U.S. President Joe Biden arrived in Israel on Wednesday pledging solidarity in its war against Hamas and backing its account that a blast that killed huge numbers of Palestinians at a Gaza hospital had been caused by militants.
The fireball that engulfed the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital delivered some of the most harrowing images yet from a 12-day war, and wrecked White House plans for Biden’s emergency diplomatic mission to the Middle East, with Arab leaders calling off their planned summit with the U.S. president.
Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli air strike for the blast, which it said had killed as many as 500 people. Israel said the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which denied blame.
Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said: “I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion of the hospital in Gaza yesterday, and based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”
If that was their goal, they could depopulate the Gaza Strip in an hour. It’s clearly not the objective, even if they’re not prioritizing minimizing casualties as much as they should.
Truly, ask yourself what Israel would do if its true aim was “killing as many as possible”. I’m genuine asking you, what do you think they would do if that was the intent, and are they doing those things?
Most genocide expert agrees the modern genocides look nothing like the past ones, and particularly say there will not likely be another genocide like the Holocaust because we literally had a world war and a convention in Geneva about it. If you marker for purposeful ethnic cleansing is that it has to look like the holocaust, you’re going to miss several genocides. If you can’t imagine why Israel would attempt to hide a motive like ‘we want to kill Palestinians because they are Palestinians’ though both words and actions then I don’t know what else to say.
And if there were no repercussions, they absolutely would.
But much to their obvious resentment, they need to play the international politics game. If they don’t, they’ll find their economy decimated in much the same way a Russia has. And when the arms deals dry up, they could easily end up on the receiving end, given their unpopularity with their neighbours.
I would keep taking inch after inch, waiting for any excuse to retaliate, and then retaliate as violently and indiscrimately as possible.
So as a purely hypothetical example, maybe I’d constantly encroach on their borders and bulldoze their homes.
Maybe I’d imprison and execute children for throwing rocks.
Maybe when a terrorist cell crossed the border and killed (a fraction as many) civilians, I’d drop an absurd number of bombs on their city, beyond what could possibly be targeting actual combatants, killing scores of civilians and levelling buildings.
Purely hypothetically of course.