Israel is proving that it’s entirely possible to carry out genocide in the 21st century, while being left with a PR problem from hell. The US, as the dominant hegemon who wields Israel like an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to maintain control of the petroleum-rich Middle-East, bears significant responsibility for the genocide and also must deal with a PR problem from Hell.

Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.

Here’s where I’m supposed to do the obligatory condemnation of “terrorism” but what’s happening in Gaza is war and when you don’t posses an air-force, navy or army you tend to improvise. War is hell and the Palestinians weren’t the first ones to target civilians. Just as an example, a couple years back Palestinians in Gaza chose to protest their treatment non-violently, like all the bleeding-heart observers urged them to do. Israel responded by employing snipers to target the legs of protestors. As a result there are hundreds if not thousands of amputees crutching around Gaza while the open air prison continues as before.

Even the UN agrees with this assessment. Speaking at a UN general debate on the Middle East in New York, Secretary-General Guterres created fury when he said: “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

Most Americans remain oblivious to such realities thanks to the power of the Jewish Lobby but the rest of the world, especially in Muslim countries, knows the score and are up in arms, leading US officials to try and do damage control, following the tried and true Ike Turner play-book where the question becomes–who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Indeed, US officials are making the rounds. According to an exclusive in Axios, Secretary of State Blinken on Monday said before a closed-door group of Jewish leaders that he “asked the Qatari prime minister less than two weeks ago to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza”, according to three people who attended the meeting. Blinken said he gave toning down Al Jazeera coverage of the war in Gaza as an example of steps the Qatari government can take to do this. Blinken said he asked the Qataris to “turn down the volume on Al Jazeera’s coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement,” according to one source.

Blinken didn’t given any specific examples of what constitutes problematic coverage, according to the people who attended the meeting, but Israel has long accused the channel of being “a propaganda mouthpiece” for Hamas.

The US administration has not said so, but likely quietly agrees. Indeed, US spokespersons have recently dismissed or downplayed the soaring civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip as it’s being daily pummeled by Israeli airstrikes. 

And then on Wednesday, President Biden himself asserted, “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” He added: “I’m sure innocents have been killed. And that’s the price of waging a war. I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

I’m not sure that the White House understands that it doesn’t matter if they have no confidence “in the number that the Palestinians are using.” The anger Israeli bombing is creating in the Arab world is overwhelming and they believe in the number of casualties, and going further many observers believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with the end goal being ethnic cleansing or worse extermination. After all, that’s the clear historical record since the Nakba.

Meanwhile the Biden Administration still believes they can convince “moderate” Arab leaders to press “moderate” Palestinians to form an Israeli-friendly government in Gaza that would displace Hamas and impose security and order. That the White House should be floating these cockamamie schemes shows just how severed is the US from reality. The anger across the region is real and threatens “moderate” Arab leaders, whose room for maneuver is now severely limited.

No amount of PR is enough to obscure the horror of what Israel and the US are doing as they wage siege warfare on the civilian population of Gaza and carpet bomb entire city blocks into rubble.

Update: Israeli ground forces have ramped up activities in Gaza in what anonymous US officials are reportedly telling the press is a “rolling start” to the long-anticipated ground invasion.

Israel has also concurrently crippled Gaza’s largest telecommunications service, which had been the enclave’s last remaining contact with the outside world after Israel knocked out all the others. Humanitarian organizations and mainstream press outlets now say they have lost communication with their contacts in Gaza in a level of information blackout we’re unaccustomed to seeing in modern times.

Update 2:

In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.