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The Partial Observer by Wriley Nelson

J’accuse: Every American Has Palestinian Blood on Their Hands

Have we all gone mad? Since my last column six months ago, the American genocide in Palestine has killed at least another 50,000 civilians, with total death estimates now reaching over 200,000. Two million civilians, half of whom are children and most of whom were already refugees from previous Israeli ethnic cleansing across the country, are starving as you read this. They wander back and forth in the bombed-out shell of their homeland from fake safe zone to fake safe zone while brave American Zionist teenagers sit in air conditioned trailers and drop more American bombs on them.

I need not repeat the main points of my first column; it is still available on AllOtsego.com. Nor is this the place to examine the inherent absurdity of Zionism, or any other claim that a national or religious group has the right to an apartheid ethnostate on someone else’s land. For the uninitiated, Zionism is the 19th century European ideology that Jewish people should build a 19th century European-style nation-state somewhere, and is quite distinct from the ancient, vibrant and culturally rich major world religion that is Judaism. I doubt I have ever attended a pro-Palestine event without a significant contingent of anti-Zionist Jews. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s Zionists are evangelical Christians and secular liberals in the U.S. and Western Europe. Zionism was implemented through self-styled terrorism in the British colony of Palestine in 1948, creating the state of Israel through massive, intentional ethnic cleansing that killed 15,000 people and drove 750,000—fully half of the Palestinian population—out of their homes and villages.

Let me give you a small taste of what the overgrown American aircraft carrier calling itself “Israel” has done in our name and on our dime since last I wrote. It has done these things with the full backing of the Biden/Harris administration, which provides the occupation regime with at least two-thirds of its weaponry, supplemental air cover from resistance missiles, and unlimited diplomatic cover. They offer bald lies, “refuse to speculate,” ask us to wait for the IDF to investigate itself and get back to them. The motto of Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party—proud home of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez—is “now is not the time.”

Tel Aviv (occupied Jaffa) is repeating the exact playbook they used to justify their indiscriminate assault on Gaza as they prepare a suicidal attack on Lebanon. At press time on Monday, September 30, Israeli officials confirmed that Netanyahu was about to roll the dice on a ground invasion his own generals believe could doom the entire country. In the past two weeks alone, the world’s most moral army has introduced or re-introduced the world to: 1) kicking bodies off rooftops for fun; 2) infiltrating global supply chains and placing remote-control bombs in civilian electronics, with no reliable way of identifying who is holding them at the time of detonation; 3) genocide sight-seeing cruises off the Gaza shore for hardcore Zionists to party as their future homes are cleared of human debris; 4) shutting down press offices by military assault.

Their war on Lebanon has already killed more than 700 civilians and injured at least 4,000 more, often with horrific hand, abdomen, groin, and face wounds from the little “exploding pager” terrorist stunt. Right on cue, Israeli newspapers began speculating whether Lebanon is rightfully part of the God-given 19th century nation-state, while developers started soliciting investment in the first soulless American suburb development to be built over Lebanese bones. Some IDF members allegedly wear shoulder patches depicting the true “Eretz [land of] Israel” stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, a national ideology of ethnic conquest known in other times and tongues as “Manifest Destiny” and “lebensraum.”

They have done each and every one of these things because Biden and Harris will not lift a finger to stop them. In fact, they just keep vacuuming money out of our economy to buy Israel more American bombs. On a single day last week, FEMA announced a $9 billion budget shortfall on the same day Israel announced another $8.7 billion weapons package from the U.S. That might be relevant now that Helene has wiped entire communities in the Southeast and Appalachia from the map. Every Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese or American death from this point on is the direct responsibility of Democratic staffers, volunteers and voters who signaled to their party that genocide overseas was not a deal breaker for them. If not our fault as everyday voters and taxpayers, it is certainly our responsibility. I address this column, then, to my former fellow Democrats who keep stopping me in the street for lectures on responsible citizenship and single-issue voting.

Thanks to our administration, I know what it looks like when an 18-month-old child’s head is blasted to ribbons—literally exploding from air pressure—by a 2,000-pound American bomb dropped on a tent city. I saw that child’s maddened, sobbing father hold the little bundle aloft and beg us all to make it stop. That was in May.

I know what it looks like when volunteers digging out the remnants of a hospital must distribute 70-pound bags of miscellaneous limbs and partially congealed human flesh pudding to survivors in lieu of their loved ones’ pulped bodies. I have seen shredded infants with dangling jawbone tatters, eyes blown from their sockets, sniper bullets carefully threaded through their half-ossified kneecaps, and cheekbones thrusting through their starved fleshless faces. I saw the mummified remains of doctors and nurses with their limbs zip-tied together and neatly-placed bullet holes in their heads exhumed from mass graves still in their scrubs.

