Not “Israel,” the IDF

Regarding the catastrophe in the Middle-East, I am starting to use “the IDF” instead of “Israel” or the “Israelis” as the correct term to describe the actors inflicting the majority of the damage, death and destruction there.

There have been many peace demonstrations in Israel and efforts by Israelis to mitigate the horrors visited on Gaza, making “Israel” an overbroad and inaccurate catch-all term for assessing responsibility for the horror visited, both on their own people as a result of the denial of human rights to Palestinians, and the direct infliction of ethnic cleansing and genocide on the Palestinian people.

What is clear to me is that the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF, is a terrorist organization in its own right, protecting colonizing “settlers,” by enabling their terrorism and dispossession of Palestinian homes and farms on the West Bank, and inflicting massive, mechanized and technologized terror on the Palestinians of Gaza.

No pleadings of “collateral damage,” “human shields” nor “right of self defense” excuse the depravity that the IDF has visited on 2 million prisoners, half of them children, incarcerated in the largest open air prison on the planet. The IDF, let off their leash by Netanyehu and his right wing cabal, did this…

Just as the IDF ordered its jailers on the Gaza border to ignore unusual activity on that border in the days prior to October 7. Which raises the question whether the slaughter inflicted on left leaning Israelis, foreigners, and some ill-prepared recruits on October 7 by Hamas terrorists wasn’t a set up by Netanyehu and the IDF, a pretext for an IDF campaign of ethnic cleansing and extermination against the Palestinian people.

Netahyehu’s Likud party has long promoted the Zionist goal of “Greater Israel” or Eretz Ysrael, including all of the West Bank and Gaza. In March of 2019, Netanyehu argued on social media that Israel was “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” In a speech in August of 2019, Netanyehu promised “Jewish sovereignty” of the entire West Bank. His and the Likud’s objective is clear: at best an apartheid state and more centrally, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population to establish the Zionist Eretz Ysrael.

Just as the Hamas and Islamic Jihad Palestine fighters were the terrorists acting under the direction of Hamas leadership in Gaza and elsewhere, the IDF are the incomparably better armed and equipped terrorist forces under the direction of Netanyehu, the Likud and the other right wing actors in Israel.

At this point, there is no other reasonable way of seeing it.