Rescue workers line up body bags in Tal Al Sultan, in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Credit: UNOCHA
By James E. Jennings
ATLANTA, USA, Jul 30 2025 – Why is a grinning Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, wildly cheered by both Democrats and Republicans whenever he addresses the US Congress, while at the same time in Gaza countless innocent civilians are being killed by American bombs and bullets—and now babies are starving?
Shamefully, Israel’s leader, a certified genocidaire, is one of the few global leaders to have ever been granted the privilege of speaking to Congress, which he has done frequently. But the world sees and will remember his Big Lie that “There is no starvation in Gaza.”
The mantle of righteousness that once adorned the American flag after WW II is shredded, perhaps beyond repair. President Roosevelt’s global goal of “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, of religion, of want, and of fear, are no longer defended or even recognized by the US government.
US presidents from Kennedy to Obama have asserted American exceptionalism by using the Biblical “City on a Hill,” as a figure of speech. President Ronald Reagan frequently claimed in his speeches during the Cold War that the United States is like that city, a position so prominent that all the world can see our purity of motives and good works in the struggle against the Evil Empire. That might have been true once but today is laughable.
Most of the jet planes and bombs Israel has used over the past months to kill and wound civilians have come from the United States. They have been instruments to pulverize a high percentage of the buildings in Gaza and torment with fire and death unarmed families seeking handouts of food or just huddling in their tents.
The Israeli army’s dominance of Gaza’s tiny territory is total, with no military objectives left, yet they keep bombing despite the worldwide outcry that this is not truly a war but a genocide against the civilian population. US citizens have mostly ignored the fact that for nearly two years President Biden and President Trump have merrily kept feeding the Israeli war machine’s Turkey Shoot.
So far, the result of nearly twenty-two months of unremitting bombing of Gaza’s homes and tents with US-supplied money and weapons has been killing and wounding more than 100,000 mostly unarmed, innocent, unprotected civilians, the greatest number of them women and children.
By now Hamas has no power to resist, if they ever did in the past. They have repeatedly agreed to release the remaining hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. No deal. The Likud government is greedy for land for new settlements and is down to three options for the millions of people in Gaza—either kill them by continued bombing; blockade and starve them as now; or forcibly remove them.
But forcible transfer is the very definition of genocide. Another option—to enslave them, has already been tried on a smaller scale before the Hamas outbreak of October 7, 2023. Many Gazans used to travel to jobs in Israel under punishing and humiliating low wage conditions, but no longer.
The US government and people cannot continue to deny the plain fact of what has happened and is happening daily and nightly in Gaza. We Americans must choose the high road of civilized behavior or else forever be classed with the some of the most rapacious, bloody, and evil regimes in history.
James E. Jennings PhD is President of Conscience International. A former professor of Middle East History, he has led numerous aid teams to Gaza since 1987.
IPS UN Bureau
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