The Chevalier de la Barre, 2/22/2024: Appease the genociders and pass them more ammunition: Say it ain’t so, Joe

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza; what I saw wasn’t war, it was annihilation.”

— Dr. Irfan Galaria, writing in the Los Angeles Times

Late last week, as the world was learning of the discovery of the body of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in a car entoured by the bodies of five relatives, several meters from the lifeless bodies of the two Red Crescent paramedics dispatched, with Israeli approval, to rescue her, all apparently killed by Israeli shelling and bombing, and less than two weeks after the world heard the girl’s 15-year-old cousin pleading with a Red Crescent dispatcher to send help as an Israeli tank bore down on the car until the girl screamed amidst the rat-a-tat-tat of Israeli gunfire followed by a harrowing silence as well as the dispatcher’s subsequent conversation with 5-year-old Hind as she pleaded for three hours for help to come, an overwhelming majority of 77 United States Senators including all but two Democrats and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders voted to send Israel $14 million more worth of arms, effectively enabling a rogue state which has already killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians including at least 12,000 children — 5,000 since the International Court of Justice ordered it to stop on January 26 and not counting 6,000 buried under the rubble of buildings leveled by Israel — to keep on killing with effective impunity. (Indeed, the mainstream media, at least here in France, has devoted more air time over the past week to playing Where’s Navalny’s body? than it has over the past 130 days interrogating the fate of those 6,000 civilians. And the one public radio report on Israel’s assassination of Hind and her relatives practically made it sound like they were just caught amidst the tank fire, victims of a perpetrator-less tragedy rather than having been targeted as all the evidence suggests.) And Tuesday, just days after the Israeli army besieged, bombed the fourth floor of, forcibly evacuated, kidnapped many of the medical staff of, and cut electricity at the largest hospital in Southern Gaza thus causing between two and eight Intensive Care Unit patients to suffocate to death when their oxygen supply was cut off, and with one of six Palestinian children starving to death and 2.2 million people facing imminent famine according to the World Health Organization, Joe Biden once again vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have ordered an immediate cease-fire, stopped the carnage, and let substantive humanitarian aid in.

Now, before we go on, I want to ask you to just stop, close your eyes, make them the eyes of a 5-year-old child trapped in a car with the dead bodies of five relatives including her 15-year-old cousin, and imagine what it is like staring at the monstrous machine eyes of their assailant, a tank intent on killing you. I don’t know about you, but when I was five years old, my mother was walking me to Alvarado Elementary School in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, the face of authority was not a tank firing bullets at me and my family, it was Miss Stettner, in her high boots and with her long black hair and Karen Valentine dimples, drawing pictures and forming letters on a blackboard and opening my mind up as her smile held me mesmerized, and I still had 57 years of education and teacher crushes ahead of me. And unlike the Palestinian boy who turned up at a Gaza hospital recently with enough of his leg blown away that you could see the bones after Israel bombed the school with UNITED NATIONS written on it where his family had taken refuge thinking they’d be safe, killing the rest of his family as the boy recounted to the American plastic surgeon who tried to treat him (sterile instruments and instruments period are at a minimum at Gaza’s few remaining functional hospitals, with Israel blocking all but a trickle of deliveries of medical and food supplies; the doctor, interviewed on Democracy Now, said he witnessed hundreds of trucks lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafa border waiting to get in), when I was 14, I was insulting my own nose as Cyrano and wooing Naomi Woolf’s Roxanne in a drama class at Hoover Junior High School. When I was little more than 15, the age of Hind’s sister before Israel nipped her life out as it was budding, I was not screaming as faceless Jewish soldiers were firing real bullets at me determined to kill me until I could scream no more, I was offstage with the rest of the cast of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” crying over our imagined deaths at the hands of an imaginary Gestapo as the final scene — Otto Frank returning to the Secret Annex after the war to discover his daughter’s journal so that he could share its lessons with the world — played out, little imagining that 46 years later the roles would be reversed, with Jewish soldiers hunting down and killing in their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their mosques and their churches another Semitic people, thus crapping on Anne Frank’s most important legacy: Never again and putting to the test her most enduring precept: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.”

Even for those of us who have observed Israel’s arrogant comportment with the Palestinians subject to its rule and ongoing defiance of international law over the years, particularly in Gaza (where this is not the first time it has killed civilians) and to a lesser extent in the West Bank which like Gaza it has illegally occupied for 57 years, Israel’s vicious, merciless, genocidal acts — by the evidence, those doing the killing and those directing them do not see Palestinians, even children, as human beings — over the past four months, as it over-avenges Hamas’s equally (in degree and dehumanizing optic if not in scale) vicious and inhuman massacre of 1200 people and kidnapping of more than 200 surpasses what History has shown us Man is capable of doing to his fellow man, at least since 1945, as Israel continues to bank on and abuse the latitude accorded it in the United States and Europe and among many Jews because of the last Holocaust to perpetrate another genocide.

Because I have been watching this, watching Israel’s human rights abuses, watching the growth of an Apartheid state which treats people as lesser citizens and human beings because of their race, watching its bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon for 18 years, I have long been liberated from the blinders which have made so many Jews refuse to see — to believe — what Israel has become because it is a Jewish state or because they feel we need a Jewish State to protect us from the next Holocaust, refuse to believe the next genocide could be generated by an allegedly Jewish state. In this respect I am not disillusioned that a “Jewish” state could do this because I stopped believing in the intrinsic morality of such a state just because it lays claim to that appellation a long time ago.

I am, however, disillusioned by Joe Biden, who has singularly (well, not so singularly as all that; he had a little help from his secretary of state and those Democratic and Republican senators who voted to keep the bombs coming) destroyed any residue of the belief I once had in the ability and inkling of my country, globally, to be a force for good, a moral beacon. (There are too many good Americans, including Palestinian and Jewish Americans — as there are Israelis, including journalists, members of parliament, and conscientiously objecting soldiers, and of course Palestinians — trying to counter their president’s effective enabling of genocide for me not to believe in our individual power to still do good.)

For despite Anita Hill, despite his approval as a senator of George Bush’s illegal and bloody invasion of Iraq, until he continued sending arms to Israel in the face of this imminent and now in process genocide and blocking any efforts to stop this carnage, I had still believed that Joe Biden was essentially a decent man, a confirmed and sincere anti-racist who cared as much about Black and Brown (including Arab) lives as he does about white (Ukrainian) lives. And despite Iraq, despite Vietnam, despite Cambodia, despite Chili, despite Iran (where we instigated the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the 1950s), despite Kissinger and all the war crimes in which he implicated us, I still believed that my country could be a moral beacon for the world.

