For nearly two years now we have been waiting for that moment when the dam bursts and the true horrific reality of the Gaza Holocaust comes crashing through into the mainstream. Yet every time an atrocity occurs that should fully open everyone’s eyes to the unfolding Holocaust, it becomes obfuscated. Our news media can be relied on to provide cover for Israel because they are deeply compromised at the highest levels. However there are signs that the system of Israel apologetics is fragile. Zionist ideology has become rigid and cracks are showing.
Until now reality has been fighting an uphill battle against a very expensive campaign of propaganda using all of the sophistication and complexity of modern communications. Much of this seems to have been aimed at blunting and confusing opposition rather than winning converts to the cause of genocide and the hatred of Palestinians. By nature this creates a building tension, a collective cognitive dissonance between the horrors we see and the bland mumbling concerns expressed by our politicians and pundits. The more expert they are in muting the natural alarm and outrage, the more pressure mounts.
I do not want to understate the capacity in the current media ecology for creating complacency and confusion, but the great weakness of pro-genocide voices is that they cannot take any criticism whatsoever. When UEFA put out a banner reading “Stop Killing Children – Stop Killing Civilians” they were accused of “blood libel” by a wide range of Zionists. The highly respected journalist Stephen Pollard posted of the sign “They might as well have gone the whole way and written ‘Fuck you, Jews’”. This sort of response may consolidate the siege mentality of their base, but it is not going to reflect well on them around the water cooler or in the pub. Most people tend to lack the nuanced understanding of antisemitic tropes that this hasbara effort relies on. In their vulgar ignorance they are liable to think that if a someone feels personally attacked by a sign saying “stop killing children”, they might have something to hide.
This is coming at a time when liberal Zionists are under pressure to be more critical of what is happening. Simply saying that you don’t like “Netanyahu and the current right-wing government of Israel” à la Bernie Sanders is not going to cut much ice. This situation creates the potential for an explosive end to pro-genocide apologism. For example the amoeboid creature that for some inexplicable reason is currently the Prime Minister of Aotearoa said that things were bad and that Netanyahu has “lost the plot”. This caused considerable brouhaha, yet in reality he was adhering strictly to the liberal Zionist party line that this is all a Netanyahu problem of allowing Israel’s perfectly reasonable need to massacre at least some Palestinians after October 7 to go too far.
The amoeba in question was guilty only of using undiplomatic language to say exactly the thing that the US wants its pets to say, yet Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister responded angrily by suggesting that the greatest threat faced by Aotearoa is a possum whereas Israel has to deal with a “jihadi death cult”. I personally would like for her to come to Christchurch and tell that to the survivors of the massacre committed by a fanatical murderous racist Islamophobe just like her. I would like her to explain how she justifies labelling her enemies a “death cult” when the government she is part of has killed at least 500 Palestinian children for every Israeli child killed on October 7.
Racist double-standards aside, the reaction to the Prime Minister’s comment shows that some anti-Palestinian pro-genocide people cannot tolerate any deviation from a very narrow script. They are genuinely angry at the controlled opposition of Western leaders whose job is to gaslight people with their wildly understated reactions and tepid criticisms. This has been a great strength in the past with liberal Zionists able to burnish their credibility with the condemnations from zealots, but reality is starting to intrude.
The current fashionable liberal Zionist exit strategy from their past embrace of genocide is to become suddenly concerned over starving children and to reiterate that they have always been for a two-state solution, but is that a defensible position?
The best way I can illustrate the problem facing Zionists is with a hypothetical example featuring a true liberal’s liberal. Pete Buttigieg (a man, incidentally, who once took great personal umbrage at a random sign saying “don’t be a shitlib”) was interviewed on Pod Save America. Matt Lieb of the Bad Hasbara podcast summarised his inauthentic rodent vibes on this occasion by dubbing him “Rat-GPT”, which seems reasonable.
