental funds.
But,
according to CCR, “The United States has a duty under Article 1 of the Genocide
Convention to prevent and punish acts of genocide, an obligation the U.S.
Congress made law in 1988.” It’s not just the number of dead Palestinians that
ought to result in a withholding of U.S. aid but the fact that Israeli
officials have been overt about their genocidal aspirations.
The
lawsuit offers evidence of how various Israeli politicians have referred to
Palestinians with dehumanizing language such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant,
who promised that the “human animals” in Gaza would suffer the consequences of
his order for “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” resulting in “no
electricity, no food, no fuel.”
Days
into Israel’s bombing campaign, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca
Albanese warned on October 14, 2023, of a grave danger of ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians, saying, “The international community has the responsibility to
prevent and protect populations from atrocity crimes.” Referring to the first
great displacement that Palestinians suffered, Albanese added, “There is a
grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and
the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale.”
At
the time Albanese made the warning, Israel had killed 1,900 Palestinians.
A
month later, on November 13, Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter
described his nation’s bombing campaign with a concise phrase, worthy of an
operational name for planned genocide: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”
By
then the official death toll of Palestinians was more than 11,000. United
Nations experts warned that “the Palestinian people are at grave risk of
genocide,” and, added, “Israel’s allies also bear responsibility and must act
now to prevent its disastrous course of action.”
One
journalist named Chris McGreal, wrote in The Guardian, “I covered the Rwandan
genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel after the butchery
of the Hamas attacks is eerily familiar.” McGreal also correctly called out
U.S. elected officials such as Senator Lindsey Graham for picking up the
pitchfork and joining the violent mob. “We are in a religious war here. I’m
with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the
place,” said Graham.
It’s
a simple calculus: Israeli officials promise to wipe out people who they view
as less than human, with the full blessing and financial might of the U.S. The
predictable outcome is a fulfillment of their promises, one that is happening
in real-time. Not only are politicians responsible for Palestinian genocide,
but so too is the media for uncritically reporting on the explicit goals and
desires of genocidal maniacs.
Why
shouldn’t we believe leaders when they tell us exactly who they are and what
they intend to do? History is replete with naïve denials of stated intentions
to violate human decency even as crimes unfold in plain sight. Recall that when
Donald Trump told the nation in 2015 that he would launch a white supremacist
presidential bid. Media outlets refused to call him a racist until several
years later after the damage was done and he was in the White House. Hate
crimes surged against Black people, Latinos, Muslims, and Jews. It wasn’t until
the summer of 2019 that media outlets finally decided it was okay to label him
a racist—that too after much hand-wringing. About a year and a half later,
Trump mobilized an attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 in what legal
experts describe as an “insurrection” by a majority white mob. Trump told us
who he was. Mainstream media outlets refused to believe him until it was too
late.
We’re
seeing a familiar hand-wringing today. Take the New York Times’s insistence on
using euphemisms like “extremist,” “incendiary,” and “inflammatory” to avoid
describing Israeli officials’ language and the Israeli military’s actions as
genocidal.
This
type of discussion dilutes an understanding of Israel’s stated goal by
attempting to grapple with the technical definition of genocide. For example,
Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University
wrote in a November 10 New York Times op-ed that, “I believe that there is no
proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.” Still, Bartov admits
that his “greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is
genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.” (Notice how he
doesn’t say “Israel has genocidal intent”—a common use of the passive voice to
dilute blame.)
Countering
this concern in comments to Vox, Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust
and genocide studies at Stockton University asked, “How many Palestinians need
to die for these statements [by Israeli officials] to be recognized as what
they are?”
It
is the job of journalists to warn against abuse, exploitation, and corruption,
and to shine a light on power so that an informed citizenry can decide on the
course of its government. Many journalists are indeed speaking out against
sidestepping the responsibility to report on genocide. More than a thousand
have signed on to a letter saying they “hold Western newsrooms accountable for
dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians.”
That
ethnic cleansing is in full force. CCR’s lawsuit is seeking an injunction to
immediately block U.S. tax dollars from supporting Israel’s war in a concrete
effort to block the genocide, or at least wash the stain of Palestinian blood
off American hands. Meanwhile, public support for U.S. aid to Israel has
dropped, with more Americans now opposed to the military assistance than
supporting it according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll. Nearly 70 percent support a
ceasefire.
International
leaders, government offices, and media institutions, often ignore or deny
genocides as they are unfolding, express regret after it’s too late, and then
make promises of “Never again.” When warning signs of the next genocide arise,
the cycle repeats. It’s up to us to stop it and we have that chance right now.
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