Toshiyuki Mimaki said Gaza workers deserved a Nobel Prize after his organisation won the award.

Nobel Prize-winning Hiroshima Survivor’s
Gaza Comparison Angers Israel
Middle East Eye

(October 14, 2024) — Israel has attacked a prominent survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing over a comparison he made between the blast and the current assault on Gaza.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, a leader of the Nihon Hidankyo organisation that represents survivors of the US attack, compared the two after the group was announced as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

“I thought for sure [the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize] would be the people working so hard in Gaza, as we’ve seen,” he told reporters in Tokyo after the announcement.

“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held by their parents. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”

In response, Israel’s ambassador to Japan attacked the comparison as “outrageous and baseless”, and said such comparisons “distort history and dishonour the victims”.

In August, the American and British ambassadors to Japan announced they would skip the ceremony commemorating the victims of the US’s 1945 atomic bombing because the city’s mayor did not invite the Israeli ambassador.

During Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, multiple Israeli ministers and officials have advocated using a nuclear bomb on Gaza, turning the enclave into a “slaughterhouse” and “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”.

South Africa has argued these statements are evidence of genocidal intent in its ongoing case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, a charge which Israel denies.

At least 140,000 people were killed by the US bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, while a further 74,000 were killed in Nagasaki three days later.

Nihon Hidankyo was founded by survivors to commemorate the blast and campaign for nuclear disarmament.

Israeli forces have killed at least 62 Palestinians and wounded 220 in the past 24 hours, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

This brings the death toll since 7 October 2023 to 42,289, with more than 98,684 wounded and at least 10,000 still missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.

Health officials report that over 60 percent of the victims are children and women.

Israeli plain-clothed military personnel examine a part of an Iranian ballistic missile, recently located in an open area near the city of Arad in southern Israek, on 24 April 2024 (AFP/Oren Ziv)

Benny Morris: Israeli Historian
Calls for Nuclear Strike on Iran

Middle East Eye

(July 1, 2024) — Israeli historian Benny Morris has called on Israel to launch a military attack on Iran, either through “conventional weaponry” or by using nuclear weapons.

In a column for Haaretz over the weekend, Morris said Israel’s response to Iranian missile attacks on 13 April was “weak”, and was part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “extreme hesitation and restraint” in the face of Iranian threats for the past 15 years.

Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles in April, in its first direct attack targeting Israeli territory.

No one died in the attack, which came in reponse to a suspected Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which killed 16 people, including high-ranking members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Morris said Israel had arrived at a “moment of truth”, stating that Iran was on the cusp of having 90 percent uranium enrichment which could be upgraded to produce a stockpile of nuclear bombs.

“The attacks against Israel over the past eight months by Iran, its emissaries and its allies… provide sufficient reason to attempt to destroy Iran’s strategic capabilities, which include ballistic capabilities,” he wrote.

“There’s no better moment to deliver a strategic blow against Iran, given the current asymmetry in capabilities between the two countries,” he added, stating that Israel had far superior weaponry than Tehran, but that such advantages would be lost in the coming years.

“Once the ayatollahs have nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, they may well use them against Israel – and leave it to Allah to protect them against Israel’s second-strike capabilities,” he wrote.

He said that Israel had one key advantage over Iran: its current reported possession of nuclear weapons, while Iran only aspired to it.

“If Israel proves incapable of destroying the Iranian nuclear project using conventional weaponry, then it may not have any option but to resort to its nonconventional capabilities,” Morris wrote, referring to nuclear weapons.

He said that while the international media, some world leaders and “ignorant and mindless youngsters on the campuses” would condemn Israel, there would be “significant understanding” among other international onlookers.

Morris’s comments came as Yair Katz, head of the Israeli workers’ union in the aerospace industry, stated that Israel had weapons that could “break the equation” against Iranian threats, in an apparent reference to nuclear weapons.

“If Iran, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and all the countries of the Middle East decide that it is time to settle accounts with us, I understand that we have the capabilities to use the doomsday weapon,” Katz said, according to a report in Israel Hayom.

Israel’s Moral Deterioration’
The column by Morris was criticised by several Israeli commentators. In a column for Haaretz, Yossi Melman, a commentator on Israeli security and intelligence, said that Morris was “overwhelmed by an idea that none of the current and former mainstream members of the security establishment is proposing”, aside from far-right politicians such as Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu.