On Pod Save America Buttigieg, the former Mayor of South Bend (and first openly gay rodent to be US Transport Secretary) said that the US shouldn’t support things that are “unconscionable” and that “…[We are] Israel’s strongest ally and friend. You put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” The host’s reaction to this was not the nausea and rage that it should have provoked. He was as calm as if they were talking about a neighbour who was over-watering the houseplants but prickly about accepting advice. I do not know this Pod Save America guy from any other context, but I don’t need to because on the screen I can see two disgusting racists who would never use these words or maintain this casual chatting demeanour if the same atrocities happening to a less demonised group.
Imagine, though, if Buttigieg had been pressed on the details of what is “unconscionable”.
We don’t live in a world where anyone that Buttigieg would agree to talk to would question why the starving of children is somehow worse than shooting them, burning them, and burying them alive. Nor would we expect any interviewer to contextualise the current starving children (that so troubles the liberal conscience) with the mountains and mountains of evidence that Israelis have targetted and killed children in systematic ways for many years. We might, however, see someone asking for specifics about what is “unconscionable”, and for the liberal Zionist there is no right answer for that.
Clearly if you say that Israel is deliberately starving children you will be attacked violently for “blood libel”. In fact, if you don’t endorse the claim that starvation is all the fault of the Khamas jihadi death cult, you are clearly a self-hating Zionist, a Zionist-in-name-only, and an as-a-Zionist. A single sound-bite to the effect that Israel means to do all the terrible things it does is sufficient to send the Israel lobby money stampeding away from you and into the arms of the ratfuckers (which admittedly would be a fitting and amusing end for Buttigieg’s political career).
Liberal Zionists are trying to walk an impossible line. They want to condemn Israel in the abstract only, while avoiding any mention of what they are condemning so as not to bring down wrath of AIPAC-on-high that will smite them with ineluctable finality and having smit move on. Whether it is from a media interrogation or from public pressure some of them will be forced into breaking with the genocidal project, They will be rejected from the Israel supporters club because if you can’t handle the Jewish state at their mass-slaughtering holocaust worst, you don’t deserve them at their Western liberal yoga-loving gay-person-accepting settler-colonial apartheid slow-genocide creeping annexation best.
Wembley Stadium is booked in September for Brian Eno’s “Together for Palestine” one night and a Kneecap gig the next night. This is a sure sign that opposing genocide is becoming pretty mainstream all of a sudden. In these circumstances we can truly hope that people like Rat-GPT will be forced to flee the sinking ship of the Jewish-supremacist state.
In the meantime there is a lesson for humble believers in the Palestinian cause (even those not able to get Pete Buttigieg to agree to come on their podcast) because there are implications for the liberal Zionists; the philo-semitic apologists; the Israel exceptionalists; the casual racists; and the Islamophobes in our day-to-day lives. If you find someone wavering in their commitment to “Israel’s right to defend itself from Khamas” encourage them to express what it is that they are concerned about in Israel’s behaviour. The have lived in an environment where, despite the real world asymmetry, it is the crimes of Palestinians that have been emphasised and given the weight of emotion and essential meaning. Israel for them, is only reacting. Once they start to see Israel go beyond any justification, even in the fantasy they have been immersed in, then they may start to think of Palestinian resistance as the justified response. The more they start to think about these things the sooner they will realise that this is not an occasion for mild or partial criticisms. Some might even admit that they were wrong and it wasn’t all legitimate self-defence until some arbitrary time when they personally deigned to stop making excuses for the death and suffering in Gaza. Strnger things have happened.
Remember that things that can’t go on forever don’t. Palestine will be free.
No other word than Holocaust suits what is occurring now in Gaza. Perhaps the future will provide a unique term to suit the unique horror, but for now we we need to know this as a Holocaust with a capital H.
The world has never witnessed atrocities in the way that they have witnessed this the excruciation of the people of Gaza. The Gaza Holocaust stands out as defining historical event of our time.
We have seen bags filled with pieces of children. We have witnessed people burned alive. We have seen massacres with the eagle’s perspective and deaths with wrenching intimacy. We have forgotten things that would once have been unforgettable. We have seen a country driven mad by racist hate: posting war crimes for likes, destroying food meant for the starving, and rioting for the right to torture and rape prisoners.
They cannot erase this experience. This will define us in the same way that the antiwar activists of the 60s and 70s saw that struggle as the central uniting aspect of their political and civic identity. Opposing the War in Viet Nam did not lessen other struggles, it created the greatest sinews of solidarity. It created clarity. It created a culture.
