As Seymour Hersch put it -- Gaza is a new version of the Killing Fields, and Apocalypse Now, with IDF given liberty to shoot freely any Palestine at all.
Within a week Joe Biden will be slouching out of his White Den into the limbo of his accelerating dementia.
He will be pursued by curses on millions of Palestinian lips, generation after generation, beyond his grave, until the end of Time.
Of all US presidents who dealt with Palestinian affairs since Wilson, none, (not Truman, not LBJ not even Trump) have approached Joe Biden’s inexplicable animus towards Palestinians throughout his administration.
The closest parallels to such contempt for Palestinians can only be found in such Israeli likes as Begin, Shamir, or Netanyahu.
In his anti-Palestinian Crusade Joe Biden’s accomplice was his equally Zionist secretary of state: Blinken--masquerading as a mediator on a score of visits to the ME.
The apocalyptic horrors visited on the Gazans with Joe Biden’s nihil obstat have no antecedents in recorded Palestinian history- not even in the Nakba, or British Occupation, or Crusades or the Mongolian invasion.
To find a proximate antecedent you have to cross the millennia: Joshua’s attempted annihilation of the Canaanites.
Biden, ostensibly an American foreign policy guru, considered Hamas’ Oct 7 two-pronged attack on the military HQs of IDF’s Gaza Division & adjoining Kibbutzim
a) Unprovoked
and b)“Pure and adulterated evil”
This, in his view, warranted Israel’s exercise of its so- called Right of Self Defence.
If Biden has an Israel Doctrine it is: THERE IS NO LIMIT TO CHOICE OF TARGET OR TO LAPSE OF TIME FOR ISRAEL TO EXERCISE ITS RIGHT OF SELF DEFENCE AGAINST WHOMSOEVER IT CHOOSES IN THE M.E.
A corollary is that Israel can count on open ended, unconditional, uninterrupted American financial, political, logistical, strategic & diplomatic support for all such Vengeance operations.
This, is tantamount to a blank check to Israel to act as Washington’s proxy mailed fist to impose PAX AMERICANA between the Mediterranean & Afghanistan.
Of course, it was no secret to Biden that
o Most of Gaza’s population were 1948 refugees whose homes, lands & properties were stolen by Israel.
o Nor that the Kibbutzim surrounding Gaza were built by force on those stolen lands
o Nor that the Kibbutzim were military bases whose function was to police the Gaza borders.
o Nor that for decades Israel had imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip through the Kibbutzim & had turned it into the World’s 20th-21st century Ghetto.
o Nor that for these decades Israel had prevented the free movement of Gazans by land, sea or air.
o Nor that all the while Israel had controlled everything that entered the Strip, whether it was food, medicine, clothing, building material or whatever. Even the food was rationed in minimal calories.
o Nor that access to the Sea was strictly limited to Gazan fishermen.
o Nor that human nature being what it is, the Gazans (unprovoked?) had hit back & that Israel had “retaliated” with devastating effect (thanks to American munitions) in scores of operations the deadliest of which was in 2014.
Biden’s blazing Green Light to Israel to indulge in its orgiastic slaughter of Gazan refugees is all the more depraved when you consider Israel’s trumpeted ability at targeted political assassination.
So proud is Mossad of its feats in this field of human endeavour that it commissioned a journalist Ronen Bergman to write a 600 plus hundred page book with the Biblical title Rise & Kill First detailing the exact circumstances of each of its 95 targeted assassination attempts between 1970 & 2012 personally authorized by the incumbent Israel P.M.
o The point here is that after Oct 7, targeted assassination of Hamas leaders (an understandable objective of the Israelis) was replaced by Biden’s blessing of dropping of 100,000 tons of US munitions-- the equivalent of 4 Hiroshima bombs on 2.3 m. mostly Gazan women, children, & elderly refugees.
In the process the Gaza Strip, the most densely built-up area in the world has been pulverized into rubble: Its infrastructure, water & sewage systems, streets, homes, institutions, hospitals, universities, schools, offices, shops, gardens, playing fields, libraries, laboratories, markets, restaurants--- all without exception levelled to the ground. Its undernourished, homeless, sickly, refugee, inhabitants, displaced again & again by calculated sadistic bombing under the watchful gaze of American urban warfare experts.
Recent Israeli visitors to North Gaza have reported that:
o What they could see as far as they looked was levelled ruins with packs of wild dogs fighting over human remains in the wilderness of the debris.
That Biden should get away with all this is galling.
o No less intolerable is the total blissful non-awareness of the vast bulk of Americans about all this with the connivance of the American so called political elite and the slavishly pro-Israeli American mass media.
Indeed, we live on different planets. On the American planet the Biden-Blinken parting gift to Netanyahu is 8billions worth of more US munitions.
o And the Republicans in the House have just voted to sanction the members of the ICC for condemning Netanyahu as the war criminal that he is.
It’s annoyed me that even sympathetic outlets have just used the official number as if it was anywhere near accurate. It has to be a major undercount: the whole society has collapsed. It’s not like they have fully staffed teams doing this work—it’s just insane.
Thank you for your work Owen. This is a crime beyond imagining and yet we must try to imagine and to empathise. Otherwise, what are we to become?
