Tag: ethnic cleansing

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and staunch backer of the illegal settler movement, said on 30 December that Washington has given Tel Aviv “full support” to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.

“The US administration is giving us full support to expand settlements in the West Bank in order to undermine the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Smotrich said. 

The statement coincided with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US and came after a meeting between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.

“We have had a discussion, big discussion for a long time on the West Bank. And I wouldn’t say we agree on the West Bank 100 percent, but we’ll come to a conclusion on the West Bank,” Trump said after the meeting.

When asked by reporters what the disagreement was about, Trump said, “I don’t want to do that, it will be announced at an appropriate time.”

Netanyahu “will do the right thing,” the US president went on to say. 

Since coming to power in late 2022, Netanyahu’s government has been rapidly advancing Israel’s longstanding goal of annexing the West Bank, which was occupied illegally during the 1967 war. 

New illegal settlements are being established at an accelerated rate, and the Knesset has approved a bill calling to impose Israeli “sovereignty” over the territory. 

Trump recently claimed that he would “not allow” Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.

“Trump and his top advisors asked Netanyahu to change Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank during their meeting on Monday,” informed sources told Axios on 30 December.

“The White House thinks a violent escalation in the West Bank would undermine efforts to implement the Gaza peace agreement and prevent the expansion of the Abraham Accords before the end of Trump’s term,” the sources went on to say, adding that the US president’s team asked the Israelis to “calm things down.”

“The president and his team raised settler violence against Palestinian civilians, the financial instability of the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli settlements expansion. Netanyahu spoke very strongly against settler violence and said he is going to take more action,” the sources said.

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Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza – a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly eighty years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the Nakba of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide – ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization – we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on October 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?

The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on October 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like eight-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.

During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30% of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.

The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.

If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.

The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the “encouragement of migration” and demanded that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: “erase Gaza,” “leave no one there.” When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals,” they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.

This was preceded by the hermetic siege – a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of ‘security,’ always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s ‘largest open-air prison‘. Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded ‘terrorists’ and ‘militants’ whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.

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