February 2, 2024
Dozens of bodies of Palestinians
have been uncovered in a mass grave in a schoolyard in northern Gaza, with
witnesses saying they appeared to have been killed “execution style” by Israeli
forces. A human rights lawyer has said the killings are “clearly a war crime.”
Palestinians uncovered more than 30
bodies buried in northern Gaza in black bags with their hands and feet tied and
blindfolded, according to witnesses.
“As we were cleaning, we came across
a pile of rubble inside the schoolyard. We were shocked to find out that dozens
of dead bodies were buried under this pile,” one witness told Al Jazeera on
Wednesday. “The moment we opened the black plastic bags, we found the bodies,
already decomposed. They were blindfolded, legs and hands tied. The plastic
cuffs were used on their hands and legs and cloth straps around their eyes and
heads.”
Video and photos appearing to show
the bags containing the bodies show that they are zip-tied shut with tags with
barcodes and writing in Hebrew.
The witnesses’ accounts line up with
previous reports of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians execution style in
other locations, including reporting that soldiers had lined up Palestinians,
including newborn babies, and shot them point blank at another school in
northern Gaza in December. Around the same time, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
reported that Israeli soldiers had been killing dozens of elderly Palestinians
in field executions after ordering them to leave their homes or after releasing
them from being detained without charges.
Western Officials Warn
of War-Crimes Complicity
More than 800 government officials
in the United States and Europe released a letter Friday criticizing their
countries’ leaders for providing unconditional military and diplomatic support
to Israel as it inflicts disaster on Gaza’s population.
[The 800-plus figure is ascribed to
an organizer of the letter who is quoted anonymously, for fear of reprisal, in
a report in The New York Times.]
The authors of the letter, who
remain anonymous, wrote that their attempts to voice concerns internally about
their governments’ support for Israel’s assault on Gaza “were overruled by
political and ideological considerations.”
“We are obliged to do everything in
our power on behalf of our countries and ourselves to not be complicit in one
of the worst human catastrophes of this century,” the letter reads. “We are
obliged to warn the publics of our countries, whom we serve, and to act in
concert with transnational colleagues.”
“Israel has shown no boundaries in
its military operations in Gaza, which has resulted in tens of thousands of
preventable civilian deaths,” the letter continues.
“There is a plausible risk that our
governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international
humanitarian law, war crimes, and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
The letter was coordinated by
government officials in The Netherlands, the U.S., and European Union bodies
and endorsed by civil servants in 10 countries, including Belgium, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Josh Paul, a former U.S. State
Department official who resigned in October over the Biden administration’s
decision to continue arming Israel as it pummeled Gaza, called the new letter
“a remarkable statement from hundreds of individuals who have devoted their
lives to building a better world.”
“One-sided support for Israel’s
atrocities in Gaza, and a blindness to Palestinian humanity, is both a moral
failure, and, for the harm it does to Western interests around the globe, a
policy failure,” Paul told HuffPost.
“At a time where our politicians
seem to have forgotten them,” Paul added, the letter “is a much-needed reminder
of the core values that bind the transatlantic relationship, and a proof that
they endure.”
Paul told The New York Times that he
knew the organizers of the letter, which marks the latest sign of mounting
dissent inside Western governments over their support for Israel’s war on Gaza
as famine and disease spread across the enclave.
United Nations experts warned
earlier this week that Gazans are “enduring apocalyptic humanitarian
conditions, destruction, mass killing, wounding, and irreparable trauma.”
Berber van der Woude, a former Dutch
diplomat who resigned in 2022 over her government’s support for Israel’s
oppression of Palestinians, also spoke out in support of the new letter from
U.S. and European civil servants. Rights groups have accused the Dutch
government of complicity in Israeli war crimes, pointing to the export of
military supplies.
“Being a civil servant doesn’t
absolve you from your responsibility to keep on thinking,” van der Woude told
the Times on Friday. “When the system produces perverse decisions or actions,
we have a responsibility to stop it. It’s not as simple as ‘shut up and do what
you’re told’; we’re also paid to think.”
The unnamed officials implored their
governments to stop telling the public that “there is a strategic and
defensible rationale behind the Israeli operation and that supporting it is in
our countries’ interests.”
