Norman Solomon
Despite all the dodging of
reality, many Americans now know that mass murder of certain other human beings
is a functional U.S. ideology, writes Norman Solomon.
An
aerial photo of displaced Palestinians waiting in northern Nuseirat to return
to their homes in Gaza, Jan. 6, 2025. (Ashraf Amra/UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/ CC
BY-SA 4.0)
Whatever the outcomes of Benjamin
Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday and the latest scenario for a
ceasefire in Gaza, a bilateral policy of genocide has united the Israeli and
U.S. governments in a pact of literally breath-taking cruelty.
That pact and its horrific
consequences for Palestinian people either continue to shock Americans or
gradually normalize indifference toward ongoing atrocities on a massive scale.
Recent news reporting that
President Donald Trump has pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza is an echo of a
familiar refrain about peace-seeking efforts from the Biden and Trump
administrations. The spin remained in sync with the killing — not only with
American bombs and bullets but also with Israel’s refusal to allow more than a
pittance of food and other essentials into Gaza.
Last year began with a United
Nations statement that
“Gazans
now make up 80 per cent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger
worldwide, marking an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid
Israel’s continued bombardment and siege.”
The U.N. quoted experts who said:
“Currently
every single person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population are starving
and struggling to find food and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”
In late February 2024, President
Joe Biden talked to journalists about prospects for a “ceasefire” (which did
not take place) while holding a vanilla ice cream cone. “My national security
adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden
said, before sauntering off.
He spoke during a photo op at an
ice cream parlor in Manhattan, while the U.N. was sounding an alarm that “very
little humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month.”
During the 16 months since then,
variants of facile verbiage from top U.S. government officials have repeated
endlessly, while normalizing genocide with a steep race to the ethical bottom,
so that — in Orwellian terms, much like “war is peace, freedom is slavery,
ignorance is strength” — genocide is not genocide.
Refusal to acknowledge the
complicity and impunity is most of all maintained by avoidance and silence. The
process makes a terrible truth inadmissible rather than admittable.
All the doublethink and newspeak
must detour around the reality that the U.S.-supported Israeli siege of Gaza is
genocide, which the international Genocide Convention defines as:
“acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group” – with such actions as “deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part.”
Israel’s actions in Gaza clearly
meet that definition, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have
unequivocally concluded with exhaustive reports.
But under the cloaks of the
Israeli and American flags, the official stories insist that the unconscionable
should be invisible.
Liberal Zionist groups in the
United States are part of the process. Here’s what I wrote in an article for
The Nation early this year after examining public statements by the
“pro-Israel, pro-peace” group J Street:
“Routinely,
while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also
expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in
Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start
of the [temporary] ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to
shipments of the U.S. bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while
enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war – a glaring
omission for a group that declares itself to be ‘pro-peace.’ It was as if J
Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks
in its stance.
However,
J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel
was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the
position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.
In
mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of
Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government
with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that ‘J
Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.’
Four
months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel
to ‘immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah. ‘J Street continues to
reject the allegation of genocide in this case,’ a news release said.”
Likewise, with rare exceptions,
U.S. news media and members of Congress dodge the reality of genocide against
Palestinians in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the events in Gaza and
the evasions in the United States have been enormously instructive, shattering
illusions along the way. Many Americans, especially young people, know much
more about their country and its government than they did just two years ago.
What has come to light includes
mass murder of certain other human beings as de facto policy and functional
ideology.
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