I’ve seen photos and videos of Sde Taiman, where Israeli newspapers have finally confirmed long-standing Palestinian reports of electric shocks, amputation of dead limbs after months of tight bindings, constant beatings, surgery without anesthesia, deaths from poor sanitary conditions, playing loud music until inmates’ ears bleed, and systematic torture and sexual abuse. In July, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir bragged about this torture and rape, saying “Everything published about the abominable conditions was true… I have already proposed a much simpler solution, of enacting the death penalty.”

When the IDF arrested nine of its members for raping abducted Palestinians on camera (I have also seen this video, thank you), a nationalist Israeli mob led by Knesset (parliament) members and mutinous soldiers overwhelmed the base and secured their release. Within the day, journalist Yehuda Schlesinger took to Israel’s most popular TV news channel to argue for a systematic, intentional policy of raping Palestinians as a strategy of war. Knesset members took up the question, debating with great skill and subtlety exactly how much rape of the subhuman is optimal for military discipline. As the nine brave soldiers walked free, their paralyzed, organ-ruptured victim quietly died in the hospital. Israel became the first country in modern history, to my knowledge, to postpone a civil uprising by openly confirming its brownshirts’ unlimited right to rape the untermenschen. Consider that most of Israel’s 3,000 Palestinian hostages are random civilians plucked off the street for their skin color—and failure to die quietly so a retired couple from Brooklyn can move into their house—and ask yourself again why Hamas has such an easy time recruiting.

I was in D.C. for Netanyahu’s visit on July 24 and saw both Houses and both parties of our Congress demonstrate that they would have fellated Hitler on live television if the money was right. I saw an occupying army of police shut down half the National Mall to protect a foreign war criminal from American protestors. I saw heavily-armed and well-paid outside agitators turn our march violent (more than 200 body-armored NYPD personnel, each drawing at least a full day of overtime and benefits to pick their noses on the Capitol lawn, helped tear gas a peaceful group of marchers outside Union Station). I saw Democratic operatives from right here in Otsego County repost Harris’s obscene post-protest statement weeping over a burned flag and accusing protestors of treason while waving away the hundred thousand civilian casualties. I watched her on the debate stage, repeating without pushback the long-debunked “Hamas mass rape” lie.

All she had to do to win the critical Arab-American vote was be less evil than Trump’s “Muslim ban.” She tripped over this low bar so hard that she’s now two points behind him with this demographic. I have yet to see a Democratic response to this fact that does not boil down to “haha, hope you all enjoy the camps when Orange Man wins,” or “that’s really too bad, but what about MY rights?”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that basic domestic human rights don’t matter, or that a second Trump term won’t shred them. I am saying I have no faith that someone who lies about a genocide every day and is tacking right faster than a one-armed sailor in a hurricane will actually do anything about them. What exactly is the “lesser evil” here? Harris’s every move since the convention has signaled that she’s betting on “moderate Republicans” and centrists to make up for alienating the left (save, of course, for the left-wing VP who can be put out to pasture after the election).

Democrats haven’t done a single thing about abortion in the last 50 years except fundraise and grandstand. We gave them supermajorities in ‘08 and they gave us a Wall Street bailout, a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, and 20 more years of war. Biden built more wall and allowed more COVID deaths than Trump. They exploited the 2020 BLM movements and then passed record police funding. They got us into two exciting new wars we’re losing, wars so geopolitically and morally idiotic that we’ve lost the remnants of our soft power and might lose the dollar empire itself. Every single American is less safe now that our government has allowed a rogue client state to shred international law and show a world full of potential foes that the American flag stands for dead babies. We must not expect the blowback to be long in coming.

I hate to be the one telling you that Santa isn’t real, but the Democratic Party will not save us. All it took was a slick ad campaign and the threat of a worse option to get our nation’s good liberals falling over each other to support a livestreamed Holocaust speedrun. If I throw away my vote and put my immortal soul on the line for your “lesser evil” theory, whose rights exactly will I be preserving? Will stopping Donald Trump really stop the rot in a country that decided unlimited genocide and war weren’t deal breakers? And, as I have asked myself nearly every day since at least December: If we, as a country and society, cannot put a stop to this, why should we, as a country and society, be saved?

Wriley Nelson is the former news editor of Iron String Press.