Gaza Update No. 1: Israel's "Window of Legitimacy" and How to Close It

The need to focus on international humanitarian law violations (war crimes), past and present.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoes Security Council resolution calling for a ‘humanitarian pause’ in Israel-Gaza war (CNN 10/18)

Between 31 October (noon) and 1 November (14:00), 280 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, bringing the reported fatality toll since the start of the hostilities to 8,805, of whom about two-thirds are children and women, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza

As of 29 October, about 1,950 people, including at least 1,050 children, have been reported missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble, awaiting rescue or recovery.

The Palestinian Civil Defense has stated that the decomposition of bodies under collapsed buildings, amid the limited rescue missions, raises humanitarian and environmental concerns.

Relatedly, a total of 192 Palestinian families have lost ten or more of their members, 136 Palestinian families have lost 6 to 9 members, and 444 families have lost two to five of their members - UN OCHA Flash Update No. 24, 10/30, No. 26 11/1

Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza | As Israeli forces continue to intensify their cataclysmic assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, Amnesty International has documented unlawful Israeli attacks, including indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes. - Amnesty International, 10/20

Body bags have run out and the dead are now being buried in mass graves...Some hospital staffers have started drinking IV fluid because Israel has cut off water supplies. - Washington Post, 10/16

In terms of a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind", to quote the American Declaration of Independence, the Global West will have effectively flushed itself down history's toilet. - John Whitbeck comment on Sara Roy’s list, 10/15

…To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then? \ Say they who counsel war, we are decreed, \ Reserved and destined to eternal woe… - Paradise Lost

This is the first of a daily newsletter which will provide Emergency Updates on the crisis in Gaza. Its main value will be derived from its reproduction of all messages posted to Professor Sara Roy’s email list¹ (which is now impossible to join because Professor Roy is so busy and cannot add individual email addresses). Harvard’s Roy is considered the world’s leading expert on the Gaza Strip. The postings to her list consist of everything from obscure but important data from non-governmental organizations to WhatsApp messages from Gazans actively under bombing begging the world to hear their final pleas for humanity.

Before I continue on, I want to give a message to anyone in the media who may be reading this. The main role I have taken on since this crisis started is that of media liaison: I have already put several major national newspapers in touch with Palestinian Americans and people on the ground in Gaza, mainly through the Palestinian American Community Center in New Jersey (which can be reached at info@paccusa.org), and I would be happy to make more such connections. Telling the human stories of Palestinians and Palestinian Americans has never been more important, and could indeed save lives, so I encourage journalists and editors to get in touch: gazablog2@gmail.com

As with this first post, I will also be providing my own comments about what a smart strategy for ending this insanity might be. I am far from an expert, but I hope that readers find my analyses useful in some way. If so, please reach out. I am split between New York and DC and would happily meet with journalists, congressional staffers, NGO workers and political advocates, etc. on short notice.

I will post this newsletter every day at 6:00pm from now on. This first message will just be my own commentary, as there were some technical issues with pasting in the massive backlog of messages on Prof. Roy’s list. I hope to have all these uploaded by tomorrow. In future editions I will start with my own comments, and then give a rundown of the highlights from the messages posted to the list the previous day. When I post the backlog of messages tomorrow, it will be a very long, but, I hope, very valuable, record of the best reporting and commentary on the crisis in Gaza. I encourage readers to “Ctrl+F” topics they’re interested in like international law, health facilities, diplomacy, ceasefire, and so on.

Lastly, someone very graciously pledged to support this blog and this inspired me to set up donations, which I will have up and running by the next issue. I am actually fairly financially secure for the moment, and since I could not justify making a profit from this project, I have decided to donate all proceeds to a direct aid charity for Gaza. I am still deciding which charity is the best (perhaps ANERA — recommended by Roy — or Medical Aid for Palestinians?), so if anyone has any suggestions, please put them in the comments or in an email to me.

If I have one wish with this project, it’s that readers use what they learn here for good. Thank you.

Israel’s “Window of Legitimacy” and How to Close It

“Anti-war protesters raise their "bloody" hands behind U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on President Biden's $106 billion national security supplemental funding request to support Israel and Ukraine” (Reuters, 10/31)

(Note: after I wrote the bulk of this article (during the week of 10/16), Mouin Rabbani posted a Twitter thread (10/29, archived) in which he argues that “If the volume of Palestinian death, destruction, and suffering indeed play a role in the calculations of Western governments it would have already done so. It hasn’t, and it won’t.” It is hard to disagree with his analysis. But, as I will explain more in a future article, the indifference of Western governments to Palestinian suffering and even Western support for Israel’s historical project of physically/politically dispossessing the Palestinians do not make fighting for a ceasefire through popular pressure futile).

Israel is currently operating in a “window of legitimacy”— the time it takes for international censure to become strong enough to force it to relent. Our duty is to close this window as fast as possible.

Here’s how things unfolded after 10/7: following the Hamas attacks, Netanyahu called up Western capitals and asked for their diplomatic and military support for an “operation” in Gaza of unprecedented magnitude. Across the board, Western leaders gave the green light with no reservations. Israel had just experienced “its 9-11” and Western states felt obliged to give their full throated support to any and all reprisals by the IDF and initially said little to nothing about international law and did not urge restraint. But the ground is shifting rapidly. I know how futile political activism in the West might seem, given how dehumanizing Western rhetoric and policy toward Palestinians has been (not just now, but for over 75 years), but it is a fact that Israel’s brutal military assault simply could not continue without American bombs² and American and Western diplomatic support. We can use international pressure to close Israel’s window of legitimacy as soon as possible and stop the attack on the people of Gaza.

The urgency of trying something seems clear: As of 10/30, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 8,309 Palestinians, significantly more than in the last two major Gaza “operations”, Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014), combined. Cast Lead was described in a meticulously documented 450-page UN report (the “Goldstone Report”) as a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population”. Amnesty International found “strong evidence” that Protective Edge was characterized by “serious violations of international humanitarian law and…grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention or other war crimes.” ³

The current aggression is by all accounts unfathomably more intense and devastating.

(I will discuss this more below, but the invaluable source for understanding Israel’s past wars on Gaza is Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest Into its Martyrdom (2018, PDF). A masterful synthesis and critique of past human rights reports, it is unparalleled in its thoroughness and, most importantly, its usefulness for activists)

The Washington Post (10/24) quoted defense minister Gallant as saying a ground invasion could last up to 3 months, and it’s likely that the combined “land, sea, and air” assault on Gaza will be even more deadly than the ongoing bombardment. At the current rate of more than 300 (overwhelmingly civilian) casualties per day, 90 days of “war” would kill 27,000 Gazans, or 1.3% of the population. Many more will die from the total collapse of health services and chaos of mass displacement, so 1.3% is a very conservative estimate.

The clock is ticking

Israeli officials are clearly aware of the constraints placed upon them by international public opinion and Western governments. Ehud Barak’s comments (10/22) in an interview with Fareed Zakaria are illustrative and typical:

We [Israeli officials and the “defense establishment”] are fully aware that our universal support and legitimacy will erode as the number of citizens [read: civilians] who are hit [sic] there grows. We are aware of these constraints.

