We Need to Talk About the Ceasefire: Part 2 – An Endless Nightmare of Torment

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“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.

We Need to Talk About the Ceasefire: Part 1 – The Killing Hasn’t Stopped

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“The ceasefire isn’t peace. It’s just a pause, and pauses don’t heal wounds, they just give you time to feel them.” Mohammed Marwish – “Reflections on the Ceasefire in Gaza”

A ceasefire in Gaza does not mean the end of genocide and it does not mean the end of mass killing. The ceasefire is bringing in a new phase. In truth, Israel itself needed this. There have been growing morale problems in its military and economic pressures on the home front. There is also pressure on foreign governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end their support for Israel’s genocide. We must therefore be careful not to mistake the fatigue of a butcher whose arm is tired for a lessening in bloodlust. There was also an apparent decision in the US to time the ceasefire with the change of Presidential administration, presumably as a wayto funnel any discussions about its role into vituperative dead-end arguments about partisan politics. Israel seems to have had some foreknowledge of this and the Knesset earlier passed legislation to ban UNRWA timed so as to cause the greatest possible harm and suffering with the least possible coverage and reaction. This is a foretaste of the way genocide will continue under the “ceasefire”.

Historically Israel does not honour ceasefires. This is a deliberate strategy on its part to normalise its violations of ceasefires and establish a de facto claim to have a routine right to use armed violence outside of their recognised borders.

It will surprise no one who knows the history of “ceasefires” in Lebanon and Gaza to read that Israel had continued murdering people. 80 inhabitants of the Gaza strip were killed by Israel in the first 12 days of what is called a “ceasefire”. In the meantime the military violence in the West Bank keeps increasing, especially in and around Jenin, while settler violence increases and looks ever more ominous. Israeli leaders have openly talked of applying lessons learned in Gaza to Jenin, where 14 people have been killed in this one week of “ceasefire”. Hundreds of residents have been forced to move after being given Gaza-style “evacuation orders”. Meanwhile Israel, which is thought to have violated the “ceasefire” in Lebanon around 100 times in its first week, has not removed its forces and at last count as I write has massacred 22 Lebanese civilians trying to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.

Israel’s mockery of the concept of a ceasefire, of power parity, and of reciprocity itself extends to their treatment of released prisoners. As they have in the past, they increase the numbers of Palestinians they take from the occupied territories even as they release an agreed amount. One day after they released 90 prisoners they took another 64 into custody. Since then they have raided Jenin on multiple days taking significant numbers into custody.

The state of Israel continues to reinvigorate norms of might makes right, wherein their extraterritorial and extralegal murder and abduction of people is treated as a regular and accepted part of life. The events of the last 15 months have created a new watershed at which a higher level of violence is rendered invisible to Western editors, politicians and pundits. Actual deaths of Palestinians will be reduced in value far below mere potential Israeli deaths, let alone actual Israeli deaths. Once again, footage, column inches, gigabytes and megapixels will all be focussed more on the plight of Israelis who must live in the fear that the people their government kills every day might find ways of striking back. In the name of security Israel will keep killing and killing and killing; one here, another here, four more here, just a small family over there. Nothing that would mean anything to a Western news gatekeeper. Yet this horrible unspoken killing will likely be only the tip of the iceberg, while the Israeli siege kills far more people through deprivation than it does through armed violence.

If a ceasefire beds in Israel will find it difficult to restart the Holocaust with the same level of violence, however history suggests that they will push the boundaries of the term “ceasefire”. In all Palestinian territories the higher levels of armed violence that have taken hold will continue. More to the point, though, having reduced the people of the Gaza Strip to a condition of extreme vulnerability, Israel will use deliberate acts of deprivation to kill people just a surely as with force of arms. If Israel is not stopped the next few years will come to feel like the second phase of the Gaza Holocaust, and like the first phase it will seem inexplicable to the people suffering through it that the world is letting this happen.

If Israel does not keep killing as many people in Gaza with bombs and bullets and missiles and drones, it does not mean they will be killing fewer people over time. Even drastic drops in deaths through traumatic injury and starvation will not translate into a correspondingly drastic drop in excess mortality.

The current condition of the people in Gaza is so reduced that they are vulnerable to deaths from disease, deprivation, exposure, despair and malnutrition. The genocide is going into stealth mode, cloaking itself in the passive voice even more thoroughly than it has previously managed. This has happened before. By preventing the necessities of life from entering the Gaza strip Israel can kill more people with far less attention and without the pressure to end the killing. The killing will be slower, but not necessarily much slower.

Genocide does not mean that a certain quantity of people must die, yet it is entirely possible that people in Gaza will continue to die prematurely at levels that will quickly reach hundreds of thousands within a few years. There is a clear precedent for this outside of Palestine. After the destruction of Desert Storm the US instituted a genocidal sanctions regime that is estimated to have caused one million Iraqis to die of preventable disease and malnutrition.

There are other precedents that I will outline in part 2 of this article. In these precedents a moment of crisis and shock in which massive deadly force is unleashed is followed by endless “low intensity” conflict, political and social fragmentation, and deadly structural violence. Armed violence persists, but at lower chronic level that seems strangely incurable. With the compliance of news media the structural violence is made invisible to people and the instability is made to seem endemic so that over time the deadly genocide appears as a normal state of affairs, even to the point where it seems that the victims themselves create the misery through their own deficiencies. This is predictable as part of the future in all of occupied Palestinian territories, because it has already happened, because it was already happening. The Gaza Holocaust has ushered in a heightened level of violence beyond the Gaza Strip, but this is an intensification of existing processes. Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories face greater suffering in the coming years than the considerable suffering they faced before October 2023.

Despite this some Palestine solidarity organisations seem determined to support this new phase of genocide by signalling to the public that the ceasefire changes everything, even when amongst themselves they clearly understand that this is not the case. Unconsciously they are letting the public misapprehension about the situation dictate their strategy rather that critically reflecting on it and reacting appropriately. It is very important that the public is kept awake despite the heavy sedative pressure that the media and political establishment will exert on them. That means that visible activism should be maintained as is for quite some time even as efforts shift in future months to outreach, education and BDS activities.

Far from being a time to pause this is a time to work towards increasing efforts. It may be that momentum is lost, but the less we lose now the less we need to regain later. We can no longer pretend that our role is to apply pressure so that the Powers That Be will finally recognise the injustice and act to re-establish the International Rules-Based Order. Legal avenues and formal political participation at various levels of government are important tools, but ultimately it will only work as expressions of wider democratic pressure coming from a public roused to action in very large numbers. It should be obvious by now that protecting Israel’s right to commit genocide is such a key strategic plank of US imperial power that it is willing to call in all favours and spend any amount of political, cultural and economic capital to maintain the Zionist outpost to control the oilfields of the Middle East. Throughout the West, leaders in politics, media and commerce have shown themselves to be slaves of an authoritarian obedience to power even at their own expense, and those chains can only be broken by the realistic threat that they will lose their positions, their money, and their power if they do not change. Many will simply have to be driven out of public life.

The fact is that all around the world Zionists have absolutely committed totally to their cause. They have left no room for compromise and we have no choice but to see this through to its completion. As Abby Martin told TRT World: “There is no way forward except for the total liberation of Palestine.” The Gaza Holocaust has been a mask-off moment and we now know that the Zionists thorughout the world have transitioned to full-fat fascism. They believe that controlling information creates reality in a literal sense and they cannot be reasoned with or debated. You cannot show them images of dead and mutilated children, cities turned to moonscapes, prisoners being tortured, or mass graves and cause any change in their beliefs. It is only when people lose their illusions and discard the myths that they regain their humanity.

Consider the example of Piers Morgan who has tried to position himself from the beginning as some form of honest broker willing to criticise the Israeli government. In the last 16 months he has been made to confront some of the horrors of the genocide, though he manages to remain ignorant of some inconvenient facts to a remarkable degree. His schtick means that he cannot simply deny and gainsay everything he is confronted with otherwise he would serve no purpose. He would be another Eylon Levy or Danny Danon or Mark Regev. These people are useful for rabble-rousing among anti-Palestinian zealots, but they have become liabilities in the general public whilst there is an awareness of the mass deaths that Israel is causing among innocents. Morgan’s role is not to deny everything it is to cast doubt, throw shade and sow confusion, but as more atrocities are exposed and proven he is forced into extreme positions. In a conversation with Tucker Carlson he endorsed the deliberate killing of children as a moral act “if there is a world war and it threatens the entire world”. It is hard not to conclude that he is shifting his moral goalposts by changing the way he views the context so as to make room for defending the documented systematic killing of children that has been occurring. It is a reminder that although spreading emotive information about the human costs of genocide is important, it may be more important to challenge the one-sided framing of the causes of violence. Israel does not have a right to use armed violence and claim self-defence and Morgan should have been challenged on that from the first time he bullied guests into accepting that framework. If people can use foundational myths to legitimate one murder, they will simply increase the perceived stakes to justify one million murders.

Some people never admitted that Adolf Hitler did anything wrong, and there was no way of making them do so. The answer to this problem was to ensure that a consensus existed among the general society that Hitler’s crimes were real and inexcusable. Zionist or Nazi, the only way to push fanatics out of the mainstream discourse in our decadent society will be to rouse the passion of the majority against them. Above all that means creating certainty. Currently the average person does not like what Israel has done in Gaza, but they are kept in a space of extreme ambivalence, if not confusion, by the constant repetition of Israeli hasbara in our media. The fact that polls show that the public mostly sides with Palestinians in simple binary terms, should not fool activists into think that the public really grasps what is going on. They are kept in a fog of uncertainty and made to feel that some aspects of the situation are very complicated and difficult. They are told repeatedly that the causes of violence in Palestine are ancient enmities and they are not given any reason to question that lie.

Hasbara can be thought of as propaganda, but the word means “explaining”. Western media has been very careful to always leave room for people to give credence to the hasbara – the Zionist explanation – often by simply leaving out the parts of the news that blatantly contradict said hasbara. We need to create education and awareness so that people understand that Israel’s explanations do not create the controversy that people are led to believe. There are no two sides to this and once a majority understand this the politics will have to shift. Once that motion starts it will create its own momentum as each new Israeli atrocity or attempt at diplomatic bullying is seen for what it actually is. At some point many of us crossed a line in our lives when our received notions of Arab savagery, Israeli nobility, Islamic fanaticism, and Jewish urbane humanism no longer persuade us that the victim is the murderer. As much as we need to end the distortions of emphasis and viewpoint and scale in our media, we also need to convince people to believe the evidence of their own eyes.

Israel is still killing people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and in Lebanon. It is not going to end. They will be committing even worse crimes by putting a genocidal stranglehold on goods entering the Gaza Strip. This has happened before and it has cost many lives already. The people who dies from preventable and treatable diseases are just as precious. They and their loved ones must often endure the agony of knowing that they are being murdered through a system of detached cruelty and banal evil.

We must do our best to bring freedom to Palestine because the genocide will continue until this is over. The best way to understand deadliness of this phase is to look at the genocidal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990’s. The events show the power of the US empire to replace one mode of genocide with another as required. Imperial powers do not relent and they will not ever tire or recoil from the inhumane expedients that create their hegemony. The only way out of this is a full conscious movement of solidarity between the masses at the “core” and those at the “periphery”. The nature of imperial genocide is found beyond war and conquest and massacres, it is found in neocolonialism, neoliberalism, structural violence and the perpetual suffering that is inflicted as a matter of course by the implacable and fanatical mass-murderers that wield power in the Western world.

The “ceasefire” has left a situation in which misery and death will continue of it own accord, but which will be aggravated and accelerated by the structural violence brought to bear. Chris Hedges’ article “The Western Way of Genocide” opens:

Gaza is a wasteland of 50 million tons of rubble and debris. Rats and dogs scavenge amid the ruins and fetid pools of raw sewage. The putrid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rises from beneath the mountains of shattered concrete. There is no clean water. Little food. A severe shortage of medical services and hardly any habitable shelters. Palestinians risk death from unexploded ordnance, left behind after over 15 months of air strikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes and blasts from tank shells, and a variety of toxic substances, including pools of raw sewage and asbestos.

Hepatitis A, caused by drinking contaminated water, is rampant, as are respiratory ailments, scabies, malnutrition, starvation and the widespread nausea and vomiting caused by eating rancid food. The vulnerable, including infants and the elderly, along with the sick, face a death sentence. Some 1.9 million people have been displaced, amounting to 90 percent of the population. They live in makeshift tents, encamped amid slabs of concrete or the open air. Many have been forced to move over a dozen times. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed or damaged. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, universities — Israel blew up Israa University in Gaza City in a controlled demolition — cemeteries, shops and offices have been obliterated. The unemployment rate is 80 percent and the gross domestic product has been reduced by almost 85 percent, according to an October 2024 report issued by the International Labor Organization.

In Part 2, I will discuss the phase that comes after this intense destruction – a Sisyphean curse of slow genocide that the West inflicts on its former colonies and potential rivals.

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 7^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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.

Episode 6: We Need to Talk About Syria

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The fall of the Assad regime has been widely celebrated but there are already signs that it may lead to an even worse future for the people of Syria and the region. The experiences of those who suffered under the Assad regime are real and their pain and loss should be honoured but we should not do so by ignoring the crimes of others. The people who have suffered and those who will suffer at the hands of Islamists, US client forces, and Turkish proxies are just as valid and meaningful as those who suffered and died under the Syrian Ba’ath regime.

We who are not personally affected have a duty to be disinterested, a duty to advocate for every person, not to pick a side because Assad was a ruthless dictator or because we support a particular ideology. In this age of “Western values”, pinkwashing, greenwashing, femiwashing and now the HTS’s “woke-jihadism” we should know already that the Manichean propaganda machine that makes some people into demonic neo-Hitlers is morally arbitrary.

The Western media system does not promote true resisters as its anti-Hitler’s, it promotes its own loyal torturers and murderers. We cannot in conscience throw up our hands and join the cynics who say nothing, nor can we countenance the repugnant celebration of the fall of the Assad regime that whitewashes the cruel circumstances and the likely cruel future that will come of it. We have to find a way to understand what this means to humanity that is not predicated on childish notions of heroes and villains.

In another world the end of the Syrian Ba’ath regime would be cause for joy, but we do not live in that world. The further empowerment of the US empire and its clients Turkiye and Israel will almost certainly cause more death, grief, pain and destruction than the continued existence of the Assad regime would have. Instead on focusing on the specifics of the Balkanisation of Syria and it future of likely instability and subservience to the US, Israel and Turkiye,

I take a broader historical view. Using Tipu Sultan as an analogy I show that the nature of a local potentate, good or bad, is less significant in the long term than the fact that they are local. A bad dictator might kill tens of thousands and will forever be known as an epitome of brutality, but imperial powers can murder hundreds of thousands and it will be viewed as simple the cost of “stability”.

READING:

William Shawcross: SIdeshow

John Atkins Hobson – Imperialism

Lenin – Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Michael Hudson – Superimperialism

Mike Davis – Late Victorian Holocausts

A Fiction of War

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To continue its genocide Israel must first convince the world that it is fighting a war. It targets civilians and claims they are “human shields” who have become collateral damage. It leaves Palestinians with no choices, demanding of them the impossible, and then claims that they are choosing war. Israel simulates war to commit genocide.

The “thinking” behind Israel’s tactics of genocide in Gaza is not directly practical. In practical terms it would be easier to simply name a “final solution” of extermination and work from that basis. Yet the current modalities of genocide are crucial in creating a fiction of war, a lie that the one-sided violence of genocide is warfare in the sense characterised by Clausewitz as being “policy carried out by other means”, which is often quoted with the word “policy” replaced by “diplomacy”. In the case of Israel we can also say that diplomacy is genocide carried out by other means. Israeli diplomacy invariably aims to create the fiction of war – a sense that the violence inflicted by Israel is a form of two-sided “conflict” rather than the one-sided murder that it is.

