THEN SENT ISRAEL 1,800 NEW 2,000-POUND BOMBS TO ACCELERATE GENOCIDE
April 1, 2024
On March 25, Genocide Joe Biden finally agreed to allow the United Nations to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s horrific war against the Palestinian people (even though the U.S. still refused to vote for it).1 This after months of vetoing or putting roadblocks in the way of a ceasefire resolution.
Four days later, the Washington Post revealed that the same Biden sent another “arms package” to Israel—this one including 1,800 new 2,000-pound-bombs!
Bombing Much of Gaza into an Uninhabitable Moonscape
As of March 30, Israel has killed more than 32,623 Palestinians across Gaza. Thousands more bodies are uncounted, buried in the rubble from U.S.-supplied bombs. The most horrific monster in the pipeline of death from the U.S. to the Israeli military are the 2,000-pound bombs.
These weapons of mass destruction have turned much of Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape with 40-foot-wide craters where apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools used to be. They have blown people up as they fled into areas Israel designated as safe for civilians. They have damaged or destroyed more than two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza. They are a weapons of genocide.
This is what these bombs have done already. Think about what it will mean to the people of Gaza that Biden just shipped 1,800 more of these to Israel!
U.S. State Department Blesses Israel’s Genocide as “In Compliance” with International Law
The March 25 UN resolution demanded an immediate ceasefire. Israel denounced and ignored it. Six days later, as we post this, Gaza’s second-largest city, Khan Younis, is under siege. Israeli troops rampage through Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. And the sky above Rafah at night is red with exploding bombs. Israel is starving the people of Gaza, which is now on the brink of famine, preventing aid trucks from coming in with lifesaving food and supplies.
On the same day that Israel began defying the UN mandated ceasefire, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller claimed Israel is in compliance “with international humanitarian law… when it comes to the conduct of the war [and] when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”
And with that, the U.S. demonstrated that international law and crimes against humanity are whatever the U.S. rulers say they are. To them, any crime against humanity carried out by the U.S. or its allies is “in compliance” with international law and even “humanitarian”!
Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself” = Genocide
The Washington Post noted that Biden’s new arms package, including the 2,000-pound bombs, “underscores that while rifts have emerged between the United States and Israel over the war’s conduct, the Biden administration views weapons transfers as off-limits when considering how to influence the actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [emphasis added].”
And a White House official declared, “We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
What he is essentially admitting is that what Israel’s defenders call its “right to defend itself” means Israel’s right to exist as a genocidal apartheid state, crushing the Palestinian people.
Genocide Joe and Netan-NAZI (Netanyahu) Clash Over HOW to Invade Rafah
Right now, in furious diplomatic back-and-forth between Genocide Joe Biden’s State Department and the government of Israel’s Prime Minister Netan-NAZI, the U.S. and Israel are fighting over how to carry out an invasion of Rafah.
A million and a half people are packed into that city. Most of them were driven from their homes throughout Gaza by Israel’s U.S.-supplied bombs, missiles, and tanks, and Israel’s strategy of starvation. Any invasion of Rafah would be a catastrophe on a scale even far beyond the current horrors in Gaza. It would even further isolate Israel and set off outrage around the world beyond what has erupted so far. Biden’s State Department counsels a more “surgical” approach: missiles, tanks, assassinations. And driving out the civilian population, but in what they hope would be as controlled a way as possible.
Israel’s Netan-NAZI government seems hell-bent on a massive ground invasion, dispensing with much, if any, effort to cover up the horrors involved.
These are real and deep differences. But here’s the real “deal.” Biden presides over an empire of exploitation and oppression, a world of slums and sweatshops. Over a capitalist-imperialist system that is destroying the environment. And that enslaves women in countless ways. And that system relies on its “special relationship” with Israel to dominate all that enslavement, suffering, and death.
U.S.: Sticking by, and Stuck with, Israel
Israel seized on Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—which included the war crimes of taking hostages and the murder of civilians—to attempt to deal with what Israel’s rulers see as an existential threat. That is: in the area now ruled by Israel (the state of Israel and territory it occupies), Jews are a minority. Israel’s objective in the current genocidal assault on Gaza is to reduce the Palestinians to such a state that they can no longer pose any threat to Israel’s existence as an apartheid, Jewish-supremacist state. And that could mean mass expulsion and/or slaughter on a massive scale, beyond even what Israel is now carrying out.
Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, and U.S. backing for them, are exposing the nature of the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S. to people of conscience in this country. And to the whole world. And Israel’s crimes against humanity undercut Biden’s work to sell the U.S. as the defender of the “free world” against “authoritarian” dangers from U.S. capitalist-imperialist rivals Russia and China.
And yet, for all the problems Israel’s genocidal massacre in Gaza create for the U.S. empire, Biden and the whole U.S. ruling class are all-in on one thing: sticking with Israel. Even threatening any interruption in arms shipments from the U.S. to Israel is considered “off limits” for the rulers of this country.
