“In the Greek myth, Sisyphus, a mortal, is condemned by the gods to endlessly roll a rock up a mountain, only to have it fall back down again. Each time the rock rolls down the mountain, he pushes it up, and in the most optimistic telling of the story, he hopes that it will be the final time. This is his punishment for defying the gods and for imagining his life, his fate, equal to their own.”

Edwidge Danticat “We Are Tired but not Defeated” 

In 2011 Edwidge Danticat made a comparison between Haiti and Sisyphus and my immediate reaction was to wonder if Prometheus was a better analogy. Both men were punished by the gods for daring to challenge their low station as mortals, but it was Prometheus who suffered the greater agony of daily torture. It seems to me that Haiti suffers a similar excruciation and torture that never ends. Their crime was to throw off the shackles of slavery rather than allowing their masters exploit them for another half century before generously freeing them to live in a country where everything, including all necessities of survival, would be owned by their former masters (the racist violent former masters who view them as subhuman animals). 

Haiti’s punishment began with France returning, decades after Haiti broke free, to demand that they pay for the privilege of being independent or face military action. It took 122 years to pay the debt, which kept Haiti in chains of underdevelopment and is estimated to have cost a total of $US115 billion in lost wealth due to the compounding effects of underinvestment. That is over $US21,000 per adult in a country that has the lowest median wealth in the world ($US207 per adult). This impoverishment, though, is never enough. Every time the people of Haiti try to raise themselves the US (with the collusion of France and Canada) has been there to drag them down, sometimes through direct military intervention. The US occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, then supported the brutal regime of the Duvaliers, and helped oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the subsequent suppression of Fanmi Lavalas, the only popular political faction with a potential to govern democratically to exist in decades. While US clients enforce neoliberal piracy and police brutality, they have sham elections with pitiful turnouts so they can call themselves leaders. The instability has lead to gang warlordism. While wealth is shipped offshore, and US companies profiteer by lining their pockets with aid money, the people suffer violence, poverty and disease. In 2009 the US intervened to try to keep the Haitian government from implementing a rise in the minimum wage which was 22 US cents an hour. In 2010 a US contractor dumped raw sewerage from a UN peacekeeper base causing a cholera outbreak that killed about 9000 people and has yet to be eradicated. 

Once the imperial mechanisms of oppression and greed are unleashed they are tireless and merciless. There is no room for peace and justice, nor room for simple honesty. The abusers paint themselves as saviours and camouflage their brigandage as “aid”. Those Westerners who do seek to act from fairness are overwhelmed by the greedy, the racist, the fanatical, and the paranoiac. Many Western officials, oligarchs and functionaries embody all of these traits. They loathe, they covet, they despise and they fear the possibility that their victims might one day develop strength. Unions, socialism, nationalisation, independent foreign policy, control of natural resources are all anathema. As circumstances change they alter the methodology of oppression. This creates phases, and what is happening in Palestine with a ceasefire can be seen as a phase-change in an ongoing genocide.

The nature and dimensions of this next phase can best be understood through an examination of the evolution of Balkanisation, neocolonialism and structural violence in the 20th century. To really understand what happens, though, it is necessary to leave aside any notions that legal concerns or humane sentiments play a role in these actions. This is a cycle of repeated and relentless violence premised on abstract notions of weakening and controlling nations as. Very few civilian or military personnel ever lose faith because they become aware of the human cost; in fact it is far more likely that people will question the morality of causing mass death and misery if they begin to question underlying mythology of moral righteousness at the centre of their imperialist ideology. This is very alarming in light of the current chauvinistic exceptionalism in the West generally, in Israel, and in the USA most especially. 

The ancient imperialist practice of divide-and-rule finds modern expression in practices such as partition, Bantustanisation, and sponsorship of separatism. The imperial and Great Power practice of fomenting and sponsoring ethnic separatism amongst enemy polities grew in the 20th century to include ideological, religious and sectarian forms of division which can be seen in US-backed colour revolutions and the sudden rise of the Islamic State. Currently the US empire has created a situation in which countries must either be “open” societies into which it can pour money and corrupt the system through overt and covert means, or they must choose to be undemocratic thus giving a pretext to the US to impose sanctions and use other covert means of destabilisation and enfeeblement.