Israel claims it is targeting Hamas,
but one human rights monitor estimates that upwards of 90 percent of those
killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were civilians.
The Wall Street Journal reported
earlier this week that U.S. and Israeli officials believe that up to 80 percent
of Hamas’ tunnels are still intact after nearly four months of incessant
bombing, which has killed more than 27,000 Gazans.
To end the bloodshed, the civil
servants demanded that their governments “use all leverage available —
including a halt to military support — to secure a lasting cease-fire and full
humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages.”
They also urged world leaders to
“develop a strategy for lasting peace that includes a secure Palestinian state
and guarantees for Israel’s security, so that an attack like 7 October and an
offensive on Gaza never happen again.”
How the news cycle
misses the predominant violence in Israel-Palestine
The violence unfolding across
Palestine-Israel over the past four months has been accompanied by a
near-real-time deluge of information on social and news media worldwide. As
with other fast-moving, politically charged situations, a portion of that information
has been false, and fact checkers have had their hands full. And as on other
occasions, platforms such as Meta, Twitter/X, and even Telegram have been
criticized for not intervening, or for intervening in a biased way.
Humans, however, do not formulate
opinions based on information, but rather with stories spun from information —
and the relationship between them is far from linear. Fictitious information
can be arranged into a story that conveys profound truths, as great novelists
have proven for centuries. Conversely, and as the past several months of
coverage have demonstrated, there is no fact that cannot be indentured into the
service of a lie. Beyond disinformation (trafficking falsehoods), I worry as a
media researcher and longtime scholar of the Palestinian struggle that
decontextualization (selectively presenting truths) is the more ubiquitous and
elusive threat to our collective understanding.
Disinformation involves lying by
commission, such as by asserting that the 2020 U.S. presidential elections were
rigged against Trump, or that ivermectin cures COVID-19. Decontextualization,
on the other hand, is all about lying by omission, and psychologists have shown
that humans lie by omission with greater facility than by commission. Moreover,
omission’s signature characteristic is absence — something humans are
notoriously bad at noticing, which means we are liable to amplify
decontextualized narratives unwittingly.
For inveterate observers of
Israel-Palestine, though, the absences in the recent discourse have been
egregious. While much has been made of the differential coverage of Palestinian
versus Israeli suffering over the past several months, by far the greater
asymmetry is to be found when comparing coverage of the weeks of kinetic
violence after October 7 versus the decades of structural violence before.
The reason for this asymmetry runs
far deeper than political agendas. News networks cover bombings, shootings, and
other forms of kinetic violence because they are loud, finite events that seize
our attention, invite investigation and intrigue, and whose victims can be
counted, named, and mourned. By contrast, the everyday structural violence of
Israel’s occupation and apartheid is comparatively uneventful. Instead of loss,
it inflicts absence. Instead of killing, it simply aborts. Its first casualties
are dreams and destinies. Even its victims cannot offer a full accounting,
because how can you miss that of which you were always deprived?
Compared to kinetic violence, the
uneventful, continuous, and illegible nature of structural violence renders it
unfit for news coverage. Yet the two are inextricably linked. Decades of
structural violence give rise to weeks and months of kinetic violence. To cover
the latter while neglecting the former is, in a word, to decontextualize; to
show audiences the symptoms while depriving them of the underlying causes.
Without that context, audiences are more likely to see kinetic violence as
unprovoked, stemming from innate and intransigent ideological commitments that
necessitate a heavy-handed response.
In search of absence
All of the narratives spun by the
Israeli government to justify its murderous bombardment of the Gaza Strip —
including at the recent International Court of Justice hearing on the charge of
genocide — draw centrally on the facts of October 7: that Hamas-led militants
broke through the Gaza fence and, with intimate brutality, slaughtered over
1,100 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, and took around 240
others hostage.
The narratives that “Hamas is ISIS,”
that Hamas is morally irredeemable and strategically irreconcilable, that
coexistence is impossible, that Hamas must be eradicated, that Palestinians in
Gaza themselves will be thankful for this — all of these dubious narratives are
lent authenticity by the undeniable horror of October 7. In this sense, these
are narratives not of disinformation, but decontextualization. And while there
have been some embellishments that have rightly drawn scrutiny, the core facts
about what happened on October 7 are true, withstand fact checking, and are
awful enough in their own right as to offer prima facie credibility to Israel’s
war narratives.
