Western media has sections nowadays titled “Israel-Gaza War,” as do the Israeli websites. Ben Samuels, for instance, says from the so-titled Haaretz section that, “The past 48 hours have seen explicit and unabashed antisemitism from the far-right; Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson lead explosion of white nationalist antisemitism since the start of Israel-Gaza War.”
We have been seeing that so-called media butter the neo-Nazi Israeli bread on both sides: Calling the Israeli genocide “war” they imply that what Benjamin “The Butcher” Netanyahu has been doing for the last 48 days is a legitimate retaliation to something that was done against Israel.
Yes, 48 days ago, a bunch of Palestinian fighters committed a reprehensible action against the Israelis in the occupied territories. But what Israel has been doing since then set a very strange logical mechanism in action: Israel’s incommensurable reaction to that action has ipso facto justified the action. To wit, the Palestinian action, retrospectively, displayed that Gaza and West Bank people were faced with an enemy who would deserve anything and everything that would come at them.
The term “war” simultaneously justifies, in the Neo-Nazi minds of media moguls, all actions of the armed Israeli occupiers of Palestine, all the atrocities, all the barbarity against the unarmed Palestinians, against their hospitals, schools, refugee camps because they are being used by armed resistance groups, mainly Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Never mind the clumsily and unskillfully fabricated “evidence” at the basement of Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital. Hamas has been firing rockets toward the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and you can’t fire rockets from the basements.
Besides, the rusty weapons and a couple of copies of the Holy Quran, and a box of dates displayed as proof of Hamas's fortifications of hospitals as a military would convince no one that Hamas has used the Al-Shifa Medical Complex as a military base. Yet, the vicinity around the hospital has been leveled to the ground; dozens of dead bodies are scattered around the complex; several of the bodies were disfigured beyond recognition.
The White House and the Pentagon’s adoption of the false Israeli narrative was a green light for the occupation to commit more massacres against civilians to force them to migrate from the north to the south to complete the occupation plan that aimed at displacing Palestinians. Yet the U.S. spokespeople at the White House and the Pentagon keep using the term “U.S.-Hamas war.”
They have to: Otherwise, they’ll have to be acknowledging that what Israel has been doing is a “genocide.”
According to the academically recognized pioneering efforts of Raphael Lemkin and the drafters of the United Nations Convention that have provided a basis in the work of the international criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, if something is not a “war,” then it is a genocide: “Genocide is the antithesis of the ... doctrine ... (which) holds that war is directed against sovereigns and armies, not against subjects and civilians. In its modern application in civilized society, the doctrine means that war is conducted against states and armed forces and not against populations. It required a long period of evolution in civilized society to mark the way from wars of extermination, which occurred in ancient times and the Middle Ages, to the conception of wars as being essentially limited to activities against armies and states.”
In short, the Israeli “war” against Hamas is a genocide, as understood by international law. It is a “fundamentally illegitimate variant of warfare – directed against civilian social groups as such rather than armed enemies” that made several Serbian and Rwandan officials rot in prisons. Netanyahu will also be one of them as soon as the peace-loving people of the world overcome their leaders.
Meanwhile, let's respond to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek who, in his latest book titled “Too Late to Awaken,” asks, “What lies ahead when there is no future?”
“The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West” should know that the victory lies ahead; it is never too late; people always win at the end as did in his native Ljubljana, and neighboring Zagreb and Sarajevo:
“We Shall Overcome,
We shall overcome someday.
The Lord will see us through someday.
We shall all be free someday.”
From the river to the sea...