But my country’s conduct here, its continued and persistent effective fueling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in the face of Israel’s deliberate enfeebling of hospitals (another tool of genocide) and killing of medical workers and journalists, our continued blocking of efforts by the rest of the world to stop the killing and start substantially funneling in the humanitarian aid, our increasingly brazen cynicism — State Department spokesman Matt Miller telling reporters that the U.S. had confidence in an Israeli investigation of 5-year-old Hind’s killing; if I had a shekel for every time Israel announced it was investigating itself for killing civilians, including Palestinian-American journalists killed by Israeli snipers despite being clearly identified as Press and American defenders of Palestinian homes being leveled by Israeli tractors, and never followed through, I’d be able to found my own Jewish state — for me my country’s ongoing support of this rogue state despite its genocidal rampage is worse than a tragedy. It’s a moral abdication.

And it’s appeasement. It’s appeasement of a genocidal state which, unlike even Germany, which by setting up the model concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where Jews were allowed to create an orchestra and which the Red Cross was invited to tour (Israel, by contrast, is killing Red Crescent workers, 14 to date according to a spokesman for the organization, as well 100 UNRWA employees according to UNRWA), at least indicated it knew that what it was doing would be looked at as wrong by other nations and tried to gloss it over by presenting a counter-image, however false, Israel — which as opposed to conjuring Theresienstadt has resurrected the Warsaw Ghetto, as Masha Gessen has pointed out — doesn’t seem to care what the rest of the world thinks of its atrocities, a law upon itself, here enabled by the sheriff.

As to why that sheriff is allowing Israel to get away with it, if Joe Biden and those 77 senators thinks it’s because if they cut off Israel’s arms supplies and stopped blocking UN efforts to impose a cease-fire and let substantial humanitarian aid in they’d lose the Jewish vote, they haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on on American college campuses, and they must think very little of our own moral values, to believe that we would countenance a genocide because this time around the genociders happen to be wearing Mogen Davids on their tanks.

The Chevalier de la Barre, 2/13/2024: Non, Monsieur Finkielkraut, c’est votre argument qui est ‘absurd’ / No, Mr. Finkielkraut, it’s your argument supporting that Israel is not committing genocide which is “absurd”

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

Imagine that Fox News host Sean Hannity was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the presumably smartest people in the land decreeing that he was fit to be one of them, a person with a certain level of intelligence who could be counted on to exercise it responsibly and whose opinions were supported by a modicum of reason, learning, considered contemplation and reflection, and studied meditation.

Imagine that instead of being confined to the Trumpian universe of Fox “News,” Mr. Hannity was accorded a primetime, Saturday morning perch on National Public Radio on which to parade his particular reading of the facts.

Imagine that instead of being regarded as (or relegated to being) a Fox News host, he was typically described by everyone else in the mainstream media as an accredited Philosopher (by virtue of having a degree in the subject), the implication being that his arguments, whether one agreed with them or not and no matter how ludicrous, were at least supported by a minimum of scholarly (and rigorous) reason; of scientific method.

Add the local nuance of a child of genocide survivors who apparently doesn’t know how to recognize a genocide when he sees one, and you have Alain Finkielkraut, a member of the venerated Academy Francaise (where his predecessors include Anatole France, Paul Valery, and Jean Cocteau) who, on his France Culture public radio program “Repliques” Saturday, implicitly labeled findings by the International Court of Justice of the United Nations — the tribune charged with enforcing the 1948 Convention against Genocide (to which France, the U.S., and Israel are signatories) and the only court with the authority to do so — issued January 26 that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza “absurd” because Israel hands out flyers warning Gazans to get out of town (my wording) and posts warnings on the Internet (regularly put out of commission by Israel) before it bombs their homes to smithereens (my wording again), continuing to bomb or shell them along the routes and in the places it has designated as safe (ditto).

(Important: I am not comparing either Mr. Hannity’s personality nor his views on other subjects with Mr. Finkielkraut’s. Rather, and in considering the latter’s extreme view and ludicrous argument to support it on this particular subject, I am comparing the relative places extreme views unsupported by any logic or fairness are given in the mainstream American media landscape and the French one, at least in this case. If anything, I am disappointed that someone with the academic pedigree of Mr. Finkielkraut (and with whose perspective on other subjects, notably in a recent emission on Pierre Bonnard, I sometimes agree) — a respectable pedigree which cannot be matched by that of Mr. Hannity — has adopted such an extreme position based on such a spurious argument, on this issue. Mr. Finkielkraut’s previous equating of just about any and all criticism of Israel — including the non-violent Palestinian civil-society-lead movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel — with anti-Semitism is unfortunately not unique on either the France Culture or American mainstream media and political landscape.)

In other words, after implicitly granting himself the authority to supersede the only court mandated to decide whether acts Israel has committed in the process of killing more than 28,000 people over four months (since Hamas massacred 1200 people, the majority civilians, on October 7), the majority civilians including at least 11,500 children, constitute genocide, Mr. Finkielkraut not only dismisses the idea that one war crime, genocide, is taking place, he does so on the sole evidence of acts implemented (the flyers distributed by the Israeli army ordering evacuation) in the process of committing another war crime, forced displacement of a civilian population.

Why does this matter? Why do I care? Why don’t I just turn the radio off?

An internationally recognized tribune of judges from around the world, with principles, acting on judiciously prepared evidence presented by a country, South Africa, whose own principles derive in part from its frank confrontation with its own history of racial crimes, and after giving Israel an opportunity to defend itself, has declared that genocide is “plausibly” taking place now, and ordered the incriminated party to stop, now, an order other signatories to the Convention against Genocide with the power to do so are obligated to enforce (by, for example, cutting off arms shipments to Israel). We have the chance to do now what we claim we were not able to do before, in Europe as in Rwanda, and stop the genocide before it takes any more lives and plants any more seeds of future death, sickness, suffering, and irredeemable hate.

For this to happen, for the blood-letting and orphaning and amputating of children without anesthetic and hate-sowing and destruction and starvation to stop, for the famine to be headed off before it’s too late, citizens need to obligate their governments to act. (Hamas also needs to release the more than 100 remaining hostages, and to be brought to account for its mass murders of nearly 1200 people on October 7.) For that to happen, citizens need to be well-informed. This is largely not happening (or if you prefer, rarely happening, although lately more eye-witness testimony from Gaza seems to be filtering through) on France Culture, a public radio chain, where the court’s decision — where its declaration that genocide is plausibly taking place — continues to be downplayed, deformed, downgraded, distorted, and, now, denigrated.