None of this is without precedent. Genocide is always a process, not an event. Colonial genocides in particular are seen at the time as a series of asymmetric wars, each treated by the aggressor as having separate causes and aims.

The most complete sequence of colonial genocide can be seen over the centuries violent expansion by the English, then British, then USA killing and dispossessing the indigenous people of what is now the continental USA. This genocide (or these genocides) began as discrete events of massacre and warfare, becoming increasingly more asymmetric. Treaties and interregna of “peace” became means of ethnic cleansing and periods of “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (a punishable act of genocide as described in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Through this time clearly genocidal non-warfare acts such the slaughter of bison and the promulgation of genocidal ideology were ongoing. The genocide grew in sophistication as it moved West, reaching California as a combination of bureaucratised and systematic mass-murder that would be a direct inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s genocidal policies.

When the victims are reduced to a tiny fraction of the original population with an even tinier fraction of the dominion that they once held the genocide does not end. Genocidal policies enter new phases. Some tribes are declared extinct so that survivors have no recognised identity nor historical claim against dispossession. Children are taken then sent to residential schools to “kill the Indian, and save the man” (frequently without achieving the latter). Other policies aim to destroy languages and other foundations of cultural identity. This leads to the last phase, that of assimilating the remnants. This phase is perhaps better exemplified in Aotearoa, Canada and Australia but is broadly indicative of the sequence of genocide in the US. In the last phase the surviving population is inducted at the bottom of the class system. The systems of class oppression are used on them as inherited from British class society, but enhanced by a racial element into “structural racism”. In this phase (which may still be considered genocidal) state instruments of coercion fall unevenly on the remaining indigenous population. Ideologically, like the lower classes, it is made to seem natural that they would need to be subject to greater surveillance, control and correction by the state. This expresses itself through the violence of policing and criminal justice and through the violent and prescriptive aspects of the state “welfare” apparatus. One indication that this can legitimately be thought of as genocide is the sobering fact, for example, that more Canadian indigenous children are taken from parents now by the state than were taken at the height of the acknowledged “genocide” enacted through the residential school system.

I have gone on this digression regarding genocide in the US because it is such a comprehensive example of genocide. It is not only complete but it is fractal, such that different pieces can be carved out and will still show much the same thing an a smaller scale in time and space. The elements of genocide tend to follow a progression, but when one modality is to the fore it does not mean that others are absent. This is true of the genocide against Palestinians which is expressed differently for Palestinians in Gaza, those in Areas A, B, and C of occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and those Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. All of the elements of colonial genocide that I have described are there.

The dominant modality or idiom of genocide against Palestinians we see at the moment is akin to that of nineteenth century California such as described in Benjamin Madley’s eye-opening 2017 book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. The most obvious differences come from the vastly expanded capabilities that technology gives the state of Israel, but the basic structure is the same – the maximum amount of surveillance, control and categorisation juxtaposed with systematic mass killing. The killing can be linked to open espousal of extermination by some elements of the Israeli state (military, government, capital and ideological/media) but the exterminatory nature is deniable in that it is not implemented in a direct comprehensive manner. The logic of extermination is there in the totalising nature of the choice of whom to kill. Though Israel often effects genocide by eliminating crucial people, such as medical or educational staff, we have ample evidence now that on the whole Israel’s violence is aimed at all Palestinians as such. The fact that there is no “final solution” does not mean that it is not a process of extermination. Over time, however, if not ended this genocide will follow the same path that other colonial genocides have followed, destroying Palestinians as such. If the current upsurge in genocidal violence becomes a new norm (like Operation Cast Lead which became a precedent for systematic mass-murder carried out with impunity) then Palestinians will effectively be cleansed from the occupied territories in one or two decades at most.

This genocidal slaughter is all underwritten by fake peace processes, the fake “two-state solution” and a form of diplomacy that (as I already stated) amounts to genocide carried out by other means. In the recently published What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? author Raja Shehadeh tells of personally attending a fake peace conference at which he was scolded for calling the occupied territories “occupied”. Shehadeh concludes that “[r]eal peace would mean a reconfiguration of the myth….” A peaceful democratic Jewish state is no longer possible and the actual apartheid state that exists cannot and could never survive without conflict.

Fake “peace” diplomacy is in fact conflict diplomacy designed to ensure that a plausible state of conflict always exists as cover for a genocidal process (which has a clear direction of travel along a road towards total erasure of Palestinians as such from the occupied Palestinian territories). I have referred to this as Israeli diplomacy, but in truth it is US diplomacy also. The Oslo process was designed by the US and it led to an impossible situation for Palestinians. There was literally nothing real that they could concede in return for peace and statehood, but Israel was able to create and maintain a façade of making demands for security. It is a paper-thin pretence that is completely belied by their settlement activities and much else besides. There is no legitimate reason why the US would accept any of this if they were at all invested in the “Oslo process”, the “peace process”, or the “roadmap for peace”. On the contrary, the US spent decades repeatedly insisting that “final status issues” (i.e. those that actually lead to peace) are an exclusively bilateral concern and did not shift that position as Israel systematically and ostentatiously made any promised resolution impossible. The consistency of the US in this regard reveals the bad faith in which they drew up the parameters of this “peace process”. This means, ipso facto, that they are the knowing architects of the fake peace process, which is to say the permanent conflict process that is a crucial foundation of the ongoing genocide. Therefore, this is a US genocide.

It is by no means abnormal for those committing genocide to use a pretext of armed conflict as cover for their activities. When Lemkin invented the term genocide he stated that: “For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” This sentiment seems to be echoed in the words of another person – Adolf Hitler (also, in a way, an authority on genocide). Hitler wrote: “This partisan war has its advantages as well. It gives us the opportunity to stamp out everything that stands against us.” As a rule, if armed conflict is serving as a pretext for another undeclared policy, that policy must certainly be genocide.

There are good reasons for believing that Israel cannot achieve its aims through genocide because the world has changed since similar colonial genocides succeeded. But that is only true if we make it true. Those people lost to historic genocides were almost voiceless, but the problem now is not voicelessness, it is deafness. The deafness of Western leaders and those of certain lackey countries. They cling to a malicious malevolent mendacious obtuseness. It is violent genocidal racism that hides behind specious arguments and a phoney concern for Jewish safety. Central to all of this toxic hatred is the fiction of war – the pretence that a stateless impoverished people pose a threat to the 6^th most powerful military in the world – a contention based on the racist notion that Palestinians reject peace because they have an irrational hatred that drives them to perpetuate a conflict in which they lose much more than their powerful enemies.

It is foul fascist nonsense, this victim-blaming fiction of war. There are no half-measures left to us in response. We need to drive the genocide supporters and genocide deniers off the air and out of office. Moreover, the genocide will not end until Palestine is free. A ceasefire will not bring real peace, just a different phase of genocide. Only a single democratic state and an international commitment to reparation and stability will bring peace, justice and an end to genocide.

New podcast: Ep 01 We Need to Talk About Antisemitism

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A new podcast by me: Ep 01 We Need to Talk About Antisemitism

Israel’s War Against Morale and Morality: Learned Helplessness, Elite Capture, Managed Fascism, and How to Fight Back.

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To begin I cried every day,

then every day,

then every day.

No shock, only churning

yearning helpless sadness.

A living emotion

that has grown tough and bitter:

A wiry weed

hugging dark cracks so that

tears are hard to reach.

Part of me has died.

A percentage is now rubble.

Last week a heartbreaking message was delivered on twitter: “This will be the last post we share here. We believe there is no point in telling our human stories anymore; everyone has grown accustomed to seeing us killed. It’s no longer worth the risk to send our voice out to a world that is content with mere solidarity. Even many of our human stories no longer interest people (even our voice is being ignored). It’s time to stop waiting for a savior and to help ourselves survive. Please try to keep us in your prayers.”

These words came from @GazaMartyrs, an account dedicated to naming and humanising people killed by Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. The decision to end these activities came after another post that read: “Nothing has ever shaken or broken me before like Mohamed did today during our filming. There is nothing in this world that justifies killing a man’s children, mother, and wife all at once. He went from being the happiest man because of his children to being completely shattered in a single moment. This is the reality for all of us here in this hell. We are being killed here, losing our dearest loved ones and friends, and all we have met with is abandonment and silence.”

That earlier post came in response to a particularly cruel story. Readers may be familiar with the tragic details. Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan left his wife, mother-in-law and newborn twins to obtain birth certificates for his babies. Social media posts show how happy Muhammad and his wife were with their beautiful and beloved new arrivals. An Israeli strike hit precisely the 5th storey apartment where the proud new mother, Dr Jumana Abu al-Qumsan, was standing at the window trying to get an internet signal.

Given what we know of the timing and precision of the strike it seems very likely that Israel deliberately timed the murders so as to leave the father bereft. This is an act of psychological warfare. It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that Israel would deliberately leave a survivor whose tragic loss becomes a global news story, but, as the reaction of @GazaMartyrs shows, such actions can be very demoralising. Thankfully @GazaMartyrs have resumed their work, but the source of their despair is ongoing. Israel is selectively using ostentatious atrocities to make Palestinians feel powerless and isolated while also creating a divide between the global Palestine solidarity activist population and less engaged majority populations in Western countries.

We cannot know for certain that this or any particular act of murder was also a macabre form of psychological operation, but if it’s not true in this case it is certainly true in others. The killing of Hind Rajab and the paramedics sent to her aid took place over many hours, took great coordination, and was clearly intentional and purposive. Equally in the initial months of the assault on Gaza an IDF run Telegramsocial media account shared many explicit posts by IDF personnel showing themselves committing clear war crimes. There are many other instances where Israeli officials and personnel have gone out of their way to show cruelty, viciousness and illegality. There is no real dispute that this is happening, but it seems natural to assume that this action is counterproductive to Israeli strategy and it is a product of dysregulated ideological fervour. This is by no means a safe or sound assumption. There are clear benefits for Israel in ostentatiously promulgating terrible crimes, beginning with the effect of terrorising people in Gaza and demoralising Palestinians and their allies throughout the world.

Israel is using its acts of brutality to wage psychological war on Palestinians and those who oppose the violence and oppression visited upon them. These acts work on different levels and it is clear to see that currently Israel seeks to avoid publicising its acts in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, but allows acts perpetrated in Gaza and on Palestinians taken from Gaza to be seen widely. In doing so they show how little they fear losing support among the international general public. They do this all knowing that a significant minority of Westerners, mostly due to racist views about Palestinians, will never waver in their support for Israeli violence even at its most inhumane and extreme.

Powerlessness

Many people reading this will bear emotional scars from these months of slaughter and suffering and fear and grief. We have witnessed so much of the violence in graphic and often intimate detail. How can any activist, doing whatever they can to bring an end to the horror, not feel a sense of impotence? There seems to be no avenue to make our voices heard, to exert our will. We are constantly reminded that our efforts seem to change nothing. Each new obscenity feels like another gut-punch meant to teach us again and again that there are no limits. There is no red line.

There is a reason for the feeling of helplessness in that it is the product of design. Israel is using its ability to act with impunity to create that sense of impotence and futility. At the same time the parade of atrocities we see, whether by accident or design, also serves to distance activists from our compatriots. Even though most people in the general public favour peace in Gaza, they are woefully misinformed about the nature of the violence there. Those people are led to believe it is a military conflict, in which civilian deaths are collateral damage. They do not understand what genocide means and they think that activists who use the term are either exaggerating for rhetorical reasons or are deranged fanatics. If you try to explain by using illustrations of what is going on each day in Gaza, they will think you a wide-eyed partisan and are highly unlikely to believe you. They will make the reasonable seeming inference that if what you are claiming were true then it would be talked about on the news and our political leaders would behave much more assertively in reaction to these atrocious crimes.

At times it has seemed that each atrocity by Israel is concealed and effaced by the next, like a deadly form of Gish-galloping. (Gish-galloping is a bad faith rhetorical technique, used often by Zionists, where instead of explaining a position cogently you simply overload people with a stream of arguments, many or all of which may be indefensible individually). As well as doing that on our screen, it feels as if Zionists are also enacting this as a violent psychological warfare technique. We are being deliberately overwhelmed by a relentless grinding tempo of massacre upon massacre. Events such as the Superbowl final are exploited for their distracting power, but more prominent acts of Israeli violence are themselves used as camouflage for further murder, such as when the IDF used the aftermath of the Flour Massacre to kill many aid workers.

When it suits them, Israeli officials know that they can lower the rate of death so that, having themselves set a bar of what is newsworthy violence, they know with certainty that news media will ignore or bury this increasingly banal mass killing. They have completely corrupted the news media through manipulation of their established practices – the “news values” that guide them on what is and is not worthy of passing on to the masses. This works alongside practices of direct control, covert control, lobbying, and flak to create a system in which the critical reporting of Israeli violence is disproportionately infrequent and is always blunted leaving the talking points of apologists unchallenged. For the general public this means that the deaths and mutilations they see become a form of background noise because the root causes seem disputable and the complicity of our own governments is made to seem at least excusable if not tactically merited in the apparently confusing and contended circumstances. Israel does not seek to win public support for its genocide, it seeks to control the nature of public disapprobation by ensuring that the stark one-sided nature of its genocidal onslaught is hidden.

Every military action of the IDF has a propaganda dimension. This is the culmination of a long history of violent psychological operations developed by the US in the last seventy years. From Edward Lansdale hanging the bodies of exsanguinated rebels from trees in the Philippines after WWII, to the hybrid military/psychological/political onslaught of “Shock and Awe” unleashed on Iraq in 2003, the distinction between warfare and propaganda has become non-existent. Clearly the main approach for the IDF is to maximise the power of indirect violence through hunger, exposure, deprivation and disease. The violent agonies of displacement and famine have never been understood by the general public, and the situation in Gaza has few parallels because of its sustained and inescapable nature. Yet while they exploit the media habit of silence on this form of violence to assuage the general public, they also use targeted dissemination of more shocking violence that they know will reach only those who already oppose their oppression. For example, there is the aforementioned Telegramchannel that an IDF psychological warfare unit created to disseminate images of graphic violence, destruction and overt war crimes. Their material reached the activist population of the West through social media, and may have featured in news of non-Western countries, but did not reach the general Western public.

The invisible violence of diseases, homelessness, fear, dislocation, constant exposure to discomfort, lives arrested and deprived of aspiration and meaning is as nothing to the Western public. At the same time the more shocking graphic images of violence are also absent from their lives. But while the opiated masses live in the smog of manufactured acquiescence, activists are bombarded with a surfeit of graphic imagery that may also serve to dull the emotions. Israel can choose to attack the morale of the activist population by creating messages through acts that we can read but the general public cannot, acts that we know are true but can never prove. They can sadistically terrorise, hunt and murder Refaat Alareer. They can take their time massacring Hind Rajab, her family, and her rescuers. They can deliberately leave Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan alive to spread the sense of terror and helplessness. All or most of it must be deliberate, but we cannot demonstrate this let alone prove it to such a degree that people who assume that such things can never happen will change their worldview.

Israel uses its impunity to display its impunity. The sadism is functional. The Palestinians in Gaza become like mice cornered by a cruel cat while we watch in horror unable to intervene, unable to reach, unable even to comfort. In Gaza the people are subject to every imaginable attack. True to the nature of genocide the onslaught occurs at once on many levels, each multiplying the damage of the others. Outside of Gaza, though, we are all subject to a psychological attack. They are using the techniques of “learned helplessness” on us all.

Absurdities and Epistemic Bifurcation

There is a saying derived from Voltaire that has been honed over a few centuries to: “Those who can persuade us to believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.” Our society produces absurdity by controlling what is and what is not speakable. This is a self-perpetuating system as each incident that is interpreted in that restricted light is another data point proving that the sort of event that is excluded from consideration must never happen because there are no examples of it happening. Certain historical analyses that are plausible according to the specifically pertinent facts are considered inadmissible because they contravene a predetermined framework of the way the world works. Most commonly we see such contentions labelled as “conspiracy theories” (CT).