The deficiency of the Israeli
government’s narratives is not so much to be found in the information they
present, but rather in the information that is left absent. Countering
decontextualization is about seeing absence “with all its instruments” (to quote
Sinan Antoon’s translation of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish), seeing not
only what is presented but what is left out, and letting silences speak. As
Darwish would say, we must pull up some chairs for the ghosts.
The ghosts start to emerge when you
look at news media coverage in aggregate. MediaCloud, run by a consortium of
universities in the Boston area, has tracked news worldwide for over a decade.
Querying the MediaCloud database via their web interface, I found all news
articles published by American, Canadian, or British news outlets during 2023
mentioning either “Gaza” or the “West Bank”, and generated the following chart.
Media coverage of
“Gaza” (red) and “West Bank” (black) in English-language news (US, UK, and
Canada) since the start of 2023. (MediaCloud)
In the chart, two curves are
depicted, one red and one black, representing the percentage of news articles
mentioning “Gaza” or “West Bank,” respectively, published on each day from the
start of 2023 to just before the temporary ceasefire in late November.
This chart suggests that the
occupied Palestinian territories are covered by the news when and where there
is kinetic violence — that is, bombing, shooting, stabbing, and so forth. Most
notably, the coverage of both Gaza and the West Bank after October 7 dwarfs
everything published in the comparatively stable nine months preceding it. The
coverage of Gaza after October 7, meanwhile, consistently exceeds that of the
West Bank, where kinetic violence was also happening but at orders of magnitude
below its sister territory.
I say kinetic violence for the sake
of distinguishing it from its complementary concept of structural violence.
Whereas bombings or shootings are examples of kinetic violence, structural
violence is exemplified by walls, barbed wire fences, or systems of
discriminatory laws. When a bomb goes off, it is a discrete event that can be
reported or remarked upon. Structures of violence, by contrast, are continuous
features that rend reality in two.
To get a glimpse of what it means
for Palestinians to be the victims of structural violence, we can turn to the
great Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who once wrote that “our lives are
as a straight line that marches in shame and silence beside the line of our
destiny; but the two lie parallel, and shall never meet.” To live in the shadow
of a wall, or on the wrong side of a fence, or on the receiving end of a
discriminatory system, is to live “in the presence of absence,” to be haunted
by the ghost of one’s potential self — the person you would have become were it
not for this wall, this fence, this law, this structure. In Kanafani’s telling,
the life that Palestinians were meant to live haunts their every footstep. It
runs parallel, and in full view of their imagination, a daily reminder and
humiliation, next to which they trudge in silence and shame.
This is the agony of structural
violence with which Palestinians were living throughout 2023, and for the long
years and decades before that. But as the chart shows, news coverage only seems
to tune in when there are outbreaks of kinetic violence. Why does structural
violence get short shrift?
Firstly, structural violence is hard
to measure, even for scholars with the time, resources, and expertise to do so.
As Kanafani’s words suggest, structural violence can be measured by the gulf it
creates between one’s reality and potentiality; between one’s current life and
the life one could have lived were it not for this structure getting in the
way. Such counterfactual analysis, however, is slow, painstaking, and
statistical.
For example, using the West Bank as
Gaza’s counterfactual, scholars have estimated the economic and political costs
of the Gaza blockade since its imposition by Israel in 2007. While thoughtful,
these interventions are complicated, take years to produce, and invite
skepticism and disputation.
Even if you manage to measure
structural violence in a credible way, however, the findings ultimately come
off as overly statistical and hypothetical. Percentage-point declines in GDP or
employment simply lack the visceral horror of a suicide bomb or airstrike.
Behind those percentages are real people whose dreams have been crushed, and
who may succumb to depression, substance abuse, and death many years before
their natural time. But all of that is deemed so indirect, obscured, and
probabilistic that it just does not resonate with audiences as strongly.
Decontextualizing kinetic violence
For all of these reasons, structural
violence is a non-starter for news coverage. It is boring, expresses itself
through absences, non-events, things that did not happen, realities that were
not visited. News must sell itself to audiences, and audiences want to see
action and be diverted. Kinetic violence is attention-grabbing, and so (as the
chart above illustrates) it stands a greater chance of being covered in the
news.
