In The Case Against Israel (Counterpunch Books, 2005), Michael Neumann, a Jewish philosophy professor who specializes in ethics, writes that Israel is corrupting its allies. His reasoning is straightforward. Israel’s remarkably influential lobbyists portray it as morally exemplary, a light unto the nations, a beacon of democratic virtue illuminating the Middle Eastern darkness. Like all moral exemplars, its actions help set the standard for morally acceptable behaviour among nations. When Israel commits atrocities, the damage to international moral standards is therefore far greater then when atrocities are committed by reviled countries. The atrocities of states like Myanmar are universally condemned, and rightly so, but Israel’s atrocities are whitewashed or rationalized by powerbrokers throughout the Western World. This process of justification establishes new international norms guided by the principle that “If Israel does it, it can’t be so bad.” Israel’s atrocities normalize atrocity itself, lowering the bar for acceptable behaviour for all nations. Barak Obama is going out of his way to prove Neumann’s point.

In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on June 4, 2008, Obama declared, “Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper. But any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Speaking of Hamas, the Palestinians’ democratically-elected governing party, Obama said, “we must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements. . . . There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations.”

His adulation for Israel came with promises for massive economic and military assistance: “As President, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade—investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation. First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defence. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO. And I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world."

So, to recap: Obama wants Hamas to abide by past agreements and to recognize Israel’s right to exist, but he doesn’t ask Israel to abide by past agreements or recognize Palestine’s right to exist. Israel must have secure, recognized, and defensible borders, even though Israel has shown contempt for the borders established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 and has strategically kept its borders amorphous so that it can expand them whenever it wants. Palestinians must renounce terrorism, but the Israeli military is free to launch missiles into Palestinian neighborhoods and to fire indiscriminately into crowds of Palestinian civilians. Israel is also free to arrest, detain, and torture Palestinians without due process; to prevent ambulances at checkpoints from taking sick, wounded, and pregnant Palestinians to hospitals for life-saving treatment; to refuse almost all Palestinian building permits while continually demolishing Palestinian homes; to divert most of the water in the Occupied Territories to Israeli settlements; to completely control Palestinian borders; and to otherwise make Palestinian life an unbearable hell. Israel not only has a right to protect itself, it has a right to abuse Palestinians with impunity, and Palestinians don’t have a right to defend themselves.

Of the many responses I’ve read to Obama’s speech, I like Chris Hedges’ the best. In a June 6, 2008 article for Truthdig, Hedges points out that the “ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed in 2007 was 40 to 1. This is an increase from 30 to 1 in 2006 and 4 to 1 in 2000-2005.” He continues: “Obama spoke about Israelis whose houses were damaged by the crude rockets, most made out of old pipes, fired from Gaza on Israeli towns. He never mentioned the Israeli siege of Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, or that Israel was deploying fighter jets and helicopters to attack densely crowded refugee camps with missiles and iron fragmentation bombs or that it had cut off food and fuel. He ignored the steady expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. He called for Jerusalem to become the ‘undivided capital’ of the Jewish state, erasing Arab East Jerusalem from the map in contravention of international law.”

The full depth of Palestinian misery is hard to comprehend. By building a “security fence”—or a giant wall—that cuts deep into Palestinian territory, by creating numerous military zones, and by preventing Palestinians from travelling between their isolated communities, Israel has effectively cut vast numbers of Palestinians off from their livelihoods, condemning them to abject poverty. In a January 23, 2008 article for The Guardian newspaper, Karen Koning AbuZayd, the commissioner general for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), reported that 35 percent of Gaza’s Palestinians live on less than two dollars a day, and that unemployment stands at around 50 percent. A survey released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in April 2007 indicated that 10 percent of Palestinian children were suffering from such permanent effects of malnutrition as stunted growth. In November 2003, Jean Ziegler, the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, told a press conference that nine percent of Palestinian children had some kind of malnutrition-related brain damage.

Palestinian souls are being mutilated and starved as badly as Palestinian bodies. Research conducted by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program into the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has found that 54 percent of Palestinian children in areas subjected to Israeli bombardment suffer from severe PTSD, and 33.5 percent from moderate PTSD.

According to Human Rights Watch, in the last two years Israel has dramatically reduced the supply of electricity and fuel for the Gaza Strip. In June 2006, Israel bombed Gaza’s only power station, while in October 2007 Israel began restricting the gasoline, diesel, and other fuels reaching the Strip. With Egypt’s complicity, Israel has also ensured that no goods will enter Gaza from Egypt. Deliveries of gasoline to Gaza in March 2008 were 80 percent lower than they were in March 2007, while deliveries of diesel were 57 percent lower. Human Rights Watch states that “Public transport has nearly stopped as fuel becomes unavailable and prices soar. Children cannot get to school and medical personnel have trouble getting to hospitals and clinics. Car owners have converted their engines to run on cooking oil.”

Without power, Gaza’s already filthy water supply will be further compromised. It will be impossible to properly pump and distribute water to homes, businesses, and public institutions. Without clean water, hospitals won’t be able to function, and people will die, especially the most vulnerable, such as the elderly, people on dialysis, and premature babies. Sewage treatment will stop. Factories and schools will have to close. Unemployment levels will worsen, as will all the social problems unemployment produces. The fuel crisis is even curtailing humanitarian relief efforts. In April 2008, Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UNRWA, reported that UNRWA has “stopped the distribution of all food aid to 650,000 Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip because of the lack of fuel in our storage in Gaza.”

Gaza’s strangulation is supposedly designed to put pressure on Hamas, but it’s done nothing to prevent Hamas from launching their pathetic little rockets over Israel’s security fence. Instead, by increasing Gaza’s suffering and humiliation, Israel is making sure that the attacks will continue. Quite frankly, it’s unlikely that Israel’s leaders even want the attacks to stop. In a June 6, 2008 interview for Counterpunch, Noam Chomsky suggested that “nothing is more welcome to Israeli and US hawks than Qassam rockets, which enable them to shriek joyously about how the ratio of deaths should be increased to infinity (all victims being defined as ‘terrorists’).”

And it keeps getting worse. In February 2008, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, said that by launching their rockets the Palestinians were risking a “shoah,” the Hebrew word for disaster that also happens to be the term used by Jews worldwide to refer to the Nazi Holocaust. In early June 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that the “pendulum is closer” to yet another large-scale military operation in Gaza.

I’m reminded of a statement made by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan following the 1967 war. Dayan said that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will “continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.” The situation has changed since then: today, Israel has apparently decided that it’s time for Palestinians to start dying like dogs.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has compared the savagery of Israel’s occupation of Palestine to South Africa’s apartheid era. He isn’t the only one. Similar comparisons have been made by Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, among many others. What is happening in Gaza is, however, worse than apartheid.

Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide reads: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

While Israel isn’t preventing Palestinian births or transferring Palestinian children to non-Palestinian parents, in every other way its actions in the Occupied Territories meet the criteria for genocide. By praising Israel, and by promising, if elected, to fund and defend its actions, Obama, like his rivals Hillary Clinton and John McCain, and like Stephen Harper in Canada, is normalizing genocide and lowering the international bar for morally acceptable behaviour so far down that it’s sinking into the mud.