Israel needs a humanitarian intervention

There has likely never existed a state based on and sustained by such vicious lies, mass murder, propaganda, and devoid of ethics and morality as Israel. Who will save it?

If you had a typical Western upbringing, by which you went through the archetypal kindergarten to graduate school to a decent job cycle, and over these years, you learned general truths about things, either explicitly or by osmosis, things such as democracy being an ideal worth fighting for, enlightenment ideals that brought forth the modern West, academia being a meritocracy, the Nobels being the apotheosis of a career in the sciences, etc., you would have invariably learned how the early Jewish settlers — who were a people without land — made their dwellings in Palestine, a land without people, and created Israel. In fact, regarding Israel, you would have learned other “truths,” such as its right to exist and defend itself, it being the only democracy in the Middle East, how it’s the only country in the world where Jews feel safe, its army being the most moral in the world, among other things.

However, when you start to think deeply about such absorbed wisdom, you learn that things aren’t how they are projected. While there are no absolute truths, there are certainly kernels of truth in most things you learn over the course of your life about democracy, enlightenment ideals, etc. On the issue of Israel, however, the deeper you dig, the more acute your realisation that everything, literally every single thing, they tell you about that country is a lie. There isn’t even an iota of truth in anything that the conventional wisdom about that country had made you believe. Nothing at all. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

When you start exploring the claim that Palestine was a land without people and since Jews were a people without land, therefore, Jews and Palestine fit like a glove, you learn that Palestine was a thriving place with nearly two million people living there by 1948, a vast majority of them Muslims, some Christians, and a very tiny number of Jews. Every book on Palestinian history settles the matter beyond all doubt. I will quote from just one, Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine: “Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314; in 1936, Jewish numbers had gone up to 384,078 and the total to 1,366,692; in 1946 there were 608,225 Jews in a total population of 1,912,112.” Moreover, the steady increase in the Jewish population over the years, which Said’s numbers reflect, was due to illegal immigration facilitated by Zionist terrorists operating out of Palestine and their benefactors in Europe and the United States.

When you shine a light on the notion of the Israelis making the desert bloom, you find the statement so vacuous and lacking in truth as to induce vertigo. Said in his book The Question of Palestine again: “Approximately 65 percent of the Palestinian Arabs were agricultural people who lived in about 500 villages where ground crops as well as fruits and vegetables were grown.” The desert was blooming long before the European settlers set foot in it.

When you dig deeper into the story about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East, you realise how absurd that belief is. It is, in fact, a duplicity of Orwellian proportions to label a country whose leaders and state institutions never get tired of calling it an exclusive home for Jews and which has active laws that discriminate against non-Jews as a democracy. This notion doesn’t even pass a sniff test. If the nearly identical population of Arabs and Jews were allowed to vote in a genuinely democratic country between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it’s a foregone conclusion that Zionism would cease to exist as the state ideology of Israel. Israeli democracy is as real as the Loch Ness Monster.

You realise that not only is Israel the furthest thing from democracy, but it is, in fact, an apartheid state that subjugates over 20 percent of its Arab population, whose treatment is akin to second-class citizens — to say nothing of the occupied populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They are denied rights accorded to the Jewish majority and, for the most part, live at the mercy of the majority and are subjected to periodic violence from settlers encroaching on their space with the full support of the state. They are not free to marry who they want, not free to travel where they want, and not free to do business how they want. They are subjugated in their own land.

When you start looking up Israel’s self-proclaimed right to defend itself, you realise that, in fact, there is no such right in international law that accords an occupying power to defend itself from the population it occupies. On the contrary, the occupied population has every right to fight for its liberation by any means necessary, including the use of violence. Yes, the occupied Palestinians have a right to armed struggle against Israel.

40 reasons why the IDF is the Most Moral Army in the World™

When you peel the layers off the tales about the Israel Defence Forces, or the IDF, being the Most Moral Army in the World™, you can’t help but laugh at the deceit. You have heard any number of Israeli politicians and their allies in the US and the rest of the Western world repeat ad nauseam about the morality of the Israeli military. None other than the paragons of virtues and ethics like Netanyahu and Dershowitz have claimed that IDF has no parallels anywhere in the world when it comes to morality. That surely settles the matter, doesn’t it? Why believe the long-suffering Palestinians? However, human rights organisations, even the ones based in Israel, have for years documented the depravity of the IDF. But then, not everyone reads human rights reports. The IDF has made everyone’s task easy by filming their barbarity for the whole world to see in easily digestible TikTok videos and Instagram reels since October 7 with acts such as bombing hospitals, running bulldozers over fallen victims, stealing jewellery from Palestinian homes, shooting grandmothers, killing over 10,000 children, to count just a handful from the hundreds of atrocities over the past four months.

You unearth a state so depraved that since its inception, it has carried out over 2,700 political assassinations with zero regard for national boundaries. It has conducted extrajudicial killings not just within Israel but also in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Malta, etc. Award-winning Mossad stenographer Ronen Bergman, in his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, writes: “Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.” One commentator has termed the Zionist state “the most voracious assassination machine in history.” That’s some badge of (dis)honour. Not one to sit on its laurels, Israel wants to add to the tally with the current Shin Bet chief stating the state’s desire to kill Palestinian resistance leaders “in every location, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar, everyone. It will take a few years, but we will be there in order to do it.”

