We are told many lies from the Israeli government and by US politicians that parrot what the Israel Lobby tells them. One of the most prevalent lies is that Israel does not deliberately target civilians, and is therefore not guilty of genocide. We have heard this statement from many officials, including the Israeli administration, the Biden administration, Robert Kennedy Jr., and recently Elon Musk. They are all demonstrably incorrect, and knowingly misleading the public for various reasons, most importantly to justify the ongoing mass killing.
In terms of genocide, numerous reputable scholars have called it genocide. Jewish Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal calls it a “Textbook Case of Genocide.” Top U.N. official Craig Mokhiber resigned with a powerful letter also calling it a “Textbok Case of Genocide.” It is slightly plausible how one may dispute Israel’s intentions when bombing, but Israel’s genocidal targeting of civilians by cutting food and water cannot be disputed.
It is easy to further answer this question of targeting civilians if we look at history. Israel has a long well-documented history of targeting civilians, with periodic massacres for the past 75 years, from the first days of its inception up to today. Einstein and other Jewish leaders wrote about the initial massacres here in 1948. Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote a book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, about the massacres and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Many more books also cover this subject, including Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi’s book The 100 Years’ War on Palestine. Israel was literally founded in large part by targeting civilians.
These massacres continued up to today. One of the most indisputable mass targeting of civilians by the Israeli government was the sniper massacre during the Great March of Return in 2018. Israeli snipers shot thousands of unarmed Palestinian protesters as they protested near the walls of their Gaza prison, which they have not been allowed to leave since the 2007 blockade began. Snipers shot medics, journalists, children and disabled people, all clear cut war crimes. An excellent free documentary on this, Gaza Fights for Freedom, can be viewed here.
In terms of the carpet bombings and targeting of civilians: I have witnessed numerous Israeli carpet bombings of civilians in Gaza over the past 20 years of my political life. The current one is only the worst, not the first. Israeli talking points insist that we believe that they are trying to kill only Hamas members, and “accidentally” kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of civilians in the process; it is “unintentional collateral damage.” However, a great deal of evidence proves otherwise.
Previous Israeli carpet bombings were shown to have targeted civilians as detailed in scholar Norman Finkelstein’s book Gaza: An Inquest into its martyrdom. The targeting of civilians was also detailed in the Goldstone Report, which was endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Parliament. The Goldstone Report found, “Numerous instances of Israeli lethal attacks on civilians and civilian objects were intentional, including with the aim of spreading terror, that Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human shields and that such tactics had no justifiable military objective. Israeli forces engaged in the deliberate killing, torture and other inhuman treatment of civilians and deliberately caused extensive destruction of property, outside any military necessity, carried out wantonly and unlawfully.”
In terms of the current carpet bombings, a powerful new report was just published from the independent Israeli journal 972 Magazine, which was subsequently corroborated by The Guardian. This report, based on Israeli military and intelligence sources, details how the Israeli military is using a new artificial intelligence system called “The Gospel” to generate far greater numbers of targets, and how this includes targeting of civilians, “Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
Just as most, if not all, American wars are based on lies and pro-war propaganda, so is Israel’s 75 year war on Palestine. We must learn to question, reject and debunk Israel’s lies not only about targeting civilians and genocide, but also about the occupation, apartheid, and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
This is of particular importance for Americans, since it is our government that is far and away the #1 sponsor of Israel. This unconditional support includes over $260 billion in foreign military aid, and massive political support by vetoing over 53 UN resolutions that condemned Israel’s many violations of international law. Everything Israel does is co-signed by the United States. If there is hope for peace, the American keystone of unqualified support must be removed so this bridge of injustice may fall. American support for genocide and apartheid must end, so a new paradigm or new constitution may be birthed that provides equal rights for all.
Abel Tomlinson 