The Gangsters Destroying Gaza: A War on Truth, Children, and History

By Jeremy Salt

Israel continued to carry out massacres in Gaza. (Photo: social media, via PalInfo)

The Chicago gangsters of the 1930s were novices by comparison. They killed hundreds, Israel’s clique of gangsters kills tens of thousands.

The level of cognitive dissonance shown by Israelis is way beyond curiosity. It is alarming. An entire population has been stewed in lies for so long that it apparently believes them, and we are expected to believe them too.

Recent examples have been shown on the Piers Morgan talk show. Morgan is not to be trusted. He blows with the wind and blows back when it changes direction, but for the moment, he seems to agree that what is happening in Gaza is genocide.

His recent interviewees have included the Israeli ambassador to the UK, the Zionist-centred ‘historian’ Benny Morris, and Natasha Hausdorff, whose ‘expertise’ in international law seems to be based on proving that when it comes to Israel, she is uniformly right and international law uniformly wrong.

An example is her view of the West Bank. The uniform view of international jurists, human rights bodies, and the UN General Assembly is that it is occupied, yet in Ms Hausdorff’s view, Israel is the ‘sovereign power’ over the West Bank and the Palestinians have no right to a state there.

In a debate at the Oxford Union, Hausdorff claimed that “the Arabs have been massacring Jews for centuries.” True, there have been mob attacks on Jews in Arab history, but no Arab attack on Jews since the rise of Islam compares even remotely to the scale of slaughter of Arabs by Zionist Jews in Palestine and around its borders since the beginning of the 20^th century.

Neither do any anti-Jewish pogroms in history compare to the Zionist pogrom against West Bank Palestinians, backed by the state, just as the Cossack pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement were backed by the Russian state.

Pogroms usually lasted for a few days, whereas the West Bank pogrom has been continuous for nearly sixty years.

In her conversation with Morgan, Hausdorff presented herself as the only rational actor in the madhouse. She tried to argue that Israel was providing Palestinians with plenty of food and then questioned whether the nine children of Gaza pediatrician Dr. Alaa al Najjar were really killed.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, these children were killed in an Israeli missile attack. The charred bodies wrapped in shrouds were there as the undeniable truth. So was the mother weeping over them – and her husband – but the undeniable truth was not enough to stop Ms Hausdorff.

The deaths were “based on hearsay,” she said. There were “conflicting accounts,” with “artificially generated intelligence used to promote this story… if it is true.”

Her grasp on history is no better than her grasp on contemporary facts. In the Oxford Union debate, she claimed that Ben-Gurion did not say he wanted to expel ‘the Arabs.’

One would have thought this argument would have run out of steam four or five decades ago, but here Ms Hausdorff was trying to resuscitate it. If she got away with this, no doubt she would be arguing next that the ‘Arabs’ just ran away against all the valiant efforts of the settler militias to persuade them to stay so they could live in peace and harmony forevermore.

Of course, Ben-Gurion wanted to expel the Arabs. The war of 1948 was a war on the civilian population, just as the war on Gaza is right now. There could not be a Jewish state unless the Palestinian population was removed, and it could only be removed through war. What we are now seeing is the attempted final consummation of the historical Zionist objective to remove all Palestinians from Palestine.

What Ben-Gurion said in public was propaganda, and what he said or wrote in private was the real thing. In a letter to his son, he wrote that “we must expel the Arabs and take their place.” In early 1948, he spoke of expelling “Arab townspeople” so “our people can replace them” and destroying “Arab islands in Jewish population areas.” In fact, the reverse was true: there were Jewish islands in Palestinian population areas.

There are numerous other indications of what Ben-Gurion intended, as Ms Hausdorff would find out if she did the basic research she recommends to others.

Ms Hausdorff claims Israel is not ‘targeting’ children, as if killing children but not ‘targeting’ them somehow lets Israel off the hook. It is not true anyway. Israel knows perfectly well when it bombs an apartment building that children are there and they are going to be killed. It is targeting them, along with everyone else.

Its snipers shoot civilians – including children – for no apparent reason other than that they can shoot them. The government doesn’t object because the more dead Palestinians the better, as Netanyahu and the criminals around him have repeatedly made clear. Whatever they do, soldiers know they are not going to be punished.

Checking the bodies of dead or wounded children, foreign doctors volunteering in Gaza said the number of shots to the head and upper body was evidence of deliberate targeting. Why would snipers want to kill children? “As a hobby,” the Israeli politician Yair Golan has suggested.

Israel’s claims that military targets are inside civilian infrastructure have been exposed as a lie so often that they warrant only a bored yawn, but for Israel’s propagandists, everyone else is lying.

In her conversation with Piers Morgan, Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, said Israel was not targeting civilians and killing children. That is a lie, and according to Hotovely, the Nakba was a lie, too. Do these people seriously expect people to believe them? Apparently, they do.

