Israel’s Manifest Destiny (May 2024)

Since the October 7^th Hamas attack on Israeli civilians in the south, Israel has set out to eliminate Hamas. Many say that the elimination of Hamas is impossible, but Israel disagrees. Hamas can be removed from Gaza by forcing all Palestinians to abandon Gaza. With no Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas would no longer be a threat on Israel’s southern border. Fortress Israel, with U.S. assistance, would replace the military occupation.

Israel has shown no mercy for civilians and in its total war has obliterated the red lines of international humanitarian law. This is arguably consistent with the way the U.S. itself has waged war going back to its Indian Wars of the 19^th century. In the rhetoric of war in Gaza, Hamas is the target of the Israeli military machine. In reality, civilians are also targets. Their homes are targets. Their hospitals are targets. Their schools are targets. Their mosques and churches are targets. (Not all Arabs are Muslim.) The entire public infrastructure is a target. This is because Israel maintains that Hamas is everywhere, and if everywhere in Gaza is a target, then everyone is a target. Civilians are herded from one 'safe zone’ to another, but even in 'safe zones’, civilians cannot escape Israel’s bombs, missiles, and artillery from land, sea and air. More than 100,000 casualties, 35,000 dead, more women and children killed than men (and not all men being Hamas combatants). That's total war.

The U.S. has resolutely supported Israel's right to self-defense to justify Israel's war. The weapons have flowed freely from the U.S. until the very recent limited pause by the Biden Administration in May as Israel executes its ‘pacification’ of Rafah (we remember that term from Vietnam), which is the last corner of the Gaza box where Palestinian refugees have sought safety from Israeli munitions. Yet as warned, the Israeli military has begun its full scale invasion of Rafah. Internationally, the U.S. continues to be Israel's 'best friend,' ensuring that no concert of powers will intervene to stop or even pause the war and that no state actor in the region will threaten Israel as it proceeds with its full-scale assault. This is no longer just ‘mowing the grass.’ This is making Gaza uninhabitable. As long as the U.S. stands by to defend Israel from Iran, the most likely attacker, Israel may have enough bombs and bullets stockpiled to do to Rafah what it did to Gaza City and Khan Younis even if Biden’s delay of some weapons shipments (500-pound and 2,000-pound unguided or “dumb” bombs) lasts a bit longer.

The scale and intensity of Israel’s war has been extensively covered in the media. Just before Christmas, the Voice of America was already reporting that

In little more than two months, the [Israeli] offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria's Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine's Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.

Meanwhile, famine alerts have been pouring out of Gaza for months, but humanitarian aid has been choked by Israel, which maintains that every incoming shipment could be a resupply of weapons for Hamas. This control of humanitarian aid serves two purposes: first, to block incoming arms, and second, and perhaps more importantly to withhold food, medicine and basic needs from civilians who might be inclined to think Palestine might ever be livable again . . . for them. More and more the Gaza Strip is looking to be an investment bonanza for those who would remove the rubble and retrofit the area for Israeli settlement sans Palestinians. And for those Palestinians who have knowledge of what is happening on Israel's 2^nd front in the West Bank, the prospects for any part of the occupied territories being home to Palestinians looks worse than ever.

Israel has taken advantage of this moment in history to purge Palestinians from the occupied territories. Whether Israel deliberately allowed the massive security breach on October 7^th will never be settled, though serious evidence-based questions have been raised about just how much the Netanyahu government contributed to Israel’s shocking vulnerability on its southern border—an attack from an adjacent territory under Israeli military siege no less. Regardless, a war of self defense has provided just the cover Israel needs to protect its North American and critical European alliances. It is difficult to imagine that Israel could do anything in its prosecution of its military annexation—it already controls the occupied territories—to upset these alliances beyond an obligatory public rebuke.

Furthermore, the legacy of the Holocaust has sealed the West's unconditional bond with Israel in a way that no other genocide in history has done for its victims. Think of the Cambodians bombed by Americans during the war and then abandoned to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge as the Americans beat a rapid retreat from a deeply-fractured Southeast Asia in 1975. Upwards of two million Cambodians were killed in the Khmer Rouge genocide. The scenes of frantic evacuations from Saigon were repeated in Kabul 46 years later as if from the same script as America hastily took flight from Afghanistan after yet another failed war, this one spanning two decades.