Division and destabilisation operations are used as a form of undeclared warfare, notably being used to precede US-backed coups. TP-AJAX, the plan to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran, was originally a British plan taken over by the US. They started by attacking the economy, causing instability and scarcity, but above all causing fear. They fomented discontent and paid people to demonstrate, often with violence and destruction. As with roughly contemporaneous actions in Viet Nam and Guatemala they created false-flag communist terror attacks so that right-wing puppets could switch between denouncing the reformist government as themselves being crypto-communists, or as being incapable of dealing with communist insurgency. In the victim country and in the beltway halls of power, a wave of paranoiac fabulism is unleashed by imperial agents that would make a Q-anon fanatic seem like a Chomskyan realist. The terrorists are under the beds, in the wall cavities, and ready to leap out of laundry hampers. This creates a sense of panic; a sense of both a need and a license to use violence; and a sense that those who do not side with you are siding with the enemy. Variations on this playbook have continued to this day in dozens of different interventions.

The next part of the sequence is the most overt period of violence and destruction. This is the sort of shock that Naomi Klein wrote about in The Shock Doctrine. Discord and instability are sown to effect regime change and then the true violence is unleashed. For example, the destabilisation leads to a coup as above or as in 1965 Indonesia, 1973 Chile or 1993 Russia. Then, once a new regime is in place, they generally unleash mass violence and dismantle social and economic institutions (possibly facilitating mass expropriation by US, and possibly collaborator, profiteers). This pattern is not confined to coups. Regime change, in this instance, means substantively changing the way a target country works generally. Libya in 2011, for example, experienced a structural analogue in that the first shock of destabilisation created a new “regime” by creating the pretext for the second shock in terms of the violent aerial campaign launched by NATO. Equally, consistent with Klein’s depiction of the shock doctrine, you can see the same one-two punch system in the 1980 US presidential election where a radically neoliberal regime change (that arguably took hold while Carter was still in office) led to sudden “privatisation” and structural violence.

The third part is the new normal, which is likely to be a state of extreme deprivation and may involve intractable armed conflict and political fragmentation. It entails more divide-and-rule among other things. If a puppet leader has been put in place it is highly desirable that they be politically weak – divided from their own people and reliant on US support to survive. Though the US called its Cold War puppets “nationalists” (in contradistinction to the “internationalists” of the left) this was a heavy irony. The leftist enemies of US imperialism tended to be nationalist by default. Moreover US clients who developed nationalist tendencies were anathema and had to be removed if they put their own country first. In Viet Nam in 1963 and 1964 alone the US caused the overthrow of three leaders it had previously chosen, each on the basis of doing things they thought best for their country rather than doing what they were told. Similar things happened in other countries with one such incident bringing Saddam Hussein to power. 

During this period many people suffer greatly, but their suffering is rendered mute and, more importantly, the hand behind it is made invisible. It took many years of activism, including difficult investigative journalism, to alert people of the mass deaths being inflicted on the people of Iraq by the US and UK. Desert Storm, the 1991 bombing campaign against Iraq, inflicted the sort of shock and degradation that created the vulnerability for later quieter forms of genocidal mass-murder. The following is an excerpt from my own previously published work:

“Desert Storm…, was as genocidal as previous bombing campaigns, the use of laser-guided weaponry and the incessant propaganda about accuracy serving only, in a sober analysis, to underscore the intentionality of the crime. The targeting of civilian infrastructure which had absolutely no bearing on the uneven military contest was the norm. For example, a baby milk factory was targeted and destroyed while the Pentagon blithely lied and said it was involved in making biological weapons. Ramsey Clark wrote afterwards that there were:

One hundred ten thousand aerial sorties in forty-two days by the United States alone. That’s one every 30 seconds. In an admission against interest, the Pentagon says U.S. aircraft alone dropped the equivalent of 7.5 Hiroshimas – 88,500 tons of explosives.

They say about 7% were directed…. They were intended specifically to destroy the life-support system of the whole country. … This is an assault you can’t resist. … The United States lost fewer aircraft in 110,000 aerial sorties than it lost in war games for NATO where no live ammunition was used. … There is not a reservoir, a pumping station, the filtration plant that wasn’t deliberately destroyed by U.S. bombing to deprive the people of water.

We knocked out the power. It doesn’t sound like a big deal. … But it meant, among other things, that 90 percent of the poultry was lost in a matter of days…. They lost over a third of all their livestock…. Another third was driven out of the country to save them. Because you couldn’t pump water.”

