Call Israel's War Crimes and Genocide By Name

The New York Times on May 3 ran simultaneous brief clips, as presented above, of six videos of dynamited Lebanese villages as released by the Israeli offensive forces.

On Tuesday the X account of Israel’s foreign ministry posted a nice little video and a cheery message about snow falling on Mount Hermon. “Snow… in May? In Israel?” the nameless poster wrote. Except that Mount Hermon is not in Israel. It is in Lebanon. It marks the border with Syria. Israel has occupied it since 1967, as it has the nearby Golan Heights.

The imperious lie about Mount Hermon is part of Israel’s method of subduing geography to fabricated history as it demolishes and steals ancestral lands in orgies of war crimes that sometimes get reported by western news agencies–if reported at all–like fan fiction derived from Israeli army handouts.

One of the fictions every news organization still perpetuates is the reference to one of the world’s most offensive, criminal and racist militaries–an enforcer of apartheid–as the “Israeli Defense Forces,” or IDF for short. There has been nothing defensive about the Israeli military since 1948. Even then, aside from battling ragtag and moronic Arab bands pretending to be armies that never put Israel in danger, it was mostly offensive as it took advantage of the lopsided war to expel two-thirds of the population, all of them Palestinians, to make room for the Jewish population.

Israel has rebranded illegal occupations in innocuous corporate euphemisms that, again, media blindly apply. It called the occupation zone in Lebanon a “security zone” or an “advanced defensive line.” It calls the occupied West Bank “Judea and Samaria,” erasing 3.3 million Palestinians eking out a living there under siege. The so-called “yellow lines” Israel drew in Gaza and South Lebanon are among the latest fabrications. Israel paints concrete blocks and sign posts yellow to mark off the Palestinian ghetto, and now the South Lebanon no-go zone, surely an inadvertent if ironic visual echo of the yellow star Nazis forced Jews to wear before their ghettoes were leveled and Jews exterminated. In Gaza, Israel is more than halfway there: Gaza has been leveled. Nearly 4 percent of its Palestinian population has been exterminated since October 2023, 12 percent if you include the maimed. The massacres continue.

The Gaza line splits the strip in half, forcing what survives of 2 million Palestinians into a demolished area half the size of Palm Coast, without homes, hospitals or basic care. The United Nations used to refer to Gaza, before its erasure, as the world’s largest open-air prison. That dates back to 2007, when Israel started the blockade and crushed Gaza’s economy. Palestinians still had homes then. Now the half of Gaza where they live like dogs is the world’s largest tent concentration camp. It is still getting bombed. Israel occupies the other half of the Strip as it prepares to finally accomplish what it’s been planning for since 1948, when it first attempted to clear Gaza: annex and declare Gaza part of Greater Israel.

In Lebanon, the yellow line marks the 10 percent of Lebanese territory Israel has stolen so far. As in Gaza, Israel has been dynamiting hundreds of villages and towns in South Lebanon, razing them from a history measured in millennia and spared that fate during the Crusades, during 400 years of Ottoman occupation, during the French mandate of the first half of the 20th century, even through the Israeli invasions of 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, with several of those invasions resulting in lengthy occupations ended only in surrender to Hezbollah’s resistance.

Israel has exterminated 75,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023, about the number of Jews exterminated at the Lublin death camp during World War II, and coming up to 3,000 Lebanese. Israel’s morally bankrupt apologists continue to appear on western chat shows to accuse of antisemitism those who call it genocide. But the articles of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 didn’t define genocide only by body counts. Article II includes “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” That’s the systematic destruction of hospitals, houses, schools, libraries, businesses, religious buildings and heritage sites. That’s what continues to go on in Gaza and Lebanon. That, too, is genocide.

In the calculus of war crimes where fabrication fills the void of destruction, there are only means to an end. All means are justified, whether through cute propagandistic videos of snow falling on stolen land or the collective punishment of entire peoples for the resistance of a few, because let’s not quibble over this: Hamas and Hezbollah, while not nearly as murderous as Israel–and on their grounds Hamas and Hezbollah are as regressive, racist and cruel as the Christian Inquisition–may be just as immoral.

But like it or not, under the rules of war, they are the resistors. Israel is the occupier. As the Israeli historian of genocide writes in Israel: What Went Wrong, his latest book, “resisting oppression and dehumanization, including by force of arms, is not only understandable but also legal under international law, especially when it forms part of a struggle for national self-determination. We can condemn the barbarity of the [Oct. 7] attack yet recognize the right to resist occupation, at least when it’s directed at legitimate military targets.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas committed unqualified atrocities and war crimes, if not crimes against humanity. Every day since, Israel has been committing unqualified war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon, if not crimes against humanity. Every one of these 944 days. An Oct. 7 every two weeks for two and a half years.

Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon seven weeks ago, the way it supposedly has in Gaza. Neither has been true. Thousands of Gazans have been massacred since the alleged cease-fire, as have hundreds of Lebanese civilians. The massacres continue daily. So does the destruction of villages and towns through means unseen since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and before that, since World War II. Even then, but for the leveling of cities by the American and British air forces in Europe and Japan (the debate continues as to whether those were war crimes), the systematic erasure of cities and towns as collective punishment was limited: Nazis did their mass slaughters in camps. May 27, 1942, was an exception. The Czech resistance assassinated the Nazi governor of a Czech province. In one of the major atrocities of the war, the Nazis rounded up every living soul in Lidice in what is today the Czech Republic, murdered all 190 men and boys over 15, sent surviving women and children to death camps, and a few German-looking children to Germany for Germanification. The Nazis then dynamited every single structure in the town, erasing it from history.

It is justifiably scandalous to compare Israeli violence in Nabkas past and present to Nazi Germany–in scale. Method, intent and ethno-ideology are another story. Israel is not hiding the Lidice tactic as it applies it systematically in Gaza and Lebanon. It celebrates it, arrogantly releasing videos of the dynamiting of dozens of villages, as it did in Gaza. It isn’t rounding up and murdering Palestinians and Lebanese. There has been no Deir Yassin this time, no Sabra or Shatila. But the erasure of Gaza is worse than all three of those massacres combined. It is what Israel did when it wiped out hundreds of Palestinian villages during the 1948 war, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Israel, some of them and many of their descendants the same Palestinians getting expelled from refugee camps in South Lebanon today. Raze everything. Leave nothing for the villagers to come back to. It is then easier to occupy, annex and declare the land part of Israel, like Mount Hermon.

Joe Biden could have put a halt to it early on. He had that power, as has every American president to halt Israeli crimes, since we underwrite them, we arm them, we enable them. There would have been massacres. There would not have been a genocide. Among other failures that tarnished his presidency, embracing Benjamin Netanyahu’s butchery ruins Biden’s legacy. We could not expect better from Trump. Though he won in part by contrasting himself with war-loving Biden (it’s what won him Michigan’s gullible Arab vote), doubled down on the butchery then allowed Netanyahu to sucker him into the war with Iran, creating a thicker smoke screen for Netanyahu’s designs on Lebanon.

We Americans are complicit in all this with the weaponry and D9 Caterpillar bulldozers we keep shipping over to fuel the war crimes. We are complicit in our uncritical acceptance of Israel’s craven fabrications. And we are complicit with our silence, except to accuse of antisemitism, to fire, to slander, to blacklist or to deport those who call Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide by name.