Israeli Snipers Kill Unarmed, Defenseless People: Isn’t That Murder?

Gaza is a prison, Gaza is a concentration camp, Gaza has been blockaded for a decade, Gaza’s occupation is a perennial crime against humanity, but most of all Gaza is a target. Gaza is a target because it suits the Israelis to have two million captive Palestinian men, women, and children (half of them are children) to despise, starve, deny medical supplies, reduce to inescapable and unlivable conditions, kill, and then brand as “terrorists” for not surrendering and disappearing from the face of the earth 70 years ago. From an Israeli perspective, Palestinians committed original sin by merely existing.

From a Palestinian perspective, Israelis committed original sin by merely existing. They are both right, in a narrow sense that is useless for moving forward. Neither has any moral authority in a wider perspective. But where does one go to find any wider perspective?

After weeks of Israeli snipers killing unarmed, nonviolent civilians, the official view of the United States is as narrow, distorted, and misleading as it’s been for years. On May 14, the day that Israelis killed some 60 people and wounded thousands more, White House representative Raj Shah recited the US view with robotic repetition (with no supporting evidence) throughout his press briefing:

    MR. SHAH: The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas. Hamas is intentionally and cynically provoking this response…. we believe that Hamas is responsible for these tragic deaths; that their rather cynical exploitation of the situation is what’s leading to these deaths. And we want them to stop…. we think that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Hamas is the one that, frankly, bear responsibility for the dire situation right now in Gaza…. We believe that Hamas is responsible for what’s going on.

    Q: So there’s no responsibility beyond that on the Israeli authorities? Kill at will?

    MR. SHAH: What I’m saying is that we believe that Hamas, as an organization, is engaged in cynical action that’s leading to these deaths…. as I said earlier, we believe Hamas bears the responsibility. Look, this is a propaganda attempt. I mean, this is a gruesome and unfortunate propaganda attempt. I think the Israeli government has spent weeks trying to handle this without violence, and we find it very unfortunate.

    Q: But people were throwing rocks 50 meters from the wall [perimeter fence] and were faced with sniper attack. I mean, is the White House in denial of the split-screen reality that’s occurring?

    MR. SHAH: Again, we believe that Hamas is responsible for this.

Surely Raj Shah and most of the people in the Trump administration know that this is such a distortion of reality as to constitute a Big Lie in the traditional Nazi propaganda sense. Whatever argument might be made to the contrary, the Palestinians are perennially and incontrovertibly the victims here and have been for 70 years, since the Nakba of 1948. The White House blames the victim. Israel, the enduring monument to a successful terrorist campaign, wages terrorism to fight the terrorism used against it.

The White House also singles out Hamas for blame, which is a form of straw-man demonization of long standing. The White House offers no evidence that Hamas can be, much less is, an all-controlling manipulator of two million Palestinians. But blaming Hamas is a way to ignore the conditions Israel has imposed on these two million prisoners who have no choice but to slowly poison themselves with contaminated water in conditions that are literally “unlivable” (according to a 2017 UN report). Hamas is an easy scapegoat, but it is also the only Palestinian political party that actually won an election (2006) that the US, Israel, Fatah, and others prevented from taking effect. Hamas had effective control of Gaza, Fatah of the West Bank. In 2005, in an unusual form of ethnic cleansing, Israel had forcibly removed (with $200,000 individual compensation) all Jewish residents from Gaza creating a Palestinian ghetto: a fenced-in occupied territory controlled by Israel, choked by an Israeli-Egyptian blockade, cut off from humanitarian intervention by the US veto at the UN Security Council. Even so, the US and Israel conspired with Fatah to undo Hamas’s election victory by force, setting the stage for Hamas to take control of Gaza by removing Fatah in a week of fighting (estimated 118 dead, 550 wounded) in June 2007. The White House chooses just to ignore the year-old proposal by Hamas to create a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with Israel.

