{"id":301107,"date":"2025-08-18T12:01:18","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T11:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=301107"},"modified":"2025-08-14T09:37:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T08:37:14","slug":"eighty-years-after-hiroshima-the-american-bombs-have-turned-gaza-into-hiroshima-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/08\/eighty-years-after-hiroshima-the-american-bombs-have-turned-gaza-into-hiroshima-2-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Eighty Years after Hiroshima: The American Bombs Have Turned Gaza into Hiroshima 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gaza or Hiroshima?
Images of war from Gaza, by Jaber Badwen. Wikipedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Israel\u2019s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

7 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Standing at the giant parking lot of Kerem Shalom Crossing in southern Gaza next to the Egyptian border on 29 August 2024, I drew a parallel between Auschwitz and Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All comparisons typically fail to capture certain aspects. My comparison is no exception.<\/p>\n

The aerial images captured from some Jordanian air craft engaged in air drop of aid to Gaza\u2019s population being starved to death by what \u201cJewish Fascists\u201d of Israel as apartheid \u201cethnocracy\u201d, to borrow the words of Oxford University\u2019s Avi Shlaim<\/a>, boast as \u201cthe world\u2019s most moral army\u201d blows a hole in my Auschwitz analogy. (See \u201cFirst Thing: Gaza from the sky \u2013 a landscape of rubble, dust and graves\u201d, The Guardian<\/em>, Wed. 6 Aug 2025<\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah. Created 21 January, 2025. Photo: UNRWA, Wikipedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A view of Hiroshima on 7 August 1945. Photo from Peace Exhibition Flyer (see below).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Gaza is more than a slaughter house<\/h3>\n

As evidenced from the freshly emerging videos and photographs, Gaza\u2019s physical landscape today resembles Hiroshima City in the morning after on 7 August 1945. Just as Israel\u2019s mass killing of Palestinians of all ages is the direct, intended outcome by Israel\u2019s planners of this \u201cwar for annihilation\u201d of an entire Palestinian society so is the near total destruction of the physical infrastructure that sheltered the 2.3 million Palestinians at the start of the war on 8 October 2023.<\/p>\n

The vastly undercounted deaths of over 60,000 \u2014 of whom more than 16,000 were babies, and children \u2013 by the Gaza Health Ministry must be paired with the staggering number \u2013 377,000 \u2013 presented by Dr. Yaakov Garb, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev<\/a> who are \u201cmissing\u201d (presumed dead and buried under dozens of tons of rubble of bombed out Gazan buildings).<\/p>\n

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A 4-year-old Palestinian girl, lost her life due to malnutrition and lack of treatment due to the war on Gaza. Photo: 14 August 2024. Ashraf Amra \u2013 UNRWA: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Wikipedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Let\u2019s also not forget that Israel had allowed Gaza to exist as its \u201copen air prison\u201d, to use the term publicly utter by retired IDF naval admiral Ami Ayalon who also served as the chief of Shin Bet, or Shabek<\/em>, which runs Gaza like prison guards, since 2007. That was the year when the Hamas became the elected government of the 28-mile strip along the hydrocarbon rich Mediterranean Sea, something Israel eyes with its characteristic lust for land and resources.<\/p>\n

Chillingly, the common element here is both Hiroshima and Gaza have been variously vaporized by the American weapons.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the estimated 80,000 tons of the explosives delivered through Made-in-USA 1,000 and 2,000 lb bombs, all provided by the bipartisan Washington dropped from F-35s, almost daily and nightly over 660 days, could do a similar degree of physical destruction as\u00a0Truman\u2019s Bombs did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who then needs atomic bombs to destroy Gaza?<\/p>\n

Here worth noting is the fact that the American Creator of history\u2019s first-ever atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer, the German-trained professor of theoretical physics at the flagship campus of the University of California, in Berkeley, was capable of painful and honest self-reflection that \u201cI am become death, the destroyer of worlds<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n

Alas, there is absolutely no sign of such capacity for honest soul-searching amongst the American political leaders and their foreign policy advisors: the United States continues to be the destroyer of worlds, that is, other peoples\u2019 worlds (whole sale societies, countries and nations), from the Korean peninsula to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to throughout the Muslim Middle East of Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza and all of the Occupied Palestine, as well as Latin America.<\/p>\n

In the early autumn of 2016, I visited Hiroshima , with an old British friend of mine, Professor Edward Vickers, whose father is a retired Royal Air Force pilot. Ed resides in Japan with his Japanese partner and their children. I was in Kyoto for a small international seminar on comparative cases of genocidal violence where I presented my main research theme of my own \u201cBuddhist\u201d country\u2019s genocide against Rohingya people, still ongoing to date.<\/p>\n

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Ed Vickers and me, in front of the memorial shrine, Hiroshima Peace Park.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I decided to take a long train journey from Kyoto to Hiroshima and asked Ed to join me at Hiroshima, a place we had both wanted to go. For me, Hiroshima has long had a personal ring: the extended American family (of two sisters, both of whom did their undergraduate degrees at Oppie\u2019s university when the man was on the faculty of physics) who practically adopted me as a young foreign graduate student in Northern California was entangled in the Manhattan Project. The older sister got a job at Los Alamos National Lab where the bomb was developed, specifically as Oppenheimer\u2019s personal secretary. As a matter of fact, her boss walked her down the aisle at a small chapel established for the thousands of project workers as she fell in love with and married a young scientist working on the project.<\/p>\n

In the video below, Marilyn Langlois describes her pilgrimage to Hiroshima, Japan, in April 2025, recalling her family connection to the first atomic bomb, countering myths surrounding its use, and stressing the urgency of \u201cnever again.\u201d<\/p>\n

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