Over the past six months, we have witnessed some of the darkest moments in human history and some of the worst of its capabilities.
Every day, we collectively watch in horror as an apartheid state carries out war crimes against defenseless civilian populations with almost complete impunity – and with the near total support of Western leaders, who continue to funnel money, weapons and political protection to Israel.
Every day, images of war crimes are beamed to our smartphones, and the screams of babies, the wails of widows and the cries of fathers carrying their deceased children ring through our ears.
Tens of thousands of people have already been slaughtered. Officials in Washington simply repeat the mantra that Israel has a right to defend itself, even as it commits war crimes by destroying schools, hospitals and places of worship, deliberately starving a population under its control and heavily bombing populated civilian areas.
But not only is every war crime effectively signed off by Washington, but what Israel is doing in Gaza and beyond is the standard for American foreign policy.
The Israeli military has repeatedly used banned white phosphorus weapons in Gaza, burning down houses and melting peoples’ skin.
Yet the United States has admitted to using the same weapons in Syria and Iraq and used depleted uranium in Fallujah. To this day, hospitals in Fallujah report a 2,200% increase in Leukemia rates and a 740% spike in the number of brain tumors.
Deliberate Israeli strikes have destroyed or damaged every single hospital in Gaza. The United States itself has a very long history of targeting hospitals, including in El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Grenada, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Cambodia and Laos. In Syria in 2017, the U.S. dropped white phosphorus munitions on Syria’s Raqqa hospital, killing at least 30 civilians.
Food supplies in Gaza are desperately low, with two-thirds of households currently limited to only one meal per day. The Israeli government is refusing to allow aid convoys into Gaza, leaving its residents to starve as acute malnutrition begins to set in.
Yet U.S. sanctions are deliberately crafted to produce the same result and have led to shortages of food in targeted countries, such as Iran and Venezuela. Meanwhile, a U.S. government document explicitly states that their Cuba sanctions are meant to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of [the] government.”
We should rightly be shocked at the brutal Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners, which has included zip-tying limbs so tightly they needed to be amputated. But we should also remember what the U.S. did in Abu Ghraib and continues to do in Guantánamo Bay.
And while we watch ghastly videos of IDF atrocities daily, are they really so different from the “Collateral Murder” video released by Wikileaks in 2010, which showed U.S. forces massacring Iraqi civilians, including two journalists? A crime for which no one has been charged but for which Julian Assange remains languishing in a British prison.
To be clear, what Israel is doing in Gaza is terrible and amounts to genocide. But this is far from the first time this has happened; Israeli-style terrorism is standard U.S. foreign policy.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is just an outward expression of what the United States has done for decades to the Global South.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has dominated the world, overthrowing governments left, right and center, crushing movements for national liberation, and propping up brutal dictatorships across the planet. In 2016, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War alone.
Israel has been a key outpost of U.S. power in the Middle East since its creation in 1948. But that power is slipping. After its defeats and fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and beyond and as nations like China rise, American influence is waning.
And what the war in Gaza has done has exposed the moral depravity of the so-called rules-based international order, as the U.S. and other Western powers make themselves look foolish carrying water for genocide while still trying to present themselves as the arbiters of morality on the world stage.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, yes. But so is President Joe Biden, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and all the other Western leaders backing Israel.
What Israel is doing is rooted in a standard Western policy that needs to be addressed in our own countries. Yes, Zionism is the problem, but it’s only part of the problem. The overriding issue is Western imperialism, which creates this kind of ideology. And fortunately, we are seeing the beginnings of a moral awakening. Tens of millions of people around the world have taken to the streets for Palestine.
Students across college campuses in this country are occupying their universities, demanding their campuses divest from Israel and weapons manufacturers building the bombs Israel is dropping on Gaza.
We are shutting down weapons companies that supply the apartheid regime with arms like Palestine Action is doing in the UK, we are occupying the offices of our elected officials, and we are protesting on college campuses the world over.
And while many of Palestine’s neighbors quietly assist Israel in its attack, Yemen, the region’s poorest country, has enforced a Red Sea maritime blockade of Israeli ships in a bid to force Israel to end its siege on Gaza.
People have broken through the fog of war and see this for what it is. But we cannot rely on our elected officials to stop it because Israeli barbarity was made and perfected in the USA in the first place.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.