Singling out Hamas when a broad spectrum of Gazan civil society is turning out to demonstrate at more than a dozen locations along the roughly 15-mile perimeter fence helps US/Israeli officials (and media) depict a false reality. The unspoken subtext of Shah’s comments is that Palestinians have no right to engage in massive, nonviolent civil disobedience. This is so patently false that he really can’t say it out loud. And he’s helped by the undisciplined fringe of Palestinians who don’t seem to get that nonviolent civil disobedience really doesn’t include rock-throwing, fire-bomb kites, and the like, no matter how ineffectual those tactics are (causing no Israeli casualties or reported damage). More disciplined, sustained, nonviolent protest would frame Israeli conduct far more starkly, and cold-blooded murder would be seen for the terror tactic it truly is, especially now that snipers are targeting doctors and other medical personnel.

Gaza is a continuing crime against humanity in which the US is complicit with the perpetrators (as in Yemen and elsewhere). For decades the US has postured as a peace-maker, sometimes with actual good effect. Those days are long gone, as White House representative Shah made clear at his May 14 briefing:

    Q: Raj, on the issue of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, when was the last time the White House reached out to Palestinian leadership? And will — given the high numbers of casualties, Palestinians calling what has happened today a “massacre,” will the White House be reaching out?

    MR. SHAH: Well, I don’t honestly have an answer for you on that. I’ll get back to you.

What he means is that the White House has no peace plan, there is no coherent policy beyond supporting Israel no matter what, and as far as the US goes, peace is not an option. Senior Advisor to the president and son-in-law Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, has reportedly developed a US peace plan that he’s reluctant to present publicly for fear the Palestinians might reject it (even though the president calls it “the deal of the century”). On May 14, when Israeli killing in Gaza peaked, Kushner spoke obliquely of his peace plan at the US embassy ceremony in Jerusalem, claiming that the president:

    … was very clear that his decision and today’s celebration, do not reflect the departure from our strong commitment to lasting peace, a peace that overcomes the conflicts of the past in order to give our children a brighter and more boundless future. As we have seen from the protests of the last month and even today, those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution. The United States is prepared to support a peace agreement in every way we can. We believe that it is possible for both sides to gain more than they give….

None of this corresponds well to the actual behavior of the Trump administration, which has consisted mostly of provocations and subsidies (that pay for maintaining the unlivable conditions of Gaza and the bullets that kill Palestinians, among other crimes of Israel’s illegal occupation). Who can Kushner possibly mean by “our children”? The real message from Kushner, highlighted above, comes down to “blame Hamas” – nonviolent civil disobedience provokes violence, doesn’t everyone know that, have we learned nothing from Alabama, South Africa, India? The White House scrubbed that highlighted passage from its official transcript of Kushner’s remarks.

But Ambassador Nikki Haley was even more absurd at the UN. While the US was blocking any Security Council action, such as an “independent and transparent investigation,” or even a resolution of “outrage and sorrow,” Haley characterized Israel’s one-sided killing as “restraint” and lied about Israel’s border:

    I ask my colleagues here in the Security Council, who among us would accept this type of activity on your border? No one would. No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has.

The fence enclosing Gaza is not a border. Both sides of the fence are in Israel. The fence is a demarcation line, with a Palestinian concentration camp on the inside and murderers, maimers, and mutilators on the outside. Some Israelis are even proud of this, as an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesman tweeted on March 31:

    Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.

When your bullets are landing on civilians, on men, women, and children, on doctors and medical personnel, that tweet is a confession. More recently a Knesset member promised that “the IDF has enough bullets for everyone.” What can possibly justify hunting unarmed Palestinians in the unspeakable conditions of Gaza, conditions created and enforced by Israel, conditions roughly equivalent to the Warsaw ghetto of 1943? Israel is perpetrating a continuing crime against humanity. Elsewhere in the world, there is an outcry against state-sanctioned shooting fish in a barrel. The US blames the fish. This is an obscene response to an endless atrocity in which the complicit United States is once again up to its eyeballs in innocent blood.