And Just Like That, 400 More Dead Gazans
The Depraved Terrorism of Benjamin Netanyahu
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I woke up this morning and they were gone. Just like that. 400 more Gazans obliterated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s war machines.
Americans woke up to the same thing, but barely blinked an eye.
Many believe that Gazans deserve it. Hamas, after all, is led by maniacs, too.
But I’d like you to think a little harder about this, so I’m going to create an extended analogy.
Imagine that you live in a very nice house across the street from a dilapidated apartment building. There are other nice houses next to you. The dilapidated house feels out of place. It’s surrounded by wealth and prosperity.
Most of the people in the dilapidated building go on with their lives unnoticed. You see some of them leave for work in the morning. Their kids play soccer in the gravel parking lot. The mail carrier delivers parcels to the building largely unscathed.
Aside from peeking out your picture window occasionally to be sure none of the building’s residents are keying your Tesla, you give them little thought.
Then, a building resident commits a horrible crime against your neighbor, who, like everyone else around you, also owns a very nice home.
In response to the crime, rather than hunt for the perpetrator, the police call in the National Guard, which blasts the building to smithereens with tank fire, killing most of the residents, including about a dozen children.
If this is something you can approve of, there is no need to read any further. We have nothing to say to each other.
If you think you’d be appalled, then know this: This is what has happened in Gaza, except that Gaza was in even worse shape than our downtrodden apartment building, and what is being done to its innocent civilians is considerably more horrific and on a much larger scale.
And it’s been happening for a lot longer than you might realize. The struggle in Gaza is nothing new.
Compare their world with our world
So, let’s take this analogy one step further. Let’s now say that Illinois residents are fed up with Chicago. Suburban residents, especially, are fed up with Chicago crime and carjackings, so the state erects fencing around what it calls a Red Zone.
This Red Zone conveniently matches the shape and size of the Gaza Strip (if you play with your image editor a bit), because the world is full of strange and not-so-wonderful coincidences.
The state militarizes the entire border of the Red Zone and largely cuts its population off from the rest of the state, blaming gang warfare and the gangs’ control of the streets.
In June 2007, following the military takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the Israeli authorities significantly intensified existing movement restrictions, virtually isolating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory, and the world. This land, sea and air blockade has significantly exacerbated previous restrictions, limiting the number and specified categories of people and goods allowed in and out through the Israeli-controlled crossings.
— Unicef
The state then severely restricts the use of Lake Michigan by Red Zone residents.
Israeli forces restrict access off the Gaza coast, currently only allowing fishermen to access 50% of the fishing waters allocated for this purpose under the Oslo Accords.
— Unicef
Electricity is diverted from Commonwealth Edison’s nuclear plants to the suburbs and outlying areas, leaving only a fraction of output for the Red Zone. Rolling blackouts are frequent. Eventually, there are eleven hours of blackouts every day.
At its current operating capacity, the Gaza Power Plant can only produce up to 80 megawatts (MW), supplemented by 120 MW purchased from Israel, meeting about 50% of the electricity demand in Gaza (400–450MW). In 2021, rolling power cuts averaged 11 hours per day.
— Unicef
The State of Illinois then issues special driver’s licenses to the residents of the Red Zone and sets up checkpoints at all the arterial highways and interstates leading into and out of the area.
The state doesn’t allow any of the Red Zone occupants to work outside of the Red Zone unless they muddle through a cumbersome and often humiliating application process with the state. Very few applications are approved.
Furthermore, Red Zone residents are not allowed to use any of the hospitals outside of the Red Zone without approval from the state. Approval rates are low for this, too.
So far in 2022, the Israeli authorities have approved only 64% of patients’ requests to exit Gaza mainly for specialized treatment in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by the time of the scheduled medical appointment. In previous years, patients have died while awaiting a response to their application.
— Unicef
Whenever Red Zoners travel outside of the Red Zone, they must produce their specially marked driver’s licenses on demand or be subject to imprisonment. Eventually, permission to leave the Red Zone is rescinded entirely for all its residents.
Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians remain under what amounts to a 15-year-old lockdown.
Relatives of people in the areas outside of the Red Zone see their homes seized or bulldozed. No questions asked. No board of inquiry or appeals board. One morning they’re making pancakes for their kids in their nice home in Evanston. The next day, the family is kicked out and their home is bulldozed by the state.
Last month, Israel demolished 39 Palestinian homes, structures and businesses in east Jerusalem, displacing over 50 people, according to the United Nations.
