by Jonathan Cook at VanessaBeeley Telegram Channel
Already, Israel is emboldened to make much more explicit its policy towards Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants. There is a word for that policy, one we are not supposed to use to avoid causing offence to those implementing it, as well as those who quietly support its implementation.
Whether by design or outcome, Israel’s starving of civilians, leaving them with no power, depriving them of clean water, and preventing hospitals from treating the sick and wounded – from treating those Israel has bombed – is a genocidal policy.
Western governments know this. Because Israeli leaders have made no secret of what they are doing.
Fifteen years ago, shortly after Israel instituted its stifling siege on Gaza by land, sea and air, the then deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, averred that Israel was ready to carry out a ‘Shoah’ – the Hebrew word for Holocaust – on Gaza. If the Palestinians were to avoid this fate, he said, they must keep quiet at their internment.
Six years later, Ayelet Shaked, who would soon be appointed a senior Israeli minister, declared all Palestinians in Gaza to be ‘the enemy’, and included ‘its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure’.
She called on Israel to kill the mothers of Palestinian fighters resisting the occupation so they could not give birth to more ‘little snakes’ – Palestinian children.
During the 2019 general election, Benny Gantz, then leader of the opposition and soon-to-be defence minister, campaigned with a video celebrating his time as head of the Israeli military, when ‘parts of Gaza were sent back to the Stone Age’.
In 2016, another general, Yair Golan, who at the time was the Israeli military’s second in command, described developments in Israel as echoing the period in Germany leading up to the Holocaust.
When asked to comment on Golan’s remark during an interview this year, retired general Amiram Levin agreed that Israel was becoming more like Nazi Germany. ‘It hurts, it’s not nice, but that’s the reality.’
Jonathan Cook
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