Just the fact ma’am — Sgt Joe Friday, Dragnet, well kinda. Founded in 1947, the nation of Israel was the creation of the United Nations and not some kind of sacrosanct religious edict. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab state in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Granted, the idea had been around for awhile — the Balfour Declaration was a public statement made by the British government in 1917 that supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — the irony is that coming on the heels of the Holocaust, Israel became a resettlement mission born in war and political hand wringing.
Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance. The United States provided Israel considerable economic assistance from 1971 to 2007, but nearly all U.S. aid today goes to support Israel’s military, the most advanced in the region. The United States has provisionally agreed via a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to provide Israel with $3.8 billion per year through 2028.
Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas on October 7, 2023, the United States has enacted legislation providing at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel, which includes $3.8 billion from a bill in March 2024 (in line with the current MOU) and $8.7 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024.
Nature, an obviously non-partisan publication, says the following about the one year death toll in Gaza, just as the Lebanon operation begins to gear up,
Since war broke out in the Gaza Strip almost a year ago, the official number of Palestinians killed exceeds 41,000. But this number has stoked controversy. Some researchers think it is an underestimate, owing to the difficulties of trying to count dead people during conflicts. Other sources say it overestimates the number of casualties. The count comes from the Palestinian Ministry of Health — Gaza, the main institution counting mortality in the region.
Did I forget to mention that over 200 humanitarian workers have been murdered by Israel? According to Brown University’s Aid Worker Security Database, 45 national and 17 international humanitarian and aid workers were killed in Iraq between April 2003 and March 2015! Here are a few facts that brings pause to the numbers. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, since 2001, the direct deaths due to Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones, Afghanistan & Pakistan (Oct. 2001 – Aug. 2021); Iraq (March 2003 – March 2023); Syria (Sept. 2014 – March 2023); Yemen (Oct. 2002-Aug. 2021) and Other Post-9/11 War Zones is estimated to be 940,000. That number includes over 7,000 U.S. troops and more than 8,000 contractors. So, if I take the quarter century numbers of 940,000 directly dead and divide that number by 24 — the years of post 9/11 warfare — I come up with 39,166. The number is lower than the death toll in Gaza alone. Moreover, though, in the first year of the Iraq War, 12,152 civilians were killed in 2003. It took nearly 4 years of warfare in Iraq to come even close to the annual death toll — wholesale slaughter — ongoing in Israel. Drilling down just a bit further, in the Ukraine Russian conflict, in the first year of war, dating from 24 February 2022 to 31 December 2022, the TOTAL death toll was 36,823 with ONLY 5,323 civilian casualties.
The United States cannot provide security assistance to foreign governments or groups that commit gross human rights violations, a red line enshrined in the so-called Leahy Law. It is quite apparent that the US is not applying the Leahy provisions. To be clear, I am ex-military, am a Libertarian, and do not like either candidate currently running for the Office of the President. To say that the wars in Gaza and Lebanon are anything other than a turkey shoot, is complete and total bullshit. I am not saying that Hamas and Hezbollah do not need to be terminated with extreme prejudice. What I am saying is that these two conflicts are using sledge hammers to strike finish nails. A fundamental difference is that Israel is loathe to surgically strike and put its own troops on the line — dead IDF soldiers is bad PR. Ironic, when Israel has a mind boggling 600+ Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program funds, financed by the US, to provide 2,000 pound bunker busting bombs.
Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is in a Faustian bind. He is not dissimilar to the legal woes currently presenting against former President Donald Trump. In Case No. 1000, he is accused of fraud and breach of trust for accepting gifts like cigars and champagne from foreign businessmen. Case No. 2000 involves similar charges, saying that he sought favorable media coverage against a competitor in a prominent Israeli newspaper. The gravest is Case No. 4000, in which Netanyahu faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. He is accused of providing regulatory benefits worth over $250 million to his associate Shaul Elovitch, controlling shareholder of the telecommunications firm Bezeq. Netanyahu is also the subject of an application for an arrest warrant on charges of war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and he has one of the highest records of killing and displacing Gazans and West Bank residents among all Israeli premiers.
While Israel has legitimate interests in peace and secure borders, the reality is that Bibi’s political future — and individual freedom — rely upon an constant and continuously increasing level of kinetic warfare. It is the age old tale of a Grecian tragedy with no positive ending. He has traded to Mephistopheles an ongoing civilian death toll in order to remain free. Earlier, we mentioned the term direct death toll. What has many, myself included, concerned is the most recent exacerbation of an eventual genocide — the indirect death toll both Israel, during WWII, and Gaza are experiencing today. The General’s Plan — the Eiland Plan — is precisely calculated to do, just that. For those that simply look at a satellite view of Gaza before the war started and today, even the most naïve have no doubt that this is a systematic leveling of life. The last time we saw ethnic cleansing, at this level, was in the Bosnian war. And there is no end in sight. To be clear, Israel’s siege now blocks 83% of food aid reaching Gaza. Moreover, though, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) states that,
In its assessment published on March 18, 2024, the IPC concludes that each of the three famine thresholds have been passed or are likely to be passed imminently in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates of the Gaza Strip. Today, Gaza’s entire population, about 2.2 million people, is classified in IPC 3 (Crisis), IPC 4 (Emergency), or IPC 5 (Catastrophe/Famine). This represents, according to IPC, “the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.”
It gets worse, though. The cold, hard fact document the precision with which Israel is attempting to murder 2 million+ people. Even if aid magically began to move, it is unsustainable due to the targeted attacks on Gaza’s agriculture — not to mention the removal of nearly all access to water by the IDF.
According to IPC, more than 40 percent of all croplands in Gaza have been damaged since October 7, 2023, in addition to widespread damage to agricultural infrastructure and assets, including food warehouses, farms, barns, and wells. Of particular concern to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN FAO) is the death of livestock in Gaza, with about 70 percent of all livestock and other animals lost since October 7.
Israel is not infallible. Israel is nothing more than a political district drawn up on a map. And to be very candid, the only reason why there are not simply suntanning booths and oil taps there is because of the extraordinary amount of money that the US has provided. Israel wants to believe that is has some kind of religiously ordained mandate to rid the world of Islam and Arabic speaking people. It is a pogrom, plain and simple. On the one hand, Bibi desires the protection of Uncle Sam from the ICC and yet on the other he desires to continue down the path of eradication. Bibi’s all out assault on the Middle East is an attempt to cover up the abysmal failure of IDF and Mossad whom, in a misogynistic manner, discounted the months long information being fed in by IDF female forward observers. Unfortunately, the dick waiving contest failed and the women had to pay the price. And while anti-Semitism is in full swing around the globe, growing worse by the day, Netanyahu’s Faustian payment program is doing far more damage to credibility of the Jewish people than could have ever been imagined.
There is no amount of shuttle diplomacy that is going to fix the problem. Mephistopheles will get his pound of flesh from Bibi and Israel — and then some. The only thing that will even begin to help is the unilateral demands placed upon arms and ammunition with a targeted requirement for aid. If Israel wants to send troops in to strategically target terrorist cells, more power to them. If Israel wants to prosecute a kinetic war and begin to bring up the casualty count on their side, more power to them. Simply lobbing in bunker buster bombs and murdering civilians is no longer an option.