I do not want to alienate those who struggle against the right-wing CT community, but the term itself is toxic. What is and is not labelled “conspiracy theory” has nothing to do with whether or not something involves a conspiracy, nor is it valid to criticise a theory on the grounds that it posits a conspiracy. Those people who use the term seem to have no idea of the weight of the anti-intellectual shackles that they are helping to fetter humanity with. That which is and is not considered CT is determined by naked power. For example, in a thousand years historians will look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq and will probably take it as read that the war occurred due to the quantity and high quality oil in Iraqi territory. Tony Blair, however, successfully argued that “the oil conspiracy is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it.” So instead of a banal imperial reality that is in total accord with overt US foreign policy doctrine (the “Carter doctrine”), the news media gave far more credence to the elaborate tales of intelligence sources such as “Curveball”, tales of mobile weapons labs, yellowcake lies, the “dodgy dossier”, fever-dreams of missiles hitting “British soil”, and so forth. The banal and historically normal explanation was a “conspiracy theory”, but the elaborate and unrealistic tissue of complex fabrications was acceptable even though each contention involved a high number of conspiracies. So much for “conspiracy theory”.

Thus there is a growing two-way credibility gap. There is an epistemic bifurcation that is part of a wider atomisation that is creating a world of mutually exclusive realities. The empire has taken the Roman principle of divide et impera and worked out how to send it through our eyes and into our brains on an individual level. I have long remarked on the fact that US actions are often clearly meant to be read in two ways – one message to the imperial masses, and a very different one to those who resist. To the disempowered masses of the “Arab street”, for example, they are often sending the message that they are a ruthless, savage, mass-murdering genocidal power. The very same acts used to send that message, though, are often framed in the West as being acts against the barbaric violence of the people they are killing. Nor do they have any scruples about re-imagining themselves as victims. Their prolific expansive use of unmatched military violence against much weaker people becomes something they have had forced upon them by their unwitting well-intentioned entanglement with the dark quagmire of non-Western incivility. And then, as per Frankie Boyle’s famous quip, “they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.” That heart-of-darkness shit just keeps happening to the poor bastards, and somehow they never learn. The Panglossian optimism of the “Whig theory of history” has been replaced with the whingeing narcissism of the “Shitlib theory of history” where the perpetrators are always the victims (and Trump was, would be, and always will be 100 times worse).

The absurdity of the mainstream worldview does not come from any individual incident, it comes from the cumulative effect of excluding certain possibilities from consideration over and over again. This feeds the vulgar empiricism of those who always insist that positive proof is necessary for some interpretations, but not for others. Such people do not like any suggestion that a pattern might be discerned, or even sought to be discerned, among events which share common characteristics. Ironically (but not really ironically) right-wing activists who oppose the “mainstream” will sometimes exploit these behaviours to create bad faith attacks on the bad faith orthodoxy. For example, some anti-vaccination activists question the viral origins of AIDS and SARSCov2 on the basis of a vulgar empiricist claim that ignores all of the statistical links as being insufficient as they are not direct demonstrations of a laboratory infection leading to the attributed disease. These people are ridiculous, but effectively this is what orthodox scholars in some fields do all the time. The thing that makes this apparent right-wing dissent ironically unironic is that these dissident activists are largely controlled by a bunch of astroturfing billionaires and their toadies. I would go so far as to say that I have a theory that there is a conspiracy among some very wealthy people to control public policy by creating flak for governments through loud and over-resourced fake activists.

Now that I have accidentally outed myself as a proud conspiracy theorist, I feel empowered to say that sometimes we should consider that things may be as they first appear rather than insisting that things must be explained in a certain way. There is always an assumption that “civilised” governments and their military arms will not do certain things like killing their own civilians or committing genocidal violence against others. No number of proven historical cases of US, UK or Israel doing such things will be taken into account. In reality, governments in general are well demonstrated to frequently exceed the bounds of behaviour that any normal person would consider tolerable. The Zionist 3 (US, UK, Israel) even more regularly exceed the violent inhumanity of most contemporary societies. I am not going to list proven crimes here, but if I did so it would show that no action of these governments should be judged on the basis that they would not cross certain lines or that they are constrained in any way by morality. No doubt there are people and institutions that limit some atrocities, but what is limited is determined by pragmatic considerations of power. The moral calculus is complex and contended, but the most important fact to remember is that there is no ultimate red line. If the stars align the right way for the worst amongst them, they will begin implementing a “final solution” for the Palestinian people and we are already well along the road to that horrific destination.

In April, a World Central Kitchen team of 7 aid workers was slaughtered with thorough and deliberate overkill in the “deconflicted zone” of Deir al-Balah. Orders passed through multiple channels to achieve this. Israel’s non-explanation was that they thought that armed militants had taken one of the vehicles. They initially mentioned a possible kidnapping, but that was not part of the later report possibly because outside of Israel it is not considered normal to respond to a suspected kidnapping by killing the victims. The Israeli report claims that they mistook a guard for a militant and thought that one of the aid workers was another militant because someone allegedly thought that a bag was a gun. At no stage was there a suggestion that the imaginary militants posed any immediate threat to anyone. That would suggest that they were not looking for people they needed to target, nor people they should target, but rather the people they could get away with targeting and killing. Command gave permission to engage the vehicle with the suspected militants. After attacking that one vehicle Israel claims that two soldiers went against procedure by attacking the other two without permission. According to Israel it was all done in error. It was a very thorough mistake to take the lives of every one of the seven aid workers in the convoy.

This all happened at a time when the Israeli government was fighting diplomatically to be allowed to block aid entering Gaza altogether and many Israelis have shown a violent antagonism against humanitarian aid and to aid workers. The IDF report begs so many questions that even if taken at face value it does not preclude premeditated murder. It is not an exoneration of criminal intent it is a narrative framework provided for those who already assume that these deaths cannot have been purposive. Yet it was such a very comprehensive attack and Israelis have no lack of motive at a collective or individual level. Whether seen as a military strategy to deny supplies to armed militants, or an intrinsic part of the genocidal war against the Palestinian people, or a product of anger and hatred towards those who seek to give succour to the enemies of Israel, there are clear reasons why someone might deliberately use a pretext to kill an entire aid team.

We don’t know for sure that Israeli individuals at some level in the chain of command decided to kill an entire aid team, but the circumstances and results certainly lend themselves to that possibility. These killings led to a result that the Israeli government desired. Some aid organisations halted operations meaning that aid was further restricted, as was the number of outsiders coming into Gaza to help and (perhaps more crucially) to bear witness. Like the 2010 killings of 9 activists trying to deliver aid to Gaza by sea, the WCK killings sent a message. These deaths set a precedent and as we have seen in the case of recent attacks on aid vehicles in Gaza, Israel can attack without consequence any time it wants and aid organisations have no choice but to suspend operations.

Many of you reading this may be feeling uneasy that I am suggesting that in all probability someone with some level of authority in Israel decided to kill an entire aid team. The conventional wisdom is that, as Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Absent some genuine scientific or statistical expectation, though, this is the fallacy of conservatism – the idea that of two or more interpretations of events one is to be preferred as being more mundane. In political matters the weight of conservatism is usually purely ideological and has nothing to do with any scientific criteria.

Is it shocking to think that some Israelis actually intended all of the WCK workers to be killed? Perhaps it is shocking, but it is anything but extraordinary. Some might object that they wouldn’t risk it because they could not necessarily get away with it. But they can get way with it, and they know it. As long as Israel itself investigates and exonerates itself of intent in the short-term it doesn’t matter if later investigations bring that into question. Our leaders in politics and media do not ask for truth, they ask for fig leaves. Once they have the fig leaf, they add it as a page to the Encyclopedia of Official Truth. Thus, the lie that a possible thing is not possible, becomes the absurdity of claiming that these perfectly plausible things can never happen.

All of this is made even more sickening and alienating by the overt way that Israel can systematically kill Palestinian aid workers. The absurdity of the Encyclopedia of Official Truth is deepened in these cases, not by the insufficiency, but by complete silence. Israelis can openly share footage of themselves committing atrocities and other war crimes, but despite the unimpeachable source, it is not considered newsworthy. The victims are not considered newsworthy. The violence of the genocide in Gaza has become unremarkable, as has the violence of settlers and security forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not news, they may say, but there is a bit of a catch here. The existence of passenger aircraft is not news either, but news media do not act as if they don’t exist. When discussing Palestine the media are like people who try to explain air disasters without ever admitting that aeroplanes exist. That is because, on the one hand, the ongoing systematic violence against Palestinians is too banal and well-understood to bear reporting on but on the other hand the systematic genocidal nature of violence, which is the key context, is politically controversial. Therefore, the thing that is too well known in one sense must become a complete unknown when reporting on related events. Just how did the lifeless bodies of these 83 people end up scattered here amidst this metallic debris less than an hour after departing from an airport? What could explain the event? Is it because they were being used as human shields, or might a stray Hamas rocket have killed them?

Elite Capture and the Bonds of Shame

On The Daily Show Rob Corddry responded to the Abu Ghraib scandal by satirising the collective US position, “…the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a … well, we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.” The political leaders of the Western world and most other countries went along with exactly that contention, and they continually reaffirm it to this day. They do exactly the same with regard to Israel, but the results are far more grotesque. Israel doesn’t have the soft-power of the US and its image as a liberal Western nation doesn’t have as much sway in convincing us to ignore reality.

It is increasingly hard for people to believe the narrative of plucky little Israel, living at the outer edge of civilisation withstanding the onslaughts of the barbarian hordes that surround it. Some people have clearly internalised a racist blind hatred of Palestinians as such, but for those who haven’t the pretextual nature of Israel’s “security” narrative is wearing thin as they continue relentless violence and unconcealed dispossession of Palestinians. Even the average regular Western consumer of “Islamist terrorist” content is likely to find the generic conventions weakened if not violated by the glimpses and hints that slip through to them of house demolitions, land theft and infrastructure destruction. A glimpse of a road being destroyed as shown above may not immediately cause a rethink, but it will sow the seeds of dissonance and the Zionist “security” narrative will seem stretched thinner and thinner until one day it just snaps, and that person is lost forever to the Zionist cause. Meanwhile the Israelis themselves are finding it hard to maintain the façade of civilised morality as the culture of fanatical racial hatred deepens. Their public relations on social media now feature gleefully captioned images of the bloody bodies of slain enemies. They are speaking more and more to a narrow group of fanatics who have no interest in outdated imagery of liberal Israel as the bulwark against extremism. They are speaking to a racist core that want a fascistic militaristic muscular Israel standing against the barbarian Asiatic hordes like the 300 at Thermopylae.

Our beloved leaders in the Western political, media, business and academic world largely speak as the racist Zionists do, but without the foaming mouths and spray of spittle. They are not enthusiasts. They are not ideologues. They are measured and pragmatic. They are not ideological fanatics, rather they are fanatical Panzaists who believe this to be the most banal of all possible worlds.ⁱ If a giant were to suddenly appear and swipe them with a massive spiked club, their last words as they lay mangled and dying would be a warning about the dangers of windmills. They know that Israel is a bastion of Western civilisation and embodies the values of the West. Historical reality notwithstanding, Western values include the knowledge that all of the horrific violence they commit is only ever because they had really good reasons and ultimately had no real choice in the matter. In fact not doing the violence would be a complete dereliction of Western values. To eschew righteous killing would be insulting to the memory of those who died in far jungles to protect our freedoms. It would be like wiping your arse with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, the Magna Carta, and the screenplay to the beloved M*A*S*H finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” .

Western atrocities are always undertaken to prevent something that we are assured will be worse, not just for “interests” but generally speaking for the people that will be shelled, bombed, shot, displaced, and starved. When the West kills people it is really in those people’s interests if they could but see it. As an unnamed US Army Major told Peter Arnett in 1968, “It became necessary to destroy the town [Bến Tre] to save it.” Scaled up the Western attitude could accurately be parodied as, “the only thing worse than committing genocide is not committing genocide”.ⁱⁱ

Little that has come after October 7 2023 really supports Israel’s counterterrorism discourse, but each day brings more evidence that belies it. The numbers of dead are bad. The optics are bad. The logic is bad. The sheer duration is bad. The reports from third parties are bad. The diplomacy is bad. The court cases are bad. The polls are bad. The context is screaming in the ears of our leaders: “THIS IS GENOCIDE!” Despite this, they still live in a world where it is very costly to call the genocide a genocide, and there is no cost at all for outright genocide denial. Yet as “Israel’s right to defend itself” becomes ever more self-evidently detached from reality, none of these people are shifting their opinions, in fact many are hardening.

If the world worked the way it is meant to work, world leaders should fear the consequences of supporting a genocide. It is a crime to support genocide, whereas there is no crime of being insufficiently helpful to Israel (they just act like there is). In political reality (which influences realms beyond politics) the formal and theoretical situation is reversed. Some people, such as the leader from a small leftist party or a lecturer in Middle Eastern history, can say “genocide”, but those with the authority to speak as part of the establishment must prevaricate or make an outright denial using the aforementioned fallacy of conservatism. As typically seen in the academic world (for example) to speak certain truths you must declare yourself to be partisan or “critical” and banish yourself to the fenced-off free-speech zone where dangerous truths are quarantined in containment. In contrast, those who speak for power (such as those with administrative positions) must privilege power over evidence as a source of truth.

As the distance between the evidence and the official “truth” grows ever starker, you might expect that people’s positions might change, but we can see that this is not happening. Leaders will not change unless they are pushed with extreme force. They are trapped, you see. The worse things get the more they are psychologically and politically tied to being genocide enablers. At high levels of any hierarchy there is always a survivorship bias in favour of expediency. Those who act inexpediently do not keep climbing the rungs of the power ladder. Expediency is the water in which our fishy leaders swim, breathe and defecate, but even they must morally rationalise to tell themselves that their self-interested actions are for the greater good. For most (apart from a few sociopaths and outright neofeudalists) their careers are built on the foundation that they must advance themselves in order to advance humanity. Once they have decided on the righteousness of their position they have access to all of the human arts of evading, ignoring, or explaining away undesirable evidence.

As the visible evidence of terrible suffering grows, those who support the causes of that suffering become morally tied to the position. From what may have been a relatively mild support, as time and body count grows it becomes ever more necessary to believe in the value of the cause while the atrocious cost skyrockets. Those who keep acting in support of the violence become de facto members of a baby-killer club. Like those in clubs whose initiations involve social transgressions, such as humiliation or violence or unusual shared sexual behaviour, they become tied by bonds of shame that are also potential bonds of blackmail. The leaders are detached from the herd of the naive public – the masses that do not and cannot ever understand the sordid but unavoidable realities of real power and true politics. This is wonderful news for Imperialists and Zionists. The Zionist 3 cannot maintain a legitimacy that will convince a rational person to support the genocide, so they want to trap an elite class in an irrational state that is isolated from democratic influences.

In far more basic practical terms it is also impossible for leaders, especially those directly involved in politics, to change position on something that is so significant and has such a naked moral dimension. The reality of our politics is that any admission of, well, anything at all is a weakness to be exploited. That is even more so if one chooses to betray the cause of Israel and the US empire. In the media world, for example (though equally in other areas) the flak machinery in the “propaganda model” theorised by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent is now reinforced by what appears to be a fascist 5^th column within leadership roles who exploit any weakness as an occasion for oppressive over-reaction. Thus, any number of people can complain about media bias against Palestinians and it will be greeted at best with empty gestures but in contrast any accusations that criticism of Israel is “antisemitism” may be bring serious consequence even when completely without merit. Some of this is due to the work that has been done (for example with the IHRA definition of “antisemitism”) to create an institutional bias, but it seems equally clear that ideologues or corrupt agents will seize on any pretext to purge the heretic.