At least 20,000 Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem are now slated for demolition, watchdogs say.
(Israeli National Security Minister) Ben-Gvir is now pushing for the destruction of an apartment tower housing 100 people.
— PBS
Red Zone citizens who work outside of the zone are often harassed by the police on their way to and from work. They are subjected to random and frequent car searches. Hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints dot the suburban landscape that surrounds the Red Zone.
List of military checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by B’Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Red Zone children are not allowed to attend schools outside of the Red Zone. Instead, they attend poorly funded schools plagued by overcrowding and disrepair. Students wishing to attend universities outside the Red Zone are required to seek permission from the state. Permission is rarely granted.
The inability of university and post-graduate level students to travel to pursue academic studies in specialized fields is stifling the intellectual advancement of young adults in Gaza. Between July and September 2008, only 70 students managed to exit Gaza via Erez while hundreds more remained trapped owing to a newly instated diplomatic escort requirement mandated by Israeli authorities.
— OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
Red Zone citizens, including children, are often killed during intermittent raids by the state and National Guard. The state of Illinois claims the raids are a response to increased gang activity in public schools.
(2009): According to the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE), 164 students and 12 teachers from its schools were killed during the Israeli military offensive; 98 of the students killed were from north Gaza. A further 454 students and 5 teachers were injured. A total of 86 children and 3 teachers who attend UNRWA schools were killed, and a further 402 students and 14 teachers were injured. Schoolchildren, thousands of whom lost family members and/or their homes, are still suffering from trauma and anxiety and are in need of psycho-social support and recreational play activities.
— OCHA
Those who are maimed in attacks get little care because the zone’s few remaining hospitals have been reduced to field hospitals that triage only the most serious injuries. This eliminates the kinds of health care other Americans are used to. Diabetics and others with chronic diseases and health issues receive no care.
Before the onset of the Israel–Hamas conflict in early October, 2023, health-care systems in Gaza were already teetering on the brink, with only 35 hospitals operating at full capacity and a total of 3412 beds catering to a population exceeding 2 million people…
… Existing triage criteria in emergency departments in Gaza, which give precedence to war injuries over chronic conditions and non-emergency cases, will further hinder patients with chronic illnesses from accessing vital medical care.
If Red Zone residents are suspected of a violent crime, they are frequently shot by police.
(2016): In a memorandum sent to the Israeli authorities on 14 September, the organization has detailed 20 cases of apparently unlawful killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces seeking clarification about the status of investigations. In at least 15 of the cases, Palestinians were deliberately shot dead, despite posing no imminent threat to life, in what appear to be extrajudicial executions.
Other times, the state simply sends in the National Guard on a killing spree, sometimes in response to a Red Zone incident, sometimes not. In response, Red Zone Residents begin launching crude homemade missiles into the suburbs. They generally fall harmlessly to the ground or are shot down.
Years turn into decades, during which time the state of Illinois has declared people who live in the Red Zone a unique breed of people that it calls Red Zoners. Their rights are further reduced. The rest of the United States has agreed that no Red Zoner can move to any other state. This locks the blockade into formal law.
Red Zone residents live, in effect, in an open prison camp without having committed any crime. But most Americans support this because some people from the Red Zone have been violently agitating for change.
Car bombs begin to hit the wealthy suburbs. Flash mobs from the Red Zone smash affluent stores and steal their merchandise.
Suicide bombers target the one small wealthy strip along Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive that wasn’t included in the original Red Zone boundaries.
American opinion turns violently negative against all Red Zoners.
Similar to the Nazi German policy of a multitude of revenge killings for every Red Zone killing, whenever there is a casualty in the wealthy suburbs at the hands of a Red Zoner, the state responds tenfold.
December 2008 — Israel launches a 22-day military offensive in Gaza after rockets were fired at the southern Israeli town of Sderot. About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed before a ceasefire is agreed upon.
November 2012 — Israel kills Hamas’s military chief of staff, Ahmad Jabari, followed by eight days of Israeli air raids on Palestine.
July-August 2014 — The kidnap and killing of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas leads to a seven-week war in which more than 2,100 Palestinians are killed in Gaza along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
March 2018 — Palestinian protests begin at Gaza’s fenced border with Israel and Israeli troops open fire to keep them back. More than 170 Palestinians killed in several months of protests, prompting fighting between Hamas and Israeli forces.
