Before the Nakba, the land then known as Palestine was populated with Palestinians. Now they are to be driven from their remaining enclaves and entirely out of the land now known as Israel. From Gareth Porter at consortiumnews.com:
Gaza’s utter devastation and masses of civilians facing death from bombardment and deliberate starvation already presents the world with a spectacle of mass murder of unspeakable proportions, writes Gareth Porter.
Israel’s systematic and wanton destruction of Gaza has raised long-standing issues of its political and legal culpability over the treatment of Palestinians to a new level of seriousness.
It obviously poses familiar issues of Israeli war crimes, and Amnesty International had already clearly designated it as such after just the first week. The human rights organization also asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to “urgently expedite” its investigation of the aims of all parties.
But this Israeli campaign now poses the even graver issue of genocide of Palestinians as a nation. The utter devastation of Gaza and the vast numbers of civilians facing death from bombardment and from deliberately engineered starvation and sickness already presents the world with a spectacle of mass murder of unspeakable proportions.
The Israelis should face accountability for its crimes.
A panel of nine distinguished independent experts on human rights who investigated the Gaza emergency for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council has just warned that the Israeli campaign of destruction of Gaza poses “a risk of genocide against the Palestinian people.”
And there is a long history of genocidal thinking and action behind this “genocidal moment”. It should be recalled that during the previous Gaza crisis in 2014, an equally extremist Israeli government openly threatened genocide against the Palestinians.
A sober-minded friend asked, “what about the innocent victims who inhabit Gaza? An equally sober-mind responded, “sadly, the same thing that happened to untold numbers of “innocent” Germans and Japanese after their cites had been burned/bombed to rubble, and the calls for their unconditional surrender were not met!
Had the A-bombs not been available and used, the further carnage in Japan would have been almost unimaginable, as the American soldiers eliminated whatever might have remained of the mentalities that decided to attack almost the entire Pacific “theater!” To claim, in hindsight, unconditional surrender was either not needed or already being considered, flies in the face of what almost all of us understand to be the mentalities of those who choose to wage war!
As for Germany, virtually ALL its major cites/industrial capacity were turned to rubble, while the allies killed untold additional numbers of “innocent” Germans as they rid Germany of whatever vestiges of NAZI support remained.
The key for why, both Germany and Japan subsequently became what they have, is the total elimination of those who gave rise to their society’s prior political manifestations, and to make it unlikely/impossible for remaining supporters of it to again rise to power!
Israel should call for Hamas’s unconditional surrender, and then proceed with whatever is necessary to obtain it. Do so as reality has reminded them what they should have understood years ago.
Yes, depending on other key and uncertain variables in this despicable carnage, who knows what might ensue form it!
However, as recent history illustrates, anything less just puts off the inevitable.
The brutal imminence of the inevitable, now inescapably stares cruelly at all……….
“To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.”
Tacitus