Slaughtering Children in Gaza with F-35 Jets is Part of Longstanding Western Foreign Policy but it is increasingly unpopular

F-35 Training in Vermont Lines up with that Policy

Threatening, killing, and injuring civilians, especially children, remains the most glaringly visible part of Western foreign policy in the world today. This policy is most extreme in Gaza, where children are half the population of 2.3 million people targeted by the IDF. Led by the United States, most European countries and Canada have vigorously collaborated with the Israeli government’s wholesale extermination of Palestinian families, including children, for the past 20 months.

Many of the Western governments have long experience slaughtering vast populations of indigenous people, including in North America, Australia, and Africa. Just since 2001, US-led regime-change operations and wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Libya killed millions of civilians. Israel is the last settler colony still actively engaged in committing such a genocide, as described in the interview with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The interview is entitled, “This Is What a Settler-Colonial Genocide Looks Like.”

During one night, March 18, 2025, the IDF shattered the two-month-old ceasefire that was then in place by launching 100 simultaneous attacks across Gaza, killing 436 people, two-thirds of them women and children.

On top of its policy of bombing hospitals, schools, and mosques, flattening homes, and dropping fire bombs on refugees in tents, the Israeli government also re-launched its policy of mass starvation that night. The IDF destroyed farmland, killed farm animals, destroyed wells, and demolished fishing boats. IDF members block trucks carrying food, water, and fuel lined up at Gaza’s border with Egypt.

“More than 50,000 children killed or injured in Gaza,” is the UNICEF headline from May 28, 2025. Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, asks, 'How many more dead girls and boys will it take?"

The Guardian reports, “There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world.”

By carpet bombing civilian neighborhoods throughout Gaza and by destroying civilian infrastructure, including all the necessities of life, the IDF daily demonstrates genocidal intent.

The United States established itself as Israel’s enthusiastic chief partner in crushing the life out of civilians, including children, by arming the IDF with F-35 jets, by continuing to supply a vast array of child-killing bombs and missiles, by repeatedly using its veto to block UN action to halt the genocide, and by imprisoning and threatening deportation of students protesting the US-collaboration in the genocide.

The violent policy is not limited to Gaza

The mass murder and near-total demolition of Gaza is how the West—led by the United States—tells billions of people in the global south what is in store for them if they assert goals at variance with Western mandates.

State-Sponsored Violence with F-35 Jets is Right Here in Vermont

The violent policy also extends even within the US itself. Here in Vermont thousands of immigrant and working-class families living in densely populated neighborhoods near the airport in the City of South Burlington are used as human shields. According to the US Air Force nearly 3000 families in the flight path are daily assaulted with the ear- and brain-damaging 115-decibel F-35 jets training from the airport. Vermont political leaders knowingly and intentionally degraded Vermont Air National Guard F-35 pilots to committing crimes against Vermont families, including more than 1000 children, by locating the F-35 training in a city. The purpose of that city location, of course, is to give the airmen practice for the carpet bombing of civilians they will be asked to commit when called up for the next direct US intervention in a regime-change war.

No Legal Remedy in the US

Federal courts have granted the president impunity. Last year, a federal district court acknowledged that “the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.” The US ratified the Genocide Convention in 1988 and also adopted a law that implements that convention, making genocide a federal crime. But the court held that foreign policy is a political question outside the jurisdiction of the courts. On this basis the federal court canceled the rule of law and dismissed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ lawsuit challenging US collaboration with the genocide. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision.

The Public is Increasingly Aware

But public awareness is growing, as shown by polling showing dwindling support for the ethnic supremacist government of Israel and growing support for Palestine. Also by increasing public demonstrations against the genocide. For example, last week establishment institutions expressed outrage—not at the genocide committed by the IDF—but at tens of thousands of people at the Glastonbury festival in the UK who joined in chants of “free free Palestine” and “death death to the IDF” with the band called “Bob Vylan.” Although the BBC had broadcast their performance live, the footage was taken down. But the vast audience participating in the Bob Vylan chants can be seen within this commentary by Glenn Greenwald. Analysis is provided by musician Lowkey in this video:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio immediately canceled the group’s visa, killing its planned tour in the US. But others are recognizing the emergence of a politically relevant counterculture.

Notwithstanding the government efforts to repress dissent, the campaign to halt the genocide and abolish the ethnic supremacist system in Israel is becoming unstoppable. Similar campaigns faced violent government repression in the United States but stood firm and eventually succeeded in replacing Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist laws with equal rights for all.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot explains a draconian new UK law banning any expression of support for Palestine Action and puts himself at risk of arrest for violating that new law in the above video.