Including, now, by public intellectuals. (Or to be precise — and not tarnish everyone with the same brush — at least one very prominent public intellectual, perhaps the most prominent public intellectual in France today.) The exact same class of people on whom France (and the world) has always been able to depend to lead it out of the moral abyss and away from political peril, with philosophers like Albert Camus risking their lives to sneak back into Occupied France with a false passport to edit an underground newspaper, Combat. With poets like Victor Hugo going into exile for 20 years so that they could continue to attack, in print, the “petit king,” Napoleon III, from abroad. With novelists and art critics like Emile Zola possibly being murdered because he defended Captain Dreyfus and excoriated the army brass which had railroaded this patriotic Jewish veteran into several years of imprisonment on Devil’s Island, falsely treating him as a traitor. And with the General, Charles de Gaulle, who was no slouch in the brain department, refusing France’s surrender in 1940 and leading its Resistance to genocidal fascism.

From this rich tradition (a legacy which also includes Voltaire, thanks to whom we know about this column’s namesake, the pre-Revolutionary 19-year-old whose tongue and arms were cut off before he was burned at the stake after refusing to take his cap off before and chanting impudent ditties at a passing parade of religious notables), we have devolved into a public intellectual who abuses his pulpit to cast doubt on legitimate, evidentiary supported charges of an ongoing genocide.

(I am not saying there are not other public intellectuals in France who are doing the inverse, rigorously examining the possibility of a genocide taking place in Gaza. There are, among them Didier Fassin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the College de France, who explored the question for the online journal AOC on October 31, concluding, “At a time when the majority of Western governments continue to talk about ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ without imposing any but rhetorical limits [on Israel] and without imagining a similar right for Palestinians, there is in effect an historic responsibility to prevent what could become the first genocide of the 21st century.” And Professor Fassin’s College de France colleagues Henry Laurens, Francois Heran, and Antoine Lilti, if they have not directly addressed the current situation, have provided vital historical, moral, and philosophical context in their recent courses. But these public intellectuals are not getting the attention on France Culture that Mr. Finkielkraut’s efforts to decredibilize the court’s findings with specious arguments are.)

Where do I, an American expatriate, get off criticizing a member of the Academy Francaise and a French public radio chain?

As a journalist, I have a stake in responsible journalism.

As a Jew, it ashames me when a prominent Jew, a presumed intellectual, goes on the air and uses his power, the power of the air-waves and the power of the word, to mask a genocide with such a specious, almost throw-away argument, which can effectively be resumed as suggesting that because Israel handed out flyers (as a tool to implement one war crime — my words and characterization, not Mr. Finkielkraut’s) it is not guilty of another war crime.

And as someone who has believed since he was 16 and read Camus’s “The Plague” for the first time in the French ideal that writers can be a liberating force, it is a grand deception — in both the American and French senses of that word — to see a French public intellectual using his prominent and influential pulpit and exploiting his facility with language (the surveillance of whose proper and correct usage is the Academy Francaise’s most fundamental purview) in a way that results (even if unintentionally) in providing intellectual cover for war crimes.

The Chevalier de la Barre, 2/9/2024: The sounds of silence

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

“As the dead rose to 100 in my family, to 15,000 children all across Gaza, to 30,000 civilians, as I saw the famine happen, I kept looking for evidence that our government actually cares about the lives of my family, and I saw none. I kept waiting for a cease-fire that Secretary Blinken has the ability to do and he refused to do it. I kept waiting for a U.N. cease-fire resolution to call for a ceasefire, which the U.S. continued to veto. I kept waiting for something and all I saw was the opposite. I saw our U.S. strategic Middle-Eastern military reserve being used to replenish the Israeli ammunitions for this genocide. I saw cruelly… the withdrawal of funding for the United Nations agency that was supplying humanitarian assistance to over two million people going through famine. I wrote… to Secretary Blinken because I wanted him to see Palestinians as human beings.”

— Dr. Tariq Haddad, Palestinian-American leader who refused to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, interviewed Monday on Democracy Now

In memory of Morris Hertzon and Edward Winer — and for the Jewish and Palestinian children of today and tomorrow. That we teach them the compassion which is our fundamental value — and legacy.

If you want to know what the worse anti-Semitic massacre of the 21st century sounds like, as the government of the United States defies an international court order to stop the genocide and impedes the efforts of the rest of the World to do so and save the dignity of humanity in the face of Israeli inhumanity, you need to listen to 15-year-old Layan Hamadeh pleading for help from a Red Crescent dispatcher as an Israeli tank bears down on her family’s car and its seven civilian occupants in Gaza City on Monday, January 29 (as broadcast February 2 on Democracy Now). You need to hear the compassionate emergency dispatcher — as a Jewish state abandons the value of compassion which is a core Jewish value — listening, helpless, as Layan’s call is interrupted by the girl’s screaming and the sound of Israeli soldiers shelling the car from the sanctuary of an armored tank before the line goes silent; Layan and five other members of her family would be killed by the Israeli tank fire. The Red Crescent is still searching for Layan’s relative Hind, a six-year-old girl, and two health workers.

Layan Hamadeh: “Hello?”

Red Crescent dispatcher: “Hello, dear?”

Layan Hamadeh: “They are shooting at us.”

Red Crescent dispatcher: “Hello?”

Layan Hamadeh: “They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me.”

Red Crescent dispatcher: “Are you hiding?”

Layan Hamadeh: “Yes, in the car. We’re next to the tank.”

Red Crescent dispatcher: “Are you inside the car?”

Layan Hamadeh: [screaming]

Red Crescent dispatcher: “Hello? Hello?”

After the rest of her family was killed, 6-year-old Hind “remained trapped in the car as emergency workers tried to reach her,” Democracy Now reported. Emergency dispatcher Rana al-Faqeh, who spent several hours on the phone with the girl trying to reassure her, recounted:

“It is a painful experience when you hear her voice, which was trembling, sad, and at the same time she had hope that someone would save her. But we were helpless. We felt that we were paralyzed, because we were thinking about the situation she was in. She was trapped inside a car with six bodies of martyrs, audio of tanks and aircraft firing. When the tank came close to her, she was screaming and crying. The worst minute was when she said the tank got closer, and then the phone cut. At this moment, I thought the tank climbed on the car. At this moment, I started to cry, and I was trying to be strong.”

This is what terrorism and its spiraling effects — on the victims and the helpless witnesses — sounds like.

This is the abysmal level to which the allegedly Jewish state of Israel has lowered civilization, debasing our religion and culture with it. A tank firing on children. When you see their faces in front of you, you cannot claim this is “collateral damage.”

This is how genocidal killers behave. Assassinating by tank fire, at close range, a family of six trapped in a car, whose sole crime is their race, is not an act of self-defense; there were no Hamas fighters in that car, like there were no Hamas fighters among the at least 11,500 children among the more than 28,000 Gazans Israel has killed since Hamas massacred 1200 Israeli and other foreign nationals, of all ages, on October 7, in the second-worse anti-Semitic massacre of this century. (The figures for those killed in Gaza are much higher if you include the more than 6,000 who remain buried beneath the rubble of buildings Israel has leveled, more than half of those in Gaza, without counting all those who will suffer and die premature deaths in the coming years because Israel has also cut off medical supplies and bombed hospitals, leaving doctors to amputate because they have no other choice, often without anesthetic, unable to treat those with chronic diseases and to choose who to save and who not to, because there are too many wounded and there is not enough medicine, and aggravating the chronic diseases of others.)

