Dragged to the edge of the abyss

Jeremy Salt

Palestine had no break for 75 years, while the Western ‘international rules-based order’ watches, does nothing to stop it, and everything to ensure it continues.

No words are left. The mind is emptied of anything more to say beyond repetition after 75 years of this. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, no break. Ethnic cleansing, en masse and incremental; massacres, assassinations, bombing of refugee camps, schools, clinics, hospitals, ambulances, paramedics, cities, towns, and villages, bombed by artillery, tanks, jet fighters, and warships. Mothers, fathers, children, babies, brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents, uncles and aunts, and friends, were all massacred. No break for 75 years, while the Western ‘international rules-based order’ watches, does nothing to stop it and everything to ensure it continues.

There was horror and outrage in 1982 when the settler regime’s iron guard stalked through Sabra and Shatila refugee camps slaughtering men, women, and children. This woke the Western world up to the crimes it was capable of committing but then it slept throughout all the crimes that followed, until October 7, when Palestinians launched the first relatively large-scale attack inside the occupied land in all those 75 years. Then the horror and outrage knew no limits, but only at the killing of Israelis, not at the killing of Palestinians by them.

On one side of the Gaza fence about 1,400 Israelis were killed, on the other 3,500 Palestinians within the first week.

Since October 7 close to 100 Palestinians, many of them also children, have also been murdered on the West Bank by soldiers and settlers, secure in the knowledge that they are immune from prosecution. The settler regime ‘minister of national security’, Itamar Ben Gvir, has poured thousands more weapons into the settlements, an encouragement from this violent fascist to kill even more Palestinians.

The killing of these 1,400 Israelis, hundreds of them soldiers and police and armed civilians, with some civilians held hostage killed by their own soldiers, all of them living on stolen Palestinian land, is said to be the greatest crime against Jews since the Nazi genocide of World War Two.

What, then, do we say about the killing of thousands of Palestinians in each of the Zionist regime’s attacks on Gaza or Lebanon? Since when, we should ask; since the last time; since Lebanon 1982, since 1967, since Gaza in the 1960s or 1950s, or since 1948, not thousands but tens of thousands.

Ignoring the mass killing of Palestinians and Lebanese except for empty calls of ‘restraint,’ there is no stopping the horror and outrage when it is Israelis who are killed. Is there some explanation for why the killing of Israelis causes outrage and the (far greater) killing of Palestinians causes a scarcely veiled indifference? Is there some reason why Western governments and the Western media can’t be horrified at the killing of all children and not just some, which is certainly what it looks like?

The killers of Israelis are called ‘human animals,’ and the killers of Palestinians are only defending their ‘right’ to exist, by killing someone else. What a strange ‘right’ this is, and once certainly not extended to the Palestinians.

Bloodlust now pours through the Western media. The politicians join the calls for annihilation, for revenge, for killing as many innocent men, women, and children as long as it takes to wipe out the armed men. “Finish them!” cries the US presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

The media is awash in lies, lurid accusations turned into fact and repeated endlessly to normalize and validate what has to be done to tame these "savages". The native is running riot, has broken out of the prison, out of the reserve where he is imprisoned, and has to be taught a lesson he will never forget. Morality, law, and justice are irrelevant. This is the iron law of the colonial master.

We have the guns, planes, and warships and you don’t, ensuring the triumph of the master over the slave yet again, the techno-barbarism revealed when the smiling mask of ‘Western civilization’ slips to reveal the other/real face.

The savagery of the settler colony implanted in Palestine is a matter of record, which is why history doesn’t figure in Western media ‘explanations’ of what is happening in Gaza, not just happening but crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by that same regime.

The bombing of the al-Ahli hospital is one of the greatest single atrocities committed in the modern history of the Middle East. It was clear at the start who did it, but the West needed a lie to shift the blame and the mass murderers they arm, finance, and support at every level quickly provided it. They claimed the cause was a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Western media has run this fabrication every day despite all the evidence needed to confirm that it is a lie.

