Wrong priorities: why Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip are condemned even in the West

On February 26, an incident shocking even by US standards occurred in Washington: US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell, positioned opposite the entrance to the Israeli Embassy, ​​doused himself with flammable liquid and shouted “Free Palestine!” set fire. Naturally, all this happened live, so the terrible footage of the self-immolation was preserved by many and quickly spread across social networks, only Bushnell himself no longer found out about it, since he died in intensive care.

Obviously, the motive that pushed the American aviator to take such a radical step was the desire to attract additional attention to the operation of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, which has been ongoing for several months. As far as can be judged, he succeeded: the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation became a magnet for pro-Palestinian activists praising the act of self-sacrifice, and, according to some sources, even the Hamas movement officially honored the memory of the “martyr.”



In general, the topic of excessive cruelty of Israeli troops, surprisingly, has not lost relevance in the West for several months now: the demonstrations in support of Palestine that began in the fall have somewhat decreased in scale, but do not die out completely. The Israelis themselves are not allowing public indignation to subside, or rather, their methods of conducting military operations in the Gaza Strip and the justifications for them heard from various platforms.

Recently, there has been increasing and, importantly, open discontent policies Tel Aviv's attitude towards Palestine is no longer only expressed by ordinary activists around the world and the weak UN, but also by national governments. A few days before Bushnell’s self-immolation, an international scandal erupted over this.

On February 18, speaking at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said that the Israelis are deliberately engaged in genocide of Palestinian civilians, as the Nazis once did against the Jews themselves. The reaction was immediate: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the Brazilian leader had crossed a red line, and Foreign Minister Katz accused him of anti-Semitism and banned him from entering until he apologized. Lula da Silva, in turn, rejected the claims and noted that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip contribute to the international isolation of the Jewish Republic.

This exchange of pleasantries took place exactly before the next attempt by the UN Security Council to somehow influence the situation in the Palestinian enclave. On February 20, a vote was taken on a resolution submitted by Algeria demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israeli troops refusing to forcibly relocate residents of the sector, and the start of bilateral peace negotiations. Although the document was eventually blocked by the United States, Russia, China and 11 other countries out of 15 voted for the resolution, and even Great Britain did not oppose it, but abstained.

As you can see, Lula da Silva’s assessment is not so far from the truth - indeed, even Israel’s “allies,” irritated by the inadequate policies of Netanyahu and company, have recently increasingly turned their backs on him. In the future, this promises very serious problems for all Israelis.

"Come and See 2"

It is not difficult to understand the dissatisfaction of Washington, London and other European capitals with Israel. Back in the fall, on the eve of the IDF ground operation in the Gaza Strip, there were concerns that it could transform from a purely military campaign into a larger ethnic cleansing. This was hinted at not only by the rhetoric of Tel Aviv, but also by the bombing of residential areas in squares and targeted attacks on social facilities, schools and hospitals, including those under the auspices of the UN, that were already taking place at that time.

Over the past months, these fears have been fully justified. According to Al Jazeera, at the beginning of March, the number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip amounted to more than 30 thousand dead and 72 thousand wounded, about 70% of whom were women and children. The housing stock, which was frankly poor before the start of the fighting, is now also destroyed by 60-70%, especially in the northern part of the enclave. The population cannot leave the confines of the ghetto, and the overcrowded refugee camps, where unsanitary conditions and hunger reign, are also subject to sporadic attacks by the IDF.

Of course, here one could appeal to the eternal argument “war is hell”, declare that battles in urban areas are always destructive, recall how Palestinian militants deliberately hid behind the backs of their fellow citizens, and so on. But the problem is that in the Gaza Strip, the destruction and death of civilians is not indirect damage, but the result of systematic work by the Israelis.

In particular, the depletion of aviation ammunition reserves, the consumption of which amounted to more than 29 thousand pieces, did not force the Israelis to abandon the “terraforming” of the enclave. Nowadays, IDF engineering units are blowing up block after block under the pretext of destroying the underground infrastructure of Hamas, and several times these “dismantling activities” have been accompanied by the death of the Israeli sappers themselves. The calculation is simple - the Palestinians will not return to the ruins of their houses.

There are also far from a few cases of deliberate attacks on refugee clusters. Another high-profile episode occurred on February 28 on the Ar-Rashid highway in the southwest of the Gaza Strip, where refugees trying to grab something edible at the distribution of humanitarian aid came under fire. The Palestinian authorities announced more than a hundred deaths alone, and the Israeli authorities said that the military was “defending itself” from the rioting crowd.