Hotovely claims to know how many Hamas fighters Israel has killed. In fact, she no idea. The figures given by the Israeli military are all over the place and are not backed by any credible evidence.

What it seems to be doing is extrapolating adult males from the total number of civilian deaths given by Gaza health authorities, and saying they are all Hamas fighters. She admits to having no idea how many children have been killed. They came into the conversation almost as an afterthought.

Morgan’s interview with Benny Morris produced more denial. Morris made his name with his 1988 book on the ‘birth’ of the Palestine ‘refugee problem.’ His research in the Zionist archives confirmed much of what Palestinians had been trying to say all along but a Jewish historian had to say it before ‘western’ so-called ‘liberals’ felt safe to say it themselves.

In his book, Morris dodges around the question of planned expulsion and completely ignores the central question of prior intent dating back to the beginning of the Zionist program, which is the key to understanding 1948.

He argued a few years later that it was a pity Ben-Gurion did not finish the job in 1948 by ethnically cleansing all Palestinians. Then there wouldn’t be a Palestinian problem. He also said the Palestinians on the West Bank were so wild they needed to be caged. Yes, just like human animals.

Responding to another panellist, Norman Finkelstein, Morris argued that what was happening in Gaza was not genocide because “had Israel wanted to kill all Palestinians, there would have been many more deaths.” So, in his view, Israel did not kill enough Palestinians for Gaza to qualify as genocide.

When Norman Finkelstein referred to a poll indicating that 47 percent of Jewish Israelis believe all Gazan Palestinians should be exterminated, Morris said it was a lie, without producing any contradictory evidence.

Morris said he felt sorry for the Palestinian man who had “lost” 78 members of his family, but in attacking Israel, he was a liar, too. Gaza had “nothing to do with genocide.” All this was said with a supercilious smirk and the smug confidence of someone who knows the truth and no one else does.

Alon Mizrahi, the anti-Zionist Israeli writer, says he no longer intends to engage with Zionists because it is basically a waste of time. This is fully understandable. Even in the face of undeniable truths, they won’t budge. You might as well go outside and have a chat with the nearest brick wall. Thick skins when it serves their purpose, ultra-thin when they want to pour on the outrage and accusations of lies, antisemitism, and blood libels.

What we know from the polls, talk shows, and vox pop street surveys is the large number of Jewish Israelis who share the same exterminatory desires as Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir.

What we also know from polls is that around the world, Israel is loathed. This is hardly surprising considering that Israel it has done everything in its power over the past eight decades to be loathed. It has practically been pleading to be loathed, for curious psychological reasons of its own.

It cannot be that politicians in the US, the UK, Australia or anywhere else cannot see what everyone else is seeing or cannot find out if they are not seeing it, because of the media shield around Israel.

Yet in full view of some of the worst crimes in history, they can hardly bring themselves to criticize Israel. The slaughter of children passes by almost unnoticed, so far close to 20,000 or even more of them. Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, said the recent shooting of an Australian photographer with a rubber bullet in Los Angeles was “horrific.” By comparison, he said Israel’s murder of seven aid workers (including an Australian) in April 2024 was just “not good enough.” Being hit by a rubber bullet is “horrific, ” mass murder is just “not good enough.”

France has just been revealed as supplying arms to Israel throughout the genocide. The US, Germany, and other countries have done the same, which is why the genocide has to be regarded as a joint enterprise.

The media’s ‘plucky little state’ of the 1950s has turned into a monster which no one has the guts to control. The evil seed planted in Palestine more than a century ago is now reaching its full flowering.

The people running Israel are mass murderers. They have no morals, no code of honor, and no respect for law or human life outside Jewish life. Even then there are exceptions: the captives left to rot in Gaza and the Israelis deliberately killed by their own military on October 7.

The Chicago gangsters of the 1930s were novices by comparison. They killed hundreds, Israel’s clique of gangsters kills tens of thousands. They have no sympathy for their victims. They plan their deaths in detail. They know exactly what they are doing.

They don’t care how many Palestinians their soldiers kill or in what criminal circumstances they kill them because killing as many Palestinians as possible is their program. They are doing it slowly. Just chipping away, day after day, with the help now of the sub-contracted Palestinian gangsters led by Abu Shabab.

Israel is destroying ‘civilization’ at its legal and moral roots. It is holding the world in bondage. It is forcing people to watch what they can no longer bear to watch because it is so horrifying.

‘Western’ governments are beginning to shift slightly under the pressure of public opinion but they are all Israel’s accomplices. They are showing no inclination to stop the horrors inflicted on the Palestinians every day. Behind their token outrage and claptrap about ceasefires and the two-state solution, Israel’s final solution to the ‘Palestine problem’ seems to be theirs as well.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.