Two recent articles in Yedioth Ahronoth (Israel’s widest-circulation Hebrew daily) are also revealing. One from 11/1 says frankly that the Hamas attacks “did not leave a single Mother Teresa at the top of the Army,” thus:

The willingness to open corridors for humanitarian aid does not stem from sensitivity to the situation of the Palestinians in [Gaza] but from the essential need for time, legitimacy and the support of the White House: food buys time; water buys time; medicine buys time.⁴

The article goes on to admonish far-right politicians like Itmar Ben-Gvir who don’t recognize the strategic value of humanitarian aid. By failing to support the most important cover for Israel’s war, the author says Ben-Gvir is literally “risk[ing] the national interest.”

Another article (11/1) by Eyal Hulata, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s National Security Adviser and former head of Israel’s National Security Council, comments directly on the US role in relation to Israel’s window of legitimacy:

The American expectation is clear: to end the campaign in a timely manner and with as little harm as possible to the civilian population in Gaza. It is difficult to estimate how long it will be before international pressure is exerted to end the war, but as it appears at the moment it will be measured in weeks rather than months.

Hulata implies that, rather than the current high-intensity invasion, the IDF may need to keep up a low intensity war for months to draw the Hamas leadership out of hiding. For this shift in military strategy to work, however, some humanitarian concessions are required. Israel needs to “buy time and extend the political window, in particular by improving the humanitarian conditions…as the Americans demand,” Hulata says. “Clear actions must be taken immediately to extend the political clock [the window of legitimacy]…otherwise we will invite international pressure on us to stop the war.”

Israeli commentators and officials are open about the fact that humanitarian aid and promises to protect civilians are simply a fig leaf meant to buy the IDF more time, which Hulata wisely says is not on Israel’s side as world opinion coalesces against Israel and around a ceasefire. We should be equally clear-eyed: aid trucks and invocations of international law serve a military purpose, namely to hold open Israel’s window of legitimacy. Every day that a new war crime is caught on camera and erodes the IDF’s image as “the most moral army on earth”, every humanitarian report that comes out about newborns who will die if Gaza’s hospitals run out of fuel — international outrage about these incidents will eventually make it difficult for Israel to carry on has it has for the past three weeks.

So, while it is clear that the West, and particularly the US, have given Israel the green light to prosecute a devastating air war and ground invasion, it is also clear that, eventually, Israel’s impunity⁵ will begin to run out.  “Eventually” is the key word here. Every day that Israel’s window of legitimacy stays open, scores of innocent people are killed. Thus, it is incumbent upon us to build that international pressure up now and focus it as effectively as possible. The global protests that have brought hundreds of thousands of people out in solidarity with Gaza and Palestine are deeply inspiring, but in order to stop this assault as quickly as possible, that energy must be channeled in the right direction.

Long-time New York Times foreign affairs correspondent Tom Friedman recently described the situation as follows:

Basically what President Biden did is he gave Israel a green light…to fight the perfect war, the war that will go just so deep, just so long, and kill just so few civilians.⁶

“…Kill just so few civilians”… Can you imagine a mainstream journalist writing this about any other conflict?

As to the substance of what Friedman says, it is ludicrous to suppose that the IDF is capable of fighting such a “perfect war”, given what we know about past Israeli conduct, which is typified by violations of international law. Thus, Friedman worries about Israel’s ability to maintain legitimacy for its war in a “wired world, where everyone will see everything,” and in which the “enemy will go out of its way to highlight every civilian casualty, every error.” Sympathy for the Palestinian cause globally has, at least in some ways, never been higher, and this troublesome fact puts Israel in “an impossible predicament,” according to Friedman. Indeed, the NYT reports (10/31) that one of the “questions” US officials have been putting to their Israeli counterparts is “Have you thought through how public opinion will turn if civilian casualties mount.” Already US officials have recognized that “building a coalition of international support” for Israel’s war is “impossible,” according to the Times.

(As an aside, it is telling that Friedman conflates protestors concerned with human rights (like you and me) with “the enemy”. By his logic, the families of some of the Israeli hostages who have begged their government “Don’t destroy Gaza” and who are “crying for those who will lose their lives in this war” would also qualify as “the enemy.”⁷ I digress…)

Friedman’s comments are important because they reflect received wisdom among lawmakers and our political elite⁸, who may be deciding between issuing another stern, but ultimately pointless, warning to the IDF, and advocating for a ceasefire. Another received wisdom that Friedman expresses in the podcast is that “Israel does some bad stuff sometimes.” While a grave understatement, it is safe to say that this is what the majority of the political establishment believe. The thing to do, in my opinion, is to use the mountain of evidence furnished by mainstream human rights organizations to show those who are on the fence that, actually, Israel “does bad stuff” all the time in its wars on Gaza

This is How We Fought in Gaza 2014 describes loose rules of engagement that were often interpreted as carte blanche to shoot anything that moved. Such damning evidence of IDF war crimes can be found in countless reports from reputable human rights organizations like the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence. I will discuss this report in a future post.

In the past, virtually all but a tiny fringe would have agreed with that most ubiquitous yet least true line of hasbara⁹, at Israel’s is “the most moral army on earth.” This time, though, some cracks have appeared in this consensus.  Thus, we have a rare opportunity to drive a wedge through the usually unanimous “pro-Israel” bloc that gives Israel carte blanche to act with impunity in Gaza.

The strength of the “pro-Israel” consensus in the US is hard to overstate, and we should bear this in mind when formulating talking points. In one particularly shameful incident, for example, “the US House of Representatives passed by a vote of 344 to 36 a nonbinding resolution that condemned the [Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead] as ‘irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.’”¹⁰ I can’t prove this to the extent I’d like to, but something feels different this time around; it seems to me — although the signs of this are admittedly hard to tease out from political reportage, public statements from elected officials, and public opinion polling — that the halo that surrounds Israel’s military conduct is on the verge of shattering and needs just one more knock from dedicated and intelligent activists.

International law: a mere fig leaf? Yes, but…

It is notable that Western leaders issued warnings and condemnations of IDF war crimes, even if toothless, so early on compared to previous attacks on Gaza. It is clear to all serious observers that Israel’s far-right government is poised to commit (and is already committing) all manner of international humanitarian law (IHL) violations in this war. Indeed, Amnesty claims (10/20) it already has “damning evidence of war crimes.” Therefore, we are confronted with a unique, if gruesome, opportunity to shift opinion and policy towards Israel within our governments in the West.

Thus, there is a basis for pressuring our political system to change its policy vis-à-vis Israel: international law and the human rights of Palestinians over which Israel has always run roughshod. But this pressure is not building up fast enough.

For example, here’s how the NYT described (10/17) Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s attitude toward IHL violations: “Mr. Blinken signaled in his travels that the administration would have a high tolerance for whatever results from Israel’s military response"

"Whatever results'' is a blood-curdling euphemism for untold civilian casualties. This laissez-faire — really, supportive — attitude to the fish in a barrel-style carpet bombing of two million innocent people, mostly children and refugees, who are trapped in an inescapable, "unlivable" open air prison without food, fuel, water, or electricity, cannot be left unchecked by popular pressure.