Action-packed kinetic violence then
becomes the entirety of the story in our minds, through a defect of human
psychology that Israeli psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls
the “WYSIATI principle”: what you see is all there is. Besides, in a world full
of events, who has time to think about what did not happen?
The asymmetry with which kinetic
violence is covered relative to structural violence has implications for how
international audiences perceive Palestine-Israel and other civil conflicts.
Though authorities may inflict structural violence on their subjects through a
system of oppression (colonialism, apartheid, military occupation, and so
forth), it is deemed not newsworthy, and receives only a modicum of coverage.
Eventually, after many years of
daily indignities and frustration, a breaking point is reached, and a rebellion
forms. The rebels are much weaker than the state, however, and cannot wield
structural violence. Instead, their primary tool is kinetic violence. And
because kinetic violence is newsworthy, the first time many outside observers
really pay attention to the conflict is when they see masked rebel gunmen
killing and terrorizing.
Indeed, if you analyze the patterns
of rocket fire and airstrikes over the Gaza Strip in the 2010s, you will find
over and over again that it is usually Palestinian militants who appear to
break the “calm.” And yet, buried in the confidential UN security reports from
which those findings were derived, nearly every rocket attack was preceded by
Israeli provocations — bulldozing orchards, revoking work permits, and so on —
that fell below the threshold of newsworthiness, and blended into the
day-to-day humdrum of structural violence.
Outside observers do not feel the
weight of the years and decades of structural violence that precede each moment
of kinetic violence. This is what it means for the latter to be
decontextualized: robbed of its structural provenance by human inattentiveness,
by our incapacity to see absence, and by the unwillingness of the media to
report what did not happen.
But the kinetic violence of October
7 cannot be understood without the structural violence of Oct. 6 and all the
days before. If you recklessly burn fossil fuels for decades, there will come a
time of hurricanes and wildfires. And if you indefinitely postpone the
political process of relieving structural violence, you risk outbreaks of
kinetic violence.
Hamas itself was founded 40 years
deep into the Nakba and the ensuing Palestinian refugee crisis, and 20 years
into the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It is the enraged
orphan of oppression, the product of a pattern so familiar to scholars of civil
conflict that it is astonishing we still bother with proper nouns. Think of it
as a law of conservation: violence is neither created nor destroyed, merely
converted from structural to kinetic.
That causal interplay, however, is
lost on most audiences. In the wake of October 7, activists and commentators
have heroically attempted to fill in the missing context extemporaneously, in
lengthy Twitter threads or on television in the fleeting moments offered to
them by news anchors. But a century of structural violence can scarcely be
recited let alone absorbed under such constraints, even as events on the ground
dramatically unfold.
The chart above shows, moreover,
that the half-life of coverage for a crisis even of this magnitude may only be
as little as six weeks. As the author John le Carré wrote, “history never stops
to take a breath,” and people’s attention moves on to the next item, and the
next.
For all of these reasons,
decontextualization is an enormous challenge to our understanding. To undo
decontextualization will require more than fact checking. We will need
econometrics and media observatories. We will need to read the works of
Palestinian novelists and Israeli psychologists. We will need compassion and
patience, and to reflect upon our own biases and blindspots. We will need all
these instruments to see absence.
The
only right that Palestinians have not been denied is the right to dream: The
Fifth Newsletter (2024)
Dear
friends,
Greetings
from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 26
January, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it
is ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in
Gaza. The ICJ called upon Israel to ‘take all measures within its power to
prevent the commission of all acts’ that violate the UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Although the ICJ did
not call explicitly for a ceasefire (as it did in 2022 when it ordered Russia
to ‘suspend [its] military operation’ in Ukraine), even a casual reading of
this order shows that to comply with the court’s ruling, Israel must end its
assault on Gaza. As part of its ‘provisional measures’, the ICJ called upon
Israel to respond to the court within a month and outline how it has implemented
the order.
Though
Israel has already rejected the ICJ’s findings, international pressure on Tel
Aviv is mounting. Algeria has asked the UN Security Council to enforce the
ICJ’s order while Indonesia and Slovenia have initiated separate proceedings at
the ICJ that will begin on 19 February to seek an advisory opinion on Israel’s
control of and policies on occupied Palestinian territories, pursuant to a UN
General Assembly resolution adopted in December 2022. In addition, Chile and
Mexico have called upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate
crimes committed in Gaza.
