Adam Johnson

ADAM JOHNSON—A ceasefire would not help the residents of Gaza? Which residents? The tens of thousands of dead residents, or the over 1 million former residents who are now refugees? If it were possible to conduct a snap poll of those living in Gaza right now, one wonders what percentage of respondents would agree with Sen. Duckworth’s assessment that a ceasefire is bad for them. But, alas, our politicians know best.

The bombing-Palestinians-for-their-own-good line is one frequently used by Israeli officials themselves. Israel’s UK ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely, for instance, recently told Sky News that “the Hamas regime is bad for Palestinians and Israelis.”

ADAM JOHNSON—All of these nuances and qualifications are lost. Instead, the viewer is fed only panic-inducing talking points of an axiomatically expansionist and sinister Chinese threat and a brave US empire that simply needs more money to keep up. This kettle logic, inherent in all military propaganda, is central to every single talking point O’Donnell gets across: The US military is simultaneously all-seeing and all-powerful but also woefully underfunded and in urgent need of hundreds of billions more dollars.  

EDITOR—Happy to see that someone has taken the time to debunk this transparent piece of sociopathic hypocrisy. The way this pro-war-crime argument poses as something more benign is by sidestepping the fact of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment altogether, framing Israel’s campaign as a “war” against Hamas. Indeed, if this was a “war” in any meaningful sense—which is to say, a generally symmetrical battle between two armies—they may have a point. But, as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez points out in the Jake Tapper clip above, and thousands of others have noted for months, the assault on Gaza is very much not that. It’s a campaign that is openly predicated on depopulation and collective punishment of a largely defenseless refugee population. It exists within the context of over half a century of military occupation, apartheid, and the maintenance of a caged population in Gaza that has no control over its borders, civil society, air, water, power, imports, or exports.