You learn that Israel is a state so unprincipled that it not only assassinates prominent enemies but has a policy of “mowing the lawn,” whereby it periodically bombs the world’s largest concentration camp that it occupies. As Norman Finkelstein has stated, “It happens that this ‘lawn’ called Gaza, 1,100,000 blades of grass in that lawn are children.”

You discover that Israel is a society so rotten that a “former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu — one of the most senior theocrats in the Jewish State ‘ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.’” While another rabbi has proudly claimed: “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women, and children (and cattle).” At the beginning of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Mondoweiss reported on a “letter from 45 influential Israeli rabbis (initial list), addressed to ‘Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu May His Light Shine, the heads of state and security apparatus,’ explicitly affirming the right of the state to bomb the Al-Shifa’ hospital in Gaza — the main hospital in the strip.” These are the mainstream — not fringe, mind you — religious leaders of Israel.

To say nothing of the genocidal rhetoric coming left, right, and centre from the Israeli leadership since October 7. Statements so copious that they filled nine pages of the South African genocide charge against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

You find that the moral bankruptcy of Israel is so stark that not just the religious leaders but its doctors, too, write letters advocating for the bombing of hospitals. Here’s from a letter by Israeli doctors: “The residents of Gaza, who saw fit to turn the hospitals into terrorist nests in an attempt to take advantage of Western morality, are the ones who brought their destruction upon themselves — terrorism must be eliminated everywhere and in any way. Attacking terrorist headquarters located inside a hospital is the right, and even the duty of the IDF.” If it bears repeating, the Israelis never proved Palestinian fighters were using any of the Gaza hospitals for their purposes before putting nearly all 36 of them out of service.

Click on the photo to watch the video on Twitter.

You uncover a country so devoid of humanity that it teaches its children to sing songs calling for genocide, then films them perform such songs, juxtaposes it with images of its military, and uploads it on its state broadcaster’s official YouTube channel — before deleting it. And no, the children haven’t become racist and genocidal suddenly. Here’s a 1994 video of school children singing songs with lyrics that go:

All the world hates the Arabs,
And the main thing is to kill them one by one!
With these feet, I stepped on my enemy,
With these teeth, I bit his skin,
With these lips, I sucked his blood.
And I still haven’t had enough revenge.

You come across a country so devoid of the basic tenets of statehood that it doesn’t even pretend to care for its own citizens. While Joe Biden — the President of the country that has more Jews than any other in the world — says, “I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world that’s secure. I think Israel is essential,” Israel, through its state-instituted Hannibal directive, justifies killing Jews. It killed its own citizens by the hundreds by raining down hellfire missiles and shooting at them, killed three of its own Hebrew-speaking, white flag-waving, runaway captive soldiers, and killed over 60 hostages inside Gaza while claiming to be the only country in the world meant for Jews.

When you think about the Hannibal directive, you realise that a state which calls itself the home of Jews is totally at ease with killing Jews lest the enemy capture them, i.e., it doesn’t consider a Jewish life worth saving if it comes at the expense of letting go a non-Jew. That’s how the self-proclaimed messiah of Jews views Jews.

You find a country so immune to any censure that its lobby groups in the West brazenly churn out “attack ads and…back primary opponents to challenge Congress members who are not voting for or supporting Israel’s war on Gaza.” Furthermore, the lobby “groups will probably pump tens of millions of dollars into primaries this cycle to back its candidates.”

You observe a nation so entitled that it hasn’t even bothered to define its national boundaries and has brazenly occupied its neighbours’ territories. A state so violent that it routinely bombs multiple countries simultaneously at times. Since its inception in 1948, Israel has at various times bombed, among others, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. (Of late, it has been bombing Syria and Iraq at will.)

You discover a country that sees itself so far from the reach of international law that its head of state claims that “no one will stop us — not The Hague, not the Axis of Evil, and no one else” as it continues its genocide in a tiny enclave completely blocked off from the rest of the world.

You notice citizens so depraved that they grab their favourite beverages, climb to the hills with assorted meat for the barbecues, and clap, celebrate, and pose for selfies against a background of explosions when their military bombs the helpless population in the territories it occupies. The citizens move around in cars with self-explanatory stickers that read “FINISH THEM,” they celebrate the deaths of children and civilians in Telegram channels — some of which are run by their own military; and they make videos mocking victims of genocides for likes and shares on social media.

You come across people so violent and bloodthirsty that they ritually abuse the Arabs whose lands they occupy, go on rampages in Arab homes and expel them at will, desecrate their places of worship, consider spitting towards Christians a Jewish ritual, and a month into the ongoing genocide in Gaza by when thousands had already been killed, “just 1.8 percent said they believed the IDF was using too much firepower.” 98.2 percent were totally fine with genocide.

You encounter a society so deeply entrenched in criminality that it is a major cocaine hub, an ecstasy centre, a home to the world’s largest marijuana hub, a hub of international organ trade, a human trafficking heaven, a pedophile’s paradise, and a place where “allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant.”

In short, when you start to scratch the mere surface of Israel’s facade, you don’t just realise that your entire view of a seminal topic in global geopolitics has been warped beyond any semblance of reality, but more importantly, you encounter a society so disgusting and a state so rogue that the United States and its allies would have been eager to intervene on “humanitarian grounds” had it been any other than Israel — and if they really cared an iota for humans, humanity, or humanitarian grounds.

Since they don’t, who will take the lead in stopping Israel before it devours us all?

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A tale of medieval barbarians and modern Israelis