Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Palestinian fighters from the besieged Gaza Strip who entered the occupation state at the weekend as &ldquosavages&rdquo who &ldquocelebrate the murder of women children and the elderly.&rdquo He made his claim when trying to justify the ongoing campaign of Israeli air strikes that have so far killed 900 Palestinians including 260 children and 230 women and wounded more than 4500 others.
Netanyahu used the same words to mobilize international support for his massive ground offensive planned for the coastal enclave. &ldquoWe are on the third day of the operation&rdquo he said in a televised speech on Monday. &ldquoWe are in an operation for our home a war to ensure our existence a war that we will win.&rdquo He told viewers that the war was &ldquoimposed upon us by a despicable enemy.&rdquo
He went on to liken the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas to Daesh/ISIS: &ldquoThe atrocities carried out by Hamas have not been seen since the atrocities of ISIS. Children bound and executed with the rest of their families young girls and boys shot in the back executed&hellip We have always known what Hamas is. Now the whole world knows. Hamas is ISIS. We will defeat [Hamas] precisely as the enlightened world defeated ISIS.&rdquo
US President Joe Biden joined in this hate-fest on Tuesday: &ldquoThere are moments in his life&hellip when the pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world&hellip This was an act of sheer evil. More than 1000 civilians slaughtered&hellip babies being killed entire families slain&hellip and young women raped assaulted paraded as trophies.&rdquo
He also likened Hamas to ISIS. &ldquoThis is terrorism which sadly for the Jewish people it’s not new. This attack has brought to the surface painful memories. The scars led by a millennium of anti-Semitism and genocide.&rdquo And where was this anti-Semitism most prevalent Mr President? Yes in Europe and the US.
Biden then reverted to the familiar script: &ldquoWe must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel and we will make sure it has what it needs to take care of its citizens to defend itself and respond to this attack. There’s no justification for terrorism.&rdquo
According to Biden Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination. &ldquoIts stated purpose is the annihilation of the State of Israel and the murder of Jewish people. It uses Palestinian civilians as human shields and offers nothing but terror and bloodshed with no regard to who pays the price.&rdquo
Both Netanyahu and Biden lied.
Both ignored the fact that resistance against a military occupation is legitimate under international law. In this case the Palestinians are struggling against the longest occupation in history and some would argue the worst. They are not &ldquoterrorists&rdquo by doing so. Both of them insisted that all of the Israelis killed by the resistance were civilians when hundreds were serving soldiers men and women. Both claimed that Israelis were beheaded including women and children but no evidence has been produced for this allegation. Both claimed that women were raped although Muslims in an Islamic movement are unlikely to do such a thing.
Israelis who did not challenge the Palestinian fighters were not &ldquoslaughtered&rdquo. One woman told Israeli TV i24 that the Palestinian fighters told her not to worry when she told them that she had children. While the fighters were in her house she said that the children were playing on their mobile phones. She also noted that the fighters did not eat bananas from her fridge before asking for and getting permission from her.
&ldquoI&rsquom getting a lot of questions about the reports of &lsquoHamas beheaded babies&rsquo that were published after the media tour in the village [settlement of Kfar Azza]&rdquo wrote Israeli journalist Oren Ziv on X. &ldquoDuring the tour [there] we didn&rsquot see any evidence of this and the army spokesperson or commanders also didn&rsquot mention any such incidents.&rdquo
The claim that Hamas is the same as Daesh/ISIS is ludicrous. Hamas is a resistance movement that has never operated outside historic Palestine. It participated in democratic elections in 2006 the last time that the US and Israel-backed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (whose own mandate expired in 2009) allowed them to be held. Moreover it won the elections and formed the government of the Palestinian Authority a result which neither Abbas nor the US and Israel accepted despite international monitors describing the polls as &ldquofree and fair&rdquo. What’s more there are claims that ISIS was a black ops creation of the US in order to sow mayhem and cruelty in the Middle East and discredit Islam and Islamic resistance against US hegemony in Muslim countries.
Nevertheless Netanyahu used the same ISIS claim in 2014 to justify the apartheid state of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people. &ldquoHamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas. They act in the same way. They are branches of the same poisonous tree. They are two extremist Islamic terrorist movements that abduct and murder innocents that execute their own people that shrink at nothing including the willful murder of children.&rdquo
Such deceptions are par for the course for both Netanyahu and Biden it’s in the job description. Likewise for other Western governments and their compliant media outlets. Anyone who opposes their twisted narrative is discredited as &ldquoanti-Semitic&rdquo a terrorist sympathizer or worse. Look at what happened to Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn hounded out of office by the pro-Israel lobby. The West is governed by double standards and hypocrisy and the Hamas operation at the weekend has exposed that. Victim-blaming is what they excel at in order to allow Israel to act with impunity. They expect the Palestinians to just roll over and accept being oppressed and killed by Israel. We won&rsquot play their evil game by their rules.
– Motasem A Dalloul is MEMO’s correspondent in the Gaza Strip.