The more absurd the elite position the more defensive and hostile to questioning they become. The Marie Antoinette vibes are getting stronger and stronger as they do everything to isolate themselves from the wrong voices or the wrong questions. Some of us masochistically geek-out to footage of Mark Miller and similar creatures contorting words into unrecognisable abstract sculpture, but we are a small minority of connoisseurs of political bollocks. We are, to coin a term, wank wonks.ⁱⁱⁱ By contrast, normal people only experience the political speech of proper leaders, not spokespeople. None of the reporters who push Miller into verbal nonsense by being direct and persistent will ever be allowed to ask such questions of Biden, Trump or Harris. No Western leader will be pressed with hard factual details on the realities of the genocide, and we all know it. So, presumably, do any political reporters who value the “access” that lets them earn a living.

The walls of allowable thought become ever thicker and opaque to those ensconced within, but equally they are brittle. The organisers of the Democratic National Convention did not even allow a pro-Harris Palestinian-American delegate to deliver a vetted speech because even letting her humanity be seen is a political cost to them, regardless of her co-opted words. Things are so delicate that they could not accord a reminder of the plight of millions of Palestinians be seen as valid in the same sense that the plight of 100 Israeli hostages is seen as valid. Violent societies often employ selective sentimentality to erase the humanity of the enemy, even to the point of total hypocrisy.

Our Fascist Reality and How to Fight Back

People are tired. People are demoralised. Yet people are persisting. There seems to be no diminution of anti-genocide activism despite the hollow feeling of impotence that pervades. Stopping now seems unthinkable, despite having so little to show for extraordinary amounts of time, energy, imagination, tears and anger. One of the problems is that a lot that we do is premised on the idea of changing public opinion. This is difficult when access to the eyes and ears of the public is dominated by bad faith equivocation and outright lies, but it is essential. It is essential, but unfortunately it is by no means sufficient.

If we were a democratic civilisation then winning over the public would be the end-game, but it isn’t. Even if we can’t persuade a majority in the West that the genocide is a genocide, they have at least come to understand that an attack on Hamas does not justify the death and destruction that is happening. Unfortunately the public doesn’t have any say in government policy in general and international relations in particular. The traditional view is that we inhabit “distorted polyarchies” which are pluralistic but in which political power is highly skewed in favour of those with wealth and status. Part of this system has long been the manipulation of the public through indoctrination and censorship. Great figures in what liberals stupidly refer to as “democratic” theory such as Walter Lippmann openly despised the intellects of the vulgar masses and believed that “democracy” required the “manufacture of consent” (hence the title of the Herman/Chomsky classic). Sheldon Wolin referred “managed democracy” leading to a resultant “inverted totalitarianism” where a demoralised confused public is dominated by corporate power. In the 20 years since Wolin wrote that, however, we have seen the rise of a global fascist movement that exists in the same structure of inverted totalitarianism. “Managed democracy” has become “managed fascism”.

In managed fascism anomie pervades the dispirited and/or precarious masses. The resulting discontent is increasingly harnessed by the very people causing discontent, harnessed and used to create a force of reactionary ideologues empowered to crush any who threaten to enact reform or revolt. These new brownshirts are not just in the streets. There are keyboard brownshirts, thinktank brownshirts and boardroom brownshirts. They belong to no single party, but they tend to follow their leaders with such fervent myopia that they might not notice the core of reactionary patriarchal racial-supremacy that they are signing up for. The fascist ideology of our age may not have a single Führer, but it has a single essence that is cohering rapidly.

The good news is that the steps we must follow to force our own countries to fight against genocide in Gaza will also serve to weaken inverted totalitarianism and to combat the burgeoning fascism of our age. We must work to infiltrate actual democracy into our political institutions, we must work to make leaders fear the public, and we must force reason and intellect back into the public political discourse in place of dishonesty and bullying. An awful lot of groundwork has been laid by the posting and postering and protesting of the last year. Possibilities are opening, though the road ahead is not short nor easy.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that any ceasefire will not be a ceasefire. The past has show that when Israel raises the bar on its levels of slaughter that bar is never subsequently lowered. Permanent violent assault is the future of the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territories. Ever deeper immiseration, ever deeper control, and ever deeper humiliation. Israel has gone all in and there is no real going back, only further charades and chicanery. For this reason we can safely commit to the long haul rather than succumb to the sense of immediate need. If public opinion is reset by a pretense of peace, we need to show people that there is no peace and continue from that point. One thing should now be clear to most activists – something that has been true from the start but has been well hidden – the genocide will not end until Palestine is free. That can only mean one democratic state from the river to the sea. If some of the citizens refer to that state as Israel then let them as long as others can call it Palestine and all the people that belong there can call it home.

People will need patience and diligence more than anything. The long haul means knowing that you will just keep coming back to the work when you can. It means thinking of angles and approaches when you can. It means cultivating yourself and others when you can. It means switching from thinking of goals to thinking of processes.

The long haul approach means approaching the heights of power by building power, not arriving as a petitioner with doffed cap asking for justice from the lord. What I mean by that is using the force of democracy to change things at the attainable level and building upwards from there. A successful model in the past has been to bring activism to local bodies, even if only for symbolic resolutions. It works because the core of activists are not a “vanguard” or in any way analogous to the brownshirts mentioned above. It works because activists represent the public sentiment and, at the local level, you can face down politicians who can’t spin their way out of the fact.

People have been building connections within unions and associations, places that hold vestiges of democratic power in our pluralistic fascist societies. Once these bodies are forced to take an anti-genocide stance there is much that can be achieved. For example, if medical unions are made to engage in the issues they can issue statements over hospital attacks or murders of health workers and agitate for the media to cover the issues in a manner that focuses on the Israel’s intentional targeting of medical personnel.

All aspects of activism aim at the same thing, exerting moral, intellectual and democratic power in polities governed by people to whom these are all alien concepts. In these times of dire democratic deficit the power of the people is more or less the same as it is under a dictatorship, but that power is not to be despised. If the masses speak with one voice they have all the power – well sort of. An important caveat is that they have to speak with one predominant voice and that voice must be issuing a demand. It is not sufficient that the majority of the public oppose the genocide, it must be that a clear self-conscious and confident majority makes it known to the government that they will not tolerate continued collaboration with genocide. This is a blunt instrument. The public cannot demand specific policies as easily as it can veto broad flavours of policy.

Public intolerance of government complicity in genocide does not necessarily entail specific disruptions such as riots or strikes or direct action. All that is needed is that a norm against genocide denial is established in the collective consciousness. We already know that this works because such a norm already exist regarding the Holocaust. Mainstream public figures cannot support genocide denial in that instance and it must be extended to this genocide. The key is that people at all levels know that their complicity will be visible such that a politician dare not deny the genocide because the journalist would not dare normalise their denial nor fail to mention it. To create that new political reality is going to take a broad-front approach. All avenues of intellectual resistance must be pursued at all times until the war is won. There can be no half-measures because we know beyond all reasonable doubt that half-measures or compromises are merely false hopes, rest stops on the long road to defeat. Ending the genocide means ending the genocide, and that means ending the occupation.

The fight for Palestinian freedom is the fight for our own freedom. This creeping managed fascism is no joke. The 1930s showed that once fascism got its jackboots under the table, though it may have been a fringe belief to begin, its values grew within the wider society. The same is happening now. In the US and the UK particularly we have seen increased activity of right-wing racist mobs. While there has been a selectively firm and rapid response against some of the rank-and-file racist rioters in the UK, the leading provocateurs are unmolested. Meanwhile peaceful direct action on the left is punished far more severely while terrorism laws are being used to oppress selected individuals for opposing genocide. Over time fascist politics create fascist populations. There can be no better illustration of this fact than what has happened to the minds of Israelis in the past few decades.

The reason that what is happening is fascistic rather than simply plutocratic and authoritarian is because of the power that old and new media to create cadres of hateful fanatics – useful cadres. The logic is the same as that which led Stalin to become such an enthusiastic exponent of Russian nationalism despite a lifetime devoted to an internationalist ideology and despite not even being Russian. Nationalism was a tool of power that had been lying around. The aspect of fascism that is relevant here is the epistemic ideology of combat and enmity that followers take on. They become anti-intellectual self-programming robots who do not build an episteme from observed facts, but rather populate their own and each other’s mind with “facts” created from the predetermined worldview. The manipulation of old media by people like Rupert Murdoch has fed this, but we also need to bear in mind the harmful effects of the ideological isolation present in the online world. Each person’s phone becomes a pocket beer hall where thousands of impassioned preachers of hate can be watched holding forth on the need for action, the need to violently punish the malefactors who (in their fevered heads) have wronged them.

Israel has effectively lost its battle to colonise Palestine. The only future for the project would be an ethnic cleansing and annexation of all the occupied territories, which the world cannot tolerate if it claim to respect law and rights. The only path for Zionist victory is through an international regime of fascism – a world where the most powerful countries reject the rule of law and in which the only reality the masses ever experience is that which the rich wish them to see. So, you may ask, what’s new? What is new is the matter of degree that will be required. Israel must now defeat the growing legion of institutions that, after decades of bending over backwards to create a Palestine exception, have been forced by the hard work of grassroots activists to accept the humanity of Palestinians and the inadmissibility of denying otherwise universal rights on the basis of statelessness (and/or the special pleading of the “Jewish” state).

I am not suggesting that increasing fascism will be forced on the entire Western world just to support Zionism. If anything I feel it works the other way around. Support for Israel is more useful as a pretext for suppressing political dissent than the inverse. At the same time the utterly unmoving steadfast support shown by the US regime for Israel shows how important this is to the empire. When US officials cite US “interests” we need to pay very close heed. In 1986 Joe Biden said would have to “invent an Israel to protect US interests in the region” if Israel didn’t exist. Nearly four decades later he reiterated, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” We should also recall that we are in the third decade of what some US officials referred to as the “Long War”, a war they predicted was going to take 30 years. The scope of the Long War was global, but of the known prominent targets all have been targeted with hybrid or outright warfare and all suffer ongoing violence. The “War on Terror” was the pretext for the Long War, but as the history of Africom shows, the war has a tendency to start before the terror. (The same can be said of the Iraq insurgency which was in response to the depredations of “counterinsurgency” and the NLF insurgency in late 50s South Viet Nam which was prompted by the suppression supposedly meant to quell it).

I cannot even imagine what the ultimate aim of the Long War is, if such a thing exists. All I can say is that this seems like a very dangerous period in terms of a possible overt World War, and Palestine seems to be at the centre. The end of a 30 year Long War also roughly coincides with the believed 2000 year anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ. Many millenarian Christians feel that this time the end really is nigh. As frightening as the prospect of an apocalyptic war is, we cannot assuage or mollify the aggressors because they are beyond such measures. We can only constrain them by defeating them and if there is a risk of wider war it only grows with the diplomatic and military empowerment of Israel’s genocide.

This is our fight, and by “our” I mean everyone who is sane. Will enough people realise this? I don’t know, but I will end this article with an observation made by TikTok and Twitter user @highlyvibey: “anyone who’s okay with slaughtering children for their political ambitions is okay with killing you too”.

If this article was not too noxious for you, please consider giving some money to me via https://ko-fi.com/krkelly

iWith apologies to Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote), Voltaire(Candide), and Robert Sheckley (Mindswap).

iiFurther apologies, this time to Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray).

iiiApologies, in this instance, are owed directly to the reader.

The Poisoned Chalice of ICC

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Many people reacted to the ICC’s prosecutor’s application for warrants for 2 Israeli and 3 Hamas officials as some sort of triumph, a signal moment for the growing pressure to hold Israeli leaders accountable, but it is not. People for whom I normally have utmost respect are steadfastly ignoring the ICC’s record and refusing to think through the actual ramifications of these charges. A simplistic, even childish, authoritarianism seems to grip them, leading them to the delusion that some stern authority figure will get the baddies and make everything right. Even the admirable Francesca Albanese asserted that this is a “watershed”. It is not a watershed, nor is it simply an empty gesture, it is a disaster in the making.

Though two of the three Palestinians referred for charges have subsequently been killed, it still sets a dire precedent that a highly political process can be used to charge leaders of a resistance group as if on a par with the leaders of the occupying force. It would be bad enough if leaders of victim and aggressor groups were treated with parity, but the whole process is weighted against the Palestinians. As I will demonstrate the grounds on which the ICC prosecutors referred charges against Palestinian leaders are almost infinitely more permissive than those for laying charges against Israeli leaders. If this is unchallenged it will create an easy pathway for hostile powers to control Palestinian politics and excise effective resistance leaders by forcing Palestinian authorities to exclude or even arrest them.

This is an incredibly difficult topic to write about because it involves so many common misconceptions and ideological pieties. The ICC has been called the International Caucasian Court and the Imperialist Criminal Court and has been widely criticised for its self-evident flaws, but still the Court is discussed by officialdom and the punditocracy as if it were some hallowed and grave edifice of ultimate international justice. The public has no choice but to accept this at face value, and no matter how extreme the failings of the court that is unlikely to change because of extant critiques. The problem is that choosing individual flaws simply allows our leadershippers (1) to make promises of reform and continue to treat the Court as a sacrosanct institution. In a parallel universe it might be reformed, but in our real world it is incorrigible and needs to be disestablished.

In some ways the ICC is the criminal justice system in a settler-colonial state called Earth and, like all criminal justice systems of the settler-colonial states, it is inherently oppressive. Complaints about its biases have simply led to promised reforms and seemingly its abysmal record does nothing to stop the amplified class (those who monopolise public political conversations) from gaslighting the public into respecting the institution while the voiceless few with untainted knowledge simply look on in horror. In moral terms the reactions of the official world are truly equivalent to someone finding that their workmate is a cannibal serial killer and dealing with the issue by buying them a vegetarian cookbook and brightly talking about meatless Mondays around the water cooler in order to model a more healthy lifestyle.

There is no way of fixing the ICC’s bias because selecting individuals to prosecute in order to end impunity for crimes of mass violence is inherently political in a world of so much mass violence. No leader of a militarily strong country is likely to be arrested and tried and those countries, either directly or through proxies, cause almost all of the mass atrocities in this world. The very nature of the court is selective and intended to have a salutary impact. This sounds very reasonable at face value, but we have a phrase that describes such procedures. That phrase is “show trials”.

On an even deeper level, however, the ICC is part of a broader political move to maintain and deepen an international system of injustice. Rather than allow international judicial institutions to develop a transparent international justice system wherein states that are adjudicated to be committing grave crimes are placed under the collective pressure of a genuine international community, the US jealously guards the ability of its State Department to declare certain countries to be malefactors, to impose sanctions, and to punish those who do not conform with those sanctions. The ICC’s focus on individual criminality helps this process by pushing the focus onto individually or racially demonised enemies of the West while providing easy exculpation for Western leaders (who by default are accorded the assumption of benevolent intentions regardless of the nature of their acts).

For this reason I have to treat the ICC for the hydra that it is. It is insufficient to concentrate on just one aspect of its flaws. If the resulting word count is daunting, I apologise. Consider, though, that Norman Finkelstein wrote an entire book entitled I Accuse!: Herewith A Proof Beyond Reasonable Doubt That ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda Whitewashed Israel just to try and nail down one indisputable instance of corruption.

