Graham: Israel Should Do ‘Whatever’ They Want to Palestinians Like When U.S. Nuked Japan
Sen. Lindsey Graham doesn’t want Israel to hold back on its assault in Gaza, comparing the Israeli military’s efforts against Hamas to when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, killing more than 100,000 civilians.
Right now, one million Palestinians — including many women and children — are huddled in the southern Gaza city of Rafah while 300,000 have fled the area as Israel advances its ground invasion. Already Israeli tanks have entered Rafah. The United Nations warned that if Israel invades Rafah, puts hundreds of thousands of civilians “at imminent risk of death.” For nearly a week, no humanitarian aid has entered the Gaza strip due to an Israeli blockade, exacerbating famine conditions. As of May 6, at least 34,735 Palestinians have died during Israel’s assault, while another 78,108 have been injured.
But the Republican senator from South Carolina, a notorious war hawk, showed no mercy for Palestinian civilians during an interview on Sunday’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 the bombing, Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons,” Graham told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “That was the right decision.”
“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war,” he added. “They can’t afford to lose.”
In recent days, President Joe Biden has held back some weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound Mark 84 bombs that can level a city block. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” Biden told CNN this past week. The Biden administration shared a summary of a report to Congress on Friday that concluded Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza probably violated international humanitarian law. A New York Times investigation in December discovered that one-ton U.S.-made bombs were responsible for some of the most devastating attacks on Palestinian civilians since Oct. 7.
When moderator Kristen Welker pointed out to Graham that Republican former President Ronald Reagan withheld weapons shipments to Israel in the 1980s during its conflict with Lebanon, Graham returned to World War II.
“Can I say this? Why is it okay for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war?” he said. “Why was it okay for us to do that? I thought it was okay.”
“So, Israel do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do,” Graham concluded.
Welker noted that even U.S. military officials have said that the U.S. has developed more precise weapons since WWII, but Graham responded by saying those military officials were “full of crap.”
“Yeah, these military officials that you’re talking about are full of crap,” Graham said.
Graham’s interview followed Secretary of State Antony Blinken‘s Meet the Press appearance where Blinken said, “absent a credible plan to get [civilians] out of harm’s way and to support them, the president’s been clear for some time that we couldn’t and would not support a major military operation in Rafah.”