Israel’s generals call it “mowing the grass.” Joe Biden calls it “self-defense.” For 11 terrible days and nights, Israel’s made-in-the-USA air force rained the latest weapons of mass destruction on 2 million Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza Strip. The targets were apartment blocks and refugee camps and everything people need to live. They were hit with high explosives, white phosphorous, dense inert metal explosives, vacuum bombs and types of bombs never used before.
U.S.-Israeli bombs and missiles “wrecked sewage systems and water pipes, damaged at least 17 hospitals and clinics, severely damaged or destroyed about 1,000 buildings and suspended operations at Gaza’s only coronavirus testing laboratory,” the New York Times reported May 21.
Israel destroyed 66 schools, Gaza’s largest bookstore, a factory making water tanks, and 20 media offices. Roads leading to hospitals were bombed deliberately. At least 120,000 people lost their homes.
Entire families massacred
Seventy-five children are among at least 243 people murdered by Israel’s U.S.-made F-16s and F-35s. The youngest, Omar Hamdi, was 5 months old. He died with his mother and three siblings. Only his father survived.
The eldest may have been Amin Muhammad al-Qoalaq. At age 90 he was older than the Israeli state. He died with three generations of his family when their home was obliterated by U.S.-Israeli bombs.
Dozens of families were wiped out as Israel’s U.S.-trained and -paid pilots targeted homes in the middle of the night. Doctors Ayman and Raja ‘Ouf died with 12 members of their family when four Israeli missiles targeted their house. Dr. Mooein al-Aloul, 66, and journalist Yusuf Abu Hassan were also murdered when missiles hit their homes.
Israeli troops gun down unarmed protesters
Meanwhile Israeli troops, police and armed settlers on the West Bank — occupied in 1967 — and the rest of Palestine — occupied in 1948 — murdered unarmed Palestinians.
When he was 15, Obeida Jawabra was interviewed in an award-winning short film about imprisoned Palestinian children. He had been detained three times. On May 17, he was shot to death by Israeli soldiers while protesting near the Aroub refugee camp, where he lived.
Muhammad Qiyan, 17, was one of two people from the city of Umm el Fahm, occupied in 1948, shot to death by undercover cops sitting in their cars. U.S. and Israeli police have joint training programs.
Palestine’s blood on U.S. hands
The slaughter had the full support of the Biden administration and the U.S. political, military and corporate establishment. Biden spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost daily, allegedly urging “deescalation.” But the U.S. repeatedly blocked efforts by the U.N. Security Council to meet and call for a ceasefire.
In public, Biden and other U.S. officials justified the massacre with the lie that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” In truth, under international law, Palestinians and all occupied people have a right to resist occupation. Occupiers have no right to “self defense.”
Hamas was elected!
While the U.S. supplies an endless flow of arms to the terrorists in Tel Aviv, Biden, like Republican and Democratic presidents before him, calls Hamas a “terrorist organization.” Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is in fact a political party that was chosen democratically by Palestinians in Gaza.
Ever since it was first elected, in 2006, Israel has imposed a brutal blockade on the people of Gaza, punishing them for exercising their democratic rights.
Hamas is working together with Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other resistance organizations to defend the people of Gaza against siege and genocide.
When blood flows, money flows
On May 17, at the height of the massacre, Biden approved a $739-million gift of new missile guidance systems to the racist Israeli state. Israeli occupation forces also have free access to weapons the Pentagon stockpiles in occupied Palestine.
Once the ceasefire was declared, Biden pledged to replenish Israel’s U.S.-financed Iron Dome rocket system. Each Iron Dome interceptor launched by Israel costs the U.S. $50,000. When the blood flows, the money flows.
Netanyahu and other Zionist politicians know that the more they bomb and kill, the more money they will get from Washington.
Palestine has a right to exist and defend itself
Washington and the occupation regime in Tel Aviv share a common goal: to crush the Palestinian Resistance. They want to terrorize the Palestinian people into giving up their own right to exist, to accept a Western colonial settler state occupying their land.
