Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview that his job “is to keep the left pro-Israel,” which is just sad. Being a liberal Israel supporter these days probably feels like being a defense attorney for an accused murderer who won’t shut up about how much he loves murdering.
A Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land was assaulted and injured by a gang of Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Susya before being abducted by Israeli soldiers on Monday. Hamdan Ballal and two other Palestinians were reportedly transferred from the Israeli military to the police for questioning, and as of this writing are still detained.
No Other Land is a documentary about Israeli abuses toward Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, which makes the lynch mob assault by the settlers not only ironic but completely vindicating of Ballal’s work. These freaks are so consumed by hatred and Zionist brain rot that they actually thought they’d advance their cause by attacking Palestinians in the West Bank in response to a documentary about the mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
This happens as Israel adds two more bodies to the mountain of Palestinian journalists it has deliberately killed in Gaza. Al Jazeera reporter Hossam Shabat and Palestine Today TV correspondent Mohammad Mansour were both killed in separate airstrikes in different parts of the Gaza Strip on Monday, bringing the total number of Palestinian journalists killed in the Gaza holocaust to 208.
Israel is murdering journalists and persecuting documentary filmmakers because Israel hates truth. It kills press workers in Gaza for the same reason it blocks western reporters from entering the scorched Palestinian territory: because Israel doesn’t want people to see the full picture of its atrocities.
This comes after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz made amazingly explicit statements of genocidal intent last week, telling the entire population of Gaza that they will face “total devastation” if they do not find some way to overthrow Hamas themselves and return all the hostages.
They’re just getting more and more brazen with this stuff. More and more often, to a further and further extent, Israel is showing its true face to the world.
The other day Israel demolished Gaza’s only specialized cancer treatment hospital and an adjacent medical school in its ongoing systematic destruction of the enclave’s entire healthcare system with the goal of making it unlivable.
Shortly thereafter, Israel bombed another hospital in Khan Younis, killing a member of Hamas’s political bureau as well as a 16 year-old boy. The imperial media fell all over themselves to churn out headlines announcing that Israel had targeted a Hamas leader in a strike on a hospital — as though bombing hospitals is this perfectly acceptable thing we should all view as normal now — but we all know these same media outlets would be shrieking their lungs out if any of the empire’s enemies did this exact same thing.
As Jonathan Cook points out in a recent essay, this is the same as if Hamas had bombed the hospital Benjamin Netanyahu stayed at earlier this year in retaliation for his crimes. And we can all imagine the reaction of the western political-media class if that had happened.
Speaking of Netanyahu, a new report from the Israeli outlet Ynet says that after the October 7 attacks the prime minister angrily ordered the IDF to massively expand its bombing campaign without intelligence on who they were hitting, demanding that they just bomb as many buildings as possible entirely for the sake of bombing them.
According to the report, on October 9, 2023 the IDF told Netanyahu that they were bombing 1,500 targets per day because that’s what they had the intel to justify, and Netanyahu angrily demanded to know why they weren’t launching 5,000 airstrikes instead, telling them “I’m not interested in targets. Take down houses, bomb with everything you have.”
So that’s what Israel has been up to lately. It’s just getting uglier and uglier, and people who purport to stand for equality and justice are having a harder and harder time squaring their ideological positions with their steadfast support for the genocidal apartheid state.
Liberal Zionists like Bernie Sanders have tried to reconcile their support for Israel by pinning the blame entirely on Netanyahu. A recent tweet by Sanders reads, “Netanyahu has not allowed any aid into Gaza in 22 days. He broke the ceasefire, resuming a bombing campaign that has killed more than 50,000 people. Now he is threatening a long-term occupation of Gaza. NO MORE MILITARY AID TO NETANYAHU’S WAR MACHINE.”
One of the biggest scams being peddled by Democrats today is this frantic campaign to spin Netanyahu as meaningfully separate and distinct from everything Israel is — instead of the perfect embodiment of it — to protect Israel’s image while it commits genocide and ethnic cleansing.
They’re working overtime to hang this whole mess on the prime minister, so that when it’s all over and the final solution to the Palestinian question has been carried out, he can take the sins of the Zionist state and the entire US-centralized empire with him when he leaves office without anything ever needing to change about status quo US foreign policy. They’re repeating the George W Bush playbook.
Netanyahu didn’t create the genocidal racism in Israel, the genocidal racism in Israel created Netanyahu. He rode already-existing sentiments within Israel to power, and has relied on them to stay in power ever since. You could not ask for a better representative of everything Israel is than Benjamin Netanyahu — nor indeed a better representative of everything the US empire stands for.
Liberal Zionists are having a hard time reconciling their positions of antiracism and social justice with their support for Israel because at the end of the day western liberalism is just as fraudulent and deceitful as Zionism is. We all watched them passively allow the Democratic president to turn Gaza into a pile of steaming blood-soaked wreckage and then demand everyone vote for his vice president. Democrats hold their worldview in place by psychologically compartmentalizing away from the atrocities their government commits in the here and now, while singing fondly about innocuous whitewashed historical revisionist versions of their civil rights heroes who died decades ago.
Democrats are an inseparable part of the US empire and its abuses, just as the US empire is an inseparable part of Israel and its abuses. It’s all one big mess of depravity, with liberals tasked with the increasingly difficult assignment of placing a warm progressive face on one of the darkest chapters in human history.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
