The Mouse that Wants to Be an Elephant: Israel and the Steroids of US Aid

The United States and Israel share an unbreakable bond. (Photo: James Emery, via Wikimedia Commons)

The obese, sweaty Ben-Gvir, physically more repulsive than Goering, more bloodthirsty than Himmler, is now demanding that 30-40 Palestinians be killed every day because they are “not worthy of life,” a phrase that comes out of Nazi Germany and, in reality, sums up the genocide in Gaza.

In Israel’s case, the Palestinians are not worthy of life because they are human animals or the insects and snakes that Zionist rabbis, politicians and generals have described them as being over decades. Once put in that category, it is easier to kill them, to squash them, to bury them beneath tons of concrete so they die unseen and alone in the dark.

Bishop Desmond Tutu used to say that Zionism was worse than apartheid, but no one should hesitate in going further and comparing it to Nazism. Many of the Nazis were gentlemen compared to murderous trash like Ben Gvir and the gangsters around him in the cabal known as the ‘government’ of Israel.

Zionism is a fanatical ideology, more akin to a cult, it might be said, but it still has its own extreme, which is the even more murderous beliefs and behavior of the West Bank settlers, of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and others like them. Their Zionism shares with Nazism and the Islamic state the same characteristics of extreme violence, sectarian hatred, persecution of a targeted group, and rejection of all laws but their own.

The parallel lines between Nazism and Zionism, ideologically and in their mass violence, are clear for those prepared to look at them and put up with the shrill cries of ‘anti-semitism.’

Who are the true Semites anyway? Not Jewish Israelis of European stock. They have no living or genetic connection with the ancient Middle East.

The Semites, if one wants to use the word, are the Palestinians, living in the Mediterranean basin of ancient civilizations for countless generations. DNA research shows that they are overwhelmingly of Bronze Age Canaanite/‘Levantine’ stock.

Palestinian Jews have the same ancient lineage, but the Zionists don’t. They came to Palestine as European intruders who had no living or genetic relationship with Palestine, with the geography of Palestine, the people of Palestine, and even the Jews of Palestine, whom they looked on with contempt. They were cultural and historic aliens on Palestinian soil.

The Crusaders were backed by the resources of European kings, princes, popes, and cardinals; the Zionists by European governments, but the outcome was the same. Both got their hands on Palestine. The Crusaders lasted from the 11th to the 13th century; the duration of the Zionist ‘crusader state’ remains to be seen.

The Mediterranean basin has been a conflict zone for thousands of years, but these have been wars and not genocide. One side wins, soldiers die on the battlefield, civilians are killed and exploited by having their property seized or by being enslaved, but they are not wiped out and neither is there the intention to wipe them out.

‘Carthago delenda est’ was the cry that went up in the Roman Senate two centuries BCE – ‘Carthage must be destroyed ’-but it never was, not totally. Go to Carthage today and you can walk among the ruins in this outer suburb of Tunis.

Compare that to Gaza, of which 90 percent has been wiped out. If Israel has its way, the rest will soon be totally destroyed, as Israel wants nothing left of Palestine, so that in time, no matter how much time it takes, it will be entirely gone and the lie that it was always Jewish will be easier to sell.

Carthage was a Phoenician city; its mother lode was what is now Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. Gaza is now Carthage, only much worse and destroyed with far greater loss of life, not as the unavoidable consequence of war (because Gaza is not a war but a genocide), but because the destruction of the civilian population was an aim from the start. Like 1948, the ‘war’ was a necessary means to this end.

In all the massacres in and around the Mediterranean basin over thousands of years, nothing compares with the horrors of what the Zionists have done. No strip of an ancient civilization has been so completely destroyed.

Gaza will be remembered in history thousands of years from now. It will never be forgotten. It is a stain on Jewish history which can only be expunged by complete rejection of the parasitic growth that it is.

Like the Crusades, Gaza was not a massacre of locals by locals but by outsiders, in their ethnic origins and where they came from.

They were secular and used religion only as a weapon to further their cause, hijacking its symbols and turning the Star of David into a symbol of menace and forthcoming destruction. There is possibly only one greater danger to Judaism in its long history and that is Nazism, but whereas Nazism threatened the lives of Jews and the symbols of Judaism, its libraries and houses of worship, Zionism is a dagger driven towards its spiritual heart. No anti-semites could be a more dangerous enemy.

As the evidence is being bulldozed out of the way as quickly as possible, it will never be known how many people have been slaughtered in Gaza so far. They are still being killed every day, so it is not over yet but the current figure of close to 80,000 is based only on the bodies that could be counted and is nowhere near what the real figure would be, possibly hundreds of thousands.

