After a year of slaughters

The world is witnessing the start of year two of slaughters in Palestine. Hamas fighters started the killing Oct. 7, 2023, murdering over 1,200 innocents in their surprise attack. Since then the murder and mayhem has all been under the direction of the Israeli government and completely controlled and manipulated by its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

As horrific as the civilian death count is in Gaza – some 42,000 verified – the vast majority women and children, it is certainly an undercount, including only the found bodies and those dead today. In the days, weeks, months and years following, many more will die or be found dead as rubble is cleared and the maimed succumb to their wounds.

And now, Lebanon. What the Israelis call precision bombing and targeted assassinations, the world knows as the killing of innocents and mass murder.

Thinking people embrace these facts and face up to these brutal truths because they reflect on their own history of warfare.

Air forces from the United States and Great Britain carpet bombed Germany and Japan in World War II. The U.S. dropped more tons of bombs on Vietnam then it used in World War II. And it not only destroyed the country of Cambodia in 1970, it destroyed the culture and killed the soul of that nation, which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields that followed.

Netanyahu has called for complete victory and the elimination of Hamas. There is only one end game – the destruction of Gazan society. Americans may refuse to understand it, but in Gaza, the support for Hamas is total. Netanyahu claims military targets when fighters have embedded themselves among civilians, using them as human shields. That is his spin. The locals know Israeli soldiers have been killing them indiscriminately for 75 years.

Netanyahu is holding Gazans, the Lebanese and the whole world hostage. No one will be released until all the fighters are killed.

But the future result is that the entire population of both peoples will dedicate their lives and their children’s lives to avenging every murder – for that is what every death is seen as – of the last year and the coming year.

This has not been a war. One side has tanks and jets and is backed by the might of the United States military. The other side has donkey carts and sling shots.

Israel is not defending itself. Countries defend within their borders. Israel calls its invasion defense and rationalizes assassinations by labeling the dead terrorists. But the Israeli government has terrorized entire societies in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. The only end game for Israel is to press on until every one of its self-named enemies is dead. They are accomplishing that mission.

And, since Oct. 8, 2023, they are supplied by and have consulted with the United States government every step of the way, our tax dollars at work.

This was never a war. Wars end with diplomacy, negotiations, treaties, reconciliation and rebuilding. Ideally they do. The Israeli government has no plans beyond military action. There is no “day after,” not even for the recreation of basic societal norms: running water, sewage, electricity, health care, law enforcement, schools and governance. Having bombed these Palestinians back into the Stone Age, Israel is content to leave them there.

U.S. tax dollars at work cannot be separated from the destruction. If President Biden had halted sending weapons and funds to Israel early in 2024, the indiscriminate bombardments would at some point have run out of U.S. munitions.

The U.S. government has – and is – abetting, with supplying weapons and funds, the destruction of a society.

Israel has irrevocably broken Gazan society. The decades necessary to grow past the war’s trauma are incalculable and the imagination and courage to do that is absent. Who in Isreal is discussing a civilized future for Palestinians? Who in Israel is advocating living in peace?

What is certain is that loss, suffering, hatred and the grasping for vengeance on the part of the Palestinian people is total.

That and they want their own land. They want a country to call their own. They demand justice.

– Ken Stern