A timeline analysis of live-streamed aerial activity over Gaza from 8.45 pm to 7 pm on October 17 shows that Zionist forces launched four missile strikes, at 18.54/28, 18.55/03, 18.57/42, and 18.58/04. Several rockets were fired in this period by Hamas/Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all of which were destroyed by Iron Dome. The last was launched at 18.59/35 and was intercepted 15 seconds later at 18.59/50. It can be seen breaking up in the sky.

No further rockets were fired from Gaza but five seconds after the last was destroyed, an explosion lit the sky over al-Ahli hospital, followed two seconds later by the bomb dropped or fired directly outside the hospital from a drone or plane.

While no further evidence is needed, it needs to be pointed out that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad have launched thousands of rockets over the Gaza fence since October 7 and not one has caused a small fraction of the damage caused by this missile. Neither of these groups has missiles of such destructive power, as the damage they cause clearly shows. The type of weapon most probably used was a JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition), a ‘dumb’ bomb converted to precision use and configured to explode in the air just above the ground, causing mass casualties but leaving no crater as the irrefutable evidence of who must have fired it.

Gazan health authorities say 500-800 were massacred in the strike. The settler regime had attacked other hospitals and has a long history of bombing hospitals, clinics, and ambulances in Gaza and Lebanon and murdering paramedics and other medical personnel, so any argument that it would never commit such a terrible crime doesn’t hold water. The facts bear this out.

The al-Ahli hospital had already been bombed twice as a warning before the main missile attack. The hospital’s director says he was told by phone: “We warned you yesterday with two bombs. Why have you not evacuated the hospital until this moment.” Husam Na’um, Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, said that the hospital had been issued with three evacuation warnings before the main attack. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, hospital staff had been contacted, mostly by phone, and told to leave before the premeditated attack on their workplace.

A spokesman for the "Tel Aviv" regime said a week ago that “the emphasis is on damage not accuracy.” This is being borne out every day. Central Gaza city looks like Warsaw after the Nazis bombed the city in 1939, with the difference that far more bombs, and far more destructive bombs, have been dropped on Gaza.

The lack of concern for human life is the same. Thousands of Gazans have been killed, whole families have been wiped out across generations so that their names no longer exist on the population register. Convoys moving to southern Gaza after being told they would be safe there have been massacred in air attacks.

Despite these truly heinous crimes, western governments are standing by the criminals and not the victims and urging them to go even further even though this has now moved from an aerial onslaught to genocide.

There is good reason to suspect that Netanyahu and the violent Jewish supremacist cohort around him knew this attack was coming and allowed it to take place so under the cover of war the settler regime could drive Gaza’s civilian population into Sinai and take Gaza for itself. This is an open demand now being made, but so far Egypt’s President Sisi has refused to allow it. Like the lies of 9/11, this might be the underlying reality of what the settler regime calls 9/11. Netanyahu was also in serious political and personal trouble on the home front, where he is being prosecuted for bribery, fraud, and taking kickbacks.


The onslaught on Gaza

The Rafah gate remains closed except for the possible transit of humanitarian aid but there is nothing to stop it from being bombed once the war starts on the ground so a terrorized civilian population can pour through.

Even before the bombing of the al-Ahli hospital, nearly 1,000 Palestinian children had been killed in missile strikes. Whole families have now been massacred across generations so there is no name left on the population register.

Far from being horrified at the slaughter and throwing out the ambassadors of the regime responsible for these crimes, Western governments, behind their pious calls for restraint and proportionality, allow the attacks to continue as long as their psychopathic little friend doesn’t go too far. What is too far, they don’t say. How many dead children would be proportionate, no one asks.

Step by step the nuclear-armed settler regime implanted in Palestine, against the wishes and over the heads of its indigenous people, has led the Western world to the edge of an abyss. Russia and China will not step in to save it when it goes too far but Europe and the US have tied themselves to its wheels and will be dragged over the cliff with it, along with everyone else, in the region and beyond.

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Source: english.almayadeen.net. IMG: © Zeinab El Hajj, Al Mayadeen English
AWIP: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2023/10/27/dragged-to-the-edge-of