Israel’s
reaction to the ICJ’s order was characteristically dismissive. The country’s
national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, called the ICJ an ‘antisemitic
court’ and claimed that it ‘does not seek justice, but rather the persecution
of Jewish people’. Strangely, Ben Gvir accused the ICJ of being ‘silent during
the Holocaust’. The Holocaust conducted by the Nazi German regime and its
allies against European Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, and communists took
place between late 1941 and May 1945, when the Soviet Red Army liberated
prisoners from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof. However, the ICJ was
established in June 1945, one month after the Holocaust ended, and began its
work in April 1946. Israel’s attempt to delegitimise the ICJ by saying that it
remained ‘silent during the Holocaust’ when it was, in fact, not yet in
existence, and then to use that false statement to call the ICJ an ‘antisemitic
court’ shows that Israel has no answer to the merits of the ICJ order.
Meanwhile,
the bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza continues. My friend Na’eem Jeenah,
director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, has been
reviewing the data from various government ministries in Gaza as well as media
reports to circulate a daily information card on the situation. The card from
26 January, the date of the ICJ order and the 112th day of the genocide,
details that over 26,000 Palestinians, at least 11,000 of them children, have
been killed since 7 October; 8,000 are missing; close to 69,000 have been
injured; and almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced.
The numbers are bewildering. During this period, Israel has damaged 394 schools
and colleges, destroying 99 of them as well as 30 hospitals and killing at
least 337 medical personnel. This is the reality that occasioned the genocide
case at the ICJ and the court’s provisional measures, with one judge, Dalveer
Bhandari of India, going further to say plainly that ‘all fighting and
hostilities [must] come to an immediate halt’.
Amongst
the dead are many of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors. One
of the striking features of Palestinian life over the past 76 years since the
Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948 has been the ongoing richness of Palestinian
cultural production. A brisk walk down any of the streets of Jenin or Gaza City
reveals the ubiquity of studios and galleries, places where Palestinians insist
upon their right to dream. In late 1974, the South African militant and artist
Barry Vincent Feinberg published an article in the Afro-Asian journal Lotus
that opens with an interaction in London between Feinberg and a ‘young
Palestinian poet’. Feinberg was curious why, in Lotus, ‘an unusually large
number of poems stem from Palestinian poets’. The young poet, amused by
Feinberg’s observation, replied: ‘The only thing my people have never been
denied is the right to dream’.
Malak
Mattar, born in December 1999, is a young Palestinian artist who refuses to
stop dreaming. Malak was fourteen when Israel conducted its Operation
Protective Edge (2014) in Gaza, killing over two thousand Palestinian civilians
in just over one month—a ghastly toll that built upon the bombardment of the
Occupied Palestinian Territory that has been ongoing for more than a
generation. Malak’s mother urged her to paint as an antidote to the trauma of
the occupation. Malak’s parents are both refugees: her father is from al-Jorah
(now called Ashkelon) and her mother is from al-Batani al-Sharqi, one of the
Palestinian villages along the edge of what is now called the Gaza Strip. On 25
November 1948, the newly formed Israeli government passed Order Number 40,
which authorised Israeli troops to expel Palestinians from villages such as
al-Batani al-Sharqi. ‘Your role is to expel the Arab refugees from these
villages and prevent their return by destroying the villages… Burn the villages
and demolish the stone houses’, wrote the Israeli commanders.
Malak’s
parents carry these memories, but despite the ongoing occupation and war, they
try to endow their children with dreams and hope. Malak picked up a paint brush
and began to envision a luminous world of bright colours and Palestinian
imagery, including the symbol of sumud (‘steadfastness’): the olive tree. Since
she was a teenager, Malak has painted young girls and women, often with babies
and doves, though, as she told the writer Indlieb Farazi Saber, the women’s
heads are often titled to the side. That is because, she said, ‘If you stand
straight, upright, it shows you are stable, but with a head tilted to one side,
it evokes a feeling of being broken, a weakness. We are humans, living through
wars, through brutal moments… the endurance sometimes slips’.