Suspected Red Zone criminals aren’t tried by civilian courts, but instead by a military tribunal, which doesn’t have the constitutional protections other American jurisdictions have.
Within two decades, the Red Zone’s water becomes undrinkable, mostly because there are no civil engineers around to maintain the public works infrastructure.
78% of piped water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.
— Unicef
None of the nation’s prosperous companies have a significant presence in the Red Zone. They want nothing to do with the place. Unemployment in the Red Zone reaches between 40% and 66%, depending on who you talk to.
11% of Gazan households were female-headed prior to the war, with nearly 46,000 women shouldering the responsibilities of their households’ livelihood. This figure is expected to increase far more than during previous escalations — with this one being undoubtedly the deadliest — exacerbating women’s conditions in an already fragile system with limited resources. Indeed, their unemployment rate stood already at 66% before the war, vastly exceeding the male unemployment rate of 40% and all other female unemployment rates in the Arab region.
— OCHA
Radicals begin to gain ascendency within the Red Zone as the restive population agitates for resistance.
All that’s bad enough, but then a crazy, Trump-like figure is elected Illinois governor a few decades after the Red Zone’s creation. By this point, the Red Zone is a hothouse of rebellion. Young teenagers, who’ve known only poverty and rage, stage more raids into the suburbs. The state hits back with a vengeance every time.
The crazy governor hatches a plan to foment more violence by encouraging gang leaders and local citizens to coalesce around one gang.
Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued (to Hamas). For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.
Then, when he learns of a violent plot to stage a massive assault on the suburbs by the gang he’s encouraged, he does nothing. He has been given specific targets that the gang intends to attack, but he still does nothing.
Israel Knew Hamas's Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago. A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational.
Why? Because, many say, he wants them to attack. It’s the classic false flag operation.
So they do.
More than a thousand suburbanites die in a massive raid impossible to plan without the knowledge of state authorities. This gives the governor, whose numbers are sagging in the polls and who had previously been indicted on federal racketeering charges, public support to send National Guard F-22s into the Red Zone.
Netanyahu is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate scandals involving powerful media moguls and wealthy associates.
— AP
The F-22s pummel the Red Zone, leveling just about every residential building, which adds to an already bleak homelessness problem.
(2015): “You cannot imagine life in a school with about 100 other families,” said Kloob, who depends on United Nations aid to survive. “The only available solution for my family is staying at the school. We have to stand in a line and wait our turn to get food, water or even to go to the bathroom.”
Eight months after the war’s end, Kloob is among 100,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who are still homeless, the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA) said in a report this month.
Air strikes into the Red Zone have already become commonplace. But every time public sympathy for Red Zoners emerges, the gangs that control the zone stage attacks in the wealthy suburbs.
The violence becomes an endless loop.
If you consider this scenario too ridiculous for Chicago and America, then the question becomes, “Why is it not also ridiculous for the residents of the Gaza Strip?”
The question of support for Israel
Demanding an end to Netanyahu’s endless attacks is neither anti-Semitic nor a vote for Hamas. Nor is it a vote against Israel or its right to exist.
Under no conditions should any level-headed human encourage Hamas. They, too, are the worst kind of people. There is no excuse for those who profess to support Palestinians to also support the actions of Hamas.
We can call out Hamas terrorism and still support Palestinians.
So this is not about Israel’s right to exist or a complaint, of any kind, about Judaism. One of the organizations I quote is B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, a Jerusalem-based non-profit organization. Are they anti-Semitic for saying the following?
The essence of the apartheid regime in place between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is to promote and perpetuate the supremacy of one group over another. B’Tselem works to change this reality, recognizing that this is the only way to realize a future in which human rights, liberty and equality are guaranteed to all human beings living here, Palestinians and Jews alike.
This is all about Netanyahu and his fellow right-wingers in his political party Likud, which has been warping Israel since the days of Menahem Begin.
Netanyahu is a bigger anti-Semite than any of the most hardened of his Palestinian foes. He has turned the world against Israel.
Netanyahu’s professed goal has been the destruction of Hamas. He reiterated this goal today when explaining his decision, such as it was, to slaughter more Gazans in an attack designed, in theory, to hunt down more Hamas leaders. He killed 400 Gazan civilians to take out two Hamas dudes.
During the first ceasefire designed for hostage exchanges, a polling service snuck into the Gaza Strip to see how that’s going. Palestinians answering the poll overwhelmingly approved of Hamas.1
This is what happens in war. It doesn’t matter what your government looks like when you’re in a war for survival. Hamas is looked upon as the only entity that can be turned to when faced with Netanyahu’s war machine.
