There’s a ritual that plays out every time Israel does something particularly barbaric in Gaza. American officials furrow their brows. Cable news hosts purse their lips. Someone always says it: “We would never do that.”

Really?

Netanyahu has been saying something for months that nobody wants to hear. He keeps pointing out that Israel is doing exactly what America has done, over and over again. Biden himself reportedly confirmed that Netanyahu told him privately he’s doing the same thing America did in Vietnam—and much less than what we did in World War II.

The man’s a monster, sure. But on this point? He’s not wrong.

The Afghan Preview

Let’s talk about Afghanistan, shall we? The war Americans have already memory-holed, the one that’s been sanded down into a vague story about withdrawal chaos and not much else.

After 2001, we dropped an untold number of 5,000-pound bunker busters and 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bombs in round-the-clock bombing campaigns. Cluster bombs—weapons that scatter smaller bomblets across wide areas, many of which fail to detonate and later kill children—were dropped indiscriminately. We hit UN agencies. We destroyed a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul, wiping out humanitarian supplies.

And here’s where it gets truly American: despite ongoing communication between the Red Cross and U.S. forces, we bombed the same Red Cross compound again on October 26, 2001. We destroyed supplies meant for 50,000 Afghans. Twice. With coordination channels open.

Within the first year alone, we displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Estimates put civilian deaths at 3,000 to 4,000 in that first year, with an additional 19,800 refugees dying from hunger, disease, and cold during displacement. That’s not even counting the combatants, or the twenty years that followed.

We dropped thousands of cluster bombs. We used depleted uranium munitions. We systematically destroyed infrastructure: bridges, water supplies, roads, communication systems, power plants, electrical facilities. Hospital and clinic power supplies were knocked out, forcing medical facilities onto diesel generators—assuming they could get diesel. Then we started targeting privately owned fuel trucks, turning even diesel into a luxury item.

Picture the hospitals: no supplies, surgeries performed without anesthetic, staff fleeing, facilities crammed beyond capacity. We started with 500-pound bombs, then upgraded to 2,000-pounders as the war dragged on.

Wedding bombings. School bombings. Funeral bombings. These aren’t anomalies—they’re patterns.

Iraq: A Million Souls for a Lie

Then there’s Iraq, where we killed a million people based on fabricated intelligence about weapons that didn’t exist. Check the Wikileaks cables if you want the unvarnished version. A million human souls. For a lie.

What more needs to be said?

The Dangerous Comfort of “We’d Never Do That”

This is why the “we would never do that” rhetoric isn’t just wrong—it’s dangerous. It obscures the fact that we have done it, many times. It absolves us of guilt and deprives our victims of their right to accountability. It turns our war crimes into unfortunate aberrations rather than standard operating procedure.

This isn’t an attempt to reduce Israel’s guilt. The scale of destruction in Gaza—the amount of explosives dropped per square meter, per human being—is staggering even by the debased standards of modern warfare. What’s happening there is a holocaust, and no amount of historical context changes that.

But we need to emphasize our own guilt. We need to reckon with the fact that America set the precedent for what’s happening in Palestine. We normalized the bunker busters in civilian areas. We normalized the “double tap” strikes. We normalized the destruction of hospitals and the killing of aid workers and the targeting of infrastructure that keeps millions of people alive. We did all of this, and we did it in wars that most Americans have already forgotten.

Sunlight as Disinfectant

This is the case for exposure. Every single war needs to be shown the way Gaza has been shown—live-streamed, documented, impossible to ignore. No more wars fought in the shadows. No more sanitized Pentagon briefings where “precision strikes” and “minimal collateral damage” obscure piles of dead children.

The Gaza holocaust is terrible, but it’s also clarifying. For once, the world can’t look away. The documentation is too thorough, too immediate, too overwhelming. This should be the standard for every conflict, not the exception.

Whether we like it or not, we set this precedent. We wrote this playbook. Israel is just running the same plays we’ve been running for decades, with one key difference: this time, the cameras are rolling and the internet is watching.

The question isn’t whether Israel is committing war crimes. It obviously is. The question is whether we’re finally ready to admit that we’ve been committing them too, all along, in our name, with our tax dollars, under the flag we salute.

Netanyahu is holding up a mirror. We just don’t like what we see in it.