Malak
and I have corresponded throughout this violence, her fears manifest, her
strength remarkable. In January, she wrote, ‘I’m working on a massive painting
depicting many aspects of the genocide’. On a five-metre canvas, Malak created
a work of art that began to resemble Pablo Picasso’s celebrated Guernica
(1937), which he painted to commemorate a massacre by fascist Spain against a
town in the Basque region. In 2022, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) published a profile on Malak,
calling her ‘Palestine’s Picasso’. In the article, Malak said, ‘I was so
inspired by Picasso that, in the beginning of my art journey, I tried to paint
like him’. This new painting by Malak reflects the heartbreak and steadfastness
of the Palestinian people. It is an indictment of Israel’s genocide and an
affirmation of Palestinians’ right to dream. If you look at it closely, you
will see the victims of the genocide: the medical workers, the journalists, and
the poets; the mosques and the churches; the unburied bodies, the naked
prisoners, and the corpses of small children; the bombed cars and the fleeing
refugees. There is a kite flying in the sky, a symbol from Refaat Alareer’s
poem ‘If I Must Die’ (‘you must live to tell my story… so that a child,
somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye… sees the kite, my kite you
made, flying up above and thinks there is an angel there bringing back love’).
Malak’s
work is rooted in Palestinian traditions of painting, inspired by a history
that dates back to Arab Christian iconography (a tradition that was developed
by Yusuf al-Halabi of Aleppo in the seventeenth century). That ‘Aleppo Style’,
as the art critic Kamal Boullata wrote in Istihdar al-Makan, developed into the
‘Jerusalem Style’, which brightened the iconography by introducing flora and
fauna from Islamic miniatures and embroidery. When I first saw Malak’s work, I
thought of how fitting it was that she had redeemed the life of Zulfa al-Sa’di
(1905—1988), one of the most important painters of her time, who painted
Palestinian political and cultural heroes. Al-Sa’di stopped painting after she
was forced to flee Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba; her only paintings that
remain are those that she carried with her on horseback. Sa’di spent the rest
of her life teaching art to Palestinian children at an UNRWA school in
Damascus. It was in one such UNRWA school that Malak learned to paint. Malak
seemed to pick up al-Sa’di’s brushes and paint for her.
It is
no surprise that Israel has targeted UNRWA, successfully encouraging several
key Global North governments to stop funding the agency, which was established
by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 in 1949 to ‘carry out direct
relief and works programmes for Palestine refugees’. In any given year, half a
million Palestinian children like Malak study at UNRWA schools. Raja Khalidi,
director-general of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS),
says of this funding suspension: ‘Given the long-standing precarious nature of
UNRWA’s finances… and in light of its essential role in providing vital
services to Palestine refugees and some 1.8 million displaced persons in Gaza,
cutting its funding at such a moment heightens the threat to life against
Palestinians already at risk of genocide’.
I
encourage you to circulate Malak’s mural, to recreate it on walls and public
spaces across the world. Let it penetrate into the souls of those who refuse to
see the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Warmly,
Vijay
Palestinian
Babies Aren’t All That Innocent
A Republican
representative believes that Palestinian babies are not innocent civilians but
“terrorists” who should be killed.
Florida
Representative Brian Mast made the horrifying comment when confronted by Code
Pink protesters outside his office on Wednesday.
In a video, Mast
can be seen calmly telling the demonstrators, “It would be better if you kill
all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters.”
When asked if he
has seen the images of Palestinian babies killed in Israeli attacks, Mast says,
“These are not innocent Palestinian civilians.”
“The babies?”
the activists asks in astonishment.
Mast then says
that the “half a million people starving to death” should have elected a
pro-Israel government.
When one
protester points out that much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed,
Mast says, “And there’s more infrastructure that needs to be destroyed.”
“Did you not
hear me? There’s more that needs to be destroyed,” he says again for emphasis.
More than 27,000
Palestinians have been killed since October in Israel’s constant bombardment of
Gaza. The majority of the victims have been women and children.
Mast’s horrific
comments—and the chilling way in which he delivered them—should come as no
surprise. In November, just a few weeks after the war began, Mast compared
Palestinian civilians to Nazis and implied that they are all guilty for Hamas’s
atrocities.
“I would
encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of ‘innocent
Palestinian civilians,’ as is frequently said,” he said on the House floor.
“I don’t think
we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during
World War II.”
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