In a way this act, which echoes thousands like it perpetrated by Israel over the past four months and in four previous wars on Gaza (as well as one war perpetrated on Lebanon) prior to October 7, is more horrifying in its moral implications than would be a mere terrorist act, whose intention is to terrorize human beings, including by killing and torturing them. These people — the six members of this Palestinian family killed by Israel — like hundreds of other entire families and tens of thousands of other Palestinians over the past four months, were exterminated as if they were sub-humans. As if they were rats. (This isn’t wanton or even indiscriminate killing; in the way it is executed it is deliberate and targeted annihilation of what the perpetrator looks at as a pest.) Because when you kill an unarmed family of civilians like this in their car while looking them in the eyes from the relative safety of your tank, when you shoot the limbs off children (10 per day are losing one or both legs under Israeli fire) and wipe out whole families in their homes and cars, in hospitals and schools, in refugee centers, mosques, and churches, a prerequisite of this act of inhumanity is that the victims do not meet the threshold of being considered human. Of deserving compassion. Of meriting empathy. This is not accidental, it is policy, its lethal damage not collateral but intended, Israel’s defense minister having signaled to his troops before they marched off to war how little currency they should place on Palestinian lives — thus giving up his right to call himself a Jew, because compassion is a fundamental Jewish value — by publicly likening all Gaza residents to animals. And the obscenely named Monsieur Gallant did not mean domestic animals. When soldiers protected by tank armor deliberately fire at close range on a car carrying children, when they fire on naked men brandishing white flags, on schools, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, and churches, they not only are not seeing their victims as human, they aren’t even seeing them as cats or dogs, they are seeing them as rats, a nuisance, a pestilence to be exterminated, regardless of their gender, age, or profession.

The same analysis could and does apply to Hamas’s pitiless massacre of October 7. But the crucial difference here (I don’t mean in the gravity or degree of criminality, I mean in the way I am regarding or taking the two equally horrible massacres) — and this is not an excuse, as I have previously written with this massacre the murderers of Hamas christened themselves the Palestine chapter of D’esh; it is just to explain why I may seem to take the genocide being perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians more personally than the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Israelis — is that whereas the October 7 massacre was carried out by a criminal enterprise, the massacres that Israel has been committing in the four months since (as well as the killings it was committing before) are being perpetrated by a State, by a self-described Jewish state, including with weapons supplied by another State, an American State, and I as a Jew and an American need to reckon with this; I will leave Palestinians to reckon with the moral consequences of the Hamas massacre committed in their name, by their government (which the 11,500 children did not elect and cannot be held to account for) in Gaza. (As I will leave so-called reporters like the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill to reckon with the immoral relativity of victim comparison, when they contend, as Mr. Scahill did Wednesday on Democracy Now, that Hamas killed but one baby, and that that baby was shot while being cradled in its mother’s arms, as if this somehow makes Hamas less culpable and exonerates them from being baby-killers. Shame on you, Mr. Scahill, for this statement, for debasing the profession of journalism with your moral relativity, and for compromising legitimate opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. This is not about Israeli pain versus Palestinian pain. It is about calling out lack of compassion no matter which camp exercises it by wielding weapons of war against innocents.) We as Jews and Americans were supposed to be better than this (I don’t mean better than Palestinians, I mean better than compassion-less massacrerers and their enablers.) We Jews were — we are — a people which prizes compassion and empathy, even among our most religiously fundamentalist elements. (I’ll get to that.) We Americans were supposed to wield a moral compass for everybody else to follow. (You call this being historically naive or nationalistically arrogant; I call it being unremittingly idealist, another American quality; we are essentially good people.) And our leader, Joe Biden, was supposed to be an anti-racist. But when Mr. Biden does not react the same way to the killing of (brown) Palestinians by (white, Jewish) Israelis as he does to the killing of (white) Ukrainians (by the eternal Russian ogre), in the first case sending more bombs to the perpetrators of these savage acts enabling them to keep on killing when being a signatory to the Convention against Genocide obligates the United States to stop sending arms to Israel to enforce the International Court of Justice’s January 26 order to Israel that it prevent and punish genocide, as well as blocking efforts to impose the cease-fire necessary to head off a famine, the intentional provoking of which as Israel is doing by cutting off or restricting food, water, and fuel or simply attacking the few aid convoys it lets into Gaza constituting another war crime, and suspending funding to the lead agency trying to step into the breach and clean up our mess based on unproven Israeli charges against that agency, while in the second (Ukraine) sending defensive weapons to the victims, to this inhumanity and this indifference to inhumanity Mr. Biden has added the ugly patina of racism.

Since January 26, when the International Court of Justice of the United Nations ruled that South Africa’s claims that Israel was committing genocide on the people of Gaza are “plausible” and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish genocidal acts and to let substantive humanitarian aid in for the population of 2.3 million Israel has been besieging and deliberately starving (harkening back to feudal times) for four months, Israel has killed 3,000 more people according to the Gaza health ministry, including Layan Hamadeh and her family. Those are 3,000 deaths which might have been avoided if the United States had met its own obligations under international law and cut off arms supplies to Israel to enforce the ICJ’s ruling, given that Israel is intent on ignoring it. In recent days Israel has continued firing on residential areas, elementary schools, hospitals, and aid distribution sites. On Monday, Israel destroyed the Palestinian Red Crescent’s headquarters in Northern Gaza and attacked a U.N. aid convoy, the third time it has done so in the North of Gaza, according to an U.N.R.W.A. spokesperson.

I recently listened to the concluding lecture of Francois Heran’s College de France fall course on Colonialism and Immigration. Heran reiterated that the Colonialist notion of a manifest “right to conquest” was quickly dispatched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than 200 years ago, only to be replaced by the justification that the aim of Colonialism was not to conquer but to civilize supposedly savage peoples. My ears perked up when Heran reminded his audience that in their campaigns of conquest, the colonizers often resorted to tactics like extermination and forced starvation.

