Monthly Archives: January 2025

The Monster-Making Machine

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In 1945 civilians from the German village of Hurlach were marched into the midst of the horrors of newly liberated Kaufering 6, a sub-camp of Dachau. As they moved from the crisp spring air into the zone of stench and death and disease they protested that they did not know that this horror existed. Could it be true that people living in the midst of 11 such subcamps, 11 such sites of oppression and misery, did not understand what was happening to their fellow humans on their very doorstep? Could it be true of other Germans? The answer is that they knew enough to avoid knowing more, effectively giving consent to Nazi crimes by embracing ignorance. They turned their backs on those whose suffering should have made them weep and rage and take action. They were monsters, but they were human monsters, ordinary monsters.

We know that the protestations of innocence among ordinary Germans were hollow. Innocence is not knowing something, ignorance, on the other hand, comes from the word “ignore”. Ignorance is an act of will. But in our time are we not even closer, in our digital world, to the suffering of the Gaza Holocaust? The images of death, the sounds of pain and the voices of grief and fear penetrate our homes. We carry them in our pockets – we carry them in our pockets. It is likely that few of the people reading or hearing these words are among those that ignore this torrent of suffering, and many of us probably feel a duty to bear witness by enduring the sights and sounds and stories; knowing that the pain of doing so is but a distant muffled echo of the pain of those who must live these events in person. But we are not representative of our society. We are surrounded by those who embrace lies and hate, those who refuse to know, and those who understand that a wrong is being done, but who fail to take any real stand.

The people of Germany during World War II were not a different species than us and we are not immune from the same descent into inhumanity. Monsters are not born, they are made. They are made by a machine. Germany had a monster making machine, and we have our own.

The machine has many parts, but the mechanism at the centre is the news media industry. The more you look into their behaviour in reporting the Gaza Holocaust, the more horrifying their actions become. Their role in this regard is almost exclusively to promulgate callousness, ignorance, cowardice, confusion and spite. Not one day of the last 15 months has passed in which they have not radically and profoundly violated the journalistic standards and news values that are at the centre of their claims to professionalism.

It began with the shock of the attack on October 7th 2023. It was immediately obvious that the Israeli response was going to be far more deadly than the incursion into Israel. Few could have guessed the scale and the duration of the holocaust that was to come, but no reasonable person could not have known that thousands of innocent Palestinians were going to die. Did the media respond with the basic human duty to act to protect those innocents? They did not. They employed every iota of sensationalism and sentimentality they could, effectively whipping up fervour with no regard for what was about to be unleashed. Did the media feel that with the threat of mass death hanging over a people known to be trapped and defenceless it should at least practice strict vetting so as to not promulgate disinformation and misinformation? They did not. They allowed the Israeli government and dubious non-governmental organisations to spread lies – lies that many people believe to this day.

Many people believe that 40 babies were beheaded; many people believe that a baby was roasted alive; most people believe that there were mass rapes committed by Palestinians. Those lies are spread with the volume turned up to 11 and only a tiny minority of organs ever report when they are debunked – and they do so with far less fanfare. The New York Times published the malicious fabrications of “Screams Without Words” and received global coverage, while those who raised clear concerns that demanded answers were absent from the media. Israel’s prosecution service has just admitted that despite rigorous efforts they cannot yet find substantive evidence of a single instance of rape to build a case from. Not one single case where enough evidence exists to pursue a prosecution. That means that those who claimed to have proof of rape are liars. That means that those who claimed to have meaningful evidence of rape are liars. And that means that the news media who promulgated those claims as if they were all but proven are liars, liars, liars!

Nor do they have any compunction about keeping lies alive long after it is known to be a lie. When Joe Biden said “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” the follow up was more of a cover up. The White House “walk back” of the comments made absolutely no explanation of why they were said. No news media asked obvious questions about why the statement was made, including the most obvious question of whether this crucial leader responsible for the ongoing genocide was deliberately lying to promote slaughter or whether he himself had been deceived to that same end. Amidst an endless churn of media interest over Biden’s acuity and competence this explosive story was for some reason treated as a mere gaffe.

A similar mumbling silence descended on the worlds news reporters when Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, claimed unambiguously to have seen a woman being raped “on camera”. The duty for journalists to expose the lies of high officials is clear and there could be no more urgent and grave circumstance than during a time of relentless daily slaughter. She lied blatantly and the purpose of the lie was to generate support for the killing of innocent people. Why was this not a massive story?