Pressures from international public opinion and from high diplomatic sources are increasing, but they are building up at different rates. With the memory of the devastation wrought by Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Protective Edge (2014), and the 2021 war¹¹ top of mind, hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in recent weeks demanding an end to the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. This has obviously disturbed our political elite enough for them to start to mumble about upholding international law, but obviously this is not enough.

A valuable use of the current outpouring of political energy is to convert as many politicians who have dared to utter the words “protecting civilians”, or “international law” as possible to supporting an immediate ceasefire. How do we do this? Well, certainly, for some of these politicians, these calls for restraint truly are nothing but vulgar cynicism. As Sai Englert wrote recently (10/16), at the highest levels , “our rulers are prepared to let Israel level Gaza,” and we should not underestimate the extent to which "humanitarian" aid and other concessions “extracted” by Blinken and Biden and their warnings about respecting international law are themselves diplomatic cover and a form of military supplies for Israel's attack on Gaza. Actually, they are probably the most important props holding open Israel’s window of legitimacy. As James Eastwood put it in a 2017 study of Israeli militarism, “ethics can function as a weapon of war.” The IDF’s vaunted “purity of arms” have become “a facet of the ongoing colonial dispossession of Palestine through Israeli military violence,” and this applies as much to the ways the US cynically uses human rights and international law to legitimate its support for Israeli militarism as to Israel’s own military doctrine.

Biden can turn on as many water taps as he wants, Blinken can wave his finger about respecting international humanitarian law until his hand hurts, but if the framework dominating Congress and the Administration’s thinking is still “LEVEL GAZA”, then we have not done our jobs. Biden and Blinken know full well that they are being condemned (10/13) worldwide by the likes of Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director of Human Rights Watch for aiding and abetting in “displacement on a scale we have not seen since the Nakba” . But Biden and the West seem to genuinely believe that “Israel’s 9-11” gives the IDF carte blanche to do whatever it needs to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Hamas, innocent lives be damned. Thus, I predict that Biden and all supporters of Israel are going to cling on to the “necessary illusion” of the moral army myth until the war crimes become so egregious that they can’t be ignored. For the sake of the people of Gaza, we in the West who have real power to influence our governments cannot allow it to get to that point. We need to adopt, immediately, a laser-like focus on IHL violations in past and present campaigns in Gaza. Puncturing the halo that surrounds Israel’s attacks on Gaza is a vital first step in achieving a ceasefire.

Barak Ravid spells out this logic incredibly clearly in an article published Saturday (10/21):

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Israelis that it is in Israel's interest to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Doing so would help maintain international support for Israel's operation against Hamas, they said.

This cynical invocation of humanitarian principles is further exemplified by Biden’s call with Netanyahu on 10/20, during which he “reaffirmed the United States’ support for Israel’s right to defend itself … while underscoring the importance of operating consistent with the law of war to include the protection of civilians in Gaza.” Western leaders are using this hollow rhetoric about the laws of war to legitimate what they surely know is/will be a campaign marked by blatant war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Former President Obama, the enabler-in-chief of Operation Protective Edge (civilian death toll: 1,473, including 501 children and 257 women), sounded a similar note yesterday (10/23) when he said that adherence to international law is inherently good, but that there are other considerations too:

Upholding [the laws of war and avoiding killing civilians] is also vital for building alliances and shaping international opinion — all of which are critical for Israel’s long-term security.

The overriding concern is not with the inherent obligation to protect civilians, but with the chance that failing to do so could “erode global support for Israel, [and] play into the hands of Israel’s enemies”

“Preserving our moral authority” is more important than actually being moral.

In this context it’s important to remember that the Obama administration was instrumental in shielding Israel from exactly the kind of international legal accountability that might have prevented the atrocities we are seeing today. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular — who, like Obama, is today full of platitudes about human rights and international law — was proud of her efforts to protect Israel from even the most basic accountability from the international system:

The Obama administration worked behind the scenes in concert with Israel to foreclose consideration of the [Goldstone Report on Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead] in international forums, and privately gloated at the successes it had scored. Hillary Clinton later bragged that while secretary of state in the Obama administration, she had “defended Israel from isolation and attacks at the United Nations and other international settings, including opposing the biased Goldstone report.¹²

Clinton has said (10/29) that “a ceasefire is impossible” but that Gazans can rest easy because the IDF has an “obligation to limit civilian deaths.” She also recently (10/23) moderated at panel at Columbia University titled “Making Human Rights Come Alive” — maybe Secretary Clinton can apply her God-like powers to a mass grave in Khan Yunis.

Likewise, it might surprise some to learn that Samantha Power, author of “the book” on genocide, actually did not immediately resign her position as USAID administrator when she learned of the cynical use of human rights discourse to give cover to America’s support of carpet bombing in Gaza. Instead, she issued a press release (10/14) “[underscoring] the United States’ commitment to supporting civilians caught in Hamas’ barbaric war.” Quelle suprise, a ceasefire was not mentioned by this great humanitarian, this leading light of American intellectual life. (One is reminded of the USAID-supplied field radios that were used to administer electric shocks to the genitals of torture victims during the US-supported Brazilian military dictatorship…¹³)

The joint statement from western leaders from the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Italy should be enough to puncture any remaining illusions. These heads of state, who know full well the IDF’s past and present record of repeated and severe IHL violations¹⁴, “reiterated their support for Israel and its right to defend itself against terrorism and called for adherence to international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians.”

The formula seems clear: our political leaders are going to green-light the leveling of Gaza and issue increasingly stern warnings about international law to give Israel cover. This is the situation at the very top of our political systems.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden

Biden’s call with Netanyahu on 10/29 was an ominous confirmation of this hypothesis. Even as the death toll¹⁵ climbed to new heights, reaching a daily peak of 756 on Wednesday, 10/28 (8,309 in total since hostilities began as of 10/30) there was exactly the same mention in the call readout of “Israel’s right and responsibility to defend its citizens…in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law that prioritizes the protection of civilians.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said much the same in an interview (10/29) that “the Israeli government should be taking every possible means available to them to distinguish between Hamas terrorists, who are legitimate military targets, and civilians, who are not."

These warnings are totally disconnected from the reality of IDF conduct past and present.

How long can this keep up? How many more civilians have to be killed for Biden to issue something more than a verbal slap on the wrist to Netanyahu? Biden’s history of staunch support for Israel, unfortunately, indicates that there is a long road ahead.

Recently unearthed comments Biden made during a meeting with Prime Minister Menachim Begin in the heat of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon of should be cause for even more concern, as they offer a window into what Biden means when he says Israel has "the absolute right to defend itself”

Biden was alleged by Yedioth Ahronoth to have told Begin,

What did you do in Lebanon? You annihilated what you annihilated…It was great! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

Without a word of condemnation for the killing of civilians in Lebanon, Biden went on to caution Begin against settlement expansion in the West Bank because this (an unambiguous violation of international law not susceptible to hand-waving about “the fog of war”) might erode support for Israel in the US, which might jeopardize future aid packages. (As an aside, it is notable that, then just as now, Israel’s wars and colonization project in the West Bank were treated as different issues by American policymakers. As I will discuss in a future post, the two are inseparable.)