The “End of Impunity”

The story goes that the impulse to create the ICC was born out of discomfiture at the ad hoc nature of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia (ICTR and ICTY). The claim was that rather than have any possible accusation of victor’s justice there would be a permanent body that would be all the more effective because it would end, or at least erode, the impunity enjoyed by leaders in sovereign nations. The risk of prosecution would, in this fairy tale, be credible enough to provide a genuine deterrent against the commission of the gravest crimes. Instead, as mentioned, the court showed itself to be corrupt and biased from the outset. In addition it seemed to be coyly trying to avoid any move that might come back to bite its Western masters in the buttocks. For example, the Rome Statute laying out the jurisdiction of the Court did not include the crime of aggression until 2010, sidestepping some awkward conversations about the acceding states that had joined in the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

From the heady days of 20 years ago (when the court promised to end the impunity of all the barbarous warlords whilst studiously ignoring the blatant crimes that the US was committing in its “War on Terror” (2)) things have almost come full circle to the point where even their greatest supporters would have trouble suggesting that their “justice” is any less selective than that of ad hoc tribunals. The court works very slowly and must of necessity be selective. Now that it is issuing warrants for citizens of states who are not party to the Rome Statute, it is effectively cherry-picking from the entire world in a manner that is quite arbitrary in terms of gravity. On the other hand, from a political perspective the choices it makes are far from arbitrary and are invariably in accordance with the Western media discourse about the sort of person who is guilty.

A Chalice of Kool-aid?

It is impossible for me to avoid thinking of the Kool-aid metaphor when I see people celebrating the ICC chief prosecutor’s decision to pursue charges relating to the current slaughter in Gaza. My gut reaction is that this is an ugly egocentric response amongst people who want to be able to declare “we are winning”. It is stupid and superstitious in the manner that using bleeding to treat tuberculosis or trepanning for epilepsy was superstitious. The existence of a serious problem does not validate a “solution” that only brings more harm. It depresses me to see people slurping this Kool-aid with such relish, but I understand that not everyone has the privilege of discernment. For the Palestinian people it is better described as a poisoned chalice. The Kool-aid drinkers actively choose to ignore the poison (3), but those offered the chalice may be dying of thirst; they may drink in desperation even knowing that there may be poison. That only redoubles the need for those of us with the luxury of some detachment to be realistic about the actual significance of the ICC charges against Hamas and Israeli leaders.

Netanyahu and Gallant will likely never see the inside of an ICC court, and if they do it will only be the final indication that they are no longer of any use to the Zionist project of genocide in Palestine. Charging two people for crimes is obscenely inadequate during a genocide in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are actively participating (including perhaps as many outside of Israel as within it). These tokenistic charges can only ever serve to demonstrate de facto impunity and fuel backlash. We are witnessing a brutally violent genocide unfold and the ICC has sought more charges against leaders of a resistance organisation than against the perpetrators of the genocide. On the other hand, the charges against Haniyeh, Sinwar and “Deif” may cause, and are certainly aimed at causing, very serious problems for Palestinians. They will sow conflict, further pushing the “internationally recognised” but democratically deficient Palestinian Authority into the role of a collaborator regime. If this becomes a precedent the Western controlled ICC will bring or threaten charges against any resistance leader whom it considers problematic, and the PA will have to hunt them down if it values being “internationally recognised”.

On the surface the theatrics of international relations seem to suggest that Israel genuinely fears the ICC, but in public diplomacy all is never what it seems. Revelations that the Israelis have been spying on and manipulating the ICC seem to imply that Israel regards the ICC as a serious threat. The assumption is that the ICC has a business-as-usual and that Israel’s covert activity intended to disrupt its normal function is fallacious. The spying is just one of a number of control mechanisms used by the Zionist powers to steer the ICC. In reality the practice of constantly besieging international organisations covertly and overtly is normal practice for the US empire. Covert action works along with diplomatic and propaganda efforts that discipline individuals in such organisations. For example the US spied on the members of the United Nations Security Council leading up to the 2003 Iraq War, but this was in support of far more powerful public and private diplomatic actions.

Covert action is not a disruption, it is part of the mode of control, and the ICC is not some independent body being undermined, it is already penetrated through and through. Israeli spying might as well be intrinsic to the organisation. To illustrate what I mean, consider the revelations that Israel used its surveillance to detect incidents that attracted the ICC prosecutors attention and would intercede by announcing its own investigation which then triggers Article 17 of the Rome Statute. This states that cases become inadmissible if the “case is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it”. In theory the ICC could still pursue charges if they feel that charges are not “genuinely” being pursued, but the action required for Israel to compel the ICC to drop a case is far less than any reasonable definition of “genuine”. It is important to note that spying on the ICC may help Israel to fine-tune this control mechanism but it is not a necessary part of the equation. Even if a case has been opened it can easily be closed in this manner. For example, the ICC opened an investigation into UK war crimes in Iraq then stopped it in 2006, began it again due to the UK’s inaction in 2014, but then shut it down again in 2020. The ICC evinced “concerns” but considered that 15 years of apparent prevarication but cited a judgement that “courts do not base their decisions on impulse, intuition and conjecture or on mere sympathy or emotion” (4) – a formulation which is both emphatic and vague enough to be used for almost any occasion. The upshot is that if you openly refuse to do anything about the crimes of your personnel the ICC can act, but if you hire a bunch of people to actively do nothing for decades the accused need never fear. Of course, not all states are accorded the privilege of this effective impunity. For that you need “credibility”, which is generally code for having a pale-skinned citizenry. But that isn’t the only catch that works in the favour of the rich and powerful.

You may ask – why does the government of the UK have jurisdiction over crimes committed by UK personnel in Iraq and not, say, the government of Iraq? Well, the way it works is this: if you invade a country and overthrow its government then you have jurisdiction. This is often framed as a burden of responsibility, but it is quite obviously a useful tool for military aggressors. The Rome Statute was written with complete foreknowledge that this is the case and the intrinsic injustice of it does not seem to bother the ICC at all. That is because, as I will detail more fully later, the ICC is part of a project to atomise International Humanitarian Law such that powerful states have full impunity, their officials and personnel have de facto impunity, and officials of weak states are often subject to a credible threat of prosecution at the behest of European powers or even the US (which openly calls for the ICC prosecutions such as that of Uhuru Kenyatta despite not being party to the Rome Statute).

So why does Israel have jurisdiction over crimes committed in occupied territories that no other state recognises as being part of its sovereign territory? Why? Because it is the occupier and as such it bears the weighty and burdensome responsibility to investigate whenever it feels that its personnel may have done something bad. Thus when video footage emerges of Israeli personnel torturing prisoners, Mark Miller is smirkingly content to repeat ad nauseum that these serious concerns must be investigated by Israel and the IDF. Hence we get the phenomenon that we untrained people view as the perpetrator (Israel) investigating itself and finding itself innocent of all charges (5). But in this model Israel itself is never under a cloud of suspicion. The very nature of a criminal proceeding is to select certain individuals as suspects (they cherry-pick bad apples, if you will allow me to mix fruit into an unappetising salad). By necessary implication the state and the society carrying out the prosecution are exculpated and the judicial system itself is affirmed in its Godlike impartiality and Popelike infallibility (6).

Moreover, whether the country is Israel, the US or any “civilised” Western nation, this conception of individual criminality is a goose laying golden exceptionalist eggs. Such proceedings will always affirm the fundamental righteous nature of a society that is not affected by the injustices it perpetrates as a matter of unremitting habit. The message is something like Bernie Sanders’ constant refrain of: Netanyahu bad/Israel good. (The rigorous underlying reasoning is that bad is bad and good is good – which is pretty airtight). All the bad things Israelis do are exceptions, all the good things are the true intrinsic nature of the real Israel. Most readers will have come across this form of apologism being applied to the USA (where many people seem to feel that true America was in the era when President Bartlett was in the White House). It should be plain that singling out individual criminal perpetrators bolsters this ideology.

Criminal Punition vs. Justice

In case it isn’t obvious I am highly skeptical in general of the redemptive power of the criminal justice system. It is an overwhelmingly negative institution much like aforementioned harmful medical practices of the past that only added to the patients’ ill-health but were held to be necessary because doing nothing was unacceptable. As with economic austerity, there is a false dichotomy (often used in bad faith) between doing the demonstrably harmful thing, in this case mass incarceration, and doing nothing. That said, though, it is also clear that impunity is tantamount to endorsement. Impunity, however, can be viewed outside of the narrow lens of contemporary criminal justice. As things stand, even if the powerful are convicted of crimes they may serve a carceral sentence and still resume their over-sized, over-privileged, over-loud role in society. In social terms this is a more important and problematic form of impunity. I am not saying that there is no point or no hope in trying to apply international law, but there is no constructive role for criminal prosecutions in our current international system.

For that reason I also want to assert that the ICC and the ICJ are not twinned, nor equivalent, nor even complementary institutions. The ICC can only ever be a tool of the oppressor against the oppressed. By the same token those who simply dismiss international law altogether are doing a great disservice to the present and the future. It is a rigged game, but choosing not to play simply gives Western governments carte blanche to commit genocide. Nor is it ethically acceptable to simply play the game as if it is not rigged. That is a form of collaboration and that is what the elite of the human rights establishment are – collaborators in the genocide. The only way forward is to know the game is rigged, to urgently exploit every loophole and ultimately to force the rules to be rewritten by relentlessly and painstakingly exposing every internal contradiction.

If you want a fast and telling way to distinguish between the nature of the ICJ and the ICC I would suggest contrasting the moment when South African lawyer Adila Hassim fights back tears when discussing the children who have been killed in Gaza with the moment when Karim Khan declared: “Speaking with survivors, I heard how the love within a family, the deepest bonds between a parent and a child, were contorted to inflict unfathomable pain through calculated cruelty and extreme callousness.” In the former case you have someone overcome with emotion while presenting sound well-backed evidence in support of a reasoned argument. In the other you have a prosecutor deliberately evoking personal subjectivity and using emotive language in a tendentious manner. The very fact that the ICC is holding one of these publicity-oriented announcements (akin to those of District Attorneys in the USA) shows what a circus this is. This is a political process.

The Jester’s Court

Indeed, Karim Khan is a politician. After announcing the application for warrants he claimed that a “senior leader” told him: “This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin.” That is political talk that does not address the court’s actual record and does not name this clearly fictional senior leader. He is using a rhetorical trick to embed the notions that the ICC is apolitical and that the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant demonstrate the truth of this. He thus avoids exciting the curiosity of the ignorant. If he had said “This charge demonstrates that the ICC is not just a court for Africa and thugs like Putin” it would have raised some people’s interest. It would give a hint that there is a history to be uncovered, and it takes mere minutes to discover that in reality the ICC has a wholly abominable record that only seems to have worsened under Khan.

Khan was the desired choice for the job of ICC prosecutor by the US and Israel. Under his tenure the ICC immediately resumed paused investigations into crimes committed by the Taliban but ended investigations into US crimes in Afghanistan, as well as dropping another investigation into abduction, torture and murder at US black sites in countries such as Poland. Khan’s office has also charged Vladimir Putin with the unlawful transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia. The fact that they did not charge Putin with committing acts of aggression is also intriguing and I will return to that issue later.

The ICC seeking warrants against Israeli leaders may arguably be “historic” but that is not the same thing as being positive. The very nature of this process has been one in which people’s expectations are used against them. It seems logical that the pressure of truth and activism will cause institutions to move towards justice over time, in conformance with Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (7). In the general sense I agree with this sentiment, but on the level of individual institutions it is just not true. The ICC is by nature a giant exercise in subverting justice, and a development may be both “historic” and inimical to progress. No news from them is good news.

There are some notable exceptions to the reflexive celebration of this ICC development. Justin Podur of the Anti-Empire Project (who has previous excoriated the “Imperial Criminal Court”) celebrates only the fact that it may signify the “controlled demolition” of the ICC. Ali Abunimah, on the other hand, found the Khan’s applications to be both “historic and cynical”. The “historic” part, though, is the widely accepted notion that somehow these acts break with past practice and thus move a step closer to ending Israel’s de facto impunity by symbolically repudiating the absolute impunity it has enjoyed at all levels. This is a total misreading of the situation. It falsely assumes that the actions of the ICC are somehow distinct from the apparently inimical reactions of the US, the UK, and Israel. In reality it is all a farcical puppet show. The ICC dragging its feet and agonising for years is a sign that growing pressure is forcing change. The latest move is a way of capturing that pressure, that energy and effort, and subverting it into a project that actually reinforces Israeli impunity.

Many years ago I wrote that the ICC was “Br’er Bibi’s Briar Patch”. I was trying to show that Israel’s histrionic protestations about the ICC were in fact bait to lure people into empowering the ICC to act, fully knowing that it can do nothing to affect Zionist Israel’s occupation and colonisation but can be a powerful tool against Palestinian liberation. It is no coincidence that as the apparition of Palestinian statehood begins to gain substance, the ICC has finally decided to do something, and that something is to file a completely disproportionate lopsided set of indictments.

Tilted Scales

Contrary to Karim Khan’s rhetoric, the ICC referrals are in practice massively biased against Palestinian interests. Assuming that warrants were to be issued against all five individuals named by the chief prosecutor there could be terrible repercussions for Palestinians, but there will be nothing for Zionists to fear. This remains true even with two of the prospective defendants dead. On the Israel side of the coin, for example, Benjamin Netanyahu can fly to New York at any time in the future and can address the UNGA telling them that their whole organisation is anti-Semitic and that Karim Khan and the judges of the ICC are all Nazis. Nothing is going to happen to him. The US Congress, with bipartisan support, recently invited him for a record-breaking fourth time to address a joint session of Congress in Washington DC. He lied repeatedly, was applauded once every 5 words and given a standing ovation nearly every 2 minutes of his speech (8). It was a display that will hopefully become a shameful lesson on the degeneracy of the terminal stage of the US empire. For now, though, Netanyahu will be able to continue using these platforms to further his propaganda approach of painting all critics of Israel as illegitimate anti-Semites while at the same time making it very clear that he is untouchable.

Lawyer and legal commentator Michael Bradley suggested that even fewer repercussions redound on the named Hamas leaders given that they are already in hiding. He seemed quite unbothered by the repercussions of this, quipping “they already live as shadows and their liberty is only likely to end if and when Israel locates and drops a missile on them.” Firstly, I would like to point out that living “as shadows” is not really liberty. Secondly, it would have meant that a figure like Ismail Haniyeh, who lived openly in Qatar not in the shadows, could have been permanently delegitimised. He was killed by Israel not despite, but because, he was a central and almost irreplaceable part of ceasefire negotiations. If a warrant had been issued against him it might have achieved a similar effect in making it impossible for him to continue as a negotiator. Moreover, there was already US pressure on Qatar to expel Hamas which would dramatically increase their already profound diplomatic isolation.

You may wonder why that matters, but whether we agree with Haniyeh and Hamas or not this act sought to silence a significant voice and peace will be hard to find if we do not listen to all sides. It also obliges the Palestinian Authority to take action to pursue Yahya Sinwar, who is now far more crucial. So the Palestinian Authority will be under pressure to try to hunt down Hamas leaders. Bear in mind that the PA is run by Fatah and even if one believes that Fatah have never had much choice in the matter, they are literally collaborators with the Zionist regime. At the moment this is a moot point, but imagine the damage to the Palestinian cause if the collaborationist regime (woefully unpopular with Palestinians) is obliged to assist in the apprehension of the more popular resistance leaders of Hamas.

It is important to note that these indictments are highly biased against Sinwar, Deif, and especially Haniyeh. The “reasonable” claims against the Hamas leaders seem on the face of matters to strain credulity in most or all respects. In Orwellian fashion Khan states “…if we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as being applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions for its collapse.” A cynic would say that Khan’s masters have most of the world’s weapons and commit most of the world war crimes and crimes against humanity so they might not be entirely unhappy if the collapse of their Imperialist court brings down the general collapse of international law. That cynic would be correct.

The fact is that the ICC charges resistance leaders for crimes committed during a legal act of armed resistance per se. This is all occurring in a context of illegal occupation, a genocide that is widely recognised as such by genocide scholars, and vastly disproportionate casualties from acts by the occupier that are far more susceptible to accusations of criminality. Those circumstances lend a lot of credibility to a senior Hamas official saying that the ICC “equates the victim with the executioner” (the official might have yet more credibility if Hamas were not such enthusiasts for carrying out the death penalty).