Meanwhile, all of the violence being inflicted on Palestinians is normalised, minimised and sanitised. “Lives lost when hospital struck” we are told. By whom? The passive voice has become so overused in headlines that it is like a sick joke and for some reason no matter how much ire it raises the habit remains, as if they are afraid that changing will just highlight how cruel and dehumanising the practice has been. Now attacks on hospitals don’t even make it into most news formats.

Imagine the drama of the stories coming out of Kamal Adwan hospital in its last days. Patients and medical staff dying in air strikes and sniper attacks even as they struggle to save the lives of those maimed in outside attacks. Think only of the story Mahmoud Abu Al-Eish, an injured 16 year-old boy who was in the foyer of the hospital, confined to a wheelchair while waiting for an x-ray, when quadcopters entered into the hospital shooting at will. He was killed along with another patient. There are pictures available of the dying boy as staff struggled to save his life. What could be more worthy of the so-called “news values” that are meant to shape editorial decisions? How could there be a more dramatic story than this high tech murder so reminiscent of dystopian science fiction? Most people in the West probably do not even know that there are small armed drones that literally hunt people down. Most people don’t even know that they hunt down and kill children, including small children. They hunt down and kill children, with reports suggesting that children are the most common victims of this form of violence.

There are so many stories that are too too moving, too novel, and too significant for any reasonable person to judge them unworthy of coverage, yet they remain unknown to most Western news consumers. Let me just focus on one small but important group of people: doctors. How many people know, for example, that the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa hospital, Dr Adnan al Bursh died in the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre of maltreatment? Testimonies about the circumstances of his death suggest that he died of internal injuries sustained through rape. This prominent man seems to have been raped to death and that is not judged to be particularly newsworthy.

The eyewitnesses who have travelled there and returned are almost absent from most coverage, including very prominent doctors. Where, one might ask, are the long prestigious mainstream interviews with people like Ghassan abu Sitta, or Mads Gilbert, or Nizam Mamode. The latter doctor is a professor of transplantation surgery who gained a little bit of coverage when he broke down giving testimony to a UK parliamentary committee. He said that after air strikes “The drones would come down and pick off civilians – children. We had description after description – this is not an occasional thing.” Mamode is certainly well-spoken and authoritative enough that you would think they would be clamouring to feature him in all forms of media, especially when you consider that he has made significant contributions to medical science and has appeared in the famous popular drama The Crown. Editors and producers should be hungry to profile and interview this doctor or others like him, but they are nowhere to be seen.

We can probably all think of stories we know that would shake our Western compatriots from their complacency – from statistics, to personal stories of loss, to statements of visceral hatred and criminal intent from Zionist leaders. Just a few such stories would serve to show most people that Israel’s actions are not merely tragic, excessive or insufficiently mindful of civilian suffering. The suffering they inflict is not incidental, it is part of their genocidal purpose, it is the armed conflict with the tattered remnants of some impoverished militias that is incidental – militias, by the way, whose only source of weaponry is now the unexploded ordinance used so profligately against their civilian compatriots.

Instead of manufacturing a false balance, the reporting should be relentless and one-sided because the events are relentless and one-sided. It is only at this late stage that our media are slowly moving away from framing each new day of massacres and hunger and cruel displacement with constant references to October 7 and hostages as if of Gaza’s population shared a collective guilt. This is a form of racism made to seem acceptable by making the false claim that Israel has some form of legal right to use military action as ‘self-defence’. The constant refrain that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, spouted ad nauseam by the likes of Piers Morgan, is the Big Lie of these times. It is a bad faith argument that falls apart once you admit that Palestinians have a right to self-defence and think through the consequences of that. But you never hear or read in mainstream analysis that Palestinians have a right to self-defence. Israel has the right to use legal avenues to seek the prosecution of individuals who committed crimes or ordered them to be committed; but the right to use military force in self-defence cannot be invoked in the case of ongoing aggression or occupation. In response to armed resistance Israel does not even have the right to use military force against armed groups outside of its internationally recognised territory, let alone inflict collective punishment, let alone commit genocide.

The media are fabricating excuses for Israel and creating false equivalence between murderer and victim. This is purely a response to power. They have internalised the need for fake balance so much that they avoid newsworthy stories that shatter that fragile construction. They evidently feel that they would fail if their hard news products do not leave room for confusion and ambivalence. Then they assuage their consciences by running colour pieces about the human cost, as if this were not the real story, as if the ground truth meant nothing in understanding the actual nature of events. A holocaust is occurring and only the most tiny amount of the violence has been in actual combat, yet these pathetic hacks call this orgy of genocide the “Israel-Hamas War”.

