Why does Elizabeth Warren support bombing hospitals and schools?

One might think that Elizabeth Warren’s 3.125% Native American background might make her sympathetic to the plights of indigenous peoples. But though Warren has long been a liberal darling, she is proving she can be just as hawkish as any Neo-Conservative when it comes to Israel.

 Israel, she recently explained, has the right to shell Gazan hospitals and schools.
Why? “Self defense.”

Warren has helped to perpetuate the Israeli Defense Forces talking point which states that Hamas stores rocket launchers next to active hospitals and schools, something which both BBC reporters and the UN have refuted time and time again.

Furthermore, Warren defended her recent vote to send more defense funding to Israel in the middle of its recent offensive War on Gaza, saying that she thinks that civilian casualties are the “last thing Israel wants,” according to the Cape Cod Times.

Warren may not realize this, but attacks on hospitals are prohibited by the Geneva Convention’s Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War “unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” Even then, if this were documented (which it is not, according to the UN) civilian hospitals can only be targeted “after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit and after such warning has remained unheeded.”

So much for “the right to defend itself,” since nothing even remotely like this has been the practice of the IDF when bombing such civilian targets.

Warren further emphasized America’s “very special relationship with Israel.”

“Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world, and a part of the world where there aren’t many liberal democracies and democracies that are controlled by the rule of law,” she said. “And we very much need an ally in that part of the world.”

Over 17,000 civilian homes in Gaza were destroyed or damaged beyond repair during this aggression on Gaza.

Nearly 100,000 Gazans are homeless as a result of the offensive, and a senior UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) official said that 373,000 Gazan children are in need of “immediate psychosocial first aid” due to the Israeli strikes.

“The impact has truly been vast, both at a very physical level, in terms of casualties, injuries, the infrastructure that’s been damaged, but also importantly, emotionally and psychologically in terms of the destabilizing impact that not knowing, not truly feeling like there is anywhere safe place to go in Gaza,” Pernilla Ironside said last week.

UNICEF added that at least 219 schools were damaged by Israeli airstrikes, with 22 being completely destroyed. When Elizabeth Warren asks for your vote, remember that she supports that.

About the author: M.B. David is the author of several scholarly works on Middle Eastern politics, history and religion, such as People of the Book: What the Religions Named in the Qur’an Can Tell Us About the Earliest Understanding of “Islam” as well as the recently published Sci-Fi novel Sleeper Cell 2240: Memoires of the 21st Century Interplanetary Revolution. He is currently working on his doctorate, writing a dissertation focused on the non-profit Hashlamah Project Foundation and associated global study circles.

Isa Abu Jamal, Eli Khalil and Ari Simeon contributed to this report.

From the article
originally published
in Huffington Post