The establishment elite and the fascist plutocrats believe that we will forget. They are drunk on the power that they have used to control the mass mind of the West. They think we are a collection of easily distracted children who are by definition far less intelligent and knowledgeable than they are. They rely on public amnesia.
We need to be careful that we don’t merely assume that the gravity of what is occurring (and the fact that it is all on record in excruciating detail) will set the tone of the historical record. The institutions of Western political culture work by creating areas of doubt and confusion in the face of the obvious and then exploit those areas of uncertainty as wedges to open the path to a long slow gaslighting that isolates the educated activist core from the public. So, for example, the public might retain a belief that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was wrong but come to misunderstand it as a series of errors, while the establishment figures who acted to facilitate that crime against the clear opposition of the majority reinvent themselves as the leading voices of caution.
The 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side was a critically lauded. It exposed the realities of the US torture and rendition programme. It grossed about $300,000. The 2012 pro-torture propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty presented a ridiculous sickening fantasy of the US torture programme, balanced finely in such a way that misinformed people might see it agnostic and even potentially critical of the US use of torture. It grossed about $130,000,000. This followed director Katherine Bigelow’s and screenwriter Mark Boal’s prior collaboration, the 2008 “antiwar” Iraq film The Hurt Locker which received near universal critical acclaim and grossed about $50,000,000. Boal and Bigelow followed an established tradition of propaganda which suggests that the real victims of US aggression are US military personnel who, by being immersed in the barbarism that is natural to a heart of darkness like Iraq, are forced into being barbarians themselves. The film depicts the protagonist being forced to kill a child and centres his victimhood in this act, as if guided by Golda Meir’s words: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
The US can no longer do effective propaganda that portrays noble heroes fighting in unambiguous bad guys, so they present anti-heroes in gritty grey morally ambiguous struggles against unambiguous Bad Guys. That is all they need, and public opinion is informed by mainstream news and entertainment that reinforces this narrative. The path forward for Western leaders is clear. For the hardcore racists they will continue to play on the sense that Palestinians are innately barbaric, for the Western mainstream (also racist, but more discreet) they will continue the demonisation of Hamas. They will not admit that this is a genocide carried out successfully with direct participation by the US and UK and widespread and crucial support from most Western countries. They will instead present a righteous war against evil Hamas gone off the rails because of right-wing fanatics in the Israeli government. It is the propaganda of the moral grey of realpolitik in the face of the undeniable unambiguous Bad Guys called Hamas. Fortunately they do not seem to understand how they have gotten away with this in the past, and they cannot succeed to the same extent now.
Lawyer Tayeb Ali said the following in an interview:
I asked this [US official] how can you possibly back Israel in its attack on Palestinians in this way? And the answer was mind-blowing. “We did it before. We did it in Iraq and you all forgot about it, and you’ll forget about this too.” That was the answer from the lips of an American diplomat to me about this question.
The US committed genocide in Iraq. Over a million people died during the “occupation” and “insurgency” and the majority of them died from traumatic injury at the hands of the US-led coalition. Like Gaza today there were cruel attacks on all aspects of life, calculated to leave lasting agony and devastation long after the perpetrators withdrew. It was a nightmare. The Iraqis tried their best to reach the world, but the world was served a twisted version in which the true source of fear and violence was the civil war – a story that still dominates. On a gut level the Western public cannot really understand that people who look and sound like them are capable of the worst atrocities. The sense of shared identity is weaponised by propagandists such that it is the barbaric other who must be the Bad Guy on an emotional level, The victims were made the perpetrators of their own genocide.
People who tried to document what was going on were systematically killed by US forces. Rules of engagement were promulgated that designated people with cameras as “insurgents”.
More journalists were killed in Iraq than have been killed in Gaza.
It was a lonely time for activists who could oppose the occupation, but not the apologism and misdirection. Plenty of information was available but it was kept from the mainstream and politicians, media and academics could all plausibly avoid the most inconvenient facts. Using the term “genocide”, a valid framing which has the potential to abolish the obfuscations of the nature of the violence, was academic suicide.