The one charge under which the prosecutors may have firm ground is that of hostage-taking of civilians. That aspect of the Al Aqsa Deluge operation seems inevitably premeditated and is in contravention of so many articles of International Humanitarian Law conventions (including the 1979 International Convention against the Taking of Hostages) that I cannot list them here. Meanwhile, though, there is no talk of charging Israeli officials with hostage-taking even though they clearly take far more hostages.

I am not going to comment much about claims of sexual violence except to relay Ali Abunimah’s observation that Khan is not pursuing charges over the highly politicised claims of sexual violence on October 7^th, but instead charges that there are reasonable grounds to suspect sexual violence carried out against hostages held by militants and that there are also reasonable grounds to suspect criminal culpability on the part of Sinwar, Deif and Haniyeh. This is highly dubious as one would not reasonably expect any evidence connecting these people to such crimes (if they have taken place) until prosecutors have far better access to evidence than they currently have. I believe that this charge is laid in order to further the campaign of using accusations of sexual violence against Palestinians in order to facilitate the genocide in Gaza.

Controlled Opposition

In the recent book Deluge, a chapter entitled “Nothing Fails Like Success: Hamas and the Gaza Explosion” by Khaled Hroub reminds readers that Hamas has sought at every turn since 2006 to try to become a “legitimate peace partner”, making overtures to Fatah, Israel and the international community. They had been democratically elected as the government of the Palestinian Territories (as much to their surprise as anyone else’s) and they tried desperately to pivot accordingly, signalling that they would accept a two-state solution. The US and Israel did not want that. They wanted a villain so they made sure they had one. They also wanted to divide the Palestinians politically. Netanyahu facilitated billions of dollars of payments to Hamas to weaken the PA and to convince Israelis that there was no practical “peace partner” with whom they could negotiate.

The PA, led by Fatah, have been no less moulded to serve Zionist purposes than Hamas. By any measure they are a collaborator regime. They have no democratic mandate and a very thin base of support among the people. They are dependent on the enemies of their own people. From an imperialist perspective that makes them perfect. If history books were less circumspect and biased we would all be very familiar with the pattern. Syngman Rhee, a Christian who had not set foot in Korea for decades, was picked by the US to lead the Buddhist majority of Republic of [South] Korea. Soon after the genocidal bloodbath that resulted, the CIA manoeuvred to make Christian and WWII Japanese collaborator Ngo Dinh Diem leader of the Buddhist majority Republic of [South] Vietnam, leading to another genocidal bloodbath. Years later after invading Iraq the US would try to impose Ahmed Chalabi, who had no legitimacy or popular base outside of the DC beltway, as their puppet. They failed, but undaunted the US still managed to sow division and foment an insurrection in order to create another genocidal bloodbath.

Many collaborator regimes in the history of the US empire illustrate the interplay between being in conflict with one’s own population and being a military dependency of the empire. From Colombia, to Egypt, to the Philippines, to post-coup Iran, regimes that are inimical to the interests of their own people (often ironically referred to as “nationalists”) become enslaved to US masters. They might be military dictatorships (usually US-trained officers) or civilian governments who mask a turnkey Junta of officers who will step in if the civilian government strays too far from the designated path. These governments are advised to crack down violently on “terrorists” leading to increasing popular antipathy and (ideally) insurgency. Simply put, the leaders become enmeshed in an enterprise of criminality and conflict that ensures that they need US arms to prevent a popular or guerilla movement from taking over and taking vengeance upon them. This is the role chosen for the PA, for Fatah, and for the PLO. Whatever their numerous flaws and shortcomings, it would be naive and unjust to pretend that they have a lot of choice in this matter.

I have to emphasise here the extraordinary disparity of power between the Palestinian people and Israel acting with the backing of the US empire. The staunch resistance of the people themselves is undeniably effective, but it is impossible for any organised political faction to function as a representative of those people. In reality Palestinians are an impoverished stateless people facing a high-tech society with the 6^th largest military in the world and an open-ended ad lib intervention by the US, the most powerful state in human history. Overt organisation can only be done at the sufferance of these powers, and without overt organisation there is no infrastructure. The PA cannot collect its own taxes, even Hamas was propped up financially by Israel, and UNRWA (effectively a third governing body) cannot function if Israel chooses to cut it off. I am not saying that things are hopeless, but we cannot afford to be unrealistic nor shy away from the unpalatable truth of Palestinian dependence on all of us to break the chains that bind them.

What the Palestinians face is not just the hostility of the top Zionist powers (i.e. Israel, the US, and the UK) it is the hostility of virtually every government in the world, including those who profess to support the Palestinian cause. Not only that, virtually every NGO in the world is also biased against Palestinians, even if they are vocal in condemning Israel’s crimes. I say that because very few pass up any opportunity to condemn armed Palestinians militants and Hamas in order to show that they are even-handed. In terms of political discourse the problems with this approach are manifold. The ideology of context-blind “even-handed” treatments of the oppressor and the oppressed is far too profound and pervasive for me to deal with here other than to say that it is essential in keeping alive Israel apologism when the world can see its inexcusable atrocities laid bare. More specifically, though, the delegitimisation of Hamas serves to ensure that no effective resistance will ever be accepted and that Palestinians will remain trapped between collaborator factions who help Israel commit a slow genocide of creeping annexation, and “terrorist” factions whose existence provides the pretext for Israel to accelerate the genocide with acts of mass slaughter.

Prosecuting the Victims

It is valid and legitimate to disagree with the violent acts of militants on October 7^th but it is not legitimate to condemn the factions themselves nor their cause. It was wrong to condemn slavery abolitionists and suffragettes when atrocities were committed in their cause. It was wrong to condemn the “terrorist” African National Congress when their armed wing killed civilians. More to the point, it was wrong of the Germans in World War II to condemn partisan “terrorists” fighting it’s occupation. In fact, after the War it was long taken for granted that no crimes committed by resistance forces (no matter how grave and atrocious) would be prosecuted. To the best of my knowledge this was an inviolable unwritten rule until 2006 when Lithuania first sought to prosecute partisans, including Jewish partisans, for “genocide” among other crimes. It is a joke, but not a funny one – much like charging Palestinian resistance leaders in the midst of the daily slaughter of the genocide in Gaza.

Historian Benny Morris recently stated that while Israel may commit war crimes in its Gaza operations, Hamas’s October 7^th attack was itself a war crime. Mehdi Hasan rather unforgivably let this pass unchallenged, but it is a complete inversion of the truth. Hamas committed war crimes during a legal act of armed resistance, Israel’s response is in all respects criminal by nature. The occupier does not have a right to use arms in self-defence against the occupied. Armed Palestinian factions have a clear legal right to use armed force to resist occupation and it is not legitimate to treat those crimes that occur during armed resistance as if equal in gravity to acts of armed violence that are illegal as such. By this I refer to acts of aggression and genocide. In these cases atrocities are not extrinsic to the purpose of the armed violence, they are of its essence. Genocide in particular, even when not aimed at total extermination or expulsion, aims its violence at the target population as such, rather than at armed forces. In genocide the means and ends of the perpetrator are the same thing – to bring harm and destruction to the target group. A group like Hamas may commit atrocities in pursuit of its aims, but in the Gaza holocaust Israel’s atrocities are the aim.

In any true “rules-based international order” Hamas would have been recognised internationally once it was elected and, as long as the occupation continues, it should have retained recognition as a legitimate political party regardless of any actions by its personnel. Instead, in topsy-turvy fashion, we accord that treatment to Israel’s political parties when the entire regime is fully committed to occupation, apartheid, annexation and genocide. At the same time the progressive countries in the international community show their support for Palestine by treating Fatah-controlled PA as the legitimate government.

The PA’s international legitimacy has become a fait accompli, but it is still horribly problematic while it has no democratic mandate. President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Hamas-led parliament in 2007 and declared a state of emergency and there have been no elections since. Polls show that Fatah enjoys little democratic support. The more jealously they guard their prerogatives as the one legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the less moral and domestic legitimacy they have. Recently Hamas, Fatah and twelve other Palestinian factions signed a unity agreement but it is going to be hard to implement if there isn’t a wide international acceptance of the legitimacy of groups like Hamas that engage in armed resistance. Failing this there will predictably be a withholding of funds, aid, recognition, diplomatic ties and more until any resultant governing body cuts loose those factions deemed unacceptable, leaving the Palestinian people divided and weak.

Multiple countries recognising and supporting the PA may seem like a step forward, and is in some ways, but as the party controlling the PA has become more unpopular and more collaborationist and increasingly perceived as corrupt, the logic becomes akin to ostentatiously supporting the collaborator Quisling regime to show that you don’t like the Nazi occupation of Norway (while agreeing with Germany that the government-in-exile supports terror and needs to be sanctioned). To be very clear, I am not claiming a moral equivalence between Quisling and Abbas, but I am claiming that level of moral and intellectual bankruptcy among the international community.

So the ICC charges occur in the context of a political division among Palestinians crafted by Israel, the US and the UK to weaken and dominate the people while compromising their leaders. In this system the PA is trapped by its pursuit of international legitimacy, because that seems like a pathway to Palestinian liberation. If international public opinion is incorporated, the international arena is the only area in which progress seems to be happening towards an end of the agony of the Palestinian people. The problem with that is that they then become beholden and reliant on the governments of the UN nations, and in case anyone has failed to notice during this holocaust, but those governments are all run by scumbags and idiots. These leadershippers are stampeded into action by 40 fictional beheaded babies, and waste inconceivable amounts breath agonising, pontificating and condemning non-existent sexual violence by Palestinians, but they are measured to the point of indolence over thousands of real Palestinian babies being killed and totally uninterested in decades of documented instances of sexual violence and sexual torture of Palestinians abducted by Israel. We live in a world where it is easy to get fired for condemning genocide, but supporting genocide is a canny career move. International legitimacy is another poisoned chalice and that is not going to change until the ruling class start to fear the backlash they face from their own people. Until then the PA, and through them the Palestinian people, are at the mercy of an international misleadership class that can and will sabotage all efforts that challenge the slow genocide.

Not Serious People

_{For the record, doing a press conference looking like a panel of proctologists convened to deliver a prognosis of someone with Stage-4 terminal haemorrhoids is not actually a sign of seriousness.}

One of the problems with the ICC charges is that, as we have seen, they are taken very seriously by the officials of the world. The ICC should not be taken seriously as they have a very long history of proving themselves unserious. The ICC is a Europe-based mostly Europe-funded court. Europe has a relationship with African that is extractive, parasitical, and neocolonial in nature. African wealth flows very freely to European elites, and various forms of intervention are required to maintain that flow, often by ensuring the corruption of African leaders. Arguably the ICC functions to intervene in just such a manner. All ICC trials and all detained defendants have been African. For example, Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo was arrested in 2008. He had fled the Democratic Republic of Congo after multiple attempts on his life. He was charged with being responsible for atrocities committed by the MLC militia he sent into the Central African Republic at the request of the CAR government to help quell a coup. The Supreme Court of the CAR found no grounds to lay charges against Bemba or, as the ICC prosecutor saw the matter, there was a “perceived inability of the system to gather evidence….”

Bemba was in custody for well over two years before his trial even started, and it then took four years before he was convicted. It then took another two years before he was sentenced and thus a further two before his appeal was heard and his convictions overturned. Ten years of incredible expense and a man imprisoned for crimes that, quite predictably, could not be sufficiently proven. I would imagine that the four year trial was devoted to harrowing testimony and complex legal arguments and had very little relating materially to Bemba’s personal culpability. The whole saga, complete with witness tampering on both sides, was a parade of politicisation, corruption and ineptitude that should have seen the ICC’s doors shuttered then and there.

Now, once again, the ICC is pursuing charges against leaders of a non-state armed faction despite the obvious fact that they will never be able to prove the personal culpability of those charged in a fair trial. I don’t support the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant either because they are tokenistic distractions from the criminal guilt of the state of Israel, but at least it is theoretically believable that a criminal case could be built against them. In charging Sinwar, Deif and Haniyeh the ICC is doing what it really seems to have been designed for – attacking those inconvenient to Western imperialists and forcing their compatriots to turn on them. It is a divide and rule tactic, among other things. Worse still, it is a precedent. The ICC can repeat this process of both-sidesing any future Israeli pogrom (9) so that any resistance leader can be taken out of the equation by similar allegations.

The charges against Hamas leaders will be a whip for the backs of the PA, Palestinian civil society, and the Palestinian people. Hopefully none will choose to collaborate in furtherance of these charges, because whether they do or do not their real or imagined unwillingness to comply will be used to delegitimise them. It is likely (if the past is anything to go by) that these charges will be exploited to accuse Palestinians of non-compliance. Once that is mooted all of the professionals (who in their hearts may know that there is no commensurability between Israeli and Palestinian crimes) will trip over themselves to be the first to go on camera to show their even-handed credibility by condemning Palestinians like the pampered poodles that they are.

For decades an international humanitarian reporting and condemning machine has sought again and again to create space for criticising Israel by showing its willingness to criticise Palestinians. To do so they have had to be wildly disproportionate in terms of gravity and scale so as to deliberately create a spurious sense of parity, because apparently that is needed to show that they take the crimes of both sides seriously. They do so with no regard for the politics of power that they are responding to. They have to assuage the political realities on one hand, but on the other they loudly avow that they cannot allow considerations of the political ramifications of their politically motivated bias to sway them away from “impartiality”. This isn’t justice being blind it is justice being blind-drunk and wilfully bigoted. To add insult, this is all enacted with the utmost unbearable pomposity.

Fake Justice, No Peace

The reader may have noticed a smidgen of contempt on my part for the champions of “justice” who seek to preserve human rights through the salutary prosecution of criminal malefactors. I have compared the way people think about the prosecution of criminals to mediaeval superstition, but really it is much deeper than that. It is a set of ingrained assumptions concreted in place by a very personal sense of ideology. It is religion. People find their purpose in it and they are not inclined to listen to those who would trash their vocation and sense of moral identity with mere facts and reason.

The holier-than-thou antics of the “genocide prevention” professionals, for example, are particularly galling. Every major US military intervention since 1950 has been genocidal in nature and it has supported genocides in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), East Timor, West Papua, Western Sahara, Guatemala, Argentina and other places. The US has directly or indirectly been a culpable party to most of the deaths that have occurred from acts of genocide since World War II. I would say at least two-thirds of genocidal violence since WWII has been attributable to the US or its clients. That does not even account for structural genocide. Structural genocide is what it sounds like – structural violence that is genocidal in nature. Structural violence used with the intent of undermining a people or nation’s wellbeing and development in order to subjugate that people or nation and/or gain economic access to resources in neocolonial fashion is genocidal by nature. The USA has used military intervention, sponsored coups, covert action, propaganda, economic pressure and diplomatic pressure to enforce “Washington Consensus” rules of neoliberal economics that are linked to tens of millions of deaths through malnutrition and preventable disease.

The United States of America is easily the most genocidal state currently in existence, and by some measures is the most genocidal regime in human history (with the obvious caveat that Germany and Japan committed genocidal violence at a far higher rate during WWII). The entire international apparatus of “genocide prevention” has arisen in this context, but all it has done until recently is to make it easily for the greatest perpetrator of genocide to commit further genocide. This is not merely by whitewashing the genocidal superpower, but also by turning accusations of genocide into a political tool for demonising enemies of the genocidal empire.

