by AMMIEL ALCALAY
Whether Democratic or Republican, all American administrations have worked overtime to shield Tel Aviv from accountability
The best retort to the question: “What about 7 October?” – still used by the media to silence and confuse people speaking from a Palestinian or human perspective, particularly in the US political context – might be: “What about 6 August?”
That’s when the first atomic bomb used in war was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. Three days later, on 9 August, the US detonated a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki. The attacks together are estimated to have killed close to 200,000 people.
This is not even to mention “Operation Meetinghouse”, better known as the firebombing of Tokyo, in March 1945, which killed tens of thousands of people and left more than one million homeless.
The politics of numbers, so familiar from the present genocide in Gaza, are chilling.
US General Curtis LeMay, who led the bombing campaign over Tokyo, was well aware of what his change in strategy – unleashing napalm on crowded Tokyo neighbourhoods – would mean. As he himself put it: “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
Nor did LeMay stop in Japan. In a 1984 interview, he said US bombs “killed off 20 percent of the population” of North Korea, and “targeted everything that moved”.
As historian Bruce Cummings told Newsweek: “Most Americans are completely unaware that we destroyed more cities in the North than we did in Japan or Germany during World War II … Every North Korean knows about this, it’s drilled into their minds. We never hear about it.”
Collective punishment
LeMay was stymied by former US President John F Kennedy when he advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against Cuba, but the general still believed fully in the doctrine of bombing people back “into the Stone Age” during the war against Indochina, when Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were decimated and defoliated by napalm from the air.
LeMay died before the Gulf War of 1991, but with the Afghanistan conflict, the war in Iraq, regime change in Libya, and so many other US-led imperial campaigns, his doctrine lives on.
The overpowering and cowardly reliance on mass terror from the air relegates native populations to the category of sub-human. Neither individuals nor civilians exist; all are presumed guilty and must be punished collectively, to force any resistance into full submission.
Does the US control its own foreign policy on Israel and Palestine, or is it dictated by pro-Israel lobbying groups?
Recent statements do not disappoint in this regard. Following the 8 September attack by two Palestinians at a bus stop in Jerusalem, in which six Israelis were killed, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee declared: “We stand with Israel against this savagery.”
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