This time is different.
The loneliness of knowing is far less acute. As with Iraq, the job of the mainstream media is not to convince people that nothing bad is happening, but that it is complicated and largely unavoidable. They do everything they can to normalise the events, such that anyone who gets emotional or accuses the perpetrators of intentionality is seen as a fanatic. Now, though, the ordinary people you meet may know very little, but they know that something notable is happening. This time, many are willing to listen.
In November of 2023 I wrote a piece entitled “The Gaza Genocide: “Genocide” is the Necessary Word”. I was very clear in that article that the assault on Gaza was not a discrete case of genocide that only began on October 8 2023, but rather that it was part of an ongoing Palestinian Genocide. At the time it was still common to treat the word “genocide” as a restricted commodity that only the anointed experts could bestow in select instances of special gravity. My point was that if we are to understand the nature of Israel’s violence in Gaza then we must understand that it is genocide. This isn’t a war against Hamas in which they have merely by accident systematically destroyed all of the universities and municipal buildings. The target of the violence is the Palestinian people of Gaza as such.
In the last week Israel has unleashed a particularly deadly wave of killing and destruction in Jabalia. They have dropped leaflets telling people to leave the area (after killing hundreds). Can any sane person say that these strikes are because they have coincidentally found a series of legitimate military targets in Jabalia at the exact time that the want to drive the population from the area? Of course not. The Israelis might rationalise this as being a necessary step in their fight to destroy Hamas, but that is beside the point. They may claim that their motive is to destroy Hamas, but their chosen means are genocidal. If their manner of waging “war” against Hamas is by attacking civilians then their intent is genocidal and their claims relating to motive are completely irrelevant.
Israel’s claims about human shields and Hamas tunnels have become so rote that they don’t even attempt to make themselves believable any more. After multiple deadly airstrikes on the European Hospital in Khan Younis last week they released the usual boilerplate propaganda wherein they had overlay red shading on an aerial photo as if this somehow proves the existence of tunnels. To be fair, the US has used this trick hundreds of times since 1990 to show everything from mobile WMD plants, to concentration camps, to exotic execution grounds. The Western media always lap it up as if they had been vouchsafed revelations from on high. In this instance, though, the Israeli hasbarists had become so lazy and slapdash that they did not even draw their little tunnel overlays on the right building. The process by now has become so routine that I doubt any of the faithful will be moved to question the validity of their beliefs. What was once sold as crucial sophisticated and exclusive “intelligence” is revealed as being just some guy using Google Photos, but by now this is no longer an exercise in persuasion. Israel’s hasbara does not aim to change minds, it aims to give people pretexts for not changing their minds (or not changing their position).
The commentary in our media is monopolised by an obscurantist priesthood of a Whiggish religion that mystifies war and genocide in equal measure. When a Western power commits genocide it is not really genocide, it is a series of missteps and miscalculations in their war against terror or their counterinsurgency. When an enemy of the West commits genocide it is not strategic, it is an expression of demonic savagery and a personal hatred. The discourse is just shit piled on shit, and I wish with all my heart that I could say that this does not apply to anti-Zionist pundits, but they are just as bad. They simply slot Netanyahu into the demon slot.
Genocide is not a thoughtless exercise of hatred, it is a strategy. Almost everything that Israel has done in its “war” against armed militants in Gaza can only be understood as genocide carried out with obvious intent. The actual counter-insurgency has been a minor note in the orchestration of murder, maiming and destruction. Why, for example, do they keep shooting kids? In Viet Nam all of the GI’s had their heads filled with lurid tales of children throwing grenades (always second- or third-hand testimony as far as I know). In 2000 the propaganda film Rules of Engagement based its entire final act pro-massacre plot-twist on a vicious Yemeni six year-old with a revolver. These are mere pretexts, of course, but where is there even a pretext in shooting kids with a drone? Are we supposed to believe that an Israeli operator is suddenly spooked and fearful that a four-year old is a threat to their quadcopter? Nor is this violence some sort of uncontrolled racist rampage. Israel is shooting, dismembering, incinerating and starving civilians with intent and at a controlled pace.