As Seymour Hersch put it -- Gaza is a new version of the Killing Fields, and Apocalypse Now, with IDF given liberty to shoot freely any Palestine at all.
Farewell to Biden-Blinken
Walid Khalidi
11January 2025
Greetings
Within a week Joe Biden will be slouching out of his White Den into the limbo of his accelerating dementia.
He will be pursued by curses on millions of Palestinian lips, generation after generation, beyond his grave, until the end of Time.
Of all US presidents who dealt with Palestinian affairs since Wilson, none, (not Truman, not LBJ not even Trump) have approached Joe Biden’s inexplicable animus towards Palestinians throughout his administration.
The closest parallels to such contempt for Palestinians can only be found in such Israeli likes as Begin, Shamir, or Netanyahu.
In his anti-Palestinian Crusade Joe Biden’s accomplice was his equally Zionist secretary of state: Blinken--masquerading as a mediator on a score of visits to the ME.
The apocalyptic horrors visited on the Gazans with Joe Biden’s nihil obstat have no antecedents in recorded Palestinian history- not even in the Nakba, or British Occupation, or Crusades or the Mongolian invasion.
To find a proximate antecedent you have to cross the millennia: Joshua’s attempted annihilation of the Canaanites.
Biden, ostensibly an American foreign policy guru, considered Hamas’ Oct 7 two-pronged attack on the military HQs of IDF’s Gaza Division & adjoining Kibbutzim
a) Unprovoked
and b)“Pure and adulterated evil”
This, in his view, warranted Israel’s exercise of its so- called Right of Self Defence.
If Biden has an Israel Doctrine it is: THERE IS NO LIMIT TO CHOICE OF TARGET OR TO LAPSE OF TIME FOR ISRAEL TO EXERCISE ITS RIGHT OF SELF DEFENCE AGAINST WHOMSOEVER IT CHOOSES IN THE M.E.
A corollary is that Israel can count on open ended, unconditional, uninterrupted American financial, political, logistical, strategic & diplomatic support for all such Vengeance operations.
This, is tantamount to a blank check to Israel to act as Washington’s proxy mailed fist to impose PAX AMERICANA between the Mediterranean & Afghanistan.
Of course, it was no secret to Biden that
o Most of Gaza’s population were 1948 refugees whose homes, lands & properties were stolen by Israel.
o Nor that the Kibbutzim surrounding Gaza were built by force on those stolen lands
o Nor that the Kibbutzim were military bases whose function was to police the Gaza borders.
o Nor that for decades Israel had imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip through the Kibbutzim & had turned it into the World’s 20th-21st century Ghetto.
o Nor that for these decades Israel had prevented the free movement of Gazans by land, sea or air.
o Nor that all the while Israel had controlled everything that entered the Strip, whether it was food, medicine, clothing, building material or whatever. Even the food was rationed in minimal calories.
o Nor that access to the Sea was strictly limited to Gazan fishermen.
o Nor that human nature being what it is, the Gazans (unprovoked?) had hit back & that Israel had “retaliated” with devastating effect (thanks to American munitions) in scores of operations the deadliest of which was in 2014.
Biden’s blazing Green Light to Israel to indulge in its orgiastic slaughter of Gazan refugees is all the more depraved when you consider Israel’s trumpeted ability at targeted political assassination.
So proud is Mossad of its feats in this field of human endeavour that it commissioned a journalist Ronen Bergman to write a 600 plus hundred page book with the Biblical title Rise & Kill First detailing the exact circumstances of each of its 95 targeted assassination attempts between 1970 & 2012 personally authorized by the incumbent Israel P.M.
o The point here is that after Oct 7, targeted assassination of Hamas leaders (an understandable objective of the Israelis) was replaced by Biden’s blessing of dropping of 100,000 tons of US munitions-- the equivalent of 4 Hiroshima bombs on 2.3 m. mostly Gazan women, children, & elderly refugees.
In the process the Gaza Strip, the most densely built-up area in the world has been pulverized into rubble: Its infrastructure, water & sewage systems, streets, homes, institutions, hospitals, universities, schools, offices, shops, gardens, playing fields, libraries, laboratories, markets, restaurants--- all without exception levelled to the ground. Its undernourished, homeless, sickly, refugee, inhabitants, displaced again & again by calculated sadistic bombing under the watchful gaze of American urban warfare experts.
Recent Israeli visitors to North Gaza have reported that:
o What they could see as far as they looked was levelled ruins with packs of wild dogs fighting over human remains in the wilderness of the debris.
That Biden should get away with all this is galling.
o No less intolerable is the total blissful non-awareness of the vast bulk of Americans about all this with the connivance of the American so called political elite and the slavishly pro-Israeli American mass media.
Indeed, we live on different planets. On the American planet the Biden-Blinken parting gift to Netanyahu is 8billions worth of more US munitions.
o And the Republicans in the House have just voted to sanction the members of the ICC for condemning Netanyahu as the war criminal that he is.
*********
It’s annoyed me that even sympathetic outlets have just used the official number as if it was anywhere near accurate. It has to be a major undercount: the whole society has collapsed. It’s not like they have fully staffed teams doing this work—it’s just insane.