Even based on the minimal figure, nowhere in and around the Mediterranean basin in its thousands of years of recorded history has there been such slaughter, not wanton slaughter in the heat of war but the cold, calculated, ruthless aim to kill off the people and disperse the survivors beyond Gaza’s borders. This is what Zionism has brought to the central lands of the Middle East.

Where, during this history, were civilians, even women and children, regarded as no different from soldiers, to be killed without compunction? Civilians are often killed or massacred in the heat of war or in acts of revenge or retribution, but never in the tens of thousands.

The motive is also entirely different. Israel has identified its enemy as the entire population of Gaza, not the civilians trained in guerrilla warfare, manufacturing their own weapons, and facing up to the enemy in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. The enemy is the children as well as the adults. No one is left out.

The Israelis claim revenge as a motive. After October 7, no doubt this is true. Suddenly the tables had been turned. It was not the thousands of Gazans the Israelis had been killing in their ‘mowing the lawn’ operations over decades, but several hundred Jewish settler civilians, along with hundreds of soldiers and armed settlement guards.

Revenge was certainly one motive but a lesser motive in the minds of politicians and military commanders planning the Gaza operation. The destruction of Gaza and its people and the Jewish settlement of Gaza and its eventual annexation to Israel were their deeper motives and aims.

Like occupied Syria and southern Lebanon, the goal is more ‘living space’, Lebensraum, the Nazis called it, as they looked towards Poland. The phrase fits precisely into the junction between Nazi and Zionist ideology.

‘Steroids’ is a word repeatedly frequently in recent Israeli discourse. There are many steroids, but the one that is meant is the muscle-building anabolic steroid.

It has many iterations: Netanyahu’s Hamas as “ISIS on steroids”; Naftali Bennett’s attack on Qatar and Erdogan’s involvement in the Gaza ‘peace’ board proposals as “Oslo on steroids”; Qatar’s role as ‘soft power’ on steroids; a Palestinian colloquium in New York as ‘anti-zionism’ on steroids; sanctions relief for Iran as terror on steroids; Israel’s next attack on Iran as ‘Operation Rising Lion’ on steroids; and British propagandist Melanie Phillips’ “libels” against Israel as “gaslighting on steroids.”

This is one omission from the list that has more weight than any of the others. This is Israel on steroids, first the steroid of British support and then the anabolic steroids of unending arms, political and economic support of the US for more than 70 years. This is what has enabled Israel to be what it is, to conquer all of Palestine and devastate surrounding countries.

The potential consequences of using steroids to build muscle mass in the human body are well known. No matter how impressive the muscles in the first place, the constant use of steroids can lead to shrunken testicles, liver disease, liver tumors, heart attacks and strokes ending in death, and mental problems. The out-of-control body that is Israel shows the same symptoms of disease.

The bodybuilder addicted to steroids can’t stop. Someone has to stop him, and then he has to make do with a shrunken life. In the same way, in its own best interests, the supply of dangerous steroids to Israel should have been stopped decades ago.

Without the artificiality of steroid strength, it would have been reduced to the dimensions of the small state that it is. Steroids turned it into the mouse that wants to be an elephant. Without the steroids of US arms and economic assistance, it would not have been able to bully its neighbors, to invade, occupy, plunder, assassinate, and eventually commit open, flagrant, advertised-in-advance genocide. It would have been forced to deal with the Palestinians and its erstwhile neighbors as equals.

Even by Zionists, too much reliance on the US has been seen as dangerous, but to be what it is and wants to remain, Israel has to rely on someone. The problem is that no one is lining up to fill the role of endlessly indulgent uncle, to the ruin of the nephew.

What happens if the US decides to stop supply, which seems to be the direction it’s heading? Amnesty International was among 111 organizations calling on US senators to support a resolution by Bernie Sanders to block arms sales to Israel.

The vote was lost, but a dozen senators who had previously voted for arms sales voted against them. In the House, in June, 98 Democrats voted for an amendment cutting aid to Israel, compared to 103 against it. The votes are still being lost, but these figures were unimaginable just a few years ago.

The warning signs are there, but Netanyahu is vigorously biting the hand that has fed him and Israel, specifically Donald Trump’s hand. He seems intent on making life as difficult as he can for him before the midterms, probably to blackmail him into another full-scale war on Iran, while letting him do what he wants in southern Lebanon. They are diametrically opposed, but he is playing his electoral needs against Trump’s.

Whoever wins, this is not going to affect the slow and steady degradation of Israel’s standing in the US, accompanied by ultimately steady and increasing cuts in the steroids of arms supplies and economic aid.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.