… From prewar levels of 450 litres per person per day in Baghdad, supplies were 30-40 litres. This was not safe to drink but while “the water authority has warned that the water must be boiled, there is little fuel to do this and what exists is diminishing.” Conditions outside of Baghdad were most probably worse in most instances. “The mission concluded that a catastrophe could be faced at any time if conditions do not change…”

Professor Thomas Nagy found declassified documents, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) studies, which showed that the US clearly calculated and comprehensively understood that its bombing and subsequent embargoes would cause massive civilian deaths, particularly to children. Nagy concludes:

For more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives. The United Nations has estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions, and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason.

No one can say that the United States didn’t know what it was doing.

The figure of 500,000 dead children comes from a 1996 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report which has been seriously criticised for its methodology. The absolute numbers were, at this time, debatable but according to first-hand accounts disease and malnutrition had reached levels which beggar belief. I could here quote John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, Kathy Kelly, or a number of others who saw with their own eyes and documented the suffering, but I will return to Ramsey Clark:

During last week, which I spent in Iraq, my fifth annual inspection since the sanctions were imposed, I visited ten hospitals in four governates which have nearly 15 percent of all hospital beds in the country. Conditions are tragic. Lighting is dim, even in operating theaters, for lack of bulbs. Wards are cold. Pharmacies are nearly empty with only a minor fraction of needed medicines and medical supplies. Most equipment, X-ray, CAT scan, incubators, oxygen tanks, dialysis machines, tubes and parts for transfusions and intravenous feeding, and other life-saving items are lacking, scarce, or inoperable for lack of parts. Simple needs like sheets, pillows, pillowcases, towels, bandages, cotton balls, adhesive tape, antiseptic cleaning liquids are unavailable or scarce. Surgery is at levels below 10 percent of the 1989 numbers in all ten hospitals.”

By 1995 it was known that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been effectively neutralised, but once the UN security council authorised the use of force in 1990 it was possible for the US and/or UK to veto any rescinding of that authorisation, so they started a cruel game of pretending that there were still WMD while undermining the inspections regime in numerous ways. The sanctions were to continue for another 8 deadly years, and if the UNFAO figure of 1 million excess deaths including 500,000 children might have been exaggerated in 1996 it should be remembered that this was less than halfway into the genocidal sanctions period.

As outcry began to grow, the sanctions were transitioned to a new “oil-for-food” programme. This was no real change. The programme was under the umbrella of the UN but was controlled by the US and UK. In 1989 the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned citing the sanctions and “oil-for-food” programme as “genocide”. His successor Hans van Sponeck would also resign and then write a book called “A Different Kind of War” which detailed the genocide, while avoiding the use of the term (perhaps because of the politics of a German national using the term), though he would later admit the validity of its usage.

The sanctions regime might have succumbed to international pressure if it were not for the advent of the Global War on Terror. By the time public pressure had rallied once more to end the genocidal sanctions the US was ready for the next phase of genocide – another shock campaign then a genocidal occupation, fomenting a civil war and trying to further partition the country, then arming their putative enemy, which would become the Islamic State, to inflict further chaos and suffering on the people of Iraq. The cycle is never meant to end and you can guarantee that right now there are plans in the US to enact further attacks on the nation and people of Iraq under the rationale of the “containment” of Iran.

Iraq is only an illustrative example. The same logic applies in other places, always slightly different, but always with merciless resolve. Many places that the US decides to view with interest end up in a state of permanent low-intensity conflict. Places like Somalia join Haiti in being sights of normalised dysfunction. Afghanistan was inflicted with a brutal and pointless 2 decades of war only for the US and its collaborators to hand back a much more divided and degraded country to a much more bitter and stubborn Taliban. Everywhere Africom’s “anti-terror” tentacles reached found themselves facing vastly increased terrorism and everywhere in Latin America that the War on Drugs penetrates finds themselves with more drugs and more violence. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, they simply looted then destroyed. Palestine stands out for a number of reasons, but it is not exceptional. That is why historical analogues can point us to what happens next.

During the oil-for-food programme in Iraq the stated humanitarian purpose of the system became a cruel irony. The main mechanism used to this end was the control the US and UK wielded over what was allowed in to Iraq. They would deem certain essential items to be “dual use” – meaning that they might be used for military purposes. This is self-evidently open for abuse. 