As a window into Biden’s early (and thus, probably deep-seated) thinking about “the special relationship”, these comments are interesting on two counts. First they reveal Biden’s beliefs about the special dispensation vis-a-vis the laws of war to which “special nations” like the US and Israel are, in his mind, entitled. Second they show that Biden’s overriding concern when it comes to Israel’s obligations under international law is that violations too gross might endanger Israel’s international reputation, making it difficult for the US to support the former’s militarism to the hilt and at the same time maintain it’s own credibility in the eyes of other nations (especially in strategically important developing countries).

One should be careful not to read too much into these statements, but they do suggest that we should regard any rhetoric about protecting civilian lives with extreme skepticism; it is probably, in most all cases, just window dressing, At a time when calls to “level Gaza” and invocations of Dresden and Hiroshima are coming from increasingly mainstream sources, it is terrifying to think that Dresden-level civilian casualties would not be outside the realm of possibility for Biden, who has given no indications he is willing to support a ceasefire.¹⁶

(Update: on Tuesday, 10/31 the New York Times reported in an important article that in early meetings between the two countries, “it became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign.” The Allied bombings of Japan and Germany and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were explicitly invoked by the Israelis in those meetings. Biden himself was reported to have told Netanyahu on a 10/10 phone call that “if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming.")

As the official death toll in Gaza approaches 10,000, there is still no ceasefire in sight. The only change from the Biden administration has been to issue increasingly stern warnings to the IDF to follow international law.

John Kirby, White House/National Security Council spokesman, gave the game away on 10/24 at a press conference (at 18:20 in that video). Asked whether the Israeli response has been “disproportionate”¹⁷ he had this to say:

We’re going to avoid trying to react to every single event on the battlefield. We all saw last week how quick reactions to events on the battlefield turned out to be inaccurate [referring to the Al-Ahli Hospital “incident”]…All I can do is say what I said before. We continue to talk to our Israeli counterparts about the importance of avoiding and minimizing civilian casualties and respecting innocent life and preventing collateral damage as they go after legitimate Hamas targets. I said this the other day…this is an important notion: This is war, it is combat, it is bloody, it is ugly, and it’s gonna be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt [he cannot bring himself to say “killed”] going forward. I wish I could tell you something different , I wish that wasn’t gonna happen, but it is going to happen. And that doesn’t make it right, that doesn’t make it dismissible, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to still express concerns about that and do everything we can to help the Israelis do everything they can to minimize it. But unfortunately that’s the nature of conflict.

Note how Kirby, who expresses the official thinking of the Biden administration, prefaces his complete disregard for Palestinian life with a bromide about how important it is to avoid “collateral damage” (contrast this with his shedding tears over Ukrainian innocents killed by the Russian invasion). If the war crimes and killing of civilians become too blatant, it seems the White House’s strategy is to ignore or even deny them because “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel.”

The “rules-based international order” — adherence to which supposedly separates democracies like the US and Israel from the rest of the world¹⁸ — just means a velvet glove is wrapped around the iron fist. Before supplying the one-ton bomb that the IDF drops in a densely-populated neighborhood, splitting open the head of a baby and killing him instantly, the US is nice enough to “talk to our Israeli counterparts about the importance of respecting innocent life.” Or, as National Security advisor Jake Sullivan put it (10/29), have “conversations like friends do on the hard questions,"“¹⁹

Case description from Amnesty International’s study of Operation Protective Edge. Quoted in Finkelstein, Gaza (2018, PDF), p. 280

A window for action: the limits of cynicism and hypocrisy

But, I believe that political representatives at lower levels can be converted, or forced²⁰, to support a ceasefire. It’s important to distinguish between, on the one hand, those at the very top of Western political systems, for whom human rights will always be a mere fig leaf, a basis for legitimating this brutal assault, and, on the other hand, those at a lower level who can be moved. Right now, the best we can hope for is to put massive pressure on all the politicians who have invoked international law and demand that they support a ceasefire. As activists, we need to master the details of the human rights reports, beginning with Finkelstein’s 2018 synthesis and critique, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom (seriously: sit down tonight and read as much of it as you can, click the hyperlink for a PDF) and present this damning evidence to those who naively (or, as the case may be, cynically) urge restraint to the IDF.

We need to say at our rallies and in our interactions with politicians, congressional staff, etc.: Based on this mountain of evidence on past Israeli “operations” in Gaza, there is no reason to expect the IDF to heed your calls for restraint or respect your warnings to uphold international law, therefore, on your own logic, you must support an immediate ceasefire.

The core of this strategy is “trapping” every politician who has signed on to a mealy-mouthed statement of concern for civilian lives into supporting a ceasefire by showing them the damning evidence of IDF war crimes from past “operations” in Gaza. This will increase the pressure which will eventually percolate up to heads of state (this pressure is already responsible for the notable — but, yes, still hollow and cynical — shift in the Biden administration’s rhetoric on protecting civilian lives). But we need to work fast. This approach to activism applies to other Western political contexts as well.

Presently, there are three major congressional resolutions/letters circulating regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza which are worth paying attention to. The first is the bipartisan McCaul/Meeks resolution which expresses the kind of stalwart support for Israeli militarism that one can expect from Congress (“reaffirms the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security”). The only mention of Palestinians is in this line: “Hamas is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians.” The humanitarian disaster wrought by the dramatic tightening of the blockade passes without comment, not to mention Israel’s devastating, indiscriminate aerial campaign²¹ As The Intercept reported, all but 13 Democrats signed on to this resolution. Clearly there is a lot of work to do.

The best option²² we have, as far as I can see, is to push to pass Rep. Cori Bush’s ceasefire resolution, which, as of 10/20, has 18 supporters in the House. It simply “urges the Biden administration to immediately call for and facilitate deescalation and a ceasefire to urgently end the current violence.”

My primary critique of Bush’s resolution is that Israel’s violations of international law, past and present, are not explicitly mentioned. There needs to be a clause stating something to the effect of “…Whereas the Israel Defense Forces have been repeatedly condemned by authoritative human rights organizations for their egregious violations of international humanitarian law, both in past Gaza operations and in the current conflict ...”

Between the stalwart support of Israel of the McCaul/Meeks resolution and the ceasefire resolution, some Democrats have tried to stake out a middle ground. This position is represented by a letter led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal and signed by 55 Representatives.

This letter, which expresses “concerns regarding the unfolding humanitarian situation in Gaza” might seem like a promising sign. But read carefully.  It is all well and good to “urge” the IDF to “follow IHL and protect innocent civilian lives on both sides” and to say that “We strongly believe that Israel’s response must take into account” civilian lives. But nowhere is the IDF’s actual past record on IHL mentioned. If it were, if congresspeople and their staffers actually read the authoritative human rights reports on Israel’s past “operations” in Gaza, they would conclude that to urge Israel to follow international law this time around is an exercise in futility.