There are no two sides to this holocaust. There is no room for debate. There is truth and there is deceit. There should be no in-between, but in our age of post-truth politics, digital authoritarianism and focus-group-driven-fascism, the vast bulk of Western people live in a limbo of delirium, amnesia, emotional fatigue, and consumerist narcissism. That space is created by the monster making machine, with our news media at the centre.

The truth of what is happening in Gaza is available to our journalists in a flood, a deluge that keeps pouring out of that tiny territory with a force unlike anything the world has seen before. The most documented holocaust in history is everywhere and it takes a powerful act of will to avoid the truth. The worst thing of all is that in doing so the Western media are betraying the extraordinary work of their Palestinian colleagues. 203 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Abubakr Abed gave a recent speech pleading for solidarity and referring to journalists killed by being “immolated, incinerated, dismembered and disembowelled”.

I do not believe in heroes, but I struggle to find any other way of referring to the journalists of the Gaza Strip. Israel has excluded Western reporters, but there is no shortage of quality journalism coming out of the holocaust. There are things that are familiar to activists, but unfamiliar to the public such as the Flour Massacre, the Superbowl Massacre, the debunking of the lies about al-Shifa tunnels, the stories of starvation, the murder of people fleeing in “humanitarian corridors” or in “safe zones” and much else. These things we know largely because of the work of Palestinian journalists. They produce a surfeit of important stories. Therefore, as an editorial decision does it not behove Western media outlets to react to the banning of Western journalists by refusing to allow Israel’s blatant attempt to conceal the truth of its actions? Would it not make sense to say that if our journalists are not allowed to report we will use the large corps of journalists already there and soon Israel will see the futility of trying to prevent reporting and thus let our reporters in? That could have happened, but the Western world refuses to treat these professionals with the respect they deserve. In a recent interview award-winning correspondent Hind Hasan said that Arab journalists are treated as intrinsically “political”. To me this is a polite way of referring to despicable racism. Hasan mentions the killing of Shireen abu Akleh which was witnessed by five professional journalists. Five people who make a living from reporting on events witnessed the killing, but when it came to Western news media they were brushed aside in favour of Israeli hasbara-mongers whose profession is to push a predictably one-sided narrative with only a very tangential relationship to factuality.

Israel’s denials of wrongdoing are so predictable and so irrelevant to evidence of fact that it seems almost bizarre that they feature in our news at all. So often though, the news media insist on treating them as authoritative to the point where, as with the Abu Akleh killing, we are expected to accept their own self-exonerations. The implication is that as a Western power their institutions seek to ensure that their personnel act with legality. This is a racist lie. We don’t accept non-Western countries investigating their own war crimes as being authoritative. We should not accept it for any Western country and given Israeli citizen’s well-documented proven repeated unpunished criminal acts it is clearly a malicious practice to give any credence to their inevitable claims of innocence.

It is not merely the work of Palestinian journalists and witnesses that is given the right-of-hasbara-response treatment by our media. Third parties, regardless of how authoritative and disinterested, are treated as if they are partisans making their meticulously researched 400-page reports simply because they have beef with Israel and therefore Israel must be given equal space and time to deny the reports. It is not as if they ask Hamas their opinion on such reports, even though this slaughter is apparently the “Israel-Hamas War”.

Western media love Israeli hasbara to the point where self-evident information operations by intelligence organisations are amplified with wilful credulity by some and with malicious pro-genocide racism by others. Israel’s famous pager attack in Lebanon killed and maimed many civilians, especially healthcare workers. 300 people lost both eyes in the attack and 500 each lost one eye. Reports of children killed were available almost immediately as was shocking footage of civilians maimed in these attacks. The illegality was glaring. The attacks clearly violated the principle of distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets established in the Geneva Conventions. They are even more blatantly in violation of an additional protocol which states “It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed contain explosive material.” When this shocking crime occurred, though, there was an obvious simultaneous information operation to accompany it. The giveaway that makes this operation so evident was the immediate consensus around tone and themes. If you cast back your mind you may remember that within an hour of the first attacks there were many instances of the same puerile statement that thousands of Hizbullah terrorists had simultaneously had there testicles blown up. This childish sadism and triumphalism is frighteningly reminiscent of the way fascists and Nazis portrayed their early atrocities, yet it became the baseline emotion, and the angle from which the Western media approached the crime. Far from being the wary skeptics that journalists would like us to believe they are, they showed themselves to be easy marks whose culture of self-congratulation creates a herd of infantile sheep.