But 73 years of murder and terror have not achieved that goal. They did not succeed this time either.
Indeed, the Palestinian people’s resistance, from Gaza’s homemade rockets and mortars to mass protests and a general strike across all of Palestine, forced Israel’s cabinet to declare a ceasefire.
Resistance defeated occupation
While Israel’s precision-guided missiles targeted Palestinian families, Gaza’s improvised weapons paralyzed the occupation regime’s economy. “Tel Aviv, Israel’s Bustling Financial Hub, Is Shaken as Rockets Rain Down,” the New York Times reported on May 16.
Palestinian rockets set Israel’s Eilat to Ashkelon Pipeline ablaze. The pipeline is key to a U.S.-Israeli plan to transport Arabian oil to the Mediterranean Sea across occupied Palestinian land.
Rocket fire closed Israel’s main airport and made commercial airlines cancel flights to occupied Palestine. “Violence Raises Questions Over Israel’s Tourism Plans,” U.S. News & World Report wrote May 21. It will also take a toll on Tel Aviv’s real estate boom.
U.S. military personnel stationed in Palestine were evacuated to Cyprus.
The U.S. pays for all of Israel’s bombs and weapons. Yet the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said the fighting cost the Zionist state’s economy $37 million a day.
Palestinian workers shut racist state down
Perhaps most powerful of all, Palestinian workers, including those inside the 1948 borders, launched a massive general strike May 18.
“The Israel Builders Association said Palestinian workers had observed the strike, with only 150 of the 65,000 Palestinian construction workers coming to work in Israel,” Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. “This paralyzed building sites, causing losses estimated at 130 million shekels (nearly $40 million).
“But even before the strike, since the beginning of the operation in Gaza, only 6,000 to 8,000 Palestinians were coming to work every day. According to Yehuda Katav, vice president of the builder’s association, construction has slowed to a snail’s pace. ‘We cannot build without them,’ he said.”
The Israeli state is also increasingly isolated, as pro-Palestine protests swept the world. In Italy and South Africa, dockworkers refused to unload Israeli cargo.
Gaza’s Palestinians have a right to go home
Who are the people of Gaza that they are so hated by the Israeli occupation regime and its financiers in Washington? The majority are the children and grandchildren of Palestinians who once lived a few miles to the north, in cities and villages that are now called “Israeli.” They were forced from their homes at gunpoint in 1948 to make room for settlers from Europe.
When Gaza was under direct Israeli occupation, from 1967 to 2005, their labor built the luxury hotels and condos that line the Mediterranean coast, many of which are now second homes for settlers from the United States.
Like all Palestinians, the people of Gaza want the right to live in peace and freedom on their own land. This is a “crime” in the eyes of the Israeli occupation regime and its paymasters in Washington.
Wall Street profits off Palestine’s blood
The paid corporate agents in Washington fund the war against Palestine for the same reason they bombed and invaded Iraq, Libya and Syria and support Saudi mass murder in Yemen: profit.
The Pentagon brass routinely refer to the settler state in Palestine as a their “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” a phrase repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Zionist leaders. They see Israel as an “asset” in their endless war to control the world’s energy reserves and keep the region’s petrodollars flowing to U.S. banks and corporations. It is their forward base to attack Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran and other countries that don’t pay tribute to Wall Street.
U.S. energy giant Chevron corporation steals natural gas from the waters off occupied Palestine. ExxonMobil is also exploring Palestine’s waters. Citigroup loans the occupation regime money to buy arms until the next U.S. aid package comes through. The bank is a major investor in occupied Palestine.
Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the rest of the U.S. military-industrial complex see the war machine called Israel as their best advertisement. Their stocks soar when the bombs fall.
We must fight for an end to the endless flow of U.S. arms and dollars to the Israeli war machine! End the $11-million-a-day in military aid, the loan guarantees, the tax exemptions, the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement and the other myriad ways with which the U.S. corporate ruling class props up the Israeli occupation regime.
We need money to build homes, schools and hospitals, not destroy them.
