America’s Ongoing Humiliation Ritual
For the third time this month, the Israeli government deployed drones and bombs against the Global Sumud Flotilla, the convoy of 50 civilian boats carrying humanitarian aid as part of a global humanitarian attempt to break Israel’s US-backed siege of Gaza and draw international attention to the famine it has created.
Those Israeli bombings – which targeted boats carrying numerous Americans, including an editor from Drop Site News, Alex Colston – are merely the latest affront by the Israelis not only to international law but to that foreign government’s primary sponsors in Washington.
Predictably, not a single administration official has said a word about Israel’s recent attacks against the flotilla convoy carrying American citizens. The closest reference to the event came from the U.S. special envoy to Syria and ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, who vaguely acknowledged Israeli bombings in “Tunisia,” before reflexively reaffirming “Israel is a valued ally.”
But while the US government greenlights Israeli attacks against Americans, the governments of Italy and Spain have rapidly intervened to protect their own brave Italian and Spanish citizens opposing Israel’s blockade of Gaza, announcing on Wednesday the deployment of Spanish and Italian warships to accompany the Flotilla.
That gesture may not be enough to deter the Israelis, who have organized a government-run hasbara campaign depicting the civilian effort to break Israel’s famine-inducing blockade as a “Hamas” operation and “a provocation.” That Israel has a habit of bombing any civilian organization it labels “Hamas” has made the work of delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza extra courageous.
The latest attacks on the Sumud flotilla demonstrate that the Israelis have no limits and American officials won’t place any on them, even when their own citizens carrying humanitarian aid are swarmed and bombed by Israeli drones.
With the unconditional support of a bipartisan majority of lawmakers in the United States, Israeli officials correctly believe that when they target Americans, they won’t face any consequences. As Tucker Carlson revealed to Glenn Greenwald on Tuesday night, “Bibi Netanyahu is running around the Middle East and his own country, saying ‘I control the U.S. I control Trump,” something Tucker calls “an ongoing humiliation ritual.”
That “ongoing humiliation ritual” – illustrated by our exceptional treatment for Israel and impunity for its crimes against Americans – is one that has existed for decades.
In 2010, a decade and a half before Israel attacked the Sumud Flotilla, the IDF stormed the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, where they massacred ten pro-Palestine activists who attempted to break Israel’s suffocating siege – that blockade, an Israeli act of war that long predates Hamas’s own on October 7.
Among those killed by the IDF was 19-year-old American citizen Furkan Doğan, who a UN fact-finding mission revealed had been shot five times at “point blank range… while he was lying on the ground on his back… in a manner consistent with an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution.”
The Obama administration buried the report, shielded Israel from accountability, and never once demanded justice for the deliberate killing of an American teenager. “What’s the big deal here?” asked then Vice President Joe Biden on PBS News, calling the massacre “legitimate,” before blurting out an obligatory “Israel has an absolute right to deal with its security interest.”
When it was time to defend Israel’s murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, Joe Biden reliably obliged, completely absolving the Israeli government of its responsibility for the murder and desecrating the memory of an American journalist.
Shireen Abu Akleh – who was shot by an Israeli sniper in the occupied West Bank in 2022 and whose funeral was later mobbed by Israeli government thugs – was just one of dozens of Palestinian journalists killed by the IDF before Hamas even attacked Israel on October 7 – an attack which by many Israeli accounts, the government of Israel allowed to happen, likely to serve as a pretext for Israel’s long held goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza and constructing a Greater Israel.
Akleh is one of nine Americans killed by Israeli occupation forces or settlers since 2022; none of those incidents have resulted in criminal charges for the Israeli perpetrators; no American administration has told Israel to prosecute them.
But the families of Israel’s American victims continue to demand accountability. One example is 20-year-old Saif Musallet from Florida, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in July. “Our village is basically 85 percent U.S. citizens… these lands are actually owned by U.S., American citizen passport holders and legally ours. Israeli settlers were there illegally,” Saif’s father told PBS News on Thursday. He added that a mob of Israeli settlers murdered his son and how for 2.5 hours “the Israeli army prevented any medical assistance” from reaching him.
“We just want to see some sort of accountability and for this impunity to stop.”
The Americans killed by Israeli forces and settlers are only the most politically inconvenient fraction of the dead, one we all assumed the American government had a special obligation to protect. Those American victims are a sliver of the more than 100,000 Palestinians the Israelis have killed in Gaza and the West Bank, each of them executed with U.S.-funded bombs and bullets and perpetrated with complete impunity.
President Trump, whose unconditional support for Israel rivals his predecessor Joe Biden, at least hinted at ending our “ongoing humiliation ritual” when he declared he would “not allow Israel to annex the West Bank” – a remark that, however opportunistic or self-serving, faintly acknowledges the fact that our unconditional support for Israel has turned the United States into a co-conspirator in war crimes abroad and a bystander when its own citizens are killed.
Until US officials end this bizarre arrangement – where Israel can kill Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands and Americans by the dozens while U.S. leaders look away – the United States will remain in a state of total and permanent humiliation.