Now, with a ceasefire imminent Western news media and other institutional liberals are gearing up to rewrite history so that they were the voices opposing genocide all along. Amnesty International has already positioned itself as the superior voice because it waited for over a year before using the dreaded g-word, as if the case presented 10 months and thousands upon thousands of deaths earlier by South Africa at the ICJ was in any way inferior to their belated response. Those who abetted the genocide will now re-invent themselves as its greatest and most important opponents. We who stood against the lies of self-defence, we who called it genocide from the beginning, will be treated as the “premature antifascists” after World War II or the equally premature antiwar lefties of the 60s and anti-apartheid dissidents who were repressed for decades and then treated as irrelevant. The beauty of Western liberalism is that matter what horrid things you actually do, you can always claim to have been pulling in the other direction because of your innate and unquestionable “values” of equality, democracy, and happy Hollywood endings.

Now is also that rare moment when someone in my position is able to do something other than preaching to the choir, because a lot of you hearing or reading these words are going to be tempted by the post-ceasefire narratives of the resumption of normal service. They will lure you with the sense that belatedly the institutions of Western justice have started to move back into gear, enforcing norms and being a role model to lesser countries just as God and Voltaire intended.

However, this ceasefire will not be a ceasefire. It will bring much relief from the intensity of the current situation, but the people of Gaza will still be suffering under deprivation and continued violence. The genocide did not begin in 2023 and it will not end with a ceasefire. Worse still, history going right back to the opening of the First Intifada in 1987 has shown that each time Israel reaches a new watershed in the intensity of its violence it maintains a higher level subsequent level of normalised murder – banal slaughter that comes in dribs and drabs that (not coincidentally) is considered too regular and expected to be newsworthy. This has already been happening in the West Bank and East Jerusalem while attention is drawn away by the slaughter in Gaza. History also suggests that the next time there is an explosion of Israeli military force it could be of a similar magnitude to that unleashed in the Gaza Holocaust. This happened after the 2008-9 assault known as Cast Lead which established a clear pattern of behaviour. The more such violence becomes habitual, the less our news media deign to care about it.

Ceasefire notwithstanding, our activism must continue with as much dedication as ever. We are not fighting to end the current holocaust – perhaps that was never possible – but we must fight to stop the next. We have the greatest tool, the greatest weapon possible in that battle. We have truth. We have truths. Documented, demonstrable, incontrovertible truths that must be made into universal known verities. Things will change if we make it impossible for our political leaders, our academic leaders, and our news media to prevaricate. But be aware that the storyline will change next time, the scam will change. That is why it is crucial that we do not leave the self-defence lie unchallenged. That is why it is crucial that we do not allow them to imply that the genocide is ended with a ceasefire or is somehow only technically a genocide now that fewer people are being incinerated each week. Genocide is never acceptable regardless of the level of accompanying violence and it is not merely a legal fiction to call a slow genocide a genocide.

The more bitter truth that we must face, though, is that Israel has every reason to congratulate itself on its recent geopolitical victories in the region, including the massive immiseration of the people of Gaza. Undoing that immiseration is a monumental task. We have to work to abolish the genocide support systems that allow Israel to do this, and that means fixing our politics and fixing our media. We have to be resolute, we have to be meticulous, we cannot lose faith, and above all we have to support each other. We are not fighting to be winners, we are not fighting for victory over enemies, we are fighting for justice and peace. The struggle always continues.

Gaza — What is Genocide?

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[NOTE: This was originally delivered as a speech at a vigil in Wakatū/Nelson but footage of the speech was lost so I re-recorded it and appended text below]

What is genocide? Legally it is described in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which tells us “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The convention does not mention complete extermination, it does not mention Nazis nor gas chambers, and it does not mention special intent. These things are not intrinsic to genocide.

Being focused on criminal acts, the convention reflects the concept of genocide, but it does not describe its nature. This has allowed a vacuum into which people have poured their prejudices in order to demonise those they hate and wash clean the blood from the hands of they support.