Israel’s genocidal purpose is pretty clear. This is a country that refuses to say where its borders are, is engaged in a massive decades-long settlement programme in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and in which they talk of the “demographic problem” posed by Palestinians continuing to live in Palestine. If anyone needs a picture drawn, they have already drawn it, then added more pictures with helpful captions which then were collated into a graphic novel, adapted into an animated feature, then staged as a fucking Broadway musical. No one since 1945 has been so explicit about their underlying genocidal intent which has hidden in plain sight because so many Westerners harbour weird Islamophobic and racist attitudes about the victims.
“Genocide” is therefore the necessary word to understand what Israel is doing. Used correctly it strips the nonsense away. It shows the common purpose between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the West Bank. Otherwise how can we explain the accelerating violence destruction and ethnic cleansing happening in all parts of the occupied territories. 40,000 have been forced to flee their homes in the north of the West Bank in recent times. Are there Hamas tunnels there too? Israel always has its pretexts but no analysis in good faith can ignore the clear co-ordination and the professed intent to dispossess Palestinians and inscribe “national pattern” of the Jewish state on the land that is cleansed of Palestinians. It is just a shame that good faith is in such short supply when it comes to talking about Israel.
Genocide is not a word that denotes a given level of gravity. Genocide is always morally indefensible, but there is no threshold to be guarded against those who would overuse the term and debase the coinage. Something is either genocide or it is not genocide. “Holocaust”, on the other hand, is meant to denote a subjective judgement. That does not mean that we should tolerate the horrified pearl-clutching of the self-appointed word police who are full of wailing passion over the some victims of past horrors, but only those whose remembrance happens to promote their current politics.
In 2012 Māori scholar Keri Opai opined that most Pākehā did not understand the extent of suffering and violence inflicted on Māori and that it was “awful stuff that really does break down to a holocaust”. The screams of outrage reached right around the planet to the pages of the UK’s Daily Mail. Ironically the gammon of that right-wing organ decided it wasn’t kosher to profane the memory of those killed in The Holocaust. Yet the word holocaust has never been exclusively about Nazi genocide, and certainly not specifically about the Shoah or Judeocide.
In reality the word “holocaust” has long been used to refer to many events of death, destruction, or conflagration. Writing in the Journal of Genocide Studies in 2000 Jon Petrie gives pre-Nazi instances of the use and definition of the word:
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers … left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. (W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903)
It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
Holocaust, strictly a sacrifice wholly destroyed by fire … The term is now often applied to a catastrophe on a large scale, whether by fire or not, or to a massacre or slaughter (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, 1910/11)
Petrie adds:
…[T]he implicit denial within the Holocaust Studies community that “holocaust” had a significant secular history prior to its employment as a referent to the Nazi Judeocide helps to support the idea that “h/Holocaust” can only be legitimately applied to the Nazi killings which, in turn, supports the pernicious ahistorical idea that since other massacres require a different vocabulary, other massacres are incomparable to the Judeocide…. [S]ubtly supporting a pernicious intellectual climate in which a well-regarded Holocaust historian can wonder if “the Holocaust … [is] an event whose mysteries were … meant to be understood.”
To put it another way the term “holocaust” is policed by people who want to mystify and confuse historical matters. The outrage of holocaust exceptionalists is based in the same studied ignorance and cry-bullying sentimentality that is used by fascists, racists, misogynists, nativists, transphobes, homophobes and authoritarians.
As things stand it makes sense to talk of the Gaza Holocaust. It is the term we have that most suits this type of historical event. Time will probably reveal a real term – a word, presumably in Arabic, that resonates with survivors as they come to terms with the as yet unthinkable meaning of the time they are living through.
The singular nature of these events cannot be denied. In terms of relentless and unremitting peril and privation I can only think to compare the Gaza Holocaust with the Siege of Leningrad. By design what is happening in Gaza is a trauma that will live for generations.
