On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suggested Israel should drop nuclear weapons on Gaza and compared the Israeli onslaught to World War II in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki with nuclear weapons,” Graham said.
The hawkish senator justified the US nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, calling it the “right decision.”
Graham and other Republicans have been fuming at Biden for threatening to withhold heavy bombs for Israel if it launches major attacks on “population centers” in Rafah. When asked why it was OK for former President Ronald Reagan to leverage military aid to Israel during its war in Lebanon in the 1980s but not OK for Biden to make the threat now, Graham again pivoted to World War II.
“Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war. Why was it OK to do that? I thought it was OK?” he said. “To Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do.”
Israeli officials have repeatedley invoked the US and allied strategic bombing campaigns to justify the destruction in Gaza, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in conversations with President Biden. The scale of destruction in Gaza is comparable to the most heavily bombed cities in history and is even worse than the firebombing of Dresden in 1945.
