Opinion: Israel's forever wars in the Middle East will pave the way for its demise

The picture of an 11-year-old girl with napalm burns running naked down a road in Vietnam was deemed so shocking in 1972 that it won a Pulitzer Prize, writes Middle East Eye's editor-in-chief, David Hearst.

"The Terror of War" became the iconic image of the Vietnam War.

Today in Gaza and Lebanon, there are so many pictures of burning people, burning tents, bodies piled up on the streets of the Jabalia refugee camp, and dust-encrusted survivors staggering out of the rubble with the lifeless bodies of their tiny children in their hands, but no one even bothers to publish them. 

Images of "The Terror of War" being committed by Israel in Gaza or Lebanon are not entered for Pulitzer Prizes. Nor do they elicit statements of condemnation or disgust from US presidents or British prime ministers.

Editors are too frightened.

To suggest that Israel is deliberately killing children in Gaza is a "blood libel" that reminds British novelist Howard Jacobson of the pogroms of Jews in 13th century England, sparked by rumours that they were eating the remains of Christian children in Matzah bread.

But Israeli forces are deliberately killing women and children in Gaza and Lebanon and domestic opinion in Israel is urging their soldiers on. 

There are no taboos in the debate in Israel about the final solution for north Gaza or south Lebanon. No hang-ups about using words like "extermination''.

This is what Uzi Raby, one of Israel’s most sought-after experts on the Middle East, does. The senior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University said in a TV interview last month: "Anyone who stays there (north Gaza) will be judged by law as a terrorist and will go through either a process of starvation or a process of extermination." 

To read the full op-ed, click below.

Israel's forever wars in the Middle East will pave the way for its demise