The Horrors In Gaza Are Happening Because The US Empire Wants Them To Happen

Caitlin Johnstone
3 min readDec 5, 2023

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I came across an interesting quote made last month by a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick about the ongoing IDF assault on Gaza.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” Brick said. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Brick made these observations not as an anti-imperialist critique of the US war machine, but as part of a diatribe about how ridiculous it is for Israel to be asked by Washington to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and to try to avoid civilian casualties. He apparently believes Israel should be killing far more Palestinians in Gaza, not fewer.

Brick — whose warnings of an impending Hamas attack were dismissed and ignored by Israeli government and military officials in the lead-up to the events of October 7 — makes an important point nonetheless. The support of the US war machine is absolutely 100 percent essential for Israel’s continued murderous onslaught in Gaza, which just killed some 700 people in a single 24-hour period. This necessarily means that these ongoing acts of human butchery are occurring because the US permits them to.

Brick’s comments fly in the face of narratives fed to the press by the Biden administration saying that the White House is frustrated by Israel’s complete disregard for human life in Gaza but finds itself powerless to influence its ally’s actions in a more humanitarian direction.

In an article published last month titled “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught but sees few options,” The Washington Post reports that according to unnamed US officials the Biden administration believes that “Israel’s counterattack against Hamas has been too severe, too costly in civilian casualties, and lacking a coherent endgame, but they are unable to exert significant influence on America’s closest ally in the Middle East to change its course.”

This is of course a load of bullshit. The Biden administration could end all this with one phone call, in the same way it commanded Israel to restore Gaza’s communications in October after the IDF cut the enclave off from the world, and in the same way Israel’s 1982 assault on Lebanon was halted with a phone call from President Reagan.

The ongoing massacre in Gaza is happening because the US empire wants it to happen. They could stop the bloodshed at any time, but they don’t, because they do not want to. This is because the US empire is run by sociopaths who only care about global domination, and nonstop violence from Israel is a key component in the domination of a crucial geostrategic region on this planet.

Don’t let the monsters in Washington DC and Virginia wash their hands of this horrific atrocity. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re every bit as responsible for Israel’s crimes against humanity as Israel itself. They posture and pay lip service to the protection of civilian lives, but they do so exclusively for their own PR interests. These freaks would happily send every Palestinian alive to the gas chambers if they thought it would advance their strategic interests one iota.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock (formatted for size).

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