The convention defines genocide in legal terms but it does not define it in terms of meaning. This has made the concept and the law vulnerable to political power and manipulation. The way we discuss genocide is fraught with double-standards. People who know nothing about the concept are the keenest to police its usage. They proclaim, as Piers Morgan recently did that it is not “technically” a genocide unless a million people die. Yet we accept as uncontroversial the finding that Australia committed genocide when it took Aboriginal and so-called “mixed-race” children from their families. In contrast it is desperately controversial to suggest that the 76 year-long co-ordinated multifaceted unrelenting and often savagely violent programme by Zionists to cleanse Palestinians from the land of Palestine is genocidal.

So, to understand the law, we need to ask – what is genocide? Raphael Lemkin created the word and the idea. He was a lawyer, but most importantly he was a driven humanitarian. Ethnically Polish and Jewish, he grew up in what is now Western Ukraine. From a young age he developed a deep abhorrence for mass violence against people because of their identity. Pogroms against Jews; historical instances of persecution and massacres of Christians; and the horrors of the Armenian Genocide (which happened when he was 15) all shaped him profoundly.

In 1939 Lemkin was forced into a gruelling and dangerous flight when Germany invaded Poland, leaving behind his life as a prosecutor in Warsaw. When safe, he devoted himself to trying to understand the unprecedented brutality unleashed on the world at that time. He came to realise that violence against people because of their group identity (which he had previously termed “barbarism”) was not in fact distinct from the destruction of the cultural, social and political institutions of that group (which he had previously termed “vandalism”). Combining these two concepts he coined the term “genocide” and said it denoted “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups….”

If there is one sentence that Lemkin wrote that captures best the meaning of genocide it is that genocide is war directed against subjects and civilians not against sovereigns and armies. The key word is war, and Lemkin made clear that he knew that those who commit genocide do so as a form of warfare. He wrote that “the Germans prepared, waged, and continued a war not merely against states and their armies but against peoples. For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” Genocide can sometimes occur in other forms, but it is almost always portrayed by perpetrators as armed conflict.

Genocide is a policy, it is a strategy. Violent hatred is less a cause of genocide than it is a consequence of it. The dehumanisation and demonisation of the victim group is a top-down process that seeks to shape the minds of the ordinary men and women who carry out acts of violence so that all members of the victim group are seen as a threat, and as a target. The key to getting people to commit acts of genocide is not getting them to hate it is getting them to believe that their genocidal violence is an act of warfare, an act of defence.

IDF soldier Guy Zaken was a bulldozer driver who testified the he had “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.” Why does he call them “terrorists”? In the context, it is not a meaningful descriptive term. These people cruelly mangled (to death or in death) would mostly have been non-combatants if there were truly hundreds. The word “terrorists” has no meaning here at all other than to make the victims sound dangerous and worthy of extermination. Genocide makes even a small child a threat. As an ordinary Zionist recently put it, “By the time they are 6, they are already radicalized! They are the TERRORISTS of the future!”

Genocide is a “coordinated plan” – a process, a strategy, a policy. But really, what is genocide? It is what the victims experience that truly defines what genocide is. Genocide unleashes the violence of murder, rape, and torture; it unleashes the aggression of those who glory in destroying heritage, community, culture, family, and home. More than that, though, it prevents any possibility of appeal to the human traits of mercy, compassion, or even simple empathy. It turns perpetrators into implacable machines; unmoved by the tears of those whose homes are demolished; unconcerned by their own acts of murder; unreachable by the grief of a parent cradling their dead child; inured to the suffering of those shot, crushed or burnt; untouched by the pleas of those who do not want to die; happy to destroy food needed by starving people; callous in the face of inhuman living conditions that spawn disease; indifferent to the terror of a people living under ever-present threats and unending loss; able to look at the people who endure the relentless terror of bombing; missiles, shelling and drones, and call those people terrorists.

What is genocide? There can be no better answer than that it is what is happening now in Gaza.

Gaza’s “Safe Zone” is a Concentration Camp

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Al-Haq, the oldest and most established Palestinian human rights organisation, released an important report about genocide in Gaza, but it should not be important at all. Everyone should already understand that genocide is an established fact. Al Haq should not feel any need to further state that obvious fact. The report should be a matter of academic interest, detailing a grotesque aspect of the deadly campaign in Gaza. There should be no official or scholarly doubt over the gravity, lethality, unjustifiability, and criminality of Israel’s acts in Gaza; and above all there should be no denying their intrinsically genocidal nature. Instead there is yet another powerful and heartrending report trying to break through the wall of equivocation that our media, politicians, scholars and civil society create. (By “equivocation” I mean the practice of portraying the most unambiguous issue of our time as being a quagmire of uncertainty and controversy.)