I said earlier that the ground is shifting: notice how similar this 10/13 letter is to Biden’s rhetoric (in private to the Israelis) now (10/31). In ten more days, the signatories of the Jayapal letter may well sign on to a ceasefire and Biden may well be using this rhetoric about civilian lives in Gaza in public, but by then 3,500 more Gazans will have been killed. In many Western countries, we are beginning to see a clear shift in rhetoric and the beginnings of a shift in policy vis-a-vis Israel; we need to make ourselves aware of the factors driving these trends and focus activist energy on them. I believe concerns around the IDF’s blatant disregard for international law and Israel’s wanton killing of civilians explain these trends. We need to mobilize public opinion around these factors, accelerating the shifts that are already underway in order to make a ceasefire the mainstream, centrist position as soon as possible.

We must make our political leaders recognize now that the IDF has proved itself incapable of following the rules of war in the past. Why is it important to focus on past war crimes? The answer is simple. Given that the political mainstream largely believes the “most moral army on earth” myth, it’s important to focus in our advocacy on the most extensively documented international law violations. By reading and mastering the past human rights reports (compiled best by Finkelstein), we preempt the response that, “Well, we aren’t really sure who’s at fault here…”

The example of the Al-Ahli hospital is a perfect case in point. Those who oppose a ceasefire can point to such incidents and hand wave about the “fog of war.” No. there is a massive amount of evidence that Israel does not respect, and has never respected, the laws of war. as Coulter Louwerse has put it, “The Evidence is Overwhelming”

Does Israel Target Civilians?

For example, Israel is notorious for targeting health facilities, particularly ambulances, with no military justification.

Here is Finkelstein’s summary of the UN report (the Goldstone report) on Cast Lead:

In the course of Cast Lead, Israel had damaged or destroyed “everything in its way,” and not in its way, including 58,000 homes, 1,500 factories and workshops, 280 schools and kindergartens, electrical, water, and sewage installations, 190 greenhouse complexes, 80 percent of agricultural crops, and nearly one fifth of cultivated land. Whole neighborhoods were laid waste. It also damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances, almost half of Gaza’s 122 health facilities (including 15 hospitals), and 45 mosques. By the time it withdrew, the IDF had left behind fully 600,000 tons of rubble and 1,400 corpses, 350 of them children.²³

And after Protective Edge, numerous international delegations “extensively documented premeditated and unprovoked attacks by Israel on Palestinian ambulances.”²⁴ There really is a mountain of mostly untapped evidence of egregious war crimes to draw upon here.

The single best source on Israel’s (non) compliance with the laws of war is Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza (2018), which can be downloaded here for free. It is a masterful synthesis of reports from the authoritative human rights organizations.

What we need now is to condense this evidence and urgently present it to our political leaders and insist that their moral and legal obligation is not to issue successively stern warnings to the Israeli government hoping that they might change their ways, but to call for a ceasefire, cut off aid to Israel, and demand the lifting of the illegal, immoral, and inhumane siege of Gaza immediately.

It is easy to imagine this cycle of war crimes and stern condemnations continuing until tens of thousands of people are killed. We need to break this cycle today, and the way to do that is to read, as thoroughly as your time permits, the mainstream human rights reports²⁵, and then make the case to your representatives, who are deciding between a tepid call for restraint and an immediate demand to negotiate a ceasefire, that they must choose the latter. If Israel has been unable to change its ways in the past, it certainly won’t now.

(Update: After I wrote the above paragraph last week (10/23), the NYT reported (10/31), based on conversations with US officials, that “While [Biden] continues to declare unambiguous support for Israel, Mr. Biden and his top military and diplomatic officials have become more critical of Israel’s response.” I think this confirms my analysis — whatever warnings Biden now may feel compelled to give to Netanyahu, his support for Israel’s assault is still “unambiguous”. Despite dubiously describing Biden’s rhetoric as undergoing a “dramatic shift”, the Times goes on to say that the Administration is still “careful not to tell the Israelis what to do.” Instead, as the official death toll in Gaza races to 10,000, US officials are gingerly “[asking] a series of questions intended to communicate the administration’s concern.” One would think that if Biden were serious about "“[becoming] more critical of Israel’s response” and being more “strident in reminding the Israelis that…operations must be tailored to avoid nonmilitary casualties,” some conditions would be laid down on military aid, that some red lines would finally be drawn. But on 10/31, the day that Israel reportedly killed over 100 Palestinians in an airstrike on Jabalia refuge camp using an American-supplied weapons system²⁶, Secretary of State Antony Blinken penned an editorial for the Washington Post urging Congress to send $14.3 billion in emergency military aid to Israel)

Someone asked me just last week how best to deal with a representative who showed up to their mosque. Here’s a hypothetical interaction with a congressperson:

Present the language of Jayapal’s letter to him/her: “You agree that Israel should allow in humanitarian aid and respect international law, right?” They will hopefully say yes, as 55 of their colleagues, including a few centrists, have endorsed that message in writing. Then you essentially trap them into supporting the ceasefire resolution: “Well, here’s what the evidence from all these mainstream human rights groups says about the IDF’s conduct in past wars. The 400-page UN report on Operation Cast Lead in 2009 described Israel’s military actions as ‘deliberately designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’; numerous independent organizations like Physicians for Human Rights and the Israeli Red Cross have found that Israel’s constant attacks on health facilities have no military justification.²⁷ Given this, how can you expect your warnings to work? You must support a ceasefire.” Or you could, more subtly, just ask, “You signed on to Rep. Jayapal’s letter demanding Israel adhere to international law. If Israel did not adhere to international law, does that mean you would consider cutting or conditioning aid? [Answer, hopefully: Yes]. Well, Amnesty International , the authoritative body on this matter, has found “damning evidence” of war crimes by Israel in this current war. Don’t you have to reconsider military aid to Israel and support a ceasefire? What amount of evidence of war crimes would convince you to stop supporting even a strong US ally, say Saudi Arabia? Surely there is some threshold over which it is both morally wrong and harmful to American interests to keep supporting a routine violator of the laws of war and human rights, right? Well if you trust Amnesty and Amnesty has a mountain of evidence of Israeli war crimes past and present, and you apply the same standard across the board, don’t you have to call for a ceasefire and cut off aid to Israel?”

I use this conversational framing for the same reason I am relatively optimistic about this strategy working: I just haven’t seen any political leaders called out publicly for their blatant hypocrisy like this. So, maybe it is naive, as Mouin Rabbani argues (10/29) to suppose that Western governments are amenable to this kind of pressure, but until I talk to a Congressman myself using these arguments, I’m not going to give up on this framework.

The author of the letter urging restraint to the IDF, Pramila Jayapal, is an interesting case study in how this pressure might be applied effectively. She was not an original supporter of Cori Bush’s ceasefire resolution, but eventually signed on. Was she convinced because she recognized on her own the glaring contradiction between writing a non-binding letter expressing humanitarian concerns and not supporting a ceasefire? Or did it take someone explaining that contradiction to her to force her to change? Jayapal is further interesting because she’s come under criticism from lobby organizations for describing Israel as a “racist state” (comments she later walked back). She, like many congresspeople, has career ambitions that she presumably would not like to jeopardize by touching the third rail of American politics, Palestine. But, by signing that letter, and thus opening herself up to the criticism that one cannot support the sentiments it expressed and not support a ceasefire and the blocking of aid to this serial IHL violator, Israel, she and many other political representatives have given us an opening. As chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she holds together an uneasy coalition of 103 members from AOC to Bernie Sanders to Northern Virginia’s Don Beyer. Why not go to all 103 of those representatives and demand that as “progressives”, as people purportedly concerned with human rights, they cannot in good conscience fail to support the ceasefire resolution.

