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One of the talking points Israel apologists like to regurgitate is that Israel can’t possibly be acting with genocidal intent in Gaza, because if they had wanted to exterminate the Palestinians they could have easily done so in a matter of days.
As luck would have it, leaders from the Israeli government have just helpfully come out and debunked that talking point with a few shockingly frank public admissions.
Explaining the decision to allow a minuscule amount of aid into Gaza after months of deliberate starvation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel is now allowing “minimal humanitarian aid” on the insistence of western officials so that they will support Israel’s murderous operation to conquer the enclave.
Jeremy Scahill reports the following for Drop Site News:
“We’re going to take control of all the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu vowed Monday in a video released by his office announcing that Israel would begin delivering “minimal humanitarian aid: food and medicine only.” Netanyahu claimed that international pressure, including from pro-Israel Republican senators and the White House, required the appearance of humanitarian intervention. “Our best friends in the world — senators I know as strong supporters of Israel — have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge,” he said. “They come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war… but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine,’” Netanyahu added. To continue the war of annihilation, he asserted, “We need to do it in a way that they won’t stop us.”
As usual, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich went even further in saying the quiet part out loud and giving the whole game away, explaining that Israel is providing just enough aid to maintain western support and avoid war crimes charges while advancing its ethnic cleansing operation in the Gaza Strip, boasting about the government’s skillfulness in “navigating” that line.
Some choice Smotrich quotes, courtesy of the aforementioned Drop Site News write-up:
- Smotrich said the aid scheme would allow “our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.”
- “The [aid] that will enter Gaza in the coming days is the tiniest amount. A handful of bakeries that will hand out pita bread to people in public kitchens. People in Gaza will get a pita and a food plate, and that’s it. Exactly what we are seeing in the videos: people standing in line and waiting to have someone serve them, with some soup plate.”
- “Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose. It would be winning the battle, and losing the war. I’m committed to winning the war.”
- “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us. There are pressures. There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] stop; they are not succeeding. You know why they aren’t succeeding? Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and that’s how we’ll continue to do [it].”
- Smotrich said that the Israeli forces are initiating a campaign to force Palestinians into the south of Gaza “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump’s plan. This is a change of the course of history — nothing less.”
Smotrich also praised the IDF for deliberately targeting civilians and civil infrastructure, saying “The IDF is finally conducting a campaign against the civilian rule of Hamas… eliminating ministers, officials, money changers, and figures in the economic and governmental apparatus.”
So there you have it, spelled out in plain language. There is no need to wonder why Israel has been dragging out its genocidal atrocities over a year and a half instead of just brazenly annihilating all the Palestinians in one swift scorched-earth campaign. Israel has told us why. They have opted for their slow-motion strangulation approach because that’s what’s necessary to maintain essential western support and avoid war crimes tribunals.
This comes as the governments of France, Canada and the UK publicly issue a warning to Israel saying that they may begin imposing targeted sanctions on Tel Aviv if it does not begin allowing in more aid to Gaza and curbing the abuses in the West Bank. So Israel is currently acutely aware that it is walking a delicate line between (A) making Gaza an unlivable hellhole for Palestinians and (B) maintaining western support. So it is making the smallest concessions it thinks it can get away with in order to keep both A and B.
The western pushback against Israel’s criminality has thus far been feeble, pathetic, and entirely inadequate. Australia’s denunciation of Israel’s starvation warfare is even more toothless than that of France, the UK and Canada. But we are seeing some movement, which shows that these western governments are not entirely unresponsive to internal pressures from their citizenry.
I just saw a tweet from the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi which reads as follows:
“Something is happening. The number of government officials from around the world who I’ve heard in private conversations call Israel’s slaughter in Gaza a genocide — without qualifications and caveats — has increased dramatically in just the past weeks. The dam is breaking.”
Keep pushing.
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