Al-Haq’s report details a practice of displacement and concentration. It is important to note here that 20th century history revealed the crucial and baleful role that population concentration plays in oppression and mass violence. This was recognised by theorists like Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, but also by Raphäel Lemkin. Lemkin invented the term “genocide” and later explicitly linked the idea to “concentration camps”, but he did not mean the term in the rigid sense of institutions that were explicitly labelled as such by the states that created them. He wrote, for example, of “concentration camps” used in the genocide against Plains Indians in 19th century USA. The name itself is not important, it is the concentration of a population in areas without the normal collective autonomy and social functions that is important, whether they be named “camps”, “reservations”, “ghettos”, “strategic hamlets”, or “safe zones”.

These concentration zones are always extreme and intense sites of structural violence. Normal structural violence is described by Dr Paul Farmer as “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way…. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people….” In concentration zones structural violence is intensified by the destruction of normal social arrangements that allow for mutual aid and collective self-defence. Victims in concentration zones are stripped naked of all but the most primitive protection and reduced to a status akin to that of livestock unable to resist being herded or separated or ultimately culled.

All structural violence is created and maintained through acts and threats of physical violence, but in a concentration zone these acts are far more frequent and they are by nature omnipresent. It could be towers, wires and guards; or it could be drones, airstrikes, snipers, and threatening texts. The people within the zone cannot escape the heavy weight of potential death that is laid upon them. With or without barbed-wire the result is an entire population confined to a place where ordinary life is abolished. Mimicking the situation of displacement camps, concentration zones make the temporary vulnerability and loss of autonomy of refugees into a permanent twilight of contingent life. Left to their own devices people in refugee camps will reconstitute a way of living (however immiserated) but these concentration zones are kept in hellish condition of dysfunction. Concentration zones are a product and producer of dehumanisation, making extermination ever more thinkable, ever more practical, and ever more proximate.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prohibits both “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Clearly these are outcomes intrinsic to the creation of concentration zones. By nature such acts of concentration are genocidal on the surface, but can it be merely an allowable expedient of war? In short, no. It can never be justified as “unintentional” (though you would think otherwise from the way our legal, political, journalistic, and scholarly institutions have repeatedly and reliably whitewashed Western genocides). As I will explain, the logic of concentrating a given racial, ethnic, national or religious group as such en masse (i.e. on the basis of their belonging to the group) is genocidal and justifications of military necessity do not and can not withstand scrutiny.

Mao Zedong said that “The guerilla must move among the people as a fish moves in the sea”. He was only saying what imperialist counterinsurgency leaders have believed for a long time. The first acknowledged “concentration camps” were those arising from the Spanish “reconcentration” programme. The stated aim could validly be put in terms of drying the sea in which the guerillas swam. Equally validly, though, it can be seen as an aggression against the people themselves, an expression of animus from a hostile military overlord.i Needless to say these first concentration camps imposed cruel imprisonment conditions that led to mass deaths from starvation and disease. Soon afterwards the British replicated the process, the counterinsurgency rationale, the unspoken animus, and the cruelty, deprivation and mass death. The Germans used concentration camps in both its West African and East African colonies with the same horrific outcomes with the added atrocity that celebrated Nobel Laureate Robert Koch murdered thousands in medical experiments.

Ignoring the peculiar (but also illuminatingii) example of concentration camps in the German Third Reich, there is a clear pattern established here. These early examples alone serve to elucidate the current case in Gaza. Clearly concentration practices cause harms constitutive of genocide as outlined above. Intent is baked into the practice because the harms are intrinsic and it is not possible to undertake coordinated actions such as building camps, violently forcing unwilling masses into those camps, and manning those camps without clear intent. If the concentrated group is a protected categoryiii (assuming this is not merely a short-term displacement), then the acts are therefore genocidal. The Al Haq report details many ways in which, without actually constructing a camp in the “safe zone”, Israel has taken equivalent and even more elaborate measures to concentrate the people into an area where normal life is abolished in every practicable way.

The claim throughout history is always one of military necessity, but it must be made very clear that the existence of a military rationale does not preclude genocidal intent. Quite apart from the fact that these practices have a long history of being militarily counterproductive, even if there were military benefits the genocidal nature is undeniable. The intent is to take actions that cause harm to the protected group, therefore the harm is intentional. The analogy sometimes used is that if I shoot someone dead in the street I cannot then claim that I did not have intent to murder because I didn’t specifically want them dead (e.g. I wanted their sneakers and the expedient I chose was to shoot them in order to facilitate the acquisition). If the act is wilful then motive is immaterial to the criminal intent of the act. If proscribed harms are being done to a protected group in order to achieve a counterinsurgency goal the acts are still genocidal even if the military goal is furthered by those acts. It is actually worth taking a second to think about the moral bankruptcy of those people who suggest that it is okay to commit these acts and they are not genocidal by reason of having a military motive.