The hypocrisy is deep. The U.S., the principal architect of the post-World War II world order, having liberated the survivors of Germany’s death camps in 1945, today actively collaborates in the ongoing genocide of another people with all the attendant horrors of bombing, shooting, torture, famine, disease and displacement. That, however, is the only future for the two million souls in Gaza, most of whom are noncombatants who would prefer not to be terrorized, uprooted, killed and maimed by either party in the war. They would simply like to be left alone to live ‘normal’ lives, what most of us in the middle to upper socioeconomic tiers of the West, especially in ocean-buffered North America, take as a given every single day.

In the 19^th century as America expanded westward, it, too, encountered resistance from the people living there. The North American Indians indigenous to the region were regarded essentially as terrorists in the minds of settlers and more importantly the U.S. government and its military. The wars over land ownership were savage—atrocities piled up by both sides, not unlike America’s wars in the 21^st century . . . and Europe’s two wars both fought within recent memory of the two catastrophic world wars of the 20^th century. Under the banner of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. forcibly took the land away from and practically annihilated the indigenous population. But it was a just cause for a chosen people who served the one true God. Such has been the case throughout human history with different casts of nations and gods.

Every day, the U.S. betrays its avowed principles of democracy, sovereignty, rule of law and human rights by not refusing to finance or provision Israel’s ‘over the top’ prosecution of the war. Occasionally, the U.S. cautions Israel that it's going too far. But Israel hasn't forgotten, nor has the rest of the world, that the U.S. does not have a stellar record of defending international humanitarian law—certainly not where American military action is concerned. There’s Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, Dresden, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. and that doesn’t include America’s pre-Geneva Convention wars in support of its own Manifest Destiny. At all times, the enemies of America have been demonized by government leaders and other warmongers in much the same way as the ‘Palestinian,’ the ‘Arab’ has been demonized by the Netanyahu government and its right wing, absolutist constituency. The first rule of wartime public relations: dehumanize your enemy. It makes the killing easier.

In my view, the U.S. should not only pause all military shipments to Israel indefinitely but also rethink the U.S.-Israel alliance. While the U.S. has committed more than its share of wartime abominations, that should not prevent it from sanctioning Israel for the way it is prosecuting its war. On the contrary, it is all the more incumbent on the U.S. as a global power that has the blood of innocent millions on its hands to atone for its crimes and to begin to establish credibility as a principled actor in international affairs. This could be the opportunity for the U.S. to confront its ghosts from the past and send a strong message to the rest of the world and its own people. The U.S. cannot forever be captive to its crimes of the past. Realpolitik does not have to be the modus operandi of international relations. If I am mistaken, then the human race and all the sub-races of the species are condemned to eternally repeat the cycles of violence and cruelty that have stolen so many innocent lives.

Pollyannish? To some, yes, but bear in mind that in northern North America, i.e., the U.S. and Canada, we are immigrants from many nations—nations who have hated and killed one another for centuries and in some cases still do—and we have to figure out how to live together without killing one another in this demographic melting pot or multicultural mosaic, whichever you prefer. We have enough violence and killing without spawning sectarian killings among our many tribes with our lists of historical grievances.

The world is a dangerous place, and President Washington, as he was leaving office he warned of the dangers that ‘entangling alliances’ with Europe’s warring nations represented for American sovereignty and democracy. We need to be reminded of his advice. Not only is America responsible for the way it wages war, but it is equally responsible where it gives unconditional support to the wars of its allies.

Israel may go ahead and attempt to annex the occupied territories, but the world community will be in a better position to contest the illegal annexation if the U.S. is on board. Ironically, and the irony is not lost on the world outside the U.S., America is at war with Russia over its Manifest Destiny-justification of its invasion of Ukraine yet endorses and even participates in Israel’s pursuit of its Manifest Destiny. The evidence of U.S. complicity: America’s automatic veto of any UN Security Council resolution deemed to be a threat by Israel, America’s refusal to consider the merits of any case before the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court that names Israel as a defendant, and the escalation of military aid to Israel post-October 7^th, paused—but only in part—but ready to resume at a moment’s notice.

While among Jews, many are asking ‘who are we,’ ‘who have we become’; we Americans should be asking ourselves the very same questions.

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*In this article, Israel and Israeli refers to the Government of Israel. Not all Israelis, not all Israeli Jews and not all North American Jews support the Netanyahu Government’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. Conflation of the views of a nation’s government and its people is inaccurate and unhelpful and tends to promote monolithic ethnic, racial and religious prejudices and hostility. Similarly, the U.S. refers to the Government of the U.S. and not the people as many Americans strongly oppose arming Israel with 2,000-pound bombs that kill buildings and the people in and near them, not discriminating between Hamas fighters and the elderly, the infirm and the newborn.