Trauma is often buried. Sometimes it is literally buried in mass graves like those of Guatemala or Franco’s Spain. In South Korea there is a word especially to denote the fearful shameful silence of not being able to talk about what was suffered at the hands of the dictatorship. We are used to giving full voice to outrage and grief over the atrocities of the enemies of the West. We weep over the dead of Rwanda, rage over the crimes of Bosnian Serbs, and are struck silent with queasy horror when we confronted with the intimate brutalities of Tuol Sleng. With the partial exception of Viet Nam, we are not used to seeing ourselves in the perpetrators boots.
We have never really looked in the mirror of our victims’ eyes. At a very deep level of racism – a profound Western chauvinism that even transcends issues of skin colour – people are genuinely incapable of sensing the suffering inflicted by the West. They are so invested in the underlying benevolence of Western intentions that they will not and cannot imagine the agonies of those on the receiving end of Western violence. Our victims do not suffer, they are mere lights that blink out in the passive voice. Whether the killing was necessary or yet another tragic failed attempt to do good, we need not even contemplate their fear, their lonely death agonies, or the grief of those left behind. We need not contemplate these things because they are unintended. Unlike our demonic enemies we bear no ill will to those who become collateral damage. This is a preconception so strong that no evidence of atrocities can overcome it.
As the title of Omar al Akkad’s book on Gaza tells us, One Day Everyone will Always Have Been Against This. He did not mean that as a positive optimistic statement. Western leaders are already positioning themselves to twist reality to the point where they are on the right side of history. Emmanuel Macron has been using strong words for months, clearly trying to milk as much as possible from rhetoric while doing as little as possible in real terms. UK’s Labour Party has now joined him. Keir Starmer and David Lammy have used words like “unacceptable” and “monstrous”. They have cancelled trade deal negotiations. This might seem to be substantive, but it really isn’t. The UK has sent over 500 surveillance flights to Gaza during this Holocaust to support Israel. On paper the UK imposed a partial ban on arms exports to Israel, but in reality exports have “skyrocketed”. The UK’s military base in Cyprus is available for the US to use and almost certainly is a launchpad for special operations exercises. In June of 2024 US special forces were involved in the rescue of 4 hostages that left over 200 Palestinians dead. One witness said: “I saw dead children and body parts strewn all over… I saw an elderly man killed on an animal-drawn cart… It was hell.”
The UK is a culpable perpetrator in the Gaza Holocaust. His Majesty’s Government is guilty of the crime of genocide. After 20 months of slaughter it should be seen as a joke that they would now use strong language. It is a certain sign of bad faith and duplicity, yet the strength of human suffering in Gaza is so strong that people are pulled into a sense of relief, a false belief in change that seems natural when people use terms like “monstrous”. Things are changing, of course. There was always going to be a time when the genocide in Gaza would reach a point of such obvious obscenity that even Keir Starmer would need to distance himself. Once that point comes it makes sense to use your newfound humane concern both to gain popularity and to distance yourself from the position you have taken and held previously.
UK Labour’s manoeuvring is painfully obvious if you look for it. They clearly want to separate the legitimate “war” against Hamas from the excesses of Israel’s execution of it’s right to self-defence. (In reality this is not a war and Israel has no right to exercise self-defence until it ends its occupation of Palestinian territory). The playbook is once again to allow Western actions to be seen as questionable but to reinforce the idea that they are reacting to the Bad Guys, rather than the reality of being the aggressors, the occupiers, and the perpetrators of genocide. Even Piers Morgan is ostentatiously changing his tune, but only by rearranging his notes. He is now “forced” to admit there is a genocide, but with the assistance of an unctuously collegial Mehdi Hasan, he effortless reinvents his bullying support for genocide into a mere misreading of the situation. (You can find the video online of you want, but I will not link here because, unlike Hasan et al., I refuse to do anything to provide views to that cunt’s channel.)
Once the immediate violence in Gaza comes to an end there will be the usual pressure to minimise and bring into question the amount of suffering and death caused. A lot of emphasis will be placed on any violence or strife between Palestinians. There will be hand-wringing about not foreseeing things and many BBC-toned uses of “journalistic” absolutes such as “nobody could have foreseen…” an eventuality or “nobody can doubt…” a well-meaning intent.
Every Western country will be following the same basic procedure. They are all guilty. Almost every Western leader has provided significant aid to a genocide, but they will all claim to have always been against it.
