Aug 06, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

In an article titled “Smotrich: Might be ‘justified and moral’ to cause 2 million Gazans to die of hunger, but world won’t let us,” The Times of Israel reports the following:

“Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich implies he believes that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is ‘justified and moral’ even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger, adding however that the international community won’t allow this to happen.

“‘We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,’ Smotrich says at a conference in Yad Binyamin hosted by the Israel Hayom outlet. ‘We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.’”

Liberal supporters of the state of Israel often talk about Israel’s Naziesque far right leaders like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir like they’re some kind of fringe element in Israeli society, when really they’re both high-level officials in the Israeli government and play a crucial role in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Just the other day it was announced that Netanyahu has appointed a new spokesman who openly supports the ethnic cleansing and colonization of the Gaza Strip; these freaks keep getting elevated to prominent positions within the Israeli power structure because of everything Israel is as a state.

The Smotrich article is doing the rounds on pro-Palestine social media today because of how psychopathic his comments are, and understandably so. It says so much that you can occupy high-level positions in the Israeli government while openly advocating the genocide of millions of people, even as Israel is on trial in the International Court of Justice for genocide.

But what’s not getting enough attention is the grievance Smotrich is expressing here: that while he thinks it would be great to starve two million Palestinians to death, the rest of the world won’t allow Israel to do this.

Smotrich is pretty much as evil as a human being can get, but in many ways he’s also one of the most honest people in the Israeli government. Is there any doubt that Israel would have gotten away with far worse genocidal atrocities these last ten months if its powerful western allies had allowed it to? And, while we’re on the subject, is there any doubt that Israel’s western allies would be consenting to far worse genocidal atrocities if not for fear of massive public backlash?

It seems pretty clear to me that the pressure westerners have been putting on their own governments regarding Israel’s criminality in Gaza is the primary reason why the western empire couldn’t just sign off on a swift final solution to the Palestinian problem back in October, and has had to settle for this awkward slow-motion genocide disguised as self-defense instead. It’s not that the empire has a conscience, it’s that it is sufficiently afraid of sparking mass-scale unrest on its own turf to need to disguise its own psychopathy a bit.

It is entirely likely that the only reason there are any Palestinians left in Gaza today is because normal people around the world have made their own governments fear the consequences of supporting Israel through a live-streamed full-scale holocaust. Our murderous governments have no conscience apart from the conscience of their own citizenry.

So don’t let anyone tell you your opposition to this thing makes no difference. Even if all you’ve been able to do is pressure them to slow this nightmare down a bit and make them hide what they’re really doing from the light of day, it could wind up being enough to save millions of lives.

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Featured image via John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0)