Netanyahu's Christmas Gift to America
I hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful, loving, and peaceful time with family and friends. I spent some time with my wonderful wife and child but I could not get into the festive mood of the holiday. I could not shake the feeling of dread that the slaughter of innocents in Gaza has put over what is supposed to be a time of hope and renewal. As Christians we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the savior of the world, the son of God, the son of man, but I could not really feel good celebrating anything. The thought of more than ten thousand dead children, twenty thousand dead overall with seventy percent being women and children, definitely put a damper on my ability to get into a festive mood.
According to biblical accounts, Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem, now part of the west bank, the region nominatively assigned to the control of the Palestinian Authority, but in reality, controlled by Israel and increasingly taken over by Israeli settlements. Bethlehem itself was attacked by the IDF on Christmas day. Joseph had to take his very pregnant wife Mary there Bethlehem to answer a census decreed by Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. When they arrived the inns of the town were full so when Jesus was born, they laid him in a manger in a nearby stable. Herod, the king of Judea at the time heard the prophecy that the King of the Jews was born in Bethlehem. He feared for the rule of his dynasty and wanted to find the child. The wise men were sent to Bethlehem to find the child. They presented to child gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, kingly gifts for a child and they bowed down and worshipped him. Not wanting to betray the child, they avoided Herod and returned to their home by another route. An angel appeared to Joseph and told him of Herod’s plan to kill the infant Jesus and told him to escape into Egypt. This angered Herod and he ordered the deaths of all boys under the age of two.
This is the Nativity story that all Christians are familiar with. This is the story we are taught from the time we can remember but thanks to the State of Israel we have a new story to contemplate this Christmas, a new slaughter of the innocents where the former victims have become the perpetrators in one of the most barbaric acts in my lifetime.
The story of the Nativity is one of a Jew born in Palestine and his family reacting to the whims of the empire of Rome by first going to Bethlehem for the census and then fleeing the local authorities who wished to harm their newborn child and winding up in Egypt. The irony of the Zionists becoming the new local authority is not lost on me and they have the backing of the new Rome, The United States.
This slaughter by the Israelis didn’t start on October 8, 2023. It has been ongoing for seventy-five years. The original sin of the state of Israel is known to the Palestinians as the Nakba, in English the catastrophe. The Zionists violently expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and confiscated their lands, killing thousands. Some of those fleeing Zionist violence fled to other countries and were never allowed to return, the rest were impoverished and forced into smaller and smaller enclaves that were eventually ghettoized by the Israelis who now strictly control everything that goes on in these Palestinian areas. Those Palestinians who remained in the areas proclaimed the state of Israel were discriminated against as non-Jews and there are still over sixty laws in Israel that discriminate against non-Jewish citizens.
The list of atrocities committed by Israel is much more extensive than that of Hamas and began decades before Hamas was even formed. After the original sin of the Nakba the Israelis have continued their aggression against the Palestinian non-combatants. Israelis are currently bombing the same refugee camps in Khan Yunis and Raffa that they attacked in 1956, killing hundreds then, many shot in the back of the head, execution style. The execution of civilians is just one of many war crimes committed by Israel in their relatively short existence. Apartheid, collective punishment, depriving a civilian population of food, water and medicine, and during the latest excursion into Gaza, specifically targeting medical facilities, ambulances and reporters, are some of the other war crimes Israel has committed with impunity. The worst crime the Israelis have committed is the crime of genocide. The irony of pro-Israeli propaganda is that the aggressor, with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians on its hands has convinced a large portion of the American public that they are the victims and have gotten vocal and influential support from this part of the American populace.
One of the first actions the newly formed United Nations took in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, was the ratification of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Ostensibly, to prevent the tragedy that took ten million lives, including six million Jews, during the holocaust from ever happening again.
DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE IN THE CONVENTION: The current definition of Genocide is set out in Article II of the Genocide Convention: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group.
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Israel was guilty of all five conditions for the crime of genocide before the Hamas attack on October 7th and the Hamas attack was used as a pretext to kill more Palestinian civilians. What many people don’t understand is that according to the United Nations, you don’t have to kill millions of people to be guilty of the crime of genocide. In fact, if a country commits any one of the five actions listed in the Genocide Convention they are guilty of the crime of genocide.
The attack on Gaza has nothing to do with the Hamas attack. It is an attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza, another war crime. Hamas was, in part, created by Israel to split the Palestinians and sabotage the peace process and now it joins the list of organizations that Israel uses as an excuse to commit genocide and not to negotiate an equitable peace with the Palestinians. Before Hamas it was the PLO, before the PLO it was the fedayeen. The truth is, Israel doesn’t want peace with the Palestinians. It wants them gone and it wants to subsume all of Palestine into the State of Israel.
Israeli propaganda is strong in the US and it has produced a double standard that has been devastating to the Palestinians and allowed Israel to act with impunity in their genocide. Israel has avoided the appellation terrorist even though they have done more to deserve this name than the fedayeen, the PLO and Hamas combined. The State of Israel has its roots in terrorist groups like the Irgun. The first Likud Party Prime Minister, Menachem Begin was a founding member of the Irgun, the terrorist group that blew up the King David Hotel and committed other terrorist attacks against the British and Palestinian civilians. This is the history of the party of Benjamin Netanyahu. Much is made of the fact that the Hamas Charter denies the right of Israel to exist but many ignore the fact that the Likud platform also denies the right of the Palestinians to a country of their own.
The current attack on Gaza is a barbaric, intentional attack on Palestinian civilians and replicates the terrorism that has been ongoing since 1948. As a feeling person, I cannot get these Palestinian dead off my mind. The idea that the world said, “Never again,” to the brutal practice of genocide after WWII is sadly laughable in light of the events in Rwanda, Serbia and now Gaza, to name a few genocides that the world has allowed to happen.
This is Netanyahu’s Christmas gift to anyone able to see the situation in its proper context of a brutal occupier who has been the aggressor stealing Palestinian land since 1948 with the declaration that created the illegal entity now known as Israel and killing tens of thousands of Palestinians with impunity. This new slaughter of the innocents dwarfs the probably apocryphal biblical account and every dead Palestinian child haunts my every waking moment. In addition to the sadness created by the memory of every dead Palestinian child and adult Netanyahu has also gifted me with impotent rage at my own country who has provided the bombs and directed the genocide with drone surveillance over Gaza. The fact that our country will be forced to choose between someone who tried to overthrow the government and someone who has fully endorsed genocide is a national disgrace.
I have a return gift for the genocidal Prime Minister of Israel. When I became a vocal supporter the Palestinians about fifteen years ago there were not many Americans willing to condemn the actions of Israel. Sleep well, secure in the knowledge that the blood of innocents on your hands is turning the tide of American public opinion against the barbaric government of Israel and the US is slowly joining the rest of the world in seeing through the anti-Palestinian propaganda promulgated by Israel. It’s only a matter of time before Israel loses the support of its most important ally, the US. When this happens the corruption trials you face will be the least of your worries. You will be sitting in the dock at the International Criminal Court at the Hague being prosecuted for the many war crimes and genocide committed by Israel at your direction. Happy New Year Mister Prime Minister.