The nail in the coffin will be polling data. A recent Data for Progress poll (10/20) shows that there are nakedly political reasons to support a ceasefire: 66% of Voters Agree the U.S. Should Call for a Ceasefire and De-Escalation of Violence in Gaza to Prevent Civilian Deaths.

We can further appeal to the cynical instincts of our politicians by citing Shibley Telhami, a leading expert on Arab-American public opinion, who has stated (10/28) that Democrats are at risk of alienating, perhaps permanently, Arab, Palestinian and Muslim constituents, many of whom live in key swing states like Michigan and Minnesota:

Arab public sentiments go well beyond Biden. We are witnessing a paradigm-forming event. Arab outrage is with US and West broadly. In my view, this moment is greater than the Iraq war, which was also a horrific moment. But the West was divided then, and it was about the US, flawed as the reasoning was. In this case, it's blatantly about Israel. The dismissal of immense Palestinian/Arab/Muslim suffering has been so stunning that it could trigger a transformation for an entire generation. Biden seems oblivious to the harm he is causing.

We can also count the defection (10/27) of Patrick Gaspard, the president of the Center for American Progress, a pillar of the Democratic party establishment. I certainly don’t want to suggest that we should give these people undue credit for coming around three weeks (actually, 75 years) too late; I only want to show that the political ground is shifting in ways that true allies of the Palestinian cause — and of Truth and Justice and human rights — can and should exploit as soon as possible.

Confronting a congressperson in a mosque, writing your senator, getting Palestinian American friends to speak to local reporters about what’s going on in Gaza, or going to a rally may seem like drops in the bucket, and they are, but I really believe that this low level pressure can be brought to bear on the top of the political system — if enough of us, including you reading this, are committed and make the effort.

After all, the US has a significant, if not decisive, say in how and whether Israel conducts this war. For example, Israel’s decision to shut off telecommunications networks for Gaza was vetoed within days by US officials after they “made it clear they had to be turned back on”, as the Washington Post’s Claire Parker (10/29) quoted one official as saying.

Another piece of evidence on this score was reported by the Times of Israel on 10/20:

During the [Knesset] meeting, Defense Minister Yaov Gallant was pressed on why the government agreed to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza from Egypt before the hostages have been returned.

“The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?” Gallant responds.

It may well be that twenty thousand Gazans would have to be killed for the Biden administration to feel “icky” enough to veto this brutal onslaught altogether. We must not forget that the US absolutely does have veto power over Israeli military actions. The Israeli war machine would collapse without American armaments and diplomatic support. Eventually, as in 2021, Biden willl feel compelled to tell Netanyahu “Hey, man, we’re out of runway here…It’s over.²⁸” It’s just a matter of how quickly we can force Biden to make that phone call.

As Jonathan Tobin (a prominent columnist and stalwart supporter of Israel’s war) wrote on 10/16: “It is likely that the bipartisan consensus backing Israel won’t survive long once images from Gaza can be used to create a groundswell of anger about the impact of the war on Palestinian civilians.”

There is a real opening for us to change things here. It may not seem like it, but we as average citizens really do have the power to stop the madness in Gaza. I hope I’ve shown one possible strategy to do that.

For anyone wishing to take up this strategy, please consult this outline (PDF) of a congressional briefing document that I wrote up, which provides the structure of an argument based on international law and human rights that I think might convince more representatives to support a ceasefire.

I am also working on compiling a fact sheet on Israel’s international humanitarian law violations past and present (drawn from Finkelstein and other sources), and I will post that when I have it ready, which should be in the next week.

Here is a factsheet (PDF) I wrote about the blockade drawing from Sara Roy’s book (see also Adam Tooze’s recent Chartbook on Gaza’s economy).

The fact sheet would look something like this summary (PDF) of Amnesty International’s lengthy report on Cast Lead, and if you’re meeting with a congressperson or speaking at a rally tomorrow, I would humbly recommend starting with this and fitting it into the arguments laid out above.

…

Multiply that by two million…

I want to close with a personal reflection.

Throughout this article, I have used the word “eventually” when discussing the time it will inevitably take for political pressure to build and for the US to stop its support of Israel’s assault. I am clear-headed enough to know that this imperial juggernaut I live in will take weeks or months to be knocked to its senses by massive protests and the kind of strategic actions I suggest above. I say “eventually,” but that is not a word that has any right to be on our lips right now.

Last week I was trying to connect a friend from Gaza to a major national journalist, and, since the reporter wanted to speak to people on the ground, I asked my friend, “Do you have family in Gaza?” she said “Yes.” “Great! Are they reachable?”

She told me she lost contact with them. “I’m worried sick about them.” She hasn’t heard from them in over twenty days. I didn’t have the heart to ask her how likely it was that they had been killed in an airstrike. The reality in Gaza is that no one is safe.

When I read her message, I began to cry, thinking that, if I had acted sooner, I could have gotten her family to tell their stories to the world before Gaza went dark.

It is important to be honest with ourselves about the fact that we have a moral duty to act here, and that every second counts. I am fully aware that it is possible to act upon this realization in an unhealthy (and therefore unproductive) way, but we should bear it in mind when we decide to go to a football game instead of phone-banking, or scroll Twitter mindlessly when, with very, very little effort (click to do this right now), you could be writing congressmen, phone banking, going to marches, etc.

As I type this from the comfort of a cafe in Northern Virginia (the home of many of the architects of US foreign policy and the war profiteers who make these atrocities possible) more than 300 people are being killed every single day in Gaza with American bombs. American-made white phosphorous shells (which burn through skin at thousands of degrees Fahrenheit) may be dropping on a Gaza neighborhood as I sip my coffee. According to noted Gaza doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta (10/29), “Israelis [are] increasingly using phosphorus bombs.” Abu Sitta “treated a 13 year old yesterday with distinctive phosphorus burns to both legs and thighs.” Those bombs are made in Arkansas.

This is one of those rare cases of humanitarian disasters where the tragedies we see playing out on live TV and on Twitter are largely not “in God’s hands”—they’re in ours. If Biden can “greenlight” this operation, he (and by extension, we) also have the power to stop it.

To quote Sai Englert again:

[Part of] what is standing between Gaza and genocide, then, is political pressure - an internationalist movement whose aim is to force Western governments to backtrack and restrain the Israeli killing machine.

This is exactly right and, frankly, there’s no point in denying it for the sake of our “mental health”. We just need to accept it and be motivated by it in a healthy manner, which is possible.

I will forever remember setting this blog up on 10/12 and pacing my apartment, crying thinking about acquaintances in Gaza who could easily have been killed, and especially the extended families of close friends of mine who have family in Palestine and Gaza. Such is the social interconnectedness of Palestine (“Palestinians are all one big family,” as Jehad Abusalim said recently) that even someone like me (a white, upper-middle class American) with very few ties to the place can still feel a sense of intense grief watching the news.