For as much as Israel for 75 years and particularly since 1967, when it illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza, has fit the definition of a colonizer (devolving in recent years, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and both Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, into an Apartheid state), by the rabid manner of its killing of civilians in its war on Gaza — for which the argument that “Israel has the right to defend itself” flies out the window when one understands that Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories started long before October 7, with Israel killing 4,000 Palestinians in four previous wars on Gaza, according to the United Nations, sniper-killing peaceful demonstrators protesting on the other side of its illegally constructed Gaza wall in 2019 including a 20-year-old female medic, and killing more than 200 Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank before October 7 this year and more than 360 since according to the U.N., including 94 children — by the rabid manner of its killing of Palestinians and in using starvation as a weapon of war Israel’s siege of Gaza resembles not so much recrudescent Colonialism as reincarnated Crusaderism.

So why aren’t we stopping it?

After all, we (or our ancestors) claim we didn’t stop the Holocaust because we didn’t know about it, but this time we do.

Well, we have the capability to know about it — depending on where we seek our information.

I know about it, because I listen to Democracy Now, which gives me access to many more sources (including sources I don’t agree with and say so, in print), such as al Jazeera and the testimony of witnesses and scholars, activists and experts, among them Israeli activists, journalists, Knesset members, war resisters, and activists, and Holocaust survivors and artists; because I have been monitoring and writing about Israel and Palestine for 45 years; because I have interviewed and written about artists in Gaza; because I have read widely and viewed films about the subject; because I studied with Fouad Ajami at Princeton during the fall of 1979, a pivotal period in the Middle East, and audited Henry Laurens’s course on the build up to the 1967 war last fall at the College de France in Paris; and because I have worked with and supported (full disclosure) the Palestinian civil society-led movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel, published articles supporting BDS and the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, including by BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti; and participated in BDS demonstrations in New York, as well as demonstrations against Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon in Paris.

If, however, my only source of information was public radio here in France (where the report recorded and shared above like most others of its nature are nowhere to be heard, or when they are heard, they are usually presented as author-less suffering with no human integer, as if created by a natural catastrophe and not human malfeasance), specifically middle-brow chain France Culture and to a lesser extent low-brow chain France Inter (they share the same correspondents, but France Inter tends to interview more guests with Palestinian, critical Israeli, or eye-witness perspectives), here’s what I might think (once again, I’m not trying to pick on the French mainstream media, by which I mean strictly public radio, this is where I live and this the public radio I have access to; it may be the same where you are, with both CNN and MSNBC apparently having dismissed journalists they considered were too critical of Israel):

Except for a vague notion that the Palestinians have a right to a State and that the Israelis are building a lot of colonies in the West Bank, I would think that the Israel-Palestine “conflict” began October 7, 2023.

I would think that the current war is not a war by Israel being conducted on Gaza, but a war between Israel and Hamas; never mind that most of Israel’s 27,500 victims to date are civilians, 70 percent women and children.

I would think that if you criticize Israel — not to mention if you advocate boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel — you are an anti-Semite. (Even if you are a Semite.)

I would think that anti-Semitism is exploding in France, because the self-appointed representative council of Jewish organizations in France, a longtime supporter of the extremist Netanyahu government, says it is, no doubt including in its calculations (see above) those who simply criticize Israel, claims rarely if ever challenged by France Culture.

I would think that the many brave students demonstrating for the rights of Palestinians and against Israeli genocide and apartheid on campuses across the United States (several of whom were recently sprayed by other students, at Columbia, with something called “skunk juice,” with at least six hospitalized), and against Israeli genocide and apartheid, including many Jewish students, aren’t doing so because they don’t like genocide and apartheid but because they are anti-Semites and support Hamas. I wouldn’t know that some of the organizations and many of the students doing the protesting are Jewish, and that at least one of these organizations, Jewish Voice for Peace, has been banned or at least suspended on Ivy League campuses like Columbia.

I would think that the Israeli army is the most ethical army in the world (actual quote from a guest on France Culture, left unchallenged by the host or the other guest, made November 19, after Israel had already killed 13,000 Gazans), which always calls up its victims and warns them before it bombs their homes to smithereens. (Ibid, except the qualitative of “smithereens.”)

I would think that the figures of the deaths inflicted by Israel on Gazans are not facts confirmed by the United Nations, they are claims made a radical Islamic organization, in other words the same people who brought you October 7, 2023, September 11, 2001, and January 7 and November 13, 2015 in France.

Unless — and this is a big unless, as this reporter has done yeoman’s work in trying to balance her employer’s otherwise transparently pro-Israel bias with her objective reports from Ramallah and the West Bank, including meaningful interviews with the Palestinians affected by the Occupant’s repression — unless I happened upon reports by Radio France’s erstwhile West Bank correspondent Alice Froussard, which offer the Palestinian perspective, I would think that Israeli army efforts, including lethal attacks involving invading and firing on refugee camps and destroying homes and targeting and killing individuals (including at point blank range in their hospital beds), to clamp down on opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank are ‘affrontations’ between two equal parties, as opposed to violent and lethal efforts to repress opposition to an illegal occupation.

I would think that Israeli army incursions into and attacks on worshippers in a mosque are not incursions, they also are ‘affrontations’. (Long gone the days when outraged then prime minister Jacques Chirac ordered armed Israeli soldiers who invaded a Jerusalem mosque he was visiting to “Get out of here,” in English.)

I would think that Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party is anti-Semitic, the sole ‘evidence’ for this ongoing insinuation from some France Culture journalists, which pre-dates October 7, being that France’s leading Left-wing party is not afraid to criticize Israel and defend and march for the sanctity of Palestinian lives.

I would think that what was actually a preliminary ruling by the leading international court, a court officially tasked with enforcing the Convention Against Genocide, that Israel is plausibly committing genocide and binding orders by that court for Israel to stop was not a ruling accompanied by an enforceable order but a mere “accusation” (an accusation which the party plausibly perpetrating the genocide finds “scandalous”).

I’ve been talking so far about the news programs (where, most recently, Gaza has been conspicuous by its almost complete absence, particularly when you compare this to coverage of Russians doing the same thing to Ukrainians as Israel is doing to Palestinians, only with a lot less magnitude). As a public radio lifer — I was weaned on NPR, PBS, and Pacifica by my three parents and I even used to love France Culture and France Inter, until the latter dumbed down and the former intellectual’d down, including by cutting its daily broadcast of College de France lectures — I also look to public affairs programs to offer an intelligent, balanced analysis and debate on issues I care about. Hoping — like Charlie Brown who keeps believing Lucy won’t lift the football at the last second even though experience teaches him otherwise — to find this on this subject on three of France Culture’s four public affairs programs the week-end following the International Court of Justice’s ruling (I stopped listening to the fourth one, Christine Okrent’s “Foreign Affairs,” when the host started presenting the Paris director of the American Jewish Committee — a lobbying organization whose avowed mission is to get American Jews to make ‘aliya’ to Israel — as an expert on the Middle East and on American Jewish sentiment towards Israel, and described all American campus protests of Israel’s actions, including by Jewish students, as being “pro-Hamas”), I found:

