IT'S ALWAYS ACCIDENTAL

 

How reassuring to know that no matter what horrendous thing you do it will always be an accident! No matter how many people you kill it's always an accident. Even when you kill citizens of your closest ally, a simple, "Sorry! Didn't mean to," is all you need to slink guiltily away from all responsibility.

On Friday, September 6, 2024, a 26 year old Turkish-American woman, carrying no weapons other than her concern for her fellows, attended a demonstration by Palestinians against Israeli settlers who had illegally usurped land and homes of their Palestinian neighbors in the occupied West Bank. Despite this usurpation being illegal under both Israeli and International Law the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) appeared on the scene to defend,  not law, decency or common sense, but rather the usurping settlers. 

Some Palestinians threw rocks at the armed settlers and armed IDF soldiers who were up to 200 meters away. I think that we can agree that even young David needed to be much closer than 200 meters to Goliath to kill him. Still, the stone throwing became the excuse for IDF members to use deadly force. Part of that deadly response included setting up a sniper on the rooftop of one of the usurped homes. 

The first shot the sniper fired was a little off. Rather than killing a young stone thrower the bullet hit a metal dumpster(?, building?). The sniper then aimed at Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, an unarmed American citizen who was not throwing rocks but was, convenient for the sniper, fully exposed. The IDF sniper then shot Ms. Eygi in the head. 

But wait! That aimed shot was an "accident". It was nothing more than a totally accidental confluence of totally unexpected events. Who could predict that a skilled sniper would bring his rifle to a demonstration? Who would believe that there would be a convenient rooftop overlooking the demonstration? And what are the chances that the sniper would find his way to that rooftop? So, the sniper just happens to be looking through his rifle's scope just at the moment that Aysenur Ezgi Eygi surprises the sniper by deliberately walking into the focus of that scope causing him to jerk the trigger?

CLEARLY AN ACCIDENT! WITHOUT QUESTION!

Of course, Ms. Eygi's "accidental" murder is just one in a line of similar "accidents" perpetrated by the IDF. Time after time Israeli murderers make the slimey, transparent excuse that their crimes are purely accidental. It's rather as if Jeffrey Dahmer were to have said, "Gee, I don't know what could have happened to my neighbor. Would you like this casserole? Some kebabs?"

The toll of Americans murdered by Israeli military, police and settlers keeps climbing.

Ms. Ezgi Eygi murdered by IDF sniper on Friday, September 6, 2024. She was 26 years old.

Tawfiq Ajaq murdered by an off duty Israeli policeman and a settler on January 19, 2024. He was 17 years old.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist murdered by an IDF sniper on May 11, 2022. She was 51 years old.

Rachel Corrie, a journalist clearly wearing visible press credentials crushed by an IDF bulldozer on May 16, 2003. She was 24 years old.

And then there is the worst "accident" of all. On June 8, 1967 some IDF planes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a reconisance ship, killing 34 American service men and wounding 171 more. The Liberty was in international waters, clearly marked as an American ship but the Israeli Navy and Air Force "mistook" it for an Egyptian vessel.

The Israeli government has compensated the families and survivors of the Liberty with  cash but continues to pretend that the attack on the Liberty was an "accident" rather than designed to insure that Americans could never tip Egyptians off to Israel's looming surprise attack initiating the 6 Day War.

The death toll in Gaza is about to reach 41,000 with no sign of abating. The death toll in the West Bank is now over 700 and rising. But, no matter! It is all an "accident". It couldn't be other than an "accident" because Israelis are always the only ever victims of genocide, never, ever perpetrators of it. And, if the citizens of the United States happen to place themselves in the path of genocide, well, ...accidents will happen. She/He/that ship shouldn't have been there in the first place.

..

HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING GOOD FROM 1942?

 

    On May 27, 1942 Czech and Slovak partisans assassinated one of the vilest of the Nazis, Reinhard Heydrich, the chairman of the Wannsee Conference that systematized the extermination of Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and all other conquered or peoples otherwise considered "inferior" by Hitler's Third Reich. When Heydrich ultimately died of his wounds on June 4, 1942 Hitler ordered revenge for the assassination by razing to the ground the villages of Lidice and Ležáky whence the partisans may have come. In the attack on those villages, every male 14 years-old and older was taken to a field and shot. The women and younger children were sent to the extermination camps and "disposed of" there. In all, 572 men, women and children were murdered in the 2 towns while 7 children were given to SS Officers' families to raise as Nazis.