The person I am thinking about the most — I am constantly bugging Sara Roy asking for an update on his condition — is Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei, whom I had the pleasure and honor of meeting earlier this year. He runs the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, which serves a society with the highest rate of clinical depression in the world.²⁹ He gave a talk in a packed room in January where I sat in the front row dumbfounded at how such a brutally oppressed person (he lost 28(!!) members of his family in a single Israeli airstrike in 2014) could so calmly and movingly discuss hosting football clubs for children with PTSD and inviting over “foreigners” (Mickey Mouse) to cheer the children up.³⁰

Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei signed my copy of Sara Roy’s The Gaza Strip. After telling him I would like to work for UNRWA or another medical/public health organization in Gaza, he wrote “Good luck, [my name]”. 

One of the warmest, gentlest (he had a very soft voice, I remember that vividly) and certainly the most moral person I’ve ever met may have been obliterated in an airstrike this week. Multiply that by 2 million and you get a sense of the human tragedy with which we are all complicit. Can’t we all do something, however small, to rescue Dr. Abu Jamei and his brothers and sisters in Gaza from this horror?

Many academics and experts I know are extremely pessimistic about our ability to move the needle in the US. I understand their cynicism and they have every right to feel that way. And, you know what, I’m probably being naive in thinking I could make a difference.

But right when I am about to give up and sink into despair myself, I remember Yasser Abu Jamei; I remember Laila El-Haddad, author of Gaza Mom, who showed up at an event at Georgetown last week with her kids and stayed till 10:00pm talking to people because she wanted us to do something; I remember Hani Almadhoun, who appeared on the same panel and discussed getting news of his own extended family being killed, but still he was there, calmly urging us all to do our best to help, even as he expressed justified contempt and outrage at the US officials making the atrocities in Gaza possible; I remember my friend, who would like to have something to return to in Gaza so she can rebuild the house that she worked so hard on but which was destroyed in an airstrike two weeks ago.

What we do here matters. You don’t have to take it from me, and you don’t have to take it from people ensconced in the ivory tower, either.

The late Edward Said produced a film in 1986, “The Shadow of the West” which explores Western attitudes toward the Arab world and vise versa. In the context of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, here’s what a group of elderly Palestinian women told Said when he asked them, “I live in America… What should I do?”

“You can persuade” them, one woman says, gesturing intensely to try to get her point across. “How?” Said replies. “You should tell them not to supply Israel with advanced weapons.” “Why?”

“Because they attack our people with them! Israel is attacking our people with American weapons.”

“You mean [Americans] should like us [Palestinians]?”

“Yes of course! We are people like all other people.”

1. It should go without saying that things from the list that list that I reprint here do not necessarily reflect my own views. I am deliberately including all messages (except those with video attachments, which I couldn’t figure out how to upload) to get the widest range of perspectives possible. Apologies for formatting errors.

2. Politico reports (10/9) that “Israel will rely heavily on precision air-to-ground munitions fired from F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.” All of these are manufactured and supplied by the US.

3. Amnesty International, “‘Black Friday’: Carnage in Rafah during 2014 Israel/Gaza Conflict.”, 7

4. Machine translated from the Hebrew

5. I mean “impunity” in a very limited sense here related to governments’ willingness to provide Israel with diplomatic and military support. As I will discuss in subsequent articles, Israeli war criminals are almost never held to account, either by the international judicial system or their own internal accountability mechanisms — which are dismissed by nearly every authoritative human rights organization as fraudulent. I won’t pretend that Israeli war criminals will be brought before the ICC in the near future; this would require much more effort.

6. New York Times, Matter of Opinion podcast. October 10, 2023

7. I don’t mean to suggest that Israeli public opinion is identical to that of the hostages’ families, nor that the latter should have the final say about the fate of Gaza; but it is indisputably true that they exert a disproportionate influence on the debate over the war in Israel and around the world.

8. Friedman mentions on the podcast that he has spoken to President Biden since October 7

9. Propaganda

10. Finkelstein, Gaza, 99

11. “Guardian of the Walls” is the less well-known moniker for this IDF “operation”

12. Finkelstein, Gaza, 99. I provide his footnotes for reference:

68. An administration offi cial initially stated off the record that the United States would block UN action on the Report, but the White House subsequently repudiated the statement. “US Pledges to Quash Goldstone Recommendations,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (22 September 2009); “White House: Offi cial ‘misspoke’ on Goldstone report,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (23 September 2009). However, it later came out that Washington had been quietly applying pressure to contain the Report’s fallout. Jared Flanery and Ben Norton, “Deferring Justice: Clinton emails show how State Dept. undermined UN action on Israeli war crimes,” Salon (19 November 2015). 69. Hillary Clinton, “How I Would Reaffi rm Unbreakable Bond with Israel—and Benjamin Netanyahu,” Forward (4 November 2015).

13. “The dictatorship institutionalized the torture apparatus by creating a nationwide network of information and training -- in some cases with active consultation with the U.S. FBI and other military and police agencies. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) supplied field radios that were used to administer electric shocks. Oxygen was introduced only through tiny holes in the walls. For the first five days of incarceration, the prisoner was nude and hooded, his or her arms tied behind the back. Food was withheld and no sleeping was allowed. The captive had to defecate and urinate on the floor of the cell; every movement was monitored through closed-circuit television. During the day, the victim faced beatings --especially the 'telephone' torture, in which objects were mashed with great force against the ears. The captors administered electric shocks -- 'in the fingers, hands, feet, genitals, stomach, chest, and arms.' 'During the night, bone-chilling sounds were played with the objective of 'destructuring' the captive's personalty. Diabolical sounds ... seemed to penetrate the head like a corkcrew.'Levine, The History of Brazil, p. 128-132 (see here)

14. In addition to the open-source information furnished by the likes of Amnesty, Biden et al are kept abreast of war crimes by their intelligence agencies. Our leaders know what’s really happening in minute detail.

15. On the (unfounded) skepticism regarding Gaza Ministry of Health numbers, see this in the Guardian (10/27) Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said he saw no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated.

“We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” he said.

“When we have done our own independent investigations around particular strikes, and we’ve compared those figures against those from the health ministry, there haven’t been major deviations.

“Their numbers generally are consistent with what we’re seeing on the ground in recent days. There have been hundreds of airstrikes per day in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.

“We’ve looked at satellite imagery. We’ve seen the number of buildings, and the numbers that are coming out are in line with what we would expect with what we’re seeing on the ground. So you put all those things together and we’re quite confident in the overall casualty numbers.”

Shakir said a grey area was differentiating combatants from civilians among the dead, but the large proportion of women and children killed was indicative of high civilian casualties. He also said there was a need to draw a distinction between the immediate casualty numbers that came out quickly on any given day and those compiled over time, when there was more clarity.