The entire discourse of “genocide prevention” has wilfully ignored the genocidal empire and, I would argue, the inherently collective guilt that is intrinsic to genocide. It has focused on the demonic criminal figure. A key text is Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell which quite deliberately evokes demonic evil in its very title. For anyone who has looked beyond the sanitised and grossly understated (in both numerical and qualitative terms) Western accounts US interventions it is a stomach-churning book to read. It frames the US as being too unresponsive to genocides. Some people believed that in receiving a prize from Henry Kissinger she had moved away from her human rights background when she used to criticise him, but some criticisms are so weak and minimising that they are obvious apologetics. Her critique of Kissinger over Cambodia/Kampuchea, for example, is that he had no credibility to criticise the “genocide” (10) there because he “had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation.” In reality Kissinger may have slaughtered as many Cambodians as Pol Pot did (11). Moreover, the Khmer Rouge would never have taken the country if not for the calculatedly genocidal nature of the violence and displacement created at Kissinger’s behest (12).

Power’s central thesis that the US needs to intervene more is frankly nauseating and the idea that she ever cared deeply about human rights seems highly unlikely. Humanitarian interventionists like Power, Clinton, Susan Rice, Nossel, Albright and so forth are simply neocons gendered as being female. If you think that is an exaggeration, please tell me what actual difference there is between the politics of leading neocon Robert Kagan and his humanitarian interventionist wife Victoria Nuland. The policies and ideology in international relations of humanitarian interventionists and neocons are identical – and foreign policy is what they really care about. They are imperialists first and foremost. Writer David Rieff once even said to Power that her rhetoric on Libya was like that of neocon rhetoric about Iraq: “She said, jokingly, ‘I am not Paul Wolfowitz,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, actually, I think you are’”(13).

Whether the rhetoric is of the “indispensable nation” or the “responsibility to protect”, supporters of either slogan are simply creating pretexts for imperialist violence. Fortunately for these would-be overlords, the world’s population of politicians, journalists and academics boast no small portion of idiots in their number. They are happy to accept that those who napalm villages in Indochina, train death squads in El Salvador, back mass slaughter in Indonesia, torture people to death in Bagram,…(14) …are somehow moved by the highest sentiments to sacrifice national blood-and-treasure to make the world a better place. That is a key tenet of imperial apologetics, but that is far from the only problematic aspect of humanitarian interventionist discourse such as one finds in Power’s A Problem from Hell. It also replicates the politics of demonisation that is central to the art of modern warmongery (15).

Real Bad Hombres

Power’s A Problem From Hell frames mass atrocities as products of demonic individuals, not by making an argument that that is the case but by emotive appeal to existing prejudices. This suits the religion of criminal justice mentioned above, but also serves to help the very powerful commit the crimes they condemn in those weaker than they. The belief in the rectifying powers of criminal prosecutions originated in overt religion, evolved to become a tool of social domination through class and/or racial hierarchy, and is now fed like soma directly into the brains of the unwitting through the medium of copaganda shows and their prosecutorial spin-offs. The ideology of genocide prevention through deterrence is woefully weak for lack of evidence and reasoning, but I think that even that lame and vacuous justification hides an even emptier reality. People want to get the bad guy and lock them up because when something bad has happened they want closure – a self-inflicted “need” that afflicts the privileged. They want resolution. They want the credits to roll because their life experience is that injustice is a temporary departure from a norm of the world treating them fairly. The way they act, therefore, is not dissimilar to the behaviour that one would expect if convicting a murderer actually brought their victims back from death.

Some people also view retribution as desirable, either because they think that malefactors should suffer or they have a belief in reciprocity and/or “accountability”. These are all personal and ideological beliefs. I won’t spend the time making a long argument against the applicability of these intangible desires in any true form of justice. Instead I will note that instances of war crimes and crimes against humanity may have hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of lives at stake. What matters here is not crime, it is human existence and human suffering. There are real instances when the choice of indulging the desire to “see justice served” may come at the cost of peace. If we set slogans and cliches aside, losing peace means deaths, grief, suffering, fear and trauma. In these circumstances it is completely reprehensible to elevate these abstracts at the expense of real people.

It is understandable if survivors and those bereaved by such crimes want whatever solace can be provided by knowing that someone responsible has been judged and punished, however inadequate that punishment must inevitably feel. However, those who take up the cause of those victims with passion and pathos are nothing but posers. None of them seem to have the same righteous determination when it comes to US presidents, whose victims invariably outnumber those of all ICC defendants, often by multiple orders of magnitude.

Notwithstanding that a form of psychological peace might be purchased for some victims, it should never be obtained at the cost of actual peace and the creation of more victims. In its current form “international criminal justice” is a political tool of the greatest criminals and they have no concern if they create a massive disincentive to those who might make peace or relinquish power. After all, why would a warlord ever agree to lay down arms and step aside from power if they knew that only the guns and the power stood between them and ritual humiliation and a life in a foreign prison where they will die without ever seeing their loved ones again? Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, voluntarily relinquished power and went into exile under an agreement providing immunity. It is argued that he broke the conditions of his immunity, which may well be true, but his fate is likely to deter others from making peace far more than it deters them from committing war crimes.

The Charles Taylor Case

For some what happened to Charles Taylor might act as a deterrent to future would-be warlords, but that is hard to believe. The deterrence value of judicial punishments has never been as strongly evidenced as believers in general deterrence would like. Moreover, data suggest that of the three parameters thought to affect deterrence, certainty and celerity (swiftness) are highly important while severity is less so. International courts, ad hoc or otherwise, have demonstrated very clearly that they cannot provide certainty or celerity. Taylor’s trial, for instance, lasted 5 years. Theories of general deterrence also rely on rational choice theory, which has many limitations and caveats. A burglar might weigh risks, but many crimes do not accord well with rational choice theory. A rational person in charge of armed forces is very likely to conclude that the success or failure of their forces is infinitely more important than a possible criminal conviction in the hazily distant future.

Charles Taylor was a big fish for lovers of “international justice”. The Sierra Leone Civil War in which he intervened was a source of “blood diamonds”, and Taylor himself was the inspiration for warlord André Baptiste in the film Lord of War. He was literally a Hollywood villain. His victims arguably number in the thousands. Yet, as Taylor’s trial started the numbers of dead from the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq already stood at many hundreds of thousands and would surpass a million before his conviction (16). The people who died in Iraq suffered as much, were mourned as much, deserved to live as much as those who died in Sierra Leone and their numbers weigh far more heavily. The complete historic absence of any institutional moves to hold George W. Bush and others criminally accountable for those deaths confirms beyond reasonable doubt that international criminal proceedings have everything to do with power and may at best be considered incidentally involved with justice.

The clear lesson of the 30 year-long tradition of international criminal proceedings that began with the ICTY is that security comes from power. Far from providing deterrence for committing crimes, these proceedings incentivise any action, including criminal violence, that preserves the political and military power of any prospective defendant.

There is also more of a cloud hanging over the conviction of Charles Taylor than one might believe from perusing the internet. It is well-suppressed and hidden in the interwebs, but if you know where to look you will find that one of the judges on the case, Justice El Hadji Malick Sow, thought Taylor should have “walked free”. It is well worth reading this interview with him, but I will try to summarise. Sow was an alternate judge on the case, but was there throughout. He acted as main judge whenever one of the others was absent. He seems to imply that he was more diligent than the other judges. He argues that he was supposed to become a main judge once one of the other judges began serving on the ICJ. He wrote a dissent and action was taken against him for doing so. His account is entirely consistent with that of someone not playing along with a politically determined process.

The problem with the Taylor case seems reminiscent of that of the Bemba case in that one cannot realistically expect a distant leader to create enough evidence to convict them of crimes committed by armed forces far removed from their presence. A criminal court seems utterly inappropriate for these cases as convictions are only likely to come in most instances through subversion of the judicial processes. In addition I think one could rightly ask whether the length of these trials actually works against clarity.

Waging a War of Aggression

There is one international crime that is far easier to prove, or would be if anyone actually prosecuted it. It is a crime undertaken by leaders directly, not one that requires proof of intentionality or wilfulness on a given leader’s part for actions taken by subordinates. That is the crime of waging a war of aggression. In 1946 the judgement of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg stated “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The Nuremburg Principles and the UN Charter are completely consistent with this idea. When the UNGA approved a definition of aggression in 1974 the Resolution affirmed that “aggression is the most serious and dangerous form of the illegal use of force….”

Reading the definition of aggression it is pretty hard to see how US leaders would defend against such accusations in innumerable instances. With major aggressions such as Indochina, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya the US has constructed circumstances whereby it can claim a legal defence of acting at the invitation of local authorities or under the authorisation of the UNSC. I don’t think that these defences would mean much in court as their pretextual nature is pretty easily established. These excuses are merely propaganda points used to explain US impunity, and they provide the pretext for prosecutorial inaction as much as for acts of aggression.

In cases where the US commits acts of aggression on a smaller scale it is hard to see any legal reason why their leaders were not prosecuted. For example, in 1989 the US invaded Panama in “Operation Just Cause” (17). They killed around 4000 people, and there is no defence for their actions in international law. The UN definition of aggression is broad enough that the US has literally dozens of cases to answer for. All US Presidents and many cabinet members seem eminently indictable.

The international criminal justice industry has been very coy about the whole issue of waging a war of aggression. Originally the Rome Statute did not even include aggression among its enumerated international crimes. Now the statute addresses what one scholar refers to as “mere acts of aggression”. The cute trick here is to take the acts which were established from 1946 to 1974 as being a constitutive of waging a war of aggression and turn them from the acts of an entity committing the “supreme international crime” into an entirely new lesser form of crime. The customary International Humanitarian Law is perfectly clear, but it is equally clear that while invading other people’s countries is definitely frowned upon by the ICC, they aren’t going to suggest that the US is guilty of anything beyond an occasional legal peccadillo (or a tragic and clearly unintended miscalculation if the fatalities rise to six figures).

4000 dead people is merely a micro-aggression. Equally having forces in Syria attacking the government of the country for ten years (after initially justifying their intervention as being aimed at ISIS) isn’t even newsworthy enough to warrant creating an excuse. After all, if you are going to treat each act of aggression as a literal act of aggression it would make running a massive interventionist military empire that kills foreign nationals every hour of every day into some sort of criminal enterprise. That sort of thinking leads to consequences that cannot be entertained by serious figures on the world stage.

The beauty of doublethink is that you feel no cognitive dissonance. There is no part of the individual or collective consciousness that says, “hey, wait a second….” As such it should surprise no reader that there is a massive exception to the refusal to entertain the possibility of treating the crime of waging a war of aggression as an actual crime. Can you guess the exception? It is not an African exception this time, perhaps because the powers that be really don’t want to draw any more attention to Paul Kagame than that which he is quietly accumulating at the moment (18). In this case the exception is unsurprisingly made for Russia and Putin. There is a proposal to institute a special tribunal to prosecute the Russian crime of aggression. Remember how the ICC was supposed to inaugurate an end to the vagaries of ad hoc tribunals? You might, but the people behind this are more loyal to the present moment because they don’t betray today with reference to yesterday and the impurities of context. The tribunal is supported by NATO and a bunch of EU institutions. In the end, though, it is so on-the-nose that, despite not being known for subtlety in double-standards, I think that even the Western chauvinists referred to as “the international community” may resile from such obvious rank hypocrisy.

Jus in Bello, Jus ad Bellum

As well as atomising and diminishing the “supreme international crime” as “mere acts of aggression”, the ICC is part of a broader politicised juridical tendency to abandon, obfuscate and mystify questions of the legality of a given conflict and instead focus attention on the legality of actions within the war. This neatly allows the most powerful states to deploy the age-old propaganda weapon of civilisation versus barbarism. As we all know (in our guts) acts of brutality are carried out by barbarians, therefore the war crimes of this sort are the province of illiterate former child-soldiers with poor socialisation and a surfeit of melanin.

Crimes carried out within war are the province of “jus in bello” or legality/justice during war. The origin and nature of the conflict itself is the province of “jus ad bellum” which addresses the legality of the war itself. Jus in bello concerns play into the Western propaganda and the politicisation of the justice system to effectively blame and punish the victims of aggression. As we have seen already with the case of the ICC regarding UK war crimes in Iraq, this form of criminal justice is even more easily corrupted by money than normal criminal law. Further, as I will illustrate below, the right which powerful countries can exert to prosecute their own personnel (which stems from their own aggression) leads to obvious and abominable perversions of justice. War criminals are never really punished by the US and Israel, and are often made heroes if they face any form of judicial or disciplinary action. As I write Israel has just seen armed rioters (with parliamentarians and government ministers in their number) rioting in support of soldiers charged with torturing a prisoner with gang rape leaving internal injuries.

The erasure of jus ad bellum from the conversation is part of a larger war against context. As we have seen, at the end of World War II it was not the practice to prosecute those who had fought against the aggressors. I think that it would have caused enormous unrest. Is that right or wrong? Is it victor’s justice? There is no question that people did horrible criminal things while fighting against the Axis powers. Obviously history will never entirely replicate those circumstances, but it is worth thinking about why Allied and partisan/resistance personnel were not usually charged by any post-War jurisdiction for war crimes. Firstly, although there were plenty of military tribunals as well as the more famous international proceedings, it was always going to be the case that criminal cases were going to only represent a token percentage of indictable people after an orgy of murder of that scale. How would it have appeared to the public if, say, a resistance fighter were charged with torture and murder while major war criminals were happily working designing US missiles (replacing the many US rocket scientists purged for leftist sentiments with more ideologically sound Nazis); or hunting down communists in Eastern Europe, or developing bacteriological weapons to use against Chinese (allegedly); or teaching torture techniques to secret police in Bolivia. For these people the Nazi war against the tentacles of the “Judeo-Bolshevist menace” never ended (19) and it may have caused more than raised eyebrows if they were rewarded while those who fought against fascism were prosecuted.

The War against Context

The emphasis on jus in bello criminality is a crucial part of that most precious resource of imperialists – selective memory. Imperial violence in general, and the 100-year conflict against Palestinians in particular, require the continued and determined refusal to give a full context to events. The obvious exemplar of this bad faith behaviour is the manner in which the events of October 7 2023 have been treated as if there was no prior history of violence against Palestinians before that date, let alone that there had been a preceding escalation of violence on Israel’s part.

It is hard to overstate the importance of creating an official truth and an orthodox historiography that can be used to cudgel dissenting voices. The emphasis on discrete criminal acts during conflict is part of a multi-pronged system producing official findings that have a level of internal consistency. The discourse is a thick-skinned organism which bristles with antibodies ready to expel unwanted facts and reality-based quibbles.

The bureaucratic world is like the journalistic world in that it abhors reason and original thought as being subjective and suspect. Official truth is handed down from on high and bears the stamp of authority. The individual must “reject the evidence of their eyes and ears” as Orwell put it. Who are we mere humans, after all, to form opinions let alone make inferences? Truth comes from mechanistic processes that are objective. If blobs on satellite pictures are said to be the execution grounds or torture chambers or mobile chemical weapons facilities of an enemy it is because “analysis” says so, not a person.

It is manifestly unjust to treat the crimes of an impoverished militarily weak armed group enacting legal resistance as being commensurable with the crimes of an advanced occupying power with sophisticated policy, rules of engagement, and communications capabilities. For example, the “Goldstone Report” on the violence “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-9 was headed by a Zionist (chosen to give the report “credibility”(20)) who insisted that its mandate include investigating the crimes of Palestinian militants even though it originated as a reaction to Israel’s prolific violence against civilians in Gaza. The report devoted a considerable chunk of its verbiage to Palestinian crimes which, if weighted by the actual injuries and fatalities (3) they caused, would have been relegated to a paragraph or two. The victims are thus held to a higher standard than the aggressors. Indeed, when Israel kills 3 Palestinian civilians there is never any such close examination of their level of discrimination. Moreover, and more pertinently, by avoiding the jus ad bellum aspect as being outside of their purview (or seemingly that of any mere mortal) they avoid the obvious question: to wit, if Palestinians have the right to armed resistance to occupation and the right to armed self-defence, is it possible to declare their use of the inherently indiscriminate rockets illegal when those rockets are their only significant means of striking Israeli territory? It is all a monstrous sham, but the politics of being able to suggest a parity of illegality between the two parties has been absolutely crucial in blunting and silencing criticisms of Israel and in confusing the public who have no idea that the asserted “crimes” of Gaza-based militias were both miniscule and highly dubious before October 7 2023.