In November, Eliyahu suggested that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “an option” – a comment that was dismissed by Netanyahu and led to the heritage minister being suspended from government meetings.

Melman said in his column that Morris had become an “Israeli Dr Strangelove” who “stopped caring and learned to love the bomb”, referencing the 1964 film by Stanley Kubrick.

Adam Raz, an Israeli historian, said Morris’s proposal reflected the “all-destroying revenge strategy” that has dominated the Israeli mindest in recent months.

“Extermination has become legitimate in Israeli discourse, and is evidence of Israel’s moral deterioration,” he wrote on Haaretz.

Morris was formerly among a group of Israeli historians known as the “New Historians”, alongside the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev, who challenged prevailing Israeli narratives on history, including the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948.

In more recent years, however, Morris has taken extreme positions which have been criticised by his New Historian colleagues.

He said that there were “circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing”, and stated that if Israel had “cleansed the whole” of the Palestinian population in 1948, it would have “stabilised the state of Israel for generations”.

He has also been accused of making discriminatory remarks about Palestinians, including by comparing them to wild animals.

When called out on this in March during a lecture at the London School of Economics, he replied: “I’d rather be a racist than a bore.”

Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu.

Israeli Minister
Says Nuking Gaza ‘An Option’
Nadda Osman / Middle East Eye

(November 5, 2023) — Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said on Sunday that dropping a nuclear weapon on the Gaza Strip is “an option”, according to Haaretz.

The minister made the comments in a radio interview during which he maintained that “there are no non-combatants in Gaza”, adding that providing humanitarian aid to the Strip would constitute “a failure”.

Eliyahu was then asked if, since there are no non-combatants in his view, a nuclear attack on the Gaza Strip is an option. “That’s one way,” he responded.

When asked about the fate of Palestinians, he said: “They can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.”

He also said the Gaza Strip has no right to exist, adding that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth”.

The remarks were heavily criticised online, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later saying they were “detached from reality”.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid also lambasted the minister for his comments, stating it was “a horrifying and insane remark by an irresponsible minister”.

“He offended the families of the captives, offended Israeli society and harmed our international standing,” he added.

After making the comments, the minister took to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to say that his comments were “metaphorical”.

He added: “However, a strong and disproportionate response to terrorism is definitely required, which will clarify to the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism is not worthwhile.”

The minister was later suspended from government meetings indefinitely, Israeli media reported, citing a statement by the prime minister’s office.

Firing Is ‘Meaningless’
However, Israeli government ministers reportedly said that Netanyahu’s suspension of Eliyahu is “meaningless”, Israeli media reported.

“This is a joke, there barely are any cabinet meetings anyway, and most of the work is being done in rounds of votes by phone,” an unnamed minister is quoted as saying by the Ynet news site.

A cabinet meeting scheduled for Sunday has been cancelled, with no alternative date set.

This is not the first time Israeli leaders and ministers have deployed dehumanising and incendiary rhetoric in public and used the language of collective punishment when describing their military response to Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israeli southern towns on 7 October.

Palestinians have been described as “human animals” and “beasts”, with one former Israeli general saying his military “must create an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza”.

At least 9,488 people have been killed, including 3,900 children and 2,500 women, since Israel started its most aggressive bombing campaign in Gaza since the start of the war.

The Israeli military has decimated entire neighbourhoods, and continuously targeted hospitals, bakeries, civilian infrastructure, mosques, and schools sheltering thousands of displaced people. It also laid a total siege on the already-blockaded enclave.

Netanyahu and other politicians have spoken in apocalyptic terms about enacting revenge.

“We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the state of Israel and its citizens,” Netanyahu said on 8 October.

Around 1,400 Israelis were killed in Hamas’s attack, and at least 200 people were taken hostage.

Condemnation
The Israeli minister’s comments have drawn widespread condemnation.

Saudi Arabia condemned Eliyahu’s remarks “in the strongest terms”, saying such statements show the spread of “extremism and brutality” among members of Israel’s government.

Palestine’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the comments, saying that “these remarks are a translation of the genocidal war that Israel has been waging against the Gaza Strip for 30 days.”

According to Euro-Med Monitor, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale war on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.

According to the Geneva-based human rights organisation, the Israeli army has admitted to bombing over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual.

Euro-Med Monitor highlighted that the weight of the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in August 1945 was estimated at about 15,000 tons of explosives.

“Due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb,” the monitor said.

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about MEE click here. Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.