Netanyahu and Biden lie to justify their crimes against the Palestinians

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Palestinian fighters from the besieged Gaza Strip who entered the occupation state at the weekend as “savages” who “celebrate the murder of women, children and the elderly.” 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 4,500 others.

Netanyahu used the same words to mobilise international support for his massive ground offensive planned for the coastal enclave. “We are on the third day of the operation,” he said in a televised speech on Monday. “We are in an operation for our home, a war to ensure our existence, a war that we will win.” He told viewers that the war was “imposed upon us by a despicable enemy.”

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He went on to liken the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, to Daesh/ISIS: “The 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… 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.”

US President Joe Biden joined in this hate-fest on Tuesday: “There are moments in his life… when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world… This was an act of sheer evil. More than 1,000 civilians slaughtered… babies being killed, entire families slain… and young women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.”

He also likened Hamas to ISIS. “This 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.” And where was this anti-Semitism most prevalent, Mr President? Yes, in Europe and the US.

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Biden then reverted to the familiar script: “We 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.”

According to Biden, Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination. “Its 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.”

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 “terrorists” 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 “slaughtered”. 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.

“I’m getting a lot of questions about the reports of ‘Hamas beheaded babies’ that were published after the media tour in the village [settlement of Kfar Azza],” wrote Israeli journalist Oren Ziv on X. “During the tour [there] we didn’t see any evidence of this, and the army spokesperson or commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.”

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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 “free and fair”. 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. “Hamas 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 wilful murder of children.”

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 “anti-Semitic”, a terrorist sympathiser 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’t play their evil game by their rules.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.