Once again, the US has given its complete and unabashed backing to Israel on the Gaza issue. At the UN Security Council, the US vetoed a measure backed by Arab countries to protect Palestinians. The US said that the vote showed that the Security Council was willing to blame Israel, but unwilling to blame Hamas, for violence in Gaza. How right Washington is. The six weeks of “excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians” as stated in the draft resolution, can only be blamed on Israel.

The situation in Gaza has become so dire - unemployment, limited supplies of electricity and clean water, and a sanitation system unable to cope - it is being dubbed a sinking ship. The mess in Gaza was already bad enough but it degenerated badly after those six weeks in which thousands of Palestinians massed on the border in support of the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel. Israel’s use of lethal, disproportionate force that drew international condemnation, killed at least 122 Palestinian protesters and wounded more than 13,000, exceeding the number of wounded during the entire 2014 Gaza war.

After all this slaughter, all the resolution asked for was some sort of mechanism to guarantee the safety and protection of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank – but Washington stood in the way, siding with Israel that Palestinians brought the blood onto themselves.

Yet US and Israeli claims that the protests were violent made no sense. They were easily debunked by looking at the injuries and deaths that occurred to Israelis during the so-called violent protests. Since March 30, not a single Israeli soldier or civilian was injured or killed. On May 14, one Israeli soldier was scratched.

At the same time, Israeli forces deliberately targeted medical personnel, who were easily identifiable. Unexpected attacks against journalists – two of whom were killed - also point to Israel’s actions being premeditated rather than conducted in self-defense.

Another excuse for the brutal violence by Israeli troops is that the demonstrators were from the Islamist Hamas movement. After the first two weeks of protests, Israelis never mentioned Hamas as the culprits. But as the death toll among Palestinians engaging in unarmed protest climbed, Israelis and their apologists had to create a new claim, namely, that its ever ready foil Hamas was to blame, when in fact, Palestinians marched to the borders with Israel to demand their collective right of return to their homelands.

As for Friday’s second resolution, proposed by the US blaming Hamas for the latest violence, that too was defeated and for good reason. The guns have largely fallen silent on the Gaza-Israeli border following 24 hours of airstrikes from both sides in the most intense flare-up of hostilities between Palestinians and Israel since the 2014 war. In contrast to the bloody border marches inside Gaza that peaked two weeks ago, Tuesday’s events were a decidedly calmer affair and certainly did not evolve into what was feared to be the start of a full-scale war similar to the 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza four years ago.

The US and Israel should have acknowledged the initial change from Hamas launching rockets and digging tunnels to unarmed protests. But it is not possible to overestimate the lengths to which the Israeli government and its political cronies will go to keep hold of what they have built over the past 70 years by embracing the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians.

The Israeli and US spin machines want to shift blame onto the victims and in this regard vetoes help. But they can never conceal the truth.