There are two ways in which Western self-exculpation and self-adulation will fall apart, though one is far from certain. The first (and uncertain) way is that the demonisation of Hamas is completely one-dimensional and therefore may break. It derives its strength from its complete lack of intelligence or intelligibility. It works by forcing people to submit saying Hamas are terrorists and condemning October 7. This sets up the framework of a just war that has been derailed by a few bad Israelis. The fragility in this is that there is nothing to back this argument – if you can weather the outrage that questioning the assumption prompts. If someone can cut through the berating and point out that Palestinian armed factions, including Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades, have a right to use armed resistance and no one apart from a truly militant pacifist has any moral standing to condemn them for October the 7th (notwithstanding that war crimes were committed during that assault) then the anti-Palestinians will have no answer. We should not underestimate how effective a screeching fascist can be when they are in a position of authority, but it is an intellectually indefensible position and if it propaganda breaks once it will happen more easily thereafter.
A more certain thing is that the Gaza Holocaust will overwhelm the narrative of October 7th. They have stretched the unconscious tendency of Westerners to value Western life more highly than the lives of our victims past breaking point. They took for granted the idea that they can create an exclusive concern about the suffering caused in a single event by the Bad Guys, and destroyed it by an excess of violence that cannot be remedied or hidden enough to make sense. Ordinary Westerners are racist, but not racist enough for this. The sociopaths in charge clearly either do not understand the limits of their propaganda abilities or their desperation is far greater than we can see from the outside. Either way, there will never be a discussion about October 7th that occurs without the shadow of Gaza suffering destruction, starvation, dismemberment, torture, immolation and grief beyond measure. We are not going to forget and we will not let other people forget.
I will never forget the Gaza holocaust. I will never let anyone else forget about the Gaza holocaust.
No matter what happens or how this thing turns out, I will never let anyone my voice touches forget that our rulers did the most evil things imaginable right in front of us and lied to us about it the entire time.
I will never stop doing everything I can with my own small platform to help ensure that the perpetrators of this mass atrocity are brought to justice.
I will never stop doing everything I can to help bring down the western empire and to help free Palestine from the Zionist entity.
I will never forget those shaking children. Those tiny shredded bodies. Those starved, skeletal forms. The explosions followed by screams. The atrocities followed by western media silence.
I will never forget, and I will never forgive. I will never forgive our leaders. I will never forgive the western press. I will never forgive Israel. I will never forgive the mainstream US political parties. I will always want for them exactly what they wanted for the Palestinians.
No matter what happens or what they do in the future, they will always be the people who did this to Gaza. They will always be the people who inflicted this nightmare upon our species. That will always be the most significant thing about them. It will always be the single most defining characteristic about who they are as human beings.
I feel the same as Johnstone. I feel the same way about the genocide in Iraq. I won’t ever forget, but I also know that in that instance I have been isolated and powerless. But this genocide is different. There is a framework for us built from years of organising that allows us to use these feelings, because these feelings are judgements that carry real weight and real justice. We will not let these fucking scum rewrite history and paint us as the unreliable premature anti-Zionists. We will not let them rest easy.
What we do now will define us in future. We need militancy. We cannot welcome Starmer, Macron and Morgan as late-blooming anti-genocide voices, because they are not. Those who really come to understand that they are in error will be humbled and the last thing they would do is to publicly promote their new opinion as being worthy of other people’s time.
There is only one fight and there are only two sides. Everyone needs to understand this, and everyone needs to understand that the people who chose to be on the side of massacring Palestinians are not ever on our side in any respect.
I speak here off the cuff about the centrality and culpability of the US in the Gaza Holocaust. I start by explaining why I use “Gaza Holocaust” as terminology. The US is not merely supporting Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza, it is a direct participant. In this video I depart from my usual format and the result is much briefer. “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” ― Aldous Huxley.
Even in the midst of great slaughter and suffering, Israel’s attempts at ethnic cleansing face insurmountable challenges. What may seem to be brazen acts fuelled by total impunity are actually desperate and deranged acts in a colonial genocide that has become dysfunctional. Bloodlust and fanaticism have come to over-ride cold strategic calculation. Ultimately Israel has no way of achieving the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and it cannot withhold rights from its Palestinian subjects forever.
