Israel is engaged in a worldwide PR blitz to whitewash the crushing of a trapped population on a strip of land smaller than Jackson, Mississippi by one of the largest military forces in the world. But even without this concerted "re-branding," the very verbs, nouns, and adjectives of the English language must cry out at the way they have been corrupted in press discussions of Israel's brutal assault.
We know Gaza is one giant jail with Israel sealing all entries and exits, banning imports of medicines and food, blocking access to the sea, yet Israel continues to get away with blaming Hamas's "rocket attacks" for its bombing campaign, and now, its ground invasion.
In a statement on Sunday, Nobel Laureate and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said the assault on Gaza "bears all the hallmarks of war crimes."
'In the context of total aerial supremacy, in which one side in the conflict deploys lethal aircraft against opponents with no means of defending themselves, the bombardment bears all the hallmarks of war crimes,' Tutu said in a statement.
The attacks would not contribute to the security of Israel, said the anti-apartheid icon who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1984.
'It is a blight not only on the Middle East, but on the entire world - and particularly world leaders who have consistently failed the people of Palestine and Israel over the past 60 years,' Tutu added.
Gaza has no meaningful defense against Israel's assault. There is a breathtaking difference in scale here.
Israel is the BIGGEST military spender per capita IN THE WORLD, with military expenditures of $11 billion for a population of 7,337,000. Does that number include the bulldozers used to demolish 18,000 Palestinian houses in the last 40 years, or the expense of arresting and housing 11,000 Palestinians in Israeli dungeons? I don't know -- but Israel is responsible for 100% of the land confiscation, 100% of the home demolition, and 100% of the illegal settlements in Palestine.
The Gaza Strip has pebbles and homemade rockets, and craters where the police and security forces used to be.
Per capita GDP of Israel is $28,800, number 42 in the world, right after Monaco, Greece, and Taiwan. The per capita GDP of Gaza Strip and the West Bank is $110 – not even HALF of ONE PERCENT of Israel's—by far the LOWEST IN THE WORLD. The next highest number on Index Mundi's list, derived from CIA data, is the Congo's: $300.
This isn't a "conflict"; it's not a "war"; there isn't a "both sides" here. We should not even permit this to be dignified as an "I/P" issue. This is a steamroller versus an insect. This is flat-out annihilation.
Can we look at what has happened, even the accounts skewed towards Israel, and say yes, Israel is carrying out a rational plan to get rid of Hamas once and for all? Jennifer Loewenstein, in a recent article on Counterpunch, makes a plea: "Let us at least tell the truth about why this hell on earth is taking place":
The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State.
The other day, in a diary about dog whistles, we were given an instructive rundown on anti-Semitism over the years. Given the context, we can all recognize that that diary was a dog whistle in itself, warning us off criticism of Israel for engaging in mass murder and mass expulsion of Gazans. Would we not have stood up for Jews in the 1930s and any other decade in which Jews were murdered and expelled? In this decade, our own government is arming a ruthless attacker, and that's why we must defend Palestinians now. Only world opinion will bring this travesty to a stop.