** No mention of the Court’s provisional genocide ruling and orders to Israel to cut it out on any of the programs.

** Academy Francaise (!) member Alain Finkielkraut, who regularly equates criticism of Israel and support of BDS with anti-Semitism, and who has yet to speak about the Israeli massacres of civilians, using the platform of his Saturday morning “Repliques” program not to condemn the Israeli genocide (as one might expect a child of Holocaust survivors to do), but to inveigh (for the umpteenth time) against (American) “woke-ism,” the latest shibboleth of French neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, supplanting “political correctness” (as in “You’re just saying that to be politically correct”) as the intellectually lazy way to dismiss your opponents’ legitimate concerns about historical or contemporary racial or gender injustice as being driven by ideology rather than fact-based conviction, a convenient dodge which gets you out of actually having to address their arguments on the merits. This time, Finky (as French journalists sometimes fondly refer to him; I’m not trying to be pejorative) added a new — and stupefyingly anti-intellectual for a member of the Academy Francaise (where his predecessors include Anatole France, Paul Valery, and Jean Cocteau) — wrinkle, in one fell-swoop dismissing entire American university departments and research fields, by claiming that Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Transgender Studies, and even something he called “Fat Studies,” rather than being driven by legitimate research criteria are all “grievance”-driven.

** France Culture’s longtime Sunday public affairs program, “Esprit Public,” whose purview normally includes international news and which has a battery of foreign affairs experts including on the Middle East to draw upon, notably Bernard Badi (his like many of my name spellings gleaned from radio listening may be fershluganah), completely ignoring this leading court’s ruling on a genocide which includes the killing of more than 11,000 children (with Gazan mothers giving birth on top of piles of rubble), instead devoting the entire hour to debating France’s declining birth rate and president Emmanuel Macron’s exhorting French women to have more babies.

** Marc Weitzmann’s Sunday afternoon emission “Signs of the Times” ignoring the great big “PLAUSIBLE CLAIMS THAT GENOCIDE IS BEING COMMITTED HERE” billboard put up by the International Court of Justice two days before the broadcast (perhaps not a surprise as the Court’s ruling puts the lie to a previous claim made on Weizmann’s program, on November 19, at which point Israel had killed more than 13,000 Palestinians, and mentioned above, that Israel’s army is the most ethical army in the world and phones people up before it bombs their homes), and not saying a word about the Court ruling or the war and the ongoing genocide, instead spending the whole program debating protests by some poets over other poets’ nomination of a writer who has written prefaces for books by other allegedly neo-reactionary writers as the godfather of the upcoming Springtime of Poets festival. (In case you haven’t noticed: One neo-reactionary hosted current events show, one neo-liberal, and no liberals, the only France Culture talk show hosted by someone nominally on the Left being focused on sociological questions and having made only one passing reference to Gaza since October 7.)

This radio silence — this silence by two men (Mssrs Finkielkraut and Weitzmann) who present as having a conscience on public issues, and on a third program which pretends to address the main international issues of the week but ignored the main historic court action of the century that week — doesn’t just reflect poor journalistic choices. It reveals an appalling lack of compassion — of conscience. Or to cite the father (after Victor Hugo) of the modern French public intellectual, J’ACCUSE. Je vous accuse d’avoir manqué de la compassion pour les victimes d’une genocide qui saute aux yeux, au moins devant les yeux des ceux et celles who have eyes to see. As this appalling lack of compassion appears to be driven, perversely, at least in Monsieur Finkielkraut’s case, by an otherwise laudable (and understandable) identification with Jewish concerns, culture, and historic pain (which, unfortunately, in their minds or at least Monsieur Finkielkraut’s mind seems to translate as an apparent get out of war crimes jail free card for Israel, since of course no criticism of Israel is legitimate and any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Semitism), and as they both have a commendable and appreciated fondness for Jewish-American writers (and a pride in historic Jewish culture, including American Jewish or my culture), I’d like to introduce Mssrs Finkielkraut and Weizmann to another Jewish-American novelist besides Phillip Roth, Mr. Finkielkraut’s “chou-chou”. Chaim Potok — Rabbi Chaim Potok to you, bub — may not be as neurotic as Phillip Roth, but he exudes and has poignantly depicted and vaunted a less dubious and more admirable (and, obviously, not exclusive to us!) Jewish (including American Hasidic Jewish) trait to which we should all aspire: Compassion.

I first read Potok’s popular best-seller “The Chosen” on a cross-country journey with my father, step-mother, and two younger brothers whose penultimate destination was Florida, and a visit with our maternal grandparents. I was 16 and, like my brothers, had never gotten the Jewish name-giving part of the ‘bris’ (circumcision being the medical part), our liberal parents leaving it to us to decide if we wanted one when we were older. Pouring, entranced, through Potok’s novel — about a friendship between a Conservative Jewish boy and a Hasidic boy in the Brooklyn of the 1950s — by campsite lantern-light as we coursed across America and headed towards my Papa Morris, I decided that I would like to have a Jewish name and wrote to Papa asking him if he could arrange it when we got to Miami Beach. Papa, being Papa (1970 Salesman of the Year for Schenley Liquors), convinced the younger rabbi of his congregation to get a Cliff Notes Bar-Mitzvah — I’d never had that either — thrown in to the bargain with the name-giving ceremony; instead of several years of Sunday school, all I needed to do was memorize a short Latinized version of the Hebrew prayer one had to recite to be Bar-Mitva’d and faster than you can say Alouicious Lowenstein I had my Jewish name: Netanel ben Yitzhak (Netanel, son of Yitzhak).

What “The Chosen” inspired in me was not religious fervor nor even so much a renewed pride in Jewish culture (the French don’t like to hear this, but American Jews view Judaism as not just a religion but a culture, voir an ethnicity; you can be an atheist and still be Jewish, and proud of it) but pride in a culture centered around not just the Book but books and learning in general, and study, and rigorous intellectual debate about verses and arguments provoked by the books. (It was also Papa who turned me on to my first adult novel, Herman Wouk’s “The City Boy,” nestled in his library overlooking the canal right next to Henny Youngman’s “I got a million of ’em!”) Never mind that for the protagonists of “The Chosen” — the two teenagers and their fathers, one a conservative (in the Jewish sense, which goes from Reform to Conservative to Orthodox to Hasidic to Meir Kahane) Jewish scholar and writer, the other an influential Hasidic rabbi — the books in question were the Torah and the Talmud, the passages heatedly debated by the rabbi, his son Danny, and Danny’s friend Reuven often involving obscure points of Halacha, or Jewish law, or what Rabbi X meant when he said Y, and what other texts might support or contradict that interpretation. This passionate investment in the primacy of books as intellectual stimuli, stores of knowledge, and guides for life, the joy of scholarship and being immersed for hours in books, and the vigorous discourse and debate they inspired had a resonance for me that went beyond biblical texts and the Word and applied to all words and books. Indeed, Danny’s passion and alacrity for learning naturally takes him beyond Jewish books and into seeking out and devouring whole tomes on general subjects like philosophy, science, history and mathematics, for which the other boy’s father, accidentally encountered in a public library, secretly offers him guidance in the form of reading tips.

