You can read the report from Airwars on which Owen Jones based his commentary on here. Keeping in mind that it only reports on a short period of time during the Israeli attack begun as a response to the October 7th massacre, the first 25 days of it.
Especially damning is this passage comparing the number of civilians killed in Gaza to that of the previous highest number they reported on when the US led coalition attack on Raqqa over a four month period and the battle of Mosul which had been the highest month long period they reported on.
In 25 days of October 2023, civilian harm in Gaza occurred on a scale unmatched by any conflict previously documented by Airwars. This section will outline a number of key metrics by which such rates are measured.
When discussing rates of civilian harm, the most commonly used metric in public debate is the number of civilians killed in a particular period. Airwars found that at least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza between October 7th through the 31st. This number is only a minimum, with the maximum number of civilians killed reaching 6,668. It is also a known undercount as Airwars' work is ongoing, with additional civilian deaths from the period still under analysis.
This conservative figure (5,139 civilians killed) is already nearly four times the number of civilians killed in the most lethal month previously documented by Airwars: March 2017, where at least 1,470 civilians were killed by the US coalition in Iraq.
In the Battle of Raqqa, where the US-led Coalition fired 30,000 artillery rounds into the city over four months, Airwars documented 2,556 civilians killed by US coalition forces. 956 of these civilians were killed in strikes where attribution was recorded as contested, i.e. where harm may have resulted from other actors. Even taking this higher number of civilian deaths into account, it is still only half the number of civilians killed in 25 days in Gaza.
In his commentary Owen Jones points out that the accusation made by the Israeli government and its apologists that Hamas was using civilians and civilian infrastructure as "human shields" that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and that when Iran targeted the headquarters of the Israeli intelligence service and and military, located among civilians and civilian infrastructure, that no one talks about the Israeli government and military using Israeli civilians as "human shields." He also notes that the Israeli military using Palestinian civilians, even children, as human shields during their attacks has been documented.
Israel is exposed for what it is, certainly a genocidal apartheid state, what I think should be considered an apartheid democracy. I have heard its democratic status given as a reason that the west must support it, no matter what, apparently, forgetting that just because they vote in the government that that exempts them from being held responsible for the crimes that government commits. That is one of the worst examples of what giving a mere word that kind of absolute and unthinking moral authority because the Apartheid South African government was just such a democracy as were the American states which practiced and still do practice Jim Crow to maintain white supremacy. Israel, both by Constitution, by law and by Supreme Court declarations is more overtly apartheid than even the American Jim Crow states were during the lynch-law period. The "settlers" carrying out Israeli murders and terrorism and intimidation just as much as any Hollywood depicted lynch mob ever did largely with the state government's support and encouragement.
With Gaza a lot of People are waking up to realize what I did during Israel's genocidal attacks on Lebanon decades before, it is an outlaw state cultivating and demanding the conditions for its support in the United States, Britain and other countries without which it could not maintain its apartheid system of rule and Lebensraum policy of expansion. A large number of those whose eyes are opened about that are Jews, young and old and, as Mehdi Hassan has pointed out, like it or not that is an important thing.
Zionism has been a disaster as many Jews predicted it would be in the early decades of the ideology. They were right. America has to stop its facilitating of the crimes of the Israeli government, military and the majority of Israeli voters who keep apartheid in power and its imperial expansion going. It's not going to get better, it's going to be an even bigger blood bath than it is now.
Without equality being the foundation of it, democracy is as capable as any other government of being evil, that's true of the United States under apartheid democracy as it is in Israel. Calling unequal governance what it is is important, calling Israel an "ethno-state" isn't specific enough because the responsibility of the voters there, as in the United States which just voted in a white-supremacist government by democratic means, must be included in the label. Holding a vote isn't nearly enough, without equality a majority can be as evil as a single despot. In the case of Israel, they've kept Netanyahu in power longer than they have anyone else, knowing full well what an evil and corrupt person he is. The majority of Israelis hold responsibility for what their elected government does as the majority of voters and those too irresponsible to vote against Trump do for what he's about to do, including giving the genocide campaigns of the Israeli government a free hand to kill and steal even more.
No comments:
Post a Comment