But isn’t it strange? Netanyahu says he wants to destroy Hamas, even though evidence is pouring in suggesting that he propped up Hamas, partly by encouraging financial support from Qatar.2
That’s a weird way to destroy an organization.
Like all right-wingers, Netanyahu is trying to deflect from his shortcomings and his legal problems. He’s trying to deflect world opinion from his neo-fascist tendencies.
And yet… Netanyahu has achieved exactly the opposite of what he claims he wants. Netanyahu has only succeeded in turning world opinion against Israel. In doing so, he’s proven himself to be the world’s most dangerous anti-Semite.
He’s turned Hamas, an ugly, decadent, vicious terrorist group, into a folk hero of sorts among a large faction of people (many of whom, especially those in the U.S., should know better). That’s quite a trick.
He doesn’t care. Because his and Likud’s ultimate goal isn’t the destruction of Hamas. It’s the destruction of the Palestinian people. It’s obvious that he believes that if the world must hate Israel for that to happen, so be it.
The greatest way Americans can support Jews and Judaism is by calling for the removal of Judaism’s biggest enemy: Benjamin Netanyahu and his vicious war dogs.
Thanks for reading!
Notes
Programming note/Correction
Yesterday I posted a brief spiel on AI and announced a group promo on StoryOrigin I’d be running called The NO AI Kindle Unlimited Pledge.
So, of course, the stock image I grabbed from Adobe Stock had a misspelling. It misspelled Artificial Intelligence as Airtificial Intelligence. I pay $30 per month for this?
This is a drag because it’s the kind of thing that is easy for me to miss because of my vision issues, which are currently under review by my crack ophthalmology team here in Atlanta.
Luckily, nobody made fun of me if they saw it. Another reason to love my readers! :-)
Parts of this essay were written before I cancelled my NY Times subscription and contained shared, non-payall links. I’m not sure the Times would publish these articles today, although the newsletters I get do sometimes tend to suggest some regret over their sanewashing. I may resubscribe if better offers keep rolling in, so don’t yell at me if I do. Well, you can, but I’ll just delete the comment!
Footnotes
“Press Release: Public Opinion Poll No (90) | PCPSR.” 2023. Pcpsr.org. 2023. https://pcpsr.org/en/node/961?source=post_page-----781a6618bb93---------------------------------------.
Mazzetti, Mark, and Ronen Bergman. 2023. “How Israel Secretly Propped up Hamas.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. December 10, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.Gk0.lm4w.-8Rv_IPnXtbY&smid=url-share&source=post_page-----781a6618bb93---------------------------------------.
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Charles, using an American city like Chicago as an analogy to explain Hamas, Palestine, and Netanyahu to US citizens is brilliant.
I knew very little about the history of Palestine when the war started. I have since educated myself so I can better understand how Hamas was created. Because, like you said, Netanyahu helped create this terrorist organization. Trump has been trying to do the same thing here for the last decade with groups like the Proud Boys.
Thanks for such an outstanding explanation! I wish every American would read this.
Your analogy is bizarrely devoid of all of the realities that Hamas is responsible for which renders it abjectly specious. So yes - as laid out - no decent person would sanction or approve of the antagonist you describe. But if you introduce a fanatical Islamist cult that's taken its own population hostage, revels in all their death (indeed does everything it can to maximize their death as the "national guard" strives to inflict as few civilian casualties as possible) - and is presently holding people hostage (many of whom it has already raped and murdered) and delights in the rhetoric of extermination and genocide and holy war... once you take all that on board then yes - the actions of the "national guard" become quite reasonable and most reasonable people agree that they're an unfortunate (indeed tragic) option in a list of terrible options.
If you want to be taken seriously by people who care about this conflict and actually give a shit about both sides (like, me, for example) you can't write a piece that looks like it was written by Hamas' propaganda machinery (or the Kremlin's?) and insist that the people who disagree with you are in favor of wanton murder when you've stripped away all the facts that make this conflict what it is.
Unless you're a paid shill you probably hope for a solution where everyone stops dying (right?) so - please reword this taking everything I said into account and show me what rational, reasonable, sane solution you can propose that makes it unnecessary for the IDF to resume their shelling given that the hostages are still not home and Hamas still has a firm grip on the Gazan Palestinians who are their prisoners.