How Gaza Was Disappeared from the News – ██FR█████ █INTELL███████████

Another month passes, and Gaza is barely in the news: the inert, so-called Board of Peace is doing its job. You might have thought that job involved reconstruction so Gazans could use the water, roads, food markets, hospitals and schools that make life livable, but if so, you would have been mistaken. The Orwellian-named Board of Peace (or Board of Empire or Board of Genocide, whichever is most apt) was intended to blunt public opinion by disappearing Gaza, while the very long-term plan remains as garishly awful as ever: Donald Trump’s dreadful Gaza Riviera, which counts on the departure of the culturally conservative Palestinians and replacing them with strip clubs, gambling casinos, bars, resorts, high-rises and western tourists – a new playground for the rich and for the Israelis, towering over a silent necropolis below of dead Gazans.

Another reason that Israeli murders in Gaza have disappeared from the news is simple. The IDF murdered almost all the Palestinian journalists covering IDF atrocities in the enclave. Lastly, there was the Trump regime’s violent crackdown on free speech about Palestine on U.S. college campuses, beginning in the spring of 2024. That didn’t help either.

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians languish in Israeli prisons, hostages who include, very notably, Dr. Abu Safiya, a pediatrician of tested integrity, tortured so maliciously by Israel that he now lies at death’s door. On June 5, the Council on American Islamic relations urged congress to demand the doctor’s immediate release – he is currently in “solitary confinement,” per CAIR, “despite being held without charges…UN experts say Dr. Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture in Israeli custody,” and quotes Physicians for Human Rights Israel: “He is held in Negev Prison in harsh conditions, without access to medication or medical care as his health continues to deteriorate.” According to lurid details reported by AI, the doctor has been hideously tortured, with the clear and, who knows – successful? – aim of making him a broken man. But Dr. Safiya’s suffering, like his country’s, Gaza’s, has mostly vanished from the headlines.

By moderating the Gaza genocide, Trump achieved what Genocide Joe Biden, with his obnoxious refusal even symbolically, even deceitfully – like Trump – to lift a finger for the Palestinians, could not, and that is silence. The silence Israel wanted, the silence its American supporters insisted on, the silence our billionaire-owned corporate media clamored for – a silence akin to the silence of the grave.

So: Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Atrocities against Palestinians in Israeli prisons. It all raises the question: do we really want to merge the U.S. military with the Israeli one? This is the matter now before congress, and it comes, not coincidentally, at a time when the majority of Americans (60 percent) and half of American Jews view Israel’s actions since October 7, 2023 most unfavorably. But in this regard, it’s worth considering the very informed commentator on imperial adventures, Brian Berletic’s observation that U.S. and NATO’s, as well as U.S. and its Pacific allies,’ military coordination, indeed merging, pretty much match the one proposed for the U.S. and Israel. Berletic even says on X that the U.S. attack dog, Israel, is a convenient scapegoat for the U.S. Empire. This may well be true, but I don’t think it makes this proposed merger anything besides a terrible idea.

After all, this U.S./Israeli merging of militaries would basically let congress thumb its nose at Americans, as it helps Israel evade furious public opinion. People regard Israel’s adventure in Gaza as one atrocity after another, and millions agree that it’s a genocide. So Israel has lost American public opinion. The way around that loss? So Israel no longer need worry about what Americans think? Merge the two countries’ militaries. It removes Israeli military criminality from the reach of American public opinion permanently. This is sickeningly brilliant.

According to the Guardian, June 5, Israel’s advocates have been “stunned by the cratering of public support for Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and toward Iran.” So “Israel’s advocates are frantically seeking to escalate U.S. support for the Jewish state in ways that do not rely on defense of its policies…this means avoiding public discussion of Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank or Iran.” The proposed law would commit “to bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements and an unprecedented integration of the U.S. and Israeli weapons industries.” All entombed safely under the radar.

Needless to say, AIPAC endorses this legislation and lobbied for it throughout the first quarter of this year. “While neither the House nor Senate legislation made it out of committee, the same legislative architecture and much of the same language appeared in section 224 of the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] buried deep within the draft legislation.” So this whitewash-Israel’s-genocide-in-Gaza Act has a real chance of reaching Trump’s desk. The Guardian refers to it as the Zionism 2.0 framework. Whatever you call it, it stinks. It harnesses the American military industrial complex, already up to its eyeballs in blood and great evil in the world, to the Israeli military, guilty of genocide and so many horrifying atrocities that IDF soldiers can’t venture onto social media without quite obviously incriminating themselves.

An intrepid attempt to strip this abominable addition from the NDAA, led by congressmen Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, went down to defeat, as reported by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos on June 4 in Responsible Statecraft. The story, first broken by Ben Freeman in the same publication the preceding week, described supporters of the provision to merge the two militaries as spreading “half truths and outright inaccuracies about how far this provision will go to integrate the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors.” “The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense,” Freeman wrote, “but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech and many more…In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.” Incidentally, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement of his profound opposition to this military merger.

In this connection, please note that on June 5, the Pentagon assessed that Israel is a serious espionage threat to the U.S. So there’s that. (This leak suggests that some people in the Pentagon find this proposed merger alarming. Good. They should.) Then there’s the money. As Vlahos noted, this legislation “would shift the annual $3.8 billion the U.S. now gives Israel…to these programs…where sunlight is rare and often fleeting. A perfect solution – which is, by the way, endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – given the dwindling American support for Israel’s wars and U.S. military assistance for them.” So, Israel hopes, no more pesky U.S. protests about bankrolling Jerusalem’s crimes.

Thanks to the so-called Board of Peace, Gaza disappeared from the media and, as the corporate news moved on to the Israeli slaughter in South Lebanon and how it has helped entangle the U.S. in the Iran War, the spotlight also shifted off the atrocities Israel commits in its prisons. And yet, the world hasn’t forgotten the Gaza genocide, even if the Board of Empire and a compliant-billionaire-owned media have tried to effect this. Nor has it forgotten Dr. Safiya. And since these things haven’t been forgotten, we now have this horrible scheme to merge the Israeli military and the U.S. one.

It’s difficult to imagine Trump finding the backbone to oppose this, as any self-respecting U.S. president should. Where Israel is concerned, his vertebrae are made of jello, and the question on the MAGA far right is a fair one (insofar as that term can be applied to such a movement), namely, is Trump the president of America First or Israel First? If he signs an NDAA with such language about Israel, we will, as Marjorie Taylor Greene – a politico with, as it turned out, quite a spine – warned us, have the answer. She would say that first on Trump’s list, if he falls for this, is NOT America. I would qualify that. First on Trump’s list is incorporating all U.S. proxies, vassals and attack dogs, from Israel to Ukraine to the Philippines, into one terrifying, imperial, death-dealing machine. He is well on his way to doing so.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.