The promotion accorded to an Israel Defense Forces (IDF or Tzahal) officer accused of ordering troops to shoot two Gazans waving a white flag, is a hotly debated news these days. The two Gaza civilians were attempting to cross the road in Netzarim Corridor in war-torn Gaza. The accused, being promoted, is reportedly set to lead an infantry unit responsible for ongoing Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. No doubt, this revealing information reported by the Hebrew-language newspaper Haaretz on 4 June 2025 brings to the fore one thing: this report, casually leaked out, is only tip of the iceberg. That’s, in view of the ongoing US-backed Zionist genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, this report is just a hint of the horrors going on there.
Meanwhile, the US, with whose sole support Israel is carrying out the genocide, has again vetoed the UN Security Council’s draft resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire in Gaza. In continuation of this, on 5 June, the Trump administration has resorted to an unprecedented retaliation of issuing sanctions on four judges at the International Criminal Court, over its issuance of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, and ICC’s decision to open a case into US war crimes during its Afghan agression. Trump administration’s accusation against ICC charges on Netanyahu’s war crimes is that it will infringe upon the national security and sovereignty of US and its ally Israel. While condemning the war crimes and unimaginable atrocities, ICC had also demanded the release of all hostages and the lifting of all restrictions to humanitarian aid to Gazans.
Of course, Zionist Israel’s abject dependence on US, as latter’s ‘military outpost’ in Middle East, for material and military backing in the extermination of Palestinians is an acknowledged fact. However, the methodology used for ethnic cleansing and extermination of Palestinians including honouring of their ruthless killers is also copied from US that prevailed during latter’s extermination of Native Americans – an aspect often less-discussed. For instance, the promotion accorded by the Zionist Occupation Army to an Israeli officer who issued shooting orders at innocent civilians, is a repetition of what US did in its aggression against the indigenous people of America. This awarding of honours and medals to killers and mass murderers of original inhabitants or indigenous people of America was an official custom prevailed in US as part of so called “Westward expansion” of more than a century, more specifically from 1776 to 1898. That’s, awarding the Medal of Honor together with granting of material wealth including land to soldiers who eliminate Native Americans, was a recognised practice, mainly for attracting youths to the extermination program. Of course, the Medal of Honor was an official policy during American Civil War too.
And, it is an irony that the worst form of extermination and horrors took place under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. His approach to Native Americans was the direct opposite of his humanitarian approach to African Americans. He was also the US president who ordered the largest mass execution of Indigenous people in American history. For instance, in 1862, within one year of Lincoln’s tenure, the US enacted the Homestead Act, which provided that every American citizen above the age of 21, with a mere registration fee of 10 dollars, could engage in “Indian wars” (i.e., war against native or Indian Americans) and acquire upto 160 acres of land in the west. Lured by the land, the white people swarmed into the vast Indian areas and started a massacre that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of indigenous people. The Bear River Massacre was an attack by US soldiers that killed an estimated 250 to 400 children, women, and men at a Shoshone winter encampment on 29 January 1863. It is described as the largest mass murder of Native Americans by the US military. The 1864 Sand Creek genocide, was regarded as one of the most horrific, which was led by Colonel John Chivington with a 700-man force massacring around 160 peaceful Natives two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants. Chivington and his men took scalps and other body parts as trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia. As documented, he stated: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
This practice continued without any let up till the end of the 19th century. In December 1890, following US Army’s Seventh Cavalry massacre of around 200 natives at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, president Benjamin Harrison awarded 20 soldiers the Medal of Honor for their mass murder of disarmed people. Leaders of US government during the entire period of ethnic cleansing openly claimed that the skin of “Indians” could be peeled off to make tall boots, that Indians must be annihilated or driven to places that no one would go, that Indians had to be wiped out swiftly, and that only dead Indians are good Indians. American soldiers saw the slaughter of Indians as natural, even an honor, and would not rest until they were all killed. Similar hate rhetoric and atrocities are many and are documented in Native American extermination monographs.
The upshot of the argument is that today’s horrors committed on hapless Palestinians including the massacres unleashed on them at food distribution sites including those managed by Mossad- linked Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) are copied from time-tested extermination strategies pursued against Native Americans by US ‘settler colonialists’. Probably, no ruling class on earth has ever surpassed the criminality and holocausts upon holocausts unleashed on Native Americans by US. Today, Zionist Israel as a ‘settler colonialist’ superimposed on the Palestinians by US and UK at the time of postwar ‘decolonisation’ is practising the same Yankee strategy in Gaza. To be precise, along with the full military and political- economic backing of US, the extermination strategy unleashed on Palestinians by Zionists is also inherited from the horror trajectory of US!
(Courtesy: Countercurrents.org.)