An even more blatant example of the corruption of justice that arises from the decontextualisation of Israeli crimes is the “Palmer Report”. Lead author Geoffrey Palmer (sadly not the actor from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, but the former Labour Prime Minister of Aotearoa) is widely seen as genteel, genial and honourable. He certainly seems to see himself that way, but on the strength of the Palmer Report I can confidently say that he is better described as a self-satisfied fuckwit. The Palmer Report ruled the Israeli blockade to be legal on the basis that it would not consider whether or not Israel had a right to be taking military action against Gaza (such as blockading it). On the presumption that it was legal to blockade Gaza they found that it was legal to blockade Gaza. Hence my use of the word “fuckwit” as the only appropriate word in my vocabulary. If that seems offensive, just think of the contribution that the Palmer Report made to muddying the waters and furthering the Zionist claims that Israel is not occupying Gaza. Palmer has untold Palestinian blood on his hands but clearly believes his life to have been one of service and philanthropy. What a cunt (21).

The Miracle of Compound Interest

The exclusive focus on jus in bello crimes also facilitates this notion, which I have already touched on repeatedly, that the right people to deal with any alleged crimes are the perpetrators. When aggressors prosecute their own personnel they try to extend impunity as much as possible, but when forced to prosecute will engage in something worse than a failure to act – a different form of show trial where the accused is made into a nationalist martyr, even a hero. We have now seen two riots in Israel over attempts to charge IDF personnel for acts amounting to rape and torture (though I doubt the eventual charges will reflect the gravity of the acts).

The system of prosecuting one’s own war crimes, like many such processes, goes through stages and where it begins may bear little resemblance to where it ends. It is the inverse of the way criminal justice works for the underprivileged. Consider the case of a working-class Māori in Aotearoa. From birth they are more monitored by state institutions, often in the name of “welfare”. At school they are subject to individual and collective prejudices. In the community they are subject to greater levels of police surveillance. All of this adds up to a much higher likelihood that any prosecutable behaviour will be detected. Studies show that once detected such behaviour is more likely to be charged than with other ethnic groups and that charges are, on average, more serious than those laid for identical behaviour by individuals of other ethnic groups. The Māori individual is more likely to be convicted than peers of other ethnicities and will attract on average a more severe sentence. This is the miracle of compound interest at work, with compounding inequity building and building to the point where 15% of the general population constitute 50% of prison population.

The miracle of compound interest works in the same manner for the privileged, but inverted. Crimes of the privileged (such as drug crimes) often attract no attention from the state at all. The same is true of war crimes. Consider US war crimes in Viet Nam. The Russell Tribunal (the most significant impartial body to consider these issues) found the US guilty of all counts that it considered – including genocide and waging a war of aggression. This means that every single death in the war at US hands, of which there were millions, was a war crime. In considering criminality, though, the US inverted the gravity and lethality of types of armed violence so as to only prosecute those at lower ranks who commit murders with small arms while ignoring the larger mass murders committed with air or ground artillery and largely ignoring those committed from vehicles such as boats and helicopters. Officers who order villages incinerated from the sky need fear no repercussions. The mass graves of the Hue massacre are held up by US supporters as the prime exemplar of a Communist massacre in the South, but we now understand that only 10-30% of the bodies found were killed by PLAF/PAVN forces that occupied the city, while 70-90% were killed by the intense shelling the US leashed on the urban area. Those victims were just as entitled to live but no one seems to want justice for them.

In late 1968 the US 9^th Army Division began a murderous campaign in the Mekong Delta called Operation Speedy Express featuring indiscriminate mass firepower (particularly from boats and helicopters). A whistle-blower described it as “a My Lai each month”, but he understated the rate of death as even the US Army estimated conservatively that 5000-7000 civilians were killed in the 5 month operation. The easily identified driving-force behind the death toll was Gen. Julian Ewell. German Generals were hanged by the US military for this crime and Japanese Generals for far less, but Ewell never had any need to fear prosecution.

Individuals of lower ranks who took matters into their own hands were the most likely to face any charges, particularly if they killed alone rather than in units. Grotesquely the US would never charge any crimes as actual war crimes because they were carried out against “friendlies”. These were criminal acts against a putatively allied civilian population. A typical example was PFC Charles Keenan. Convicted of murdering an elderly man and woman he was sentenced to life. After intercession by his local congressional representative (who thought it “impossible that a marine could be charged with premeditated murder while on patrol under orders”) his sentence was reduced to 25 years, then one of the charges was overturned and sentence was reduced to 5 years, then he got clemency and his sentence was reduced to 2 years and 9 months.

The most famous such prosecution was that of 2^nd Lt. William Calley who murdered at least 22 people during the My Lai massacre and tried to kill many more. Hundreds of people were killed in that massacre but only one person, an officer of the lowest rank, was ever convicted. Another officer, Captain Ernest Medina, was charged and acquitted, but no one higher up was prosecuted despite these junior officers having been explicitly instructed to “kill anything that moves”. Calley was sentenced to life, but would that be particularly satisfying to the people of My Lai given that most of their dead were murdered by other people who faced no charges? While the verdict can have provided little satisfaction, closure, nor effective deterrence against future crimes, it did fuel a backlash. Leaders across the political spectrum from George Wallace to Jimmy Carter expressed outrage over the sentence – the latter encouraged Georgians to drive with their headlamps on for a week in solidarity with Calley. A song in support of Calley sold nearly 2 million records. Calley’s sentence of life with hard labour was commuted to 20 years, then ten years, then, by Richard Nixon himself, finally commuted to 3 years of house arrest.

Only 14 GI’s were sent to prison for such crimes (referred to as “war crimes” by the Pentagon despite the formality) committed in Indochina. The number is so low that it is reminiscent of a dictator who holds “elections” in which they receive 99.2% of the vote. It is a poor figleaf that in many respects is worse than complete inaction. It signals to potential perpetrators that they are right to dehumanise and victimise enemy civilians (even “friendly” enemies) and that if they overstep the bounds of acceptable behaviour their righteous feelings will be taken into account. It fuels backlash and a self-righteous nationalism that situates barbarism in the essential nature of the victims of actual barbarism.

The ICC is constitutionally obliged to uphold this system. If powerful aggressors choose to make tokenistic, insincere or even subversive performances, the ICC will honour their efforts by granting blanket impunity at the international level.

It’s All Pretty Fucked, Isn’t It?

I hope that this is enough to convince you that the ICC should be abolished, but that is not my purpose in writing this piece. What I really hope to achieve is to stop people from boosting the oppressors’ court and to stop looking in stupid places for solutions that actually advance the cause of justice for Palestine. There is no case for respecting a diversity of approaches when this is an institution that will suck in every joule of energy given to it and use that against the innocent. The ICC will help Israel commit genocide with impunity. The ICC may, and probably will, be used against effective Palestinian leaders, assuring a future of continued misleadership and division. The way to stop it is to monitor the future actions of the court, understanding the traps it lays and explaining that understanding to others.

At base the ICC has a terrible reputation already, but the public is shielded from this fact by the complacent deference of the amplified class. We must work to end that, starting now.

A Plea for Financial Support

It took me an inordinate amount of time to write this piece. In the course of writing Mohammed Deif and Ismael Haniyeh were killed and it was publicly revealed that William Calley had died earlier. Other events have occurred that occasioned revisions. The slow pace of writing becomes a cause for even more delay. I mention this because I have many other pieces that I feel I should write, including some that I have already begun. I do not need money to survive, but at this urgent hour I am getting desperate for more time to write.

I have been slowly writing very lengthy pieces like this for over a decade now. I have heretofore deliberately avoided all forms of monetisation because I did not want to be trapped by financial considerations into changing my approach. I don’t write for a general audience and I don’t preach to the choir. I try to write things that challenge people who may in all other respects share my political values and causes. If I think it takes 14,000 words to deal with a topic, I write those words and I don’t concern myself with the impact on readership numbers. I no longer fear that monetisation could corrupt me nor change these facts. I do not need a lot to sustain me, but an indication from any readers who appreciate my work enough to pay a few bucks would go a long way towards emboldening me to start more monetisation and cut back on my work hours. My day-job is far less important than this, and they won’t miss me much. I believe that my voice is quite different to the vast bulk of that which is currently available. If you agree please consider giving a little bit of money to my ko-fi account here.

NOTES:

1) I am fairly sure that “leadership” is now a verb. It is completely intransitive, because you don’t leadership people, you just leadership in a Platonic way.

2)Just a little reminder here that when the ICC was inaugurated the US was plunging into a mad era of blatant criminality. They had invaded Afghanistan in an obvious act of aggression, they had created an international system of abduction and torture, their siege of Iraq was estimated to have taken 1 million lives including 500,000 children, and the crimes were accelerating with an invasion of Iraq clearly on the horizon. I mention this because we are continually hypnotised by the miscontextualisation of historic events like this, to the extent that we don’t really appreciate how morally and intellectually bankrupt the ICC’s boosters actually were right from the outset.

3) I want to emphasise here that I am not suggesting that the victims of the Jonestown Massacre were responsible for their own deaths. I do not think that people who fall victim to cults like the Peoples Temple are to be blamed for their fate. More broadly, all humans have the roughly same capacities for committing acts of harm and those acts are the products of circumstance. Part of the thesis of this piece is that our attachment to concepts of individual moral and criminal culpability is a self-serving form of moralism that has nothing to do with justice.

4) In my limited reading of ICC, ICTR and ICTY judgements they seem to be very keen on the rhetorical trick of asserting the absolute necessity of a given stance. Thus any critic tends to be put in the position of arguing against the underlying principle which is always in itself inarguable. In reality, of course, differing principles can be applied with discretion. Sometimes the principle is empirical objectivity, in others it is wise judiciousness. These are contradictory principles, but who can object to either per se?

5) Our knowledgeable and educated superiors have a more profound understanding of the difficulties of bringing charges let alone securing convictions because of the profound legal insights they gained about war crimes by watching Apocalypse Now! and coming to understand the heartrending ambiguities of intentionality in the madhouse of war.

6) Judicial impartiality and infallibility is one of those many areas of politics and society where a normative theory is treated as an actuality. As far as my observation goes these slippages always occur in such a way as to assert that the exercise of power is undertaken under a just and/or democratic authority. One might argue that the existence of such legitimating norms pushes society in a more just and democratic direction or, to the contrary, that it conceals unjust and undemocratic practices. I think that either may be true, and that in a declining society such our “Western world” these are hollow norms filled with the rot of injustice and violent privilege.

7) Apparently this was not original to King.

8) It is interesting that many people on social media understand that the display of obsequiousness is a significant story in itself, but despite being so unusual it is not considered so by news outlets.

9) By “pogrom” I of course mean “security operation” undertaken because of “Israel’s right to defend itself”

10) In a legal sense the Khmer Rouge regime in Kampuchea cannot be accused of genocide. Their victims were predominantly Khmers. Minorities such as Cham people were no more at risk of death than the majority (ethnic Vietnamese had already fled the country under the persecutions of the previous US client regime). The word “autogenocide” was coined, retrofitting the concept of genocide to suit the emotive politics of the term rather than the law and its original conception. Admittedly the behaviours and ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime intersect with genocidal behaviours and ideology, but so do political and religious persecutions in other non-genocidal contexts. Power’s choice to include the DK autogenocide in a book about genocide has nothing to do with any rigour, and everything to do with the Hollywood disseminated personalisation of the violence. The “killing fields” resonate still, albeit mostly with boomers who remember the film of that name and its not-quite-white-saviour narrative.

11) As anyone who has read Manufacturing Consent already knows the fatality counts for the autogenocide are a very contested and political topic. What is generally missing is an account of how many died in Kissinger’s war on Cambodia. A Finnish inquiry report estimated that 600,000 died in the US carpet bombing and subsequent starvation and a similar amount under the Khmer Rouge autogenocide. Recent scholarship has suggested that more died at KR hands, but this is still a highly politicised issue despite fading in the public mind. The point stands that Kissinger, who murdered people in many places other than Cambodia, is no less condemnable than Pol Pot.

12) Even more overtly than in Viet Nam, the US did not make much of a pretence of trying to win the “war” they waged in Cambodia. Kissinger waged a campaign of complete destruction and deliberately driving the people from farmlands creating a famine among 2 million refugees in who fled to Phnom Penh. He ordered the USAF to use “anything that flies on anything that moves”. Before even beginning the war Kissinger briefed the ground operations head Col. “Fred” Ladd, telling him, “Don’t even think of victory; just keep it alive.”

13) People like Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan kind of give the game away. Neoconservatism isn’t really about keeping women in their place and defending patriarchal masculinity. Going right back to Leo Strauss, neoconservatives have viewed traditionalism as a means not an end, and the current crop views culture wars in the same way, being happily able to play both sides of the issue. Often the side these imperialists take in the culture wars is just a reflection of their gender, their general vibe, and/or their equally arbitrary detail of whether they chose the Democratic or Republican Party as vehicles for their political ambitions.

14) ….facilitate apartheid in South Africa and Palestine; enjoy warm relations with despots in many repressive regimes such as the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and any number of military dictatorships; teach torture techniques to brutal client regimes such as the Shah’s Iran and Guatemala during its genocide; overthrow sovereign governments in Iran, Iraq, Gautemala, Syria, Chile, Grenada, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and many more; back genocide in places like Iraqi Kurdistan, East Timor and Bangladesh; and many other crimes….

15) Or is it more of a craft?

16) I do not want to revisit the controversies of the mortality estimates here, but the critiques of the Lancet and ORB studies of mortality have not withstood scrutiny, at least in regards to the overall conclusions. The overall rise in mortality (from a pre-invasion baseline that was already elevated due to deadly sanctions) speaks for itself. The second Lancet (L2) study only confirms this but shows that most of the dead were lost to violence, with small arms fire from occupying forces being the number 1 known cause of death. If you want to read more I summarised the issues in section 1 of this article.

17) Note the potential double meaning if this is called “Operation Just ‘Cause”. I believe that this stems from the same sort of nerd machismo that led neocons to initially label the plan to invade Iraq “Operation Iraqi Liberation”. These are serious deadly events, but we should not forget that those behind these events may be disgusting annoying little shit-stains who wrongly think themselves witty.

18) He has reached the point where the US client figure starts to blame the US in order to garner nationalistic appeal. Afficionados of Cold War history will know that this is often close to the terminal stage in the puppet life-cycle.

19) For rocket scientists who ended up on the other side of the Iron Curtain it may have felt like the war against the tentacles of the “Judeo-Capitalist menace” never ended.

20) A pointless exercise as Zionists, in tellingly fascistic fashion, increasingly explain all unwelcome comments as being the product of a hostile and tainted individual. Richard Goldstone proved to be no exception.

21) Okay, there are two words in my vocabulary that seem to fit Palmer.

On Genocide

Tag Archives: Israel

We Need to Talk About the Ceasefire: Part 2 – An Endless Nightmare of Torment

We Need to Talk About the Ceasefire: Part 1 – The Killing Hasn’t Stopped

The Monster-Making Machine

Gaza — What is Genocide?

Gaza’s “Safe Zone” is a Concentration Camp

Episode 6: We Need to Talk About Syria

A Fiction of War

New podcast: Ep 01 We Need to Talk About Antisemitism

Israel’s War Against Morale and Morality: Learned Helplessness, Elite Capture, Managed Fascism, and How to Fight Back.

The Poisoned Chalice of ICC