In 1991 Israel started controlling the entry of goods into the Gaza Strip. This intensified after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the strip and then became a full-time blockade in 2007. Israel uses exactly the same “dual use” pretext as was weaponised against the people of Iraq. The most prominent basic needs that are denied as dual-use are drugs and medical equipment and construction materials. The denial of these items after assaults such as Israel has executed against the territory causes predictable suffering and predictable excess death. It is intentional pre-meditated structural violence causing death. It is a war crime and it is an act of genocide as detailed under Article II (c) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 

The sooner we mobilise against these acts of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction”, the fewer people will die. If it is not stopped then ultimately this phase of genocide will take more lives than the Holocaust that has just ended. Ultimately, though, the genocide against all Palestinians will continue. Every day brings more news of increasing violence in The West Bank and East Jerusalem. The only end to this is a free Palestine. We can and must exert as much pressure as humanly possible to bring as much relief and safety to people in the Gaza Strip, but they will never be safe until they are have full political control and human rights. It is the need to suppress them as a people, to prevent them from exercising their autonomy and inalienable rights, that causes Israel to keep inflicting violence as if somehow this will rewrite history and erase the right of Palestinians to live freely in their recognised land of origin.

The question is how can we change things now that the newsworthy part of the genocide is over, and that is exactly why the US and Israel have done things this way. Many people know about the NATO air campaign against Libya, but regardless of their feelings on that intervention, very few people in the Western public know what has happened in the country since then. Once something drops from the top headlines of a 24-hour news cycle the number of people who know of it shrinks drastically. When people are better informed through alternative media, actively searching for information, or a social media feed based on their own predilections, they are liable to overestimate how broadly such things are known.

People are mostly opposed to Israel’s violence in Gaza, but it pays to think about the emotional affect as well. The emotive stories that have been in the headlines are the deaths on October 7 2023, the plight of Israeli hostages and their deaths or repatriations, the mass rapes on October 7, and the beheaded babies on October 7. Two of those things are completely fictional, but they provide more passionate intensity than the many actual Palestinian beheaded babies and raped Palestinian prisoners. We need to provide the greater context and since we don’t get to choose the bulletin headlines that means getting people to expand the amount of education they allow in to their unquiet and overstimulated brains.

If 25% of the population are committed anti-Palestinian and 25% are committed pro-Palestinian, then it is really the other 50% that we must concentrate on. Because of the emotional weight of the information (and, frankly, conditioning) they have received they view Hamas as barbaric savages and Israelis as being like us (though perhaps with the Israeli government being a bad right-wing government). Israel, by these lights, has every legitimate reason to attack and indeed to wipe out the intractable irrational savage murderers of Hamas. These are, after all, fanatical animals that will never accept Israel’s right to resist. But then, Israel has killed a lot of civilians and you can’t really blame everyone for what Hamas does; but then, you kind of can because they clearly support Hamas; but then, some of them are just kids; but then, Hamas is using them as human shields and Israel has no choice; but then, they seem to be taking things to excess; but then, if they don’t finish the job this may all have to happen again and that means even more dead children; and so forth ad infinitum. 

Our challenge is to break through the manufactured synthetic ambivalence enthralling half of the population. One advantage that we have is that the numbers do not lie. Palestinian deaths so greatly exceed Israeli deaths that the Israeli narrative cannot withstand the weight. We must push for real estimates of total deaths caused and fight to correct those that misrepresent the body count as an “estimate” when it must clearly understate the total number of deaths. The current body count of around 46,000 Palestinians is likely to represent less than 20% of the total. We must also work to make people know that the violent deaths and the deaths through deprivation are all brutal and tragic. There is no hierarchy of suffering nor of victimhood. People’s suffering should be measured by the number affected, not some qualitative distinction that effectively makes some people less human than others.

Our efforts also have the advantage that any role-reversal will immediately reveal the double-standards involved. If we aim some of our informational effort at getting people to reflect on how they would feel if the identities of the actors were reversed this can create a permanent habit of mind. Our greatest asset, though, may be the anti-Palestinians. They have no room for adjustment. Any significant challenge will lead to outright denial and aggression because their narrative is too fragile for them to concede anything. We will win once half of the confused public starts to see the anti-Palestinian people for what they are. They have been accorded an unearned legitimacy for far too long and once people see them for what they are the media and politicians will have to adjust.

To effect these changes we must maintain our visibility and extend educational outreach. We have to keep Palestine on people’s minds and show them that the genocide continues and that Israeli aggression was not a finite response to Hamas, but rather a permanent state of affairs. Most people’s minds are part of the way there already, but we need their hearts. We need them to feel the pain of the daily humiliation and persecution and the unending insecurity. We need them to see the cruelty of the apartheid – both the callous impersonal cruelty and the personal fascistic aggression. 

In short, the real job in front of us is simply to get about 25% of the population to think what it must be like to be Palestinian.