Concentration is inherently genocidal and I think there is an illuminating parallel here with the use of economic sanctions that target entire populations. Like many genocidal practices, such sanctions are normalised to the point where anyone suggesting that they constitute the crime of genocide has traditionally been treated like a lunatic, but the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s changed that to some extent. In reaction the US and its minions such as the UK have of late been very careful to stress the “targeted” nature of contemporary sanctions. In the past, however, it was openly stated that “pain” was to be inflicted on national populations in order to induce them to act against their governments. This “pain” translates to serious suffering, premature deaths and sometimes mass deaths amongst individuals who suffer this purely because of their membership of the national group. Only a despicable racist would think it acceptable that the US government and its Western cronies could inflict such suffering for their own ends. And only a despicable racist would lend any credence to the galling arrogant claims made in these circumstances that the suffering is inflicted in the best interests of the victim group. This sham of benevolent intent towards the victims is a ghoulish habit seen often in genocides, where even the desire to exterminate may be couched in terms of humane euthanasia.

The Al-Haq report contains many chilling and sickening details of the humanitarian pretences adopted by Israel during repeated acts of forcible displacement. The report links these to ongoing genocidal acts, but for me the fact of continued concentration is in and of itself a clear indication of genocide. It almost becomes a problem that there are too many ways in which Israel’s action in Gaza have been clearly genocidal since October 2023. The Gaza Holocaust should be understood in similar terms to that of the Nazi Holocaust. Even though the scale is much less, they are both overdetermined as genocides. Genocide is manifold by nature, but current actions far exceed the norms of genocide. It must be understood that there is no “Gaza Genocide”, there is a Holocaust arising from an ongoing Palestinian Genocide.

The Palestinian Genocide itself has happening for 76 years at a minimum. It is easy to infer the existence of genocide from the circumstances which make the Palestinians enemies of Israel by dint of their mere existence. If Israel wanted to end the genocide it would have to seek a political solution that returned sovereign autonomy to all Palestinians and settled legitimate grievances. That would mean complying with, among other things, the part of UNGA resolution 194 which reads “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” The only way that would leave a “Jewish State” would be with massive compromise and expense. (Massive, that is, except by comparison to the endless billions that have been poured into the genocide by Israel’s international sponsors who clearly do not want an end to the genocide. The US and UK seek to dominate the Middle East by using Israel to permanently destabilise the region and have done since the Balfour Declaration).

Without according rights owed to all Palestinians, actions taken by Israel to control Palestinians in 1948 borders (recognised Israeli territory), 1967 (occupied territories), or diaspora settings (such as Lebanon) are unavoidably inclined to be genocidal. Legally Palestinians have considerable leeway to take action in self-defence and against occupation. This includes armed attacks against Israeli forces even in recognised Israeli territory. By nature Israel’s responses are certain to cause serious harm to Palestinians as such because ultimately it is the continued existence of Palestinians as such that is the source of the problem for Israel. Zionist leaders have always claimed that Palestinians have a choice to act a certain way that would end Israeli violence, but that was never the case and the growth of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory in the last 20 years makes even the pretence a transparent mockery. Apart from leaving their homeland, there is nothing conceivable that Palestinians can do to end Israeli violence against them, so the violence of the occupation itself is intrinsically and inescapably genocidal.

Concentration such as we have seen in Gaza is an act of genocide, one of numerous instances. Of late there have been some who say that “genocidal acts” may somehow exist as a technical truth that does not justify saying that “a genocide” is occurring. I cannot think of a more evil twisting of thought. The basis of this perversion is that the victims cannot possibly be considered worthy of being labelled victims of “a genocide”, so if the law literally enumerates multiple ways that they are victims of genocidal acts, it all must in some manner be a less meaningful, less condemnable thing – something (not coincidentally) that our leaders do not feel obliged to act forcefully to stop.

