Israeli President Isaac Herzog, presumably the moral arbiter of his nation, was photographed signing a bomb as a gift for Gaza.
In a vigil outside the US Embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli citizens have condemned their government’s endless killing of men, women and children in Gaza and on the West Bank. One participant in the vigil, Yossef, grieved for his Gaza friend Khalil murdered along with his entire family by an Israeli bomb, but in response to his friend’s death, he dare not show grief openly. Yossef described political repression in Israel as so extreme that even a simple expression of grief is reason to be fired, interrogated, judicially attacked, arrested and fined.
In a message directed to the US President as well as to the Israeli Prime Minister, in common with a hundred others at the same vigil, Yossef says that a society which does not have room for grief and sorrow over the loss of life ‘is rotten to its core.’
Before supporters of Israel claim that this charge is anti-Semitic, that Israel is the unfortunate victim and would never be responsible for genocidal killing and destruction, let’s assess this ‘rotten to the core’ accusation.
It means that an individual, an organisation or state is beyond correction, needs to be thrown away and is neither honest nor moral.
To the question of honesty, examine Israeli spokespersons’ claims that their forces never target civilians, always observe the rules of war, and, from the Israeli Ambassador to the US, there is no need to distinguish between civilians and terrorists because all of Gaza is Hamas.
Judgements about the morality of Israel’s murder in Gaza may be assessed in legal terms following South Africa launching a case in the UN’s International Court of Justice alleging Israel’s commission of genocidal acts. To that charge, Netanyahu responds that such an accusation is ‘blood libel’, his revival of a convenient explanation: to say that Jewish citizens might have killed others is anti-Semitic and therefore false.
This emotive blood libel language could also be regarded as a cunning attempt to distract attention from horrors in Gaza.
On the basis of an accumulation of evidence, moral judgements can also be made by a court of public opinion. The examples will have to be numerous, otherwise the media will be bombarded with Israeli press conference repeats, ‘this is war’, plus the beyond belief claim even as children are bombed out of existence, Israel has the right to defend itself, and does so with the most moral army in the world.
Those claims should be scorned, laughed out of court, but let’s weigh evidence.
The UN estimates that by January 2024, 21,000 Gazans have been killed, 70% of them women and children. Is it possible that elderly, frail women, small toddlers, even premature babies were Hamas terrorists ?
The European Media Monitor reports over 56,000 Gazans have been injured many of them seriously, but most can’t be treated. The few remaining hospitals function with neither power, food, water, nor basic medical supplies. One thousand children have had their limbs amputated without anaesthesia.
In the face of that evidence, in terms of moral judgements, the Australian MPs who have flown to Israel to express support for Israel, might want to think again. It will take pluck to do so but in the face of these end of time inhumanities, it’s surely worth a try?
If the above evidence is insufficient, let’s continue.
On an Israeli Television show, the participants are pictured laughing at the idea that Israel has committed war crimes. What a joke they say. The macabre is funny. Evil can be deemed a moral act.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, presumably the moral arbiter of his nation, is photographed signing a bomb as a gift for Gaza.
Israeli soldiers are videoed dancing and chanting a song for the elimination of the Palestinian people. They take their cue from Old Testament prophecies concerning the genocide of Canaanites referred to in the Bible as the Amalekites who were targets of instruction from the Book of Samuel, ‘Now go and smite Amelek and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not.’
In response to his armed forces’ slaughter and destruction, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his war mongering cronies, say the war must go on, they’re not finished, they must ‘deepen the fighting.’
What does ‘deepen’ mean? Together with indiscriminate and alleged targeted bombing, 300,000 fully armed Israeli soldiers saturate this narrow land and could kill another 21,000 Gazans ? Will that be deep enough ? Then we come to the boast that tens of thousands of Hamas sites have been destroyed, that most of Gazan infrastructure no longer exists.
So, members of the public must surely ask, what is there left to hit?
To this rotten to the core charge, Israeli, US governments, plus ill informed members of the media will immediately parrot ‘Hamas, designated a terrorist organisation by the US, by Australia and numerous other governments.’
The slaughter and taking of hostages on October 7 should be condemned but it now takes only one reference to one terrorist organisation to justify the decimation a whole people not just the elimination of Hamas.
Repetition ‘Hamas, Hamas’ is not sufficient defence of the rotten to the core charge. The court of public opinion should also be sifting evidence of Israeli terrorist atrocities over the last seventy five years and regarding settler thugs‘ current rampage on the West Bank.
In support of those brave Israelis sitting in the vigil outside the US Embassy in Jerusalem, can any member of the public in other countries, let alone elected politicians, sit idly by?
Veteran New York Times journalist Chris Hedges answers that question. He says that if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over the Gazan evil, our evil, if we have the capacity to stop genocide and do not, we are culpable, and even worse, we become like those carrying out the mass killings in Gaza, monsters.
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