    On October 7, 2023 Hamas Terrorists from the Gaza Strip attacked Southern Israel killing about 1,300 Israeli citizens and taking over 200 hostages. Embarrassed by the failure of his anti-democratic and ultra-right wing government to detect this attack before it happened, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the razing to the ground of the Gaza Strip. First, by indiscriminate bombing of the area under the excuse that Hamas fighters hide amongst the general population. Second, to complete his revenge on the Palestinian population of over 2,000,000 persons and with little or no regard for those 200+ hostages, Netanyahu ordered a ground invasion of Gaza to complete the razing of the Palestinian enclave. At the time of this writing somewhere over 31,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces largely through aerial bombing. Israel excuses this horror by claiming that Hamas "terrorists" live amongst the general population. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in a paroxysm of Orwellian rhetoric, has claimed that not "eliminating Hamas" means that Israel is weak and open to further attack. That is no more nor less than his excuse for a blatant genocidal attack on civilian targets.

    I support the existence of a safe and secure Jewish Homeland in the Middle East. I also support a contiguous and free Palestinian Homeland in the ancient land of Palestine. It is possible to have both if the murders on both sides stop for the most part, the parties respect one another's rights and allow the fury that reciprocal murders generate to die down without excesses on either side over the coming 75 years.

    What I do not and cannot support is the Netanyahu government of Israel inspired by its fanatical approach to land rights based on a book of mythology mixed with history. Though the Jewish peoples held much of what we call Palestine in the ancient past, that hegemony was broken after the Roman Armies won the Jewish War in 70 CE. Until the 1880s when Zionism began its defense of persecuted Jews by suggesting a home in Palestine, Arab and Bedouin peoples lived in and ruled over Palestine. Despite their ancient claims and mythology, modern Jews were and are interlopers in Palestine. Those Jews have established a homeland that they definitely need and should have but only as good neighbors to their fellow Semitic brothers and sisters.

    The none-too-soon death of Reinhard Heydrich brought about retribution 579% greater than the loss of that one vile Nazi.

    A death toll 579% greater than the 1,200 Israelis murdered on October 7th would yield a Palestinian death toll of 694,800. Thankfully, Israel's genocidal attacks since October 7th have not reached that horrific toll yet the attacks on Gaza stink of Hitler's response to Heydrich's assassination. Before we get anywhere nearer the 35,000 mark of Palestinian deaths, the bombing, the invasion, the blockade and dehumanization of Palestinians must stop.

    Unlike Netanyahu's Orwellian attempt to distract from his government's failings, further attacks are not a demonstration of Israeli strength. This frenzy of genocide is an admission of weakness. What would show strength by Israel is a ceasefire, withdrawal of invaders and a demand that Gazans, the majority of Gazans who are not Hamas, surrender all hostages and also surrenders the leaders and planners of the October 7th attacks. A truly strong leader of Israel could demand that the Gazan people surrender weapons, including rockets, in exchange for opening of border crossings and importation of materials for rebuilding homes, medical supplies and food aid as soon as the surrenders began.

    And my President could be the godfather to an incipient peace by demanding this much of his friend and client, Netanyahu. 

    I must at this point look at the use of the term "genocide". Israelis broadly and even the wider Jewish community have a special connection to that term. The Shoah perpetrated by the Nazis culminating the centuries of discrimination, pogroms and individual murders is most certainly the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. However, that does not make "genocide" a term uniquely applicable to Jews. The Bible tells us that the Abrahamic Tribes committed genocide against the Midianites. Crusaders of the Middle Ages carried out genocides of anyone who held beliefs at odds with their own regardless whether those they murdered followed Islam or a different Christian sect. The Ottoman Turks carried out a genocide on the Armenian people. The Nazi's genocidal machine devoured 6,000,000 Jews and additionally included gays, communists, socialists, and the Roma condemned to the ovens or mass graves. The Rwandan majority Hutus carried out a genocide of the minority Tutsis in 1994. Genocide as a term and a fact is not the sole property of any one people or group. Genocide continues today against the Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma) and the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. The Netanyahu Government's indignation at being called out for genocide in Gaza is only slightly less indecent than the genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza that it is currently carrying out.

    Amidst the genocide disguised as counter-terrorism we have organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) egregiously conflating criticism of the Netanyahu Government with the broader evil of antisemitism. Those are somewhat different issues though they do have some overlap. The important fact to recall is that they are not entirely the same. Being an antisemite and opposing the Netanyahu Government is almost a given while opposing the policies of the Netanyahu Government does not make one, ipso facto, an antisemite. Just ask the thousands of Israeli citizens who spent months demonstrating against Netanyahu's attempts to co-opt the Israeli judiciary in his attempt to evade conviction for massive corruption how antisemitic they are.