The Gaza Holocaust is an extreme and overdetermined instance of genocidal acts occurring in the circumstance of a long extant and historical genocide. Concentration in the “safe zone” is just one of the many acts in this Holocaust that we should recognise immediately as being genocidal. Al Haq’s report almost seems redundant, yet we need to break through. We need to support those who write such unambiguous works and do not undermine them with qualifications, equivocations or false equivalences. Sadly this is not just about our ongoing unsuccessful attempts to end the slaughter in Gaza. When a ceasefire comes that will not end the suffering and death. We must realise that we are also fighting for the lives of the survivors and to prevent future victims of the next onslaught in Gaza, or in the West Bank, or in southern Lebanon, or ultimately perhaps anywhere in the world.

Notes:

i I want to be very clear that animus is not a requisite of genocidal intent. You do not need to harbour a personal hatred of a group to commit genocide against that group. Hitler himself would affect a dispassionate view of the “Jewish race” in order to fit genocide into the faux-ethics of social Darwinism. Notwithstanding this there is a very important misunderstood role for animus in genocide. Genocide is generally a product of militarism. In all empires, in times of armed conflict, and in times where an internal enemy is portrayed as a military threat (circumstances which cover the vast majority of genocides) decision-making often devolves to racist, chauvinistic, or otherwise hateful military leaders. Even under norms of civil control once the military is involved in state action it is military leaders that make decisions over whether people live or die. They decide what is militarily expedient even if there is civil control over strategy and those tactical practices may be the most deadly part of a genocide. We have been widely remiss in our failure to incorporate into analyses the psychological tendencies of military commanders who, (by selection and through the reinforcement of culture) are aggressive, domineering, authoritarian, and ideologically chauvinistic regarding nation, branch, regiment etc. (I would be very surprised if there were not also a bias towards racial, religious, ethnic, political and cultural chauvinism that is significantly more pronounced than among the general population).

The importance of military decision-making is that it feeds into a dynamic that inclines towards genocide. Even if we ignore, for the moment, considerations of genocide there are other serious matters of illegality and immorality. Tactics of concentration or other military responses that either displace risk onto non-combatants (e.g. use of human shields or disproportionate use of firepower as under the US “force protection” doctrine) or inflict collective punishment, are all morally and legally invalid. The only legal and moral way to deal with an insurgency (assuming it enjoys some level of popular political support) is a political and policing approach. This does not necessarily preclude the involvement of military personnel, but history has shown repeatedly that the normal military response to insurgency is to treat the associated civilian population as the enemy.

The dynamic that needs to be understood very clearly is that treating civilians as hostile is predictably and inevitably counterproductive in counterinsurgency (Malayan Emergency notwithstanding) and blended political/military approaches (such as the US employs) tend only to produce an illegitimate and hated collaborator class. On the other hand the typical military approach to counterinsurgency is very functional in committing genocide. Thus, when such things stretch on for years and even decades the genocidal intentionality is writ large.

ii It is fascinating that the Nazi regime instituted a prison camp system for those considered political and social enemies of the Reich and from the first (Dachau) referred to these camps as “concentration camps”. It is one of many facts demonstrating that Nazi ideology was overtly based on prior imperial practices, but adapted for a greater totality. In the long run the concentration camp system would actually function in much the same manner as its imperial forebears (though admittedly at a larger scale and within an extensive complex of ghettos, labour camps, death camps, POW camps and death squads). The Nazi innovation of rounding up the internal enemy in concentration camps wasn’t entirely unprecedented (e.g. the Tsarist and Soviet use of penal colonies for political dissidents, or equally the British and French use of penal colonies for political crimes and class repression), but the clear identification with the imperialist practice was new. Equally this innovation did not die with the Third Reich. During the Cold War US client states would also use camps for internal enemies, especially immediately after right-wing coups, and authoritarian socialist regimes (especially China) have used comparable camps in different forms and times.

The Nazi concept of the Konzentrationslager was that of a zone of lawlessness and naked power. They saw the innately genocidal aspects of concentration camps (whose harms stem like night follows day from the radical disempowerment of individual and society) and decided to harness that mode of oppression for wider purposes. A lesson that must not be ignored is that this mode immediately began expanding and permeating society.

iii In contrast political groups are not under the supposed “protection” of the genocide convention. Politicide, however, is not a lesser evil. The evil of these practices is in how much suffering they cause. The crucial thing to bear in mind is that neither is ever never morally justifiable. To inflict harm on someone because of their intrinsic group identity or because of the political beliefs they hold is always wrong and condemnable. You might want to think of that next time you come across people justifying lethal action because the person was a “communist” or “Hamas” or even “terrorist” without some realistic indication that they were an actual combatant.