After Tallying Up 1,868 Corpses, Israel Pauses Killing Palestinian Human Beings for 72 Hours

Hamas, thinking they can force Israel to lift the 8 year long strangulation of Gaza by firing ineffectual rockets and mortars onto Israeli soil, resumed that tactic after a 72 hour ceasefire ended. Although one observer on BBC claimed it was other parties and not Hamas, 33 projectiles were fired- four didn’t even reach Israel, 3 were shot down by the “Iron Dome” anti-rocket system, for which the U.S. Congress just voted another $225 million in additional funding, and the rest wounded one whole Israeli. In “response,” Israel resumed its bombardment with U.S.-supplied weapons and munitions, attacking from land, sea, and air with warplanes, artillery, and gunboats off the coast. They “scored” another dead Palestinian, a 10-year-old boy in a mosque. (What’s the Israeli term for a dead Palestinian child? One less rock-throwing terrorist.)

Now a summary of the preceding 28 day “conflict” or “war” or “fighting,” as the western media likes to euphemise the Israeli assault on the Gazan concentration camp.

[The following is a bit Swiftian, as in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. I’m not as cold-blooded as the Israeli “strategists” who plot these crimes.]

Let’s do the type of calculus that Netanyahu and his henchmen do.

Israel, apparently because the Israeli military’s own casualty count is rising higher than expected, has announced a withdrawal of their ground forces from the Gaza concentration camp. (Presumably their relentless aerial bombardment will continue.) 64 Israeli soldiers have been killed, along with 2 Israeli Jewish civilians killed early on by rockets fired from Gaza.

27 to 1 kill ratio. Impressive, sure, but nowhere near as impressive as past Israeli kill ratios, which have been as high as hundreds to one- or even 100 to 0, as when Israel shelled the UN’s Qana refugee camp in Lebanon with U.S.-provided anti-personnel artillery shells that shredded the bodies of the people concentrated there.

From the perspective of the scoreboard, Netanyahu would have racked up a more impressive “victory” if he hadn’t launched the ground invasion. Subtract 64 Israeli soldiers killed in the ground invasion, and you’re left with two dead Israeli Jews. (There was also an imported Thai worker, a latter-day serf, killed by a Hamas rocket, or whoever fired the rocket from Gaza.) Let’s generously assume that the invaders killed 400 Palestinians- the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian dead were slain by aerial bombardment, courtesy of free U.S. F-16s and munitions, maybe drones and helicopters, and long-range artillery fire and naval gunboat shelling. So then the score would have been Israel 1,400, Palestinian 2, for a 700:1 kill ratio- far more impressive than 27:1. So in terms of his stats, Netanyahu “shot himself in the foot,” one might vulgarly say, by invading on the ground. (I’ve rounded off the number of Palestinian human beings killed, since an exact number is hard to come by. There are probably corpses buried in rubble that haven’t been discovered- with thousands of homes demolished by Israeli munitions, there must be a considerable number. And of course of the 9,567 wounded, some maimed or crippled for life, ther are those who will ultimately die of their injuries, especially with Israel crippling the medical system in Gaza, not only by bombing the hospitals repeatedly, but by destroying the electrical and water supply systems, and blockading medical supplies from Gaza. Plus, the destruction of a clean water supply will mean death by diseases such as typhus and typhoid, just as happened in Nazi concentration and POW camps. So Netayhayu’s stats will improve, but the ratio will still be about what it is now. Palestinians deaths would have to double for the ratio to even get to 50:1, which is possible with the spread of disease especially.)

10,000 homes destroyed, another 5,000 so badly damaged they are uninhabitable.

So Israel “mowed the lawn,” to use their own cynical, gangland-style terminology.

I guess now they’re trimming the bushes.

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It seems masochistic to an outsider for Hamas to start up the rocket fire again. All that can do is bring down more suffering on the Palestinians’ heads. But they see their fate as slow strangulation, increasing immiseration, so they have to try to break the blockade. Like a prisoner in solitary going on hunger strike, self-destruction is the only means of resistance left to the Palestinians. Thus they (vainly) hope to prick “the world’s” conscience by the suffering they’re enduring.

But the Jews will tell you, that can take a long time. 2,000 years, maybe?


If only Bavaria had been made the Jewish homeland, in European-U.S. atonement for the Holocaust. That at least would have been just (if impractical).

And there’s an unfortunate side effect to the hunger strike strategy. It adds credence to the sick Zionist propaganda claim put out by the Israeli government (and its U.S. parrots like Bob Schieffer and Charles Krauthammer) that the Palestinians are “forcing” Israel to “kill their children,” in the demented and vicious words of Golda Meir, quoted by Bob Schieffer. Meir-Schieffer did the neat trick of making the murderers of children the victims. The Meir quote is “I can forgive the Palestinians for killing our children. [That’s a lie right there, she couldn’t forgive, but never mind] but I can never forgive them for forcing us [sic] to kill their children.” So “forcing” her to kill Palestinian children is an unforgivable sin against her by the Palestinians! Check out that moral inversion. THEY have done HER wrong! And this is the moral calculus that the redneck reactionary Schieffer of CBS applies to the current situation, taking his cues from Netanyahu and his henchmen, who have proclaimed repeatedly that Hamas is responsible for all the Palestinian deaths.

Actually the Israelis enjoy killing Palestinian children, as they see them as “future terrorists.” More and more, the true attitude of the Israeli elite (and most of the population) has been leaking into public view outside Israel, despite the western media’s assiduous attempts to embargo that reality and present the propaganda picture favored by Israel. So for example we just had Knesset member Ayelet Shaked of the Jewish Home party calling for the murder of Palestinian mothers to prevent them from producing more “snakes” (that is, Palestinian babies).

All this can only happen because the U.S. is Israel’s zombie, Israel’s bitch. Obama rushed more bombs and missiles to Israel to keep up the bombardment, even as he shed a crocodile tear or two over the carnage.

Well, as U.S. presidents are fond of saying, “Life is Unfair.” So it’s LIFE’s fault, you see! Well, they can afford to be smug as they count their money. [See “Those Who Serve (The Ruling Class) At the Top Get Their Reward.”]

Ayelet says Kill 'Em All and Let Allah Sort Them Out!