    Further, opposing the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza to further an unjustifiable land grab does not make one a supporter of Hamas. It does make one an humanitarian who opposes genocide. Amongst those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians there are, undoubtedly, members of and sympathizers with Hamas militants but just as the larger Venn Diagram of those opposed to Natanyahu's Government includes some antisemites, so the Hamas faction is a smaller subset within the larger throng of humanity appalled by the Gazan genocide. In fact, one can justifiably argue that the Israeli Defense Force under Netanyahu is the most effective recruitment arm of Hamas that has ever existed. The senseless murders of Palestinian civilians since October 7th has unquestionably brought many survivors of this horror perpetrated by Israel into the Hamas militant fold. 

    We here in the United States have listened eagerly to interviews with Palestinian survivors of incomprehensibly great losses who see that only forgiveness and reconciliation can stop the continuing killing on both sides. The forbearance and decency of those rare souls shames all of us lesser mortals even as we praise their nobility. Yet I cannot help but believe that each of those few great souls has more less forgiving and justifiably angrier counterparts who, even now, plot revenge against the state and people who have murdered their loved ones.

    I would suggest to the right wing Israelis eagerly cozying up to the Christian Evangelical neo-fascists of the United States that they question that support more closely. A significant majority of the Christian Evangelical Movement sees Israel as a major step toward the Armageddon, the return of Christ in glory and the genocide of all who refuse to accept their perverse version of Christianity. These Christian Evangelicals need Israel to exist as one step in their bizarre train of prophecies, a red calf without blemish to resanctify the Temple, Armageddon and the subsequent mass execution of Jews, Islamists and other "unbelievers" in the ashes of the destroyed world. Perhaps allying with those who look forward to your people's ultimate genocide is not the wisest alliance one might make. But that would require some thought to the future rather than for just immediate gain, commitment to intelligence rather than willful ignorance and forgiveness rather than revenge. In short, being humane rather than minimally human.

     Unfortunately, because of those who cannot understand that peace and security do not follow from anger and revenge, I write of a world that could but stubbornly refuses to exist in which weak, authoritarian leaders refuse to see anything beyond their own advantage, people dehumanized by a majority of others turnabout and dehumanize those that are a minority in their sphere and revenge for real and imagined wrongs incite more revenge from the revenged upon. It is a cycle of vengeance, a perfect circle that grows ever smaller as neighbors devour one another leaving nothing but horror, resentment and ashes generation after generation.

    I see little or no hope, little or no sanity and unsurpassed amounts of weeping. Still, the weeping can stop if the first step is a ceasefire.

 

FASCISM IS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE U. S. AND, AMONG OTHER COUNTRIES, IN ISRAEL

 

 I am an American citizen. My ancestry in what is now the United States goes back to Peregrine White, the baby, born November 20, 1620, to William and Suzannah White aboard the good ship Mayflower. My mother and her sisters were members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I did not support the mal-administration of the Failed Orange Führer and think that that con man and criminal should never be allowed to run for public office at any level again, a prohibition that should extend to his biological and affiliated crime family unto the fifth generation at least.

At the risk of jumping with both feet into a cliche, I have Jewish friends, many of them. Some of the teachers I revered most were Jewish. Nine of my grandchildren are Jewish. I also support Israel's right to exist. I support a Jewish homeland. I do not support the Netanyahu government. 

The Failed Orange Führer attempted to overthrow not just our Congress or our government but our Constitution. The Maga insurrectionists of January 6th and the Republiscum who excuse and support them and their Führer are nothing like patriots despite being born in this country.

The recent purge of Liz Cheney confirms that the Republiscum Party and the great majority of its office holders and supporters have no respect for or allegiance to our Constitution. Their only fealty is to The Failed Orange Führer. As such every Republiscum office holder at every level of government who does not reject The Failed Orange Führer should be removed. They have, by swearing fealty to The Failed Orange Führer and his Big Lie, violated their oaths of office and should never again be allowed to serve in any level of government.

