The war against the Palestinians has gone on much longer than the Israelis thought it would, and many Israelis have become completely indifferent to what’s being meted out to the Palestinians. From Seymour Hersh at seymourhersh.substack.com:
What happens when Israel’s extremists determine policy
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attend a dinner in the Blue Room of the White House on July 7. / Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.
During the Nixon years, as the Vietnam War wound down, the American GIs had a sadistic running gag about how to end the conflict: collect a fleet of passenger ships and put the remaining Vietnamese civilians on board, then sail the ships far out to the South China Sea, and sink them.
Late last month Haaretz, Israel’s most distinguished newspaper, which has been consistently skeptical about the war in Gaza, published a series revealing that Israeli combat soldiers assigned to guard newly created food depots for the starving masses were ordered by a senior commander to open fire on—that is, to shoot to kill—Gazans who were lining up for food before the official opening hours of the depots. The newspaper cited Gaza Health Ministry figures saying that 549 Gazans have been slain by Israeli bullets and more than 4,000 wounded in this way since the depots opened in late May. It reported that the senior officer whose name came up most frequently in interviews as issuing the shoot-to-kill order was Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, a regional IDF commander and a favorite of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This is Vach’s policy,” one IDF officer told the newspaper, “but many of the commanders and soldiers accepted it without question.” He said the Palestinians “were not supposed to be there”—before the official opening hours of the food centers. Was his point really that those executed were responsible for their own demise?
I had a special reason for accepting the truth of the Haaretz account. Vach, then a colonel, so I learned last year, had been the commander of the IDF troops guarding the Netzarim Corridor, a zone off-limits to Gazans that separates north and south Gaza. I wrote then that the young IDF troops assigned as guards there were given orders to shoot to kill any Gazans who dared to approach in search of food and water.
The Haaretz series was not picked up by the mainstream US press, with the exception of the Intercept, an online news agency known for its liberal bent. I thought it took a lot of guts for Haaretz to tell it like it is—I know it only happened rarely in the early days of America’s Vietnam War. And so I began asking Israelis I know what was going on. All of them have fought for the country and been grievously wounded in action.
How they hunger for that Gaza land for Greater Israel.
What happened to Heavenly Jerusalem in Southern Ukraine?
Remember the Kissinger quote about Israel won’t exist in ten years?