Straight Talk from Bob Avakian on WHY the U.S. Supports Israel
Why is the U.S. sticking with Israel? Revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian (BA), gets to the reality behind why the U.S. backs Israel’s endless and escalating crimes against the Palestinian people:
Why is Biden, and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people, before the whole world? Here is the answer to that crucial question:
This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.
(That is from my statement Some Basic Truths About the U.S.-Supported Israeli War Against Palestine, which is posted at revcom.us.)
It’s the system! The system of capitalism-imperialism that Biden serves. The system he has to serve—the system that anybody and everybody has to serve if they want to hold office, and especially “high office,” like president, within this system. That is why Biden is doing what he’s doing—what all these politicians are doing—above and beyond their more narrow personal interests.
It’s the system! This system of capitalism-imperialism that embodies and enforces white supremacy, patriarchal male supremacy and other brutal oppression—this system resting on ruthless life-stealing exploitation of masses of people in this country and literally billions of people worldwide, including more than 150 million children—all enforced with massive violence and destruction, of people and the environment, posing a very real threat to the future and the existence of humanity.
This system that needs to be overthrown at the soonest possible time, through an actual revolution.
That is from the @BobAvakianOfficial social media stream REVOLUTION 7: Why is the U.S. supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Tune into that. And become part of the movement for an actual revolution right in the belly of the beast responsible for so much enslavement, suffering and death in Gaza, and everywhere on this planet.
REVOLUTION 7: Why is the U.S. supporting Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians?
Gaza Update: Ongoing Starvation, a Massive No-Go Zone, Surveillance, Detention, Torture
As we post this update, new and escalating war crimes by Israel in Gaza include:
- Ongoing mobilization to invade Rafah where more than a million displaced people have fled. A leaked U.S. report predicts that “A potential escalation of military operations in within Southern Gaza’s Rafah Governorate could result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response…” As we post this update, even before the long-feared invasion, the night sky over Rafah is bright red with exploding bombs.
- Rampaging through Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City where Israel has already killed hundreds of people, seized hundreds more, in what was the largest hospital in Gaza. Israel justifies mass slaughter, abduction, and torture of hospital patients, medical staff, and refugees because Hamas is “hiding” among them. This claim is bullshit given that Gaza is the most crowded space on earth and everyone is packed together.
- Imposing what will be starvation on half the population of Gaza between now and July according to recent estimates by global emergency experts. Israel has been systematically starving the Palestinian people in Gaza to death. Along with destroying Gaza’s ability to produce and distribute food, Israel has choked off aid going into Gaza. Before October 7, Gaza was under siege from Israel and (U.S.-ally) Egypt that kept aid and food going into Gaza just enough for people to survive. On March 28, the Washington Post reported that aid going into Gaza now is one tenth that amount of aid that entered Gaza before October 7.
- On March 31, Israel bombed tents outside of Al-Aqsa Hospital. The attack was aimed at civilians and journalists.
- Creating a “no-go” zone for Palestinians that covers 16 percent of the tiny area of Gaza. The zone is almost the entire west side of Gaza and is more than a half-mile wide. It represents yet another, and massive, theft of land of the Palestinian people.
- Implementing a massive photo-recognition database stocked with drone photos and Google Photos to identify “suspicious” people in Gaza and subjecting them to detention and torture. A New York Times article revealed that detentions are based on photos showing people in the proximity of suspected Hamas supporters, or because their names were extracted from tortured Palestinians in Israeli jails. Or because the system’s artificial intelligence based facial recognition tools got them mixed up with someone else. As Palestinians pass through Israeli checkpoints erected throughout Gaza, their faces are scanned and fed into the database. Those identified as “suspicious” are detained and tortured. The program came to light in part when award-winning Palestinian poet, and contributor to The New Yorker magazine, Mosab Abu Toha, was seized while holding his three-year-old son, detained, beaten, and interrogated, and then told his detention had been a mistake.
- Detaining and torturing hundreds—and killing dozens—of Palestinian women, children and men. Middle East Eye interviewed Hadeel al-Dahdouh, who was separated for more than 50 days from her family, including a son that she was breastfeeding, when Israeli troops threw her into the back of a truck. She was beaten and tortured, told (falsely) that Israeli guards had shot and killed her husband, and subjected to a mock execution herself. When she was finally released and reconnected with her children, they were suffering from severe malnutrition. Her account is validated by a photo of her being detained, and consistent with what is revealed in an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that documented that at least 27 detainees from Gaza had died in Israeli military facilities since the start of the war.
- Systematic, unchecked torture by Israeli troops in Gaza. Evidence of systematic torture continues to seep out from under intense Israeli censorship. A video documenting torture by French-Israelis in the Israeli army in Gaza was circulated widely online, apparently originating from Israeli troops themselves.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council (along with Russia, China, the UK, and France), the U.S. can veto any resolution. By not voting for the resolution, but also not voting against it, the U.S. allowed the ceasefire resolution to pass without a veto. [back]