Speaking of con men who should never be allowed to hold office, I give you Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Netanyahu has called repeated elections in a decreasingly effective quest for a solid majority in the Israeli Knesset. He failed once again in the most recent elections and subsequently failed to form a majority government. In need of some excuse to whip up support within the most extreme Israeli communities, much as his friend, The Failed Orange Führer, did following the 2020 election in the United States, Netanyahu suborned evictions from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Palestinian East Jerusalem a program that has continued for decades thanks to corrupt Israeli courts and refusal to recognize historical documents that give the lie to Israeli claims to ownership of property there. This action also whipped up anger among Palestinians who gathered for prayers in large numbers on the last Friday of Ramadan, May 7th.

Into this powder keg, Netanyahu tossed a lit match by sending Israeli "Defense" Forces (I"D"F) onto the Al-Haram Al-Sharif and into the Al Aqsa Mosque igniting Palestinian anger and inciting Gaza. Now Netanyahu's planes have bombed Gaza repeatedly and subsequently invaded Gaza. Palestinian armed resistance has fired many rockets into Israel, as Netanyahu knew they would. Several Israelis have died as a result while the Palestinian death toll is exponentially higher.

The I"D"F is Netanyahu's primary instrument of genocide against the Palestinian people. I do not believe that the average Israeli soldier is a genocidal monster but I believe that there is ample evidence that Netanyahu is such a monster. His lust for power has plunged Israel into repeated conflicts with their Palestinian neighbors.

The answer to peace for Israel is peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian population. Bombing and invading Gaza, expropriating Palestinian property and insulting the faith of their neighbors may be a route to short term political gain for Netanyahu but it is the dark, vile route to never ending war and insecurity for both sides. It is past time, long past time for the Israeli public to understand that Israeli's killed by an Hamas rocket are less the victims of Palestinian animosity than they are of Netanyahu's cynical and corrupt quest for power, just as the January 6th insurrection was the cynical and corrupt result of The Failed Orange Führer's similar quest.

Respect for Palestinian rights will go much further than bombs toward increasing Israel's security just as rooting out the Maga fanatics in government and the military in my nation will go toward creating a just and peaceful nation amongst neighbors and all of our states.

Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Goebbles, Israelis

Today the Israelis and Hamas have entered an uneasy truce in the Gaza Strip with an Israeli invasion force inside Gaza allegedly to keep the peace. In fact, the Israelis are there for no such purpose. Rockets from Gaza are simply the excuse for continuing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian population but let's put that aside for a moment to consider a couple of points relative to the most recent three weeks of murderous Israeli attacks on Palestinians.

Let me first address the myth that opposing Israeli government policy and being anti-Semetic are the same thing. That farago is the same crap dealt out by the Bush Administration when they have claimed that opposition to their odious policies is un-patriotic and "gives aid and comfort to the terrorists." It is manifest nonsense. Personally, I support the existence of a nation of Israel living in peace with its neighbors. It is because I support Israel that I oppose Israeli government policies toward the Palestinians. Israel's governments, in a nearly unbroken line for the past 62 years have engaged in policies that seal its doom rather than promote its survival.

Israel, from its inception in 1947, has engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide to displace and/or kill the indiginous Palestinian population in the name of a mythological grant by a non-existant god to the probably mythical Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Even Israeli scholars have demonstrated that much of the official history of the founding of Israel is, like most founding histories, largely myth covering a much more noisome reality. Palestinians did not voluntarily surrender their homes because of their bias toward Jews. They were forced out of their homes and into "ghettos" more than passingly reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto by an ethnic cleansing that makes the acts of Slobodan Milosovic and Radovan Karadzic look amateurish by comparison.

Israel owes its existence to a deft and even sometimes justified application of both lies and guilt. Almost all of us who are not Jews bear some guilt for the anti-Semitism that had its hellish apotheosis in the Holocaust. I would be lying to myself if I said that that guilt does not inform my support for Israel. My father and paternal grandmother were casually and at the same time vehemently anti-Semetic, an aspect of their characters that I despise even as I loved them for their other qualities. Yet it is this very guilt that I feel that has been outrageously exploited by Israel. Successive Israeli governments and Israel boosters have used that guilt to equate anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli policies, stifling reasonable debate on Israeli government actions and policies.

The sibling of that exploitation of guilt is the farago that Israel is the weak, beset and persecuted orphan of the Middle East. That may have been true in 1947-48. It may well have been true through 1956 and even a bit later. It has been utter nonsense since 1967. Jews have been persecuted world-wide for centuries but that does not mean that Israel has not become the persecutor of Palestinians over the last 40 years. While there is certainly bitter irony in that fact, those are most definitely not mutually exclusive notions.