Now, you might imagine that once the Hasidic rabbi inevitably discovers his son’s secret passion for secular learning, all hell would break loose. But, and as I was reminded when I recently re-read “The Chosen” for the first time in 45 years (after finding a copy in the free book exchange box of my Medieval French village with the all-night church bells; go figure), that his son — his scion, the boy being destined and groomed to succeed him as the ‘tzadik’ of his community — will be corrupted by non-religious learning is not the rabbi’s greatest fear. His main worry is that the boy’s hunger for learning and knowledge has been that of a machine, not accompanied by a concomitant understanding of the need to have compassion, essential for a tzadik if he is to lead and guide his community. It is to remedy this — in the hopes of provoking some feeling in his son — that the rabbi, since Danny was a tyke first exhibited this tendency, this apparent lack of compassion, has taken the drastic step of not speaking to his son outside of their formal study and debate of the religious texts. Deprived of any apparent compassion, or sentiment, from his father, the rabbi hopes, his son will developed some compassion of his own. So when the rabbi discovers the college acceptance letters for his son, the first step he takes is not to throw the letters away to thwart his son’s plans, but to, finally, explain to him — through the medium of Reuven, the other boy, who he asks to be present for the conversation (“Tell my son,” etc.) — that this is the reason he has not spoken to his son for years outside of their study sessions, as painful as this was: To try to spur some compassion in him. Faced with the fact that his son — his ‘chosen’ successor — has decided to reject his pre-destined place on the pulpit and to go out into the world, and knowing that he might well decline to succeed his father in the podium of the shul but he cannot evade his destiny to be a tzadik, what’s most important to the rabbi is not retaining his son or holding him back from integrating the world, but doing his best to make sure that he sends his boy out into the world with this compassion.

This is not just what it means to be a tzadik. This is what it should mean to be a Jew. (Again, I don’t claim that we have exclusivity on this quality.)

To have — and demonstrate — compassion for the Other.

(Or, to quote Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment,” “to be a mensch.”)

Including for the most Orthodox, or “extremist,” of Jews — like the Hasidic rabbi in “The Chosen.” (In the movie made of the book, a bearded Rod Steiger. Robbie Benson played Danny.) Choosing to belong to that extreme branch on the spectrum of our religion and culture doesn’t get you out of having to be compassionate. If anything, it obligates you to cultivate that quality.

This is why the supposedly Orthodox or fundamentalist Jews commanding Israel’s genocidal war — doing to another Semitic people what was done to their ancestors — are frauds. Not just frauds as Jews, but frauds in the Orthodox tradition they pretend to represent, whether when waging genocide in Gaza or stealing and destroying homes, burning olive trees, and killing people in the West Bank. They are not the just inheritors of this mantle. Not just the Jewish mantle but even the Orthodox or Hasidic mantle.

After Danny’s father reveals to his son, through his friend Reuven, the sacrifice he has made to try to instill in him this fundamental value to all Jews without which all his learning, all the books, is useless, even and especially for fundamentalist Jews, this value of compassion, Danny, Danny this machine-like aquisitor of knowledge, weeps.

When I think of this, when I think of the Abraham-and-Isaac like sacrifice this Hasidic rabbi, this father, makes (he may not kill his son on the altar, but he might have killed him with his silence), not just for his boy but for those who would follow and depend on his son when his son succeeds him, even if he leaves his formal religious surroundings to go out into the world, this sacrifice that a father makes to incite compassion in his son’s soul, and then I think of how this rabbi’s pretended descendants in Israel (many of those Colonists have Brooklyn accents) are blaspheming our religion by suppressing this value, conspicuous by its absence, in their acts, and are perverting their and our religion and our culture by doing to others what was done to us, of how thanks to these fraudulent Jews, the Palestinian English teachers they have killed will not be able to turn another child on to the power of books, the 15-year-old girls like Layan Hamadeh they have assassinated will not grow up to debate a passage in a book, when I think of how thanks to these profaners of our religion and culture 11,500 Palestinian children will never see another butterfly, I too weep.

Et j’accuse. Je vous accuse d’avoir trahi notre religion et notre heritage. I accuse you of betraying our religion and our heritage. Et vous, Joe Biden, je vous accuse de complicité dans ce genocide.

(Updated, 2/2/2024) The chevalier de la Barre, 2/1/2024: As Israel continues war on Gaza, flaunting Court order, Biden administration suspends funding to lead agency trying to protect and feed War’s victims

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

(See here for our previous piece, “The genocide this time: How did the victims become the perpetrators? Why are we enabling it.”)

“The day after the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, some states decide to defund UNRWA, collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time, and most likely violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

— Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories

“This is a death sentence for Palestinians in Gaza.”

— Dr. Thaer Ahmad, emergency room physician from Chicago who recently spent three weeks in Gaza volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, speaking on Democracy Now.

“The whole case of UNRWA was used by Israel to distract attention from the ICJ [preliminary ruling] which indicted Israel for plausible genocide. Instead of punishing Israel they took up this case where Israel is claiming that some workers of UNRWA have been engaged in military actions without any proof, without investigation, and then… 12 European countries and the United States of America and Canada and Japan cut off support to the only organization that is providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, that is the only bridge to humanitarian aid in Gaza. We are subject to collective punishment, Palestinians who are the victims of the Israeli aggression, of the possibility of a genocide, are subject to collective punishment by these governments, none of whom have condemned the Israeli [recent] attack on the hospital.”

— Dr. Mustapha Barghouti, physician, activist, and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, interviewed Wednesday on Democracy Now

“People are dying of hunger. The massacres — because there’s no other word for it — must be stopped. The hospital [here] is full of women and children. There is no justification for bombardments which result in hospitals full of women and children, extremely intense bombardments which hit hospitals. People are dying because there’s no medicine here to treat them. Humanitarian aid arrives in droplets. It’s a total violation of international law, the Israeli army prohibits this aid from arriving, humanitarian aid is blocked…. UNRWA is the sole actor which manages to bring food to hundreds of thousands of people in the North [of Gaza] . If you cut aid, tens of thousands of people in the North will die of hunger. At a moment when the [International] Court [of Justice] has ordered the prevention of genocide, you have one of the biggest actors of humanitarian aid who will be blocked.”