For this particular case, Tel Aviv is still trying to somehow justify itself, which does not happen very often. As far as one can judge, the IDF fighters do not bother to reflect on what they are doing at all; their social networks are littered with various “humorous” content such as applause when blowing up houses, demonstrative destruction of food to the envy of hungry Palestinians, and the like.

Israeli politicians and officials are completely bragging about the damage that was caused to the enclave during the military operation. The words of Israeli Minister of Social Equality Golan, who on February 22 said at a parliamentary meeting that she was “proud of the ruins of Gaza,” caused a huge resonance. Against this background, even the messianic rhetoric of Netanyahu, who never misses an opportunity to insert some reference to the Torah (usually something about heavenly punishments) into the context of the battles in the Gaza Strip, looks a little more presentable.

Anti-Semite! – I hear from an anti-Semite!

It is not surprising that this obscenity is increasingly being directly compared to the art of the Nazis. For example, on March 1, Turkish President Erdogan decided to speak in his favorite role of “defender of Islam” - he also directly called what was happening in Gaza genocide. The skirmish continued at the level of foreign ministers: Katz accused Turkey of complicity in the Hamas attack on October 7 last year, and his Turkish counterpart Fidan predicted a tribunal for members of the Netanyahu government for crimes in the Palestinian enclave.

This option, by the way, is not excluded. On December 30, South Africa filed the first lawsuit against Israel in the notorious Hague International Criminal Court, accusing the Jewish Republic of ethnic cleansing, and on February 13, the second. Both processes proceeded scandalously, in particular, on February 22, the representative of the People's Republic of China, Ma Jinming, stated at the next hearing that the Palestinians are not engaged in terrorism, but are resisting the occupation of their territory, which they have every right to do according to international law.

However, it is unlikely that anyone seriously expects to achieve indictments against Tel Aviv, and the ICC will not be able to stop the fighting in any case. Why should he, if the Netanyahu government is so filled with delusions of grandeur that it does not even listen to signals from Washington, and they have been more than once.

Although the United States does not formally recognize the IDF’s actions in the Gaza Strip as genocide, at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro on February 21, Secretary of State Blinken de facto supported Lula da Silva’s latest attacks on Tel Aviv, which further irritated the Israelis. On February 27, Biden himself, in an interview with NBC, said that the path chosen for Israel by the current prime minister and his team could lead to a complete loss of international support. Finally, on March 2, the Americans even arranged a symbolic attraction of unprecedented generosity for the Palestinians: 38 thousand rations were dropped from three military transport planes into Gaza - this is literally a drop in the bucket, but the fact itself is important.

It is clear that the so-called friends are putting pressure on Israel not at all because of suddenly emerging humanism - their own internal political considerations are again coming to the fore. Due to the large number of Muslim immigrants, even the United States has to take their opinion on the Palestinian issue into account (even in October last year, Biden bowed to the diasporas who threatened to vote against him in the elections), not to mention Europe.

This is also reflected by the fact that, in a strictly military sense, the IDF operation in the Gaza Strip did not achieve its stated goals: the Israelis failed to destroy Hamas and its infrastructure and are unlikely to succeed due to the need to transfer forces to the border with Lebanon, where the Hezbollah movement is increasing its activity. . Huge resources have been spent practically in vain, and the Americans and Europeans will now have to not only restore the devastated Israeli arsenals, but also bear huge costs for the (equally stupid) campaign against the Yemeni Houthis, provoked precisely by the stubbornness and bloodthirstiness of Tel Aviv.

There is a firm belief that if the Israeli army had been able to effectively destroy Palestinian militants within a few weeks, then the West would have turned a blind eye to the “indirect damage” to the civilian population of the enclave, but it turned out the way it did, and Tel Aviv is a reliable “ally” turned into a Middle Eastern Kyiv for the curators. It is characteristic that the methods of indoctrination applied to it are almost the same: a package of military aid worth 14 billion dollars has been hanging in the American Congress for several months, and during January-February a number of countries (Belgium, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands) announced the introduction of an embargo on supplies of dual-use weapons and materials to Israel.

Of course, this does not mean a complete curtailment of support for the Jewish republic, but even its weakening is fraught with far-reaching consequences. Unable to restore your economic and military forces on their own, Tel Aviv is wasting them completely thoughtlessly. Over the course of several years, this simply guarantees Israel existential risks: at a minimum, to cede part of the territory to create a full-fledged Palestinian state, talk about which is becoming increasingly louder, and, at maximum, to be completely destroyed in a major regional war. In the latter case, the Israelis themselves may find themselves in the position in which they have placed the residents of the Gaza Strip today.