16. Israeli Ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely (10/16):“'600,000 Germans were killed in your attacks on Hamburg and Dresden. Why? Because you knew this was the only way you could defeat the Nazis”; Tom Cotton, US Senator from Arkansas (10/15) said Israel could “bounce the rubble” in Gaza, using a military idiom for killing everything that moves until there’s only rubble left — and then bombing the rubble; Senior Senator Lindsey Graham (not even for the first time) has called for Israel to “level the place!”(10/11); Peter Mansoor, a retired US colonel on went on Anderson Cooper on 10/23 and compared the war on Gaza to the US’s assault on Manila in 1945, where the US killed 100,000 civilians; Jonthan Tobin, the editor of the Jewish News Syndicate reminded us on 10/23 in the context of the attack on Gaza that “800,000 German civilians were killed during the Allied bombings of Germany”; The Associate Press reported (and then inexplicably deleted from its copy) that “members of the Israeli security and political establishment told the US diplomats that the eradication of Hamas would require methods used in the defeat of the Axis powers in WWII. Israeli officials have publicly made similar comparisons”; Former member of Knesset Moshe Feiglin said that the only solution in Gaza “complete destruction of Gaza, before invading it… Destruction like Dresden and Hiroshima, without a nuclear weapon.”(10/26); Giora Eiland a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, called in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s widest-circulation daily, (10/12) for Israel to deliberately create a humanitarian crisis and expel tens or hundreds of thousands of Gazans. Eiland compared the Hamas attacks to Pearl Harbor “which led to the launch of an atomic bomb in Japan.” Israel “has no other option” than to make Gaza “a place where no human being can exist.”

Note the elision in all of these commentaries of what is thought of in the West to be legitimate military goal, “destroying Hamas” and the killing or expelling millions of Palestinians. The first goal seems to be purely for Western consumption (a basis for legitimating the operation), the second goal, the real goal, is quite openly discussed in Israeli political and security circles. Mouin Rabbani has said that “This campaign demonstrably has no legitimate military purpose or objective.” Western leaders and pundits who are analyzing this operation in Gaza in terms of a military or security goal, rather than in the context of Israel’s 100-year colonization project, are woefully off-base.

17. There must be a clause in the American Press Association guidelines prohibiting reporters from reading any book on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I haven’t seen a single journalist suggest that Israel is targeting civilians, despite much evidence of this in Finkelstein, in Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation on Israel’s war in Lebanon, and many other sources. If one were to google “Gaza war book” or “Gaza war human rights reports” the evidence that Israel’s operations in Gaza are not merely “disproportionate” but involve the deliberate targeting of civilians would stare these reporters in the face. But they apparently can’t be bothered to do their jobs. As Chomsky likes to say, “There are certain things it wouldn’t do to say”.

18. As Blinken said in recent comments. “Blinken tells Netanyahu in Israel: U.S. will 'always be there” Reuters (10/12)

19. Finkelstein, Gaza, 280, quoting Amnesty International; In the same interview with Margaret Brennan of CBS, Sullivan, asked if Israeli military actions should be more “limited”, claims that “The United States of America, when we transfer weapons to another country, whether it’s Israel or anyone else, requires an assurance that those weapons will be used in accordance with the laws of armed conflict. And we seek accountability to ensure that that is the case.” This appears to be a blatant lie: Josh Paul, the director of the State Department bureau which handles arms transfers, resigned two weeks ago precisely because Israel is routinely exempted from the accountability mechanisms Sullivan claims to be in place. “Paul said the robust U.S. military assistance for Israel was effectively giving the country a green light to do what it wants against Gaza, regardless of the civilian toll.” (Washington Post, 10/18). In an editorial (10/23), Paul wrote: “[T]he same Congress that had previously blocked arms sales to other regimes with questionable human rights records was now pressing us to move forward to meet Israel’s demands.” And in an interview on MSNBC (10/21), he goes through the specific channels of accountability from which Israel is exempt. This is exactly the kind of hypocrisy and mendacity for which Congress and the Biden administration deserve to be loudly condemned.

20. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but obviously I mean “forced” by legitimate, legal, nonviolent political tactics. I use the word “force,” to mean, for instance, firmly calling them out on their hypocrisy (for urging restraint but not supporting a ceasefire) in public events, etc.

21. The resolution also contains a laughable justification of the blockade (which, remember, is restricting food, fuel, water, electricity, and medical supplies). We are supposed to support these “tight controls” restricting everything including medical supplies because Hamas uses “rudimentary, civilian equipment, such as bulldozers, paragliders, and rubber boats.” Can Hamas’s ramshackle navy make rubber boats made from syringes and rubbing alcohol?The absurdity of this holds for the entire mainstream discussion about the blockade of Gaza. I will discuss this more in future posts.

22. Another approach has been spelled out to me by a source who works for a (US-based) direct aid charity for Gaza. She thinks that, especially with the usual difficulty of getting anything critical of Israel through congress compounded by the debacle over the speakership, the best bet is to get as many sympathetic reps to sign on to this international petition calling for a ceasefire (archived link here). It has over 500 signatures currently, including from reputable organizations like Oxfam and ActionAid.

23. Finkelstein, Gaza, 127

24. Finkelstein, Gaza, p. 251, citing: Amnesty International, “Evidence of Medical Workers and Facilities Being Targeted by Israeli Forces in Gaza” (7 August 2014); Medical Fact-Finding Mission, pp. 44–49; FIDH, Trapped and Punished, pp. 32–38.

25. Chiefly from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but there are plenty of other organizations out there. B’Tselem, GISHA, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, that come to mind. Again, see Finkelstein for a masterful synthesis.

26. Chris Cobb-Smith, a former United Nations weapons inspector, said: “The munition is almost certainly JDAM, either a GBU 31 (Warhead Mark 84) general purpose bomb or possibly a GBU 56 (Warhead BLU 109) bunker buster. Both about 2,000lb [900kg].”

The GBU (guided bomb unit) is a precision-guided air-to-surface weapon system. It is part of the Israeli arsenal provided by the US and also manufactured by Israel under contract.

These Boeing-manufactured GBUs use a tritotal, which is an explosive mix of TNT and aluminium powder, used commonly in air-dropped bombs. The Israeli air force recently posted images of dozens of GBU-31 being loaded on planes. “This fits our analysis. You can see the size of the bomb and guidance straps, which are the signature of the GBU-31,” added Garlasco.

“Cratered ground and destroyed lives: piecing together the Jabalia camp airstrike” Guardian, 11/1

27. Finkelstein, Gaza, 53-4

28. Franklin Foer, The Last Politician

29. Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip 2016 updated edition, lx

30. “We try to add colorful memories to the minds of children, and we do it in a very good way you know. Sometimes we make children sing, sometimes we make children dance. Sometimes you arrange for them folklore. And sometimes, you know, despite the closure, and the difficulty of us going out…we try to invite some people from abroad, you know. And in this case we invite Mickey Mouse, you see? [audience laughs]. And children are really happy, so you need all the time do it one way or another to keep the children smiling, because hope all the times comes from the children. And if you don’t have hope in the children, then we don’t have hope in anything. “No Permit to Live with Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei, MD and Ran Goldstein” Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Youtube Channel, talk with Physicans for Human Rights at 41:00Nov 17, 2015.