— Doctors without Borders official in charge of Palestine operations, speaking Wednesday night on French public radio chain France Inter, from a hospital in Gaza

You might think that with Israel having killed more than 26,000 Gazans in less than four months, the majority civilians including an estimated 11,000 children, and put most of the rest of the population of 2.3 million (whose well-being under international law it has the obligation as the occupying power to ensure) on the verge of famine by blockading all but droplets of food, water, medical supplies, fuel, communications, and electricity; the leading international tribune, the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, invoking the Convention against Genocide to which Israel is a signatory, having ordered Israel Friday to prevent and punish genocidal acts and let Humanitarian aid in; and Israel’s responding to the Court’s provisional ruling Friday by continuing to wage war on Gaza and blocking substantive Humanitarian aid from entering the enclave (in the first 15 days of January, Radio France reported this morning, Israel prevented 95 percent of U.N. aid trucks from reaching North Gaza), the United States would fulfill its own obligations as a signatory to the convention by speaking the only language the extremist Israeli government understands and cutting off military aid (which history shows works, Israeli PM Menachem Begin having pulled out of Lebanon in 1982 20 minutes after Ronald Reagan told him he’d cut off the spigot if he didn’t).

Instead, whereas nearly four months of Israel’s bombing, sniping, and shelling of hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, U.N. facilities, mosques, churches, homes, and Gazans fleeing to areas designated as “safe” by Israel, in the process killing journalists, medical workers, teachers, poets, elderly churchgoers, and U.N. workers and civilians sheltering in U.N. buildings (360 alone in 260 attacks on UNRWA facilities, UNRWA officials say) and sowing the seeds for more future suffering (10 Gazan children lose one or both legs every day, often amputated without anesthetics, and you can forget about post-natal care), plus Israel’s continuing its onslaught and blocking of substantive humanitarian aid after the Court’s provisional ruling have not been enough to incite the Biden administration to cut off the arms supply and stop blocking a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution which would allow Humanitarian aid to enter, it took only 24 hours for the U.S. to suspend its funding of the leading agency trying to step up where the U.S. has failed and protect and feed Gaza’s assieged civilian population, after Israel accused, without furnishing any proof — conveniently and in an obvious diversionary tactic, a day after the ICJ found that South Africa had made a “plausible” case for claims of genocide and effectively ordered Israel to stop — 12 of the 13,000 employees of the UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency which has been the lifeline to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1948 as well as the principal funder and operator of schools and other services, of taking part in Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1200 Israeli and other foreign nationals, the majority civilians.

Israel’s strategy is obvious: When you don’t have a defense on the merits, taint the witness, here the United Nations, whose documentation of Israel’s war on Gaza, together with statements by Israeli officials indicating genocidal intent (including the Israeli defense minister’s describing all Gaza residents as “animals” before the invasion began, a window into the soul of Israeli extremists — though not all Israelis, many of whom are resisting, denouncing, writing against, and refusing to serve in Israel’s war on Gaza, notably the courageous 18-year-old conscientious objector Tal Mitnick — if ever there was one), constituted the bulk of the evidence collected by South Africa in the case it brought before the International Court of Justice January 11 accusing Israel of violating articles of the Convention against Genocide and calling for the Court to take immediate measures to stop the genocide.

Israel tried to change the subject, and the Biden administration fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Or rather, cynically seconded it. (We all know this is about Joe Biden being afraid to criticize Israel, even in the face of obvious indications — now underlined by the Court’s provisional ruling — of an ongoing genocide, because of an outdated fear that he’ll lose Jewish votes. How little faith he has in our sense of righteousness! He’s already lost mine. How dare he assume that we would view this through a racial or if you prefer ethnic vector — that historical victims of genocide would not be on the side of contemporary victims of genocide?! Go Cornell West! A presidential candidate who’s not afraid to criticize Israel and has more faith in the collective Jewish conscience than Joe Biden.) Despite that the UNRWA immediately fired 9 of the 12 employees Israel accused of taking part in the October 7 massacre (between one and three of the others are reportedly dead), the U.S., followed by 12 other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Finland, Japan, Italy, and Germany, suspended aid to the organization which even before the war provided the lifeline to 50 percent of the Gaza population and which has housed and fed up to a million during the current war on Gaza. The suspension threatens UNRWA operations across the Occupied Territories, notably its schools.

(Germany’s decision to suspend funding to UNRWA is particularly stupefying, given its unserendipitous timing. On Saturday, the same day he was announcing the suspension of aid to the lead agency trying to protect and feed civilians in the face of Israel’s onslaught, the German chancellor, commemorating the Shoah, was promising a German audience “Never Again.” If you want to prevent another genocide, suspending aid to the agency leading efforts to protect and feed a population threatened by an ongoing genocide now is not the way to do it. But then, this is also the country where school appearances in Hamburg by an 87-year-old American survivor of both the concentration camps and the Allied fire-bombing of Hamburg were recently cancelled after she criticized the genocide this time.)

We’re not talking about an abstract debate here but a decision which will have dire consequences for the 2.3 million civilians in Gaza efforts to protect and feed whom have been lead by UNRWA as well as on UNRWA schools and other infrastructure in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank for which Palestinians in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967 already depended on the agency.

“This is a death sentence for Palestinians in Gaza,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago emergency room physician who just returned from spending three weeks in Gaza volunteering at the Al-Nasser Hospital, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on Monday. “All two million are dependent on what UNRWA does.” Even before the war, explained Dr. Ahmad, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and board member of MedGlobal, UNRWA was “a lifeline to the Palestinians in Gaza, [for] everything from shelter, schooling, water, health access points, [and] food distribution…. UNRWA did this tremendous job of delivering aid to [the] half of the population that was dependent on it. They were instrumental in being able to allow people to make sure that they didn’t have food insecurity issues, to make sure that the water that they were drinking was relatively clean, to make sure that kids could go to school and that there were shelters in place.

“During the war, it became one of the only places that people whose homes have been destroyed or whose cities and neighborhoods were told to evacuate, that they could go to an UNRWA shelter without being turned away. If you go to Gaza right now, like I was in Khan Younis — and I saw an UNRWA school that had been transformed into a shelter across the street from the hospital — what you saw is that it was packed with people, packed with families and children, people who were staying there who were depending on the staff of UNRWA to be able to provide their daily meals.

“And I just cannot believe that this sort of response came so quickly. It’s sort of sadistic, in a way, to punish the entire Palestinian population for what are serious allegations, but you’re going to punish two million people, and you’re doing it with the backdrop of bombs dropping over them. And you know that many people have fled and been displaced. And now to cut off this lifeline, I just find it unconscionable, and I cannot imagine that this is something that was taken so lightly. It’s such a superficial understanding of what UNRWA does, to be able to say, ‘We’re going to just cut funding,’ and not also recognize the implications that it has on all of the population in Gaza right now.”