Israel is and has been, largely with unquestioning American support, the dominant power and even the bully of the Middle East since 1967, the Yom Kippur War not withstanding. It is a nuclear power. Its military dominates its competing and fragmented neighbors. Israel is not persecuted. It is not in danger of being wiped from the map yet the constant selling and reselling of the notion of Jews as a defenseless, persecuted minority has colored all discourse about Israel making that discouse irrational and, frequently, impossible. The Jewish people have been and often are a persecuted minority even today but Israel is not so simply by extension.

Nor is Israel a democracy in any sense intelligible to Americans. An enourmous portion of the population that falls within any version of the borders of Israel is prevented from voting in Israeli elections. There are persistent efforts within Israel to disenfranchise Palestinians, even those who support Israel as a nation. Israel is regularly referred to as "the Jewish state" without any thought to the parallels that exist in that very phrase to the 1994 attempt to turn Rwanda into "the Hutu state" or the on-going efforts to turn Tibet into a "Chinese state". In fact the very use of the word "state" is Orwellian. When not calling Israel aptly "the Jewish state", we regularly refer to Israel as "the state of Israel." Is there another nation on earth referred to in that construction? We do not refer to "the state of France" or "the state of Ukraine." We do, however, refer to "the state of Connecticut" and "the state of Idaho". Words have power to direct our conversations and the construction "the state of Israel" reinforces the idea of an intimate connection between the United States and Israel that does not really exist. The disconnect between the propaganda that would have Americans see Israel as a part of our own nation and reality is made manifest when we recall the bombing of the USS Liberty or the spying of Jonathan Pollard. America may have an interest in an Israel that lives in peace with its neighbors but we have no interest whatever in supporting at murderous Israeli government and its currently dysfunctional attitude toward its American benefactor.

Now to deal with the title of this entry.

Reinhard Heydrich was the odious, murderous Nazi Gestapo chief who chaired the Wannsee Conference that set the Nazi agenda for the extermination of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other "decadent" people that fell under the Nazi hobnail boot heel. He was assassinated in Prague in 1942 though the world would have been a far better place if he'd been killed in 1912 or 1922. Among the many horrific punishments that Heydrich pioneered were the the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree adopted by the George W. Bush Administration in it's alleged "War On Terror" and the murder of an escalating number of civilians for each Nazi killed by resistance fighters. The even more horrible Reichs Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbles, "honored" Heydrich's policy by decreeing that 150 Jews would die to requite the "terrorism" that resulted in Heydrich's death. Goebbles also had the Czech town of Lidice wiped out in the memorial Operation Reinhard.

In December, 2008, Israel, having lost 4 citizens to Qassam rockets fired from Gaza attacked the population of Gaza and killed, by the time of today's truce, about 1,100 Palestinians. Please forgive me if I see an Israeli adoption of the Heydrich and Goebbels policies in this current attack on Gaza. A lot of people will, no doubt, express deep indignation at a comparison of Israeli government actions to the actions of a pair of notorious anti-Semites. Go ahead, express your indignation. All the indignation in the world does not make the comparison any less apt. Indignation is not an argument against the manifest similarity of Israeli government and Nazi policies. In fact, I am indignant that any Israeli government should adopt any policies that so much at hint at a comparison with Nazi policies. And, further, I would equate indignant Israeli government apologists denying that obvious parallel with Holocaust deniers. Even as I love my own country while hating the criminals and frauds of the Bush Administration or love my late father and babci while hating their anti-Semitism it is past time for those who love Israel to hate its wrongs to the Palestinian population.

For Israel to disingenuously claim that it did nothing to provoke Hamas even as it blockaded Gaza for years and forced disease, darkness and starvation on the population of the Gaza Strip is as obscene as murdering Polish soldiers and dressing them in Nazi uniforms to justify the 1939 invasion of Poland or doctoring the evidence of an Iraqi weapons program to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Shelling and bombing United Nations schools and aid warehouses or Red Crescent hospitals is as much a war crime as hacking up defenseless Tutsis seeking sanctuary in a church.

My four grandsons, my oldest daughter and beloved son-in-law are Jews. So are, at the risk of cliche, friends to whom I owe much and love more as were teachers who gave me the tools to think independently and deeply. I hope for the survival and well-being of all the good people of Israel. Yet I have the same hope for all the good people of Gaza and the other Palestinian lands. I do not see those hopes as mutually exclusive. And simultaneously, I damn the current Israeli government and power hungry fanatics like Bebe Netanyahu. I would hope further that all those, Jew and gentile, Palestinian and Israeli, Islamist and unbeliever alike would share that hope and condemn, not Israel, but Israeli government policies.