I write this article in response to a passage that shocked me in the epilogue to Pankaj Mishra’s book The World After Gaza (2025):
As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.
There is already too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice, powerful men have always made their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught, or its retrospective sanitizing by historians and journalists as well as politicians.
My dismay comes in no little part from how good the rest of Mishra’s The World After Gaza is. These words felt like a betrayal that hit me as an unexpected gut-punch. This is not because of my belief in the cause of Palestinian freedom. I am not letting my heart blind me to reality, in fact I believe the inverse to be true. Mishra is evincing a privileged form of defeatism. At the end of a wonderfully sober book Mishra for some reason surrendered to sentimentality. It is the inverse of baseless optimism, but it is no less self-indulgent for the fact that it makes him feel bad.
I am not a Pollyanna. I do not think that humanity is continually becoming less violent through some law of Whiggish progress. In the abstract I do not deny that what Mishra claims is possible or even probable in other circumstances. It is not hard to recall other times when horrific genocides have been turned into triumphs, and then even spawned genres of historical fiction in which the victims become the villains. From stories of Richard the Lionheart, to John Wayne Westerns, to American Sniper, this shit does keep happening. But Mishra uses the absolute term “always” far too blithely. Hitler was a “powerful” man by any normal measure but he did not manage to leave legacy in which history judges his massacres as “necessary and righteous”.
Like the Israelis, Hitler believed he could write a grand story through mass violence in the manner that had served so well in British and US colonial genocides. He was wrong. The Zionists are wrong. The world was not the same in 1939. It was not the same in 1947. It was not the same in 2023.
Colonial genocides work by destroying indigenous histories. Israel has spent decades slowly destroying the physical manifestations of historical Palestinian presence but still has come nowhere near the sort of erasure seen in the US, Canada, Aotearoa and Australia. Now they are engaged in the most futile acts of memoricide imaginable. They destroy mosques, churches, libraries and universities, but it is documented by a million Palestinian cameras and even uploaded injudiciously by their own genocidal personnel. They are not destroying Palestinian identity, they are making Palestinians one of the most recognisable groups on the planet.
Timing is everything. Aimé Césaire claimed that Nazism was only colonialism practised at home. “They tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them… because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Perhaps there is some truth here, but what might the world have looked like had Britain and France not declared war during the invasion of Poland? What would the world have looked like if Germany’s leader were a patient imperialist more like his Anglo role models? What if Germany had spent decades of playing divide-and-conquer, signing and breaking treaties then always blaming their own perfidy on the innate violence of the barbaric slavs? They might easily have replicated the success of Anglo settler-colonies.
Césaire might be right about the racist hypocrisy of Europeans, but the German-led Axis powers killed 26 million Slavs and 6 million Jews in the space of less than 6 years. No other racial slaughter in history matches this intensity. The public response in the Axis home countries was roughly no more nor less contended than that shown by British people in response to the violence of the slaughter at Ombdurman in 1898 or the brutality meted out in suppressing the Indian Mutiny.
The reason Germany could not repeat the genocidal successes of other European powers was circumstantial and seemed to be completely independent of the skin colour of the victims. The scale of the slaughter was too large and the war was not confined to the intended victim groups. Most importantly, though, they lost the war.
After 1945 things would become even more difficult for would-be settler colonials. In the wake of World War II a more determined ethos of universality took hold of the world than had occurred in the wake of World War I. Human rights were for all humans. Notably absent were the racist notions of the need for “tutelage” that allowed European powers to grab more territory as “League Mandates” after WWI.
The UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and various conventions and treaties all pointed to a non-racist world order – on paper at least. This did not end imperialist genocides, nor the cruel depredations of neocolonialism, but it set the scene for the end of most direct colonial regimes and it made new settler colonial projects legally and morally anathema. The Shoah gave some validation of Zionist arguments for the need for a Jewish homeland and they were backed by duplicitous manoeuvrings by the UK and the US. Thus a partial blind eye was turned to this particular settler-colonial project on the basis of pretending that a “just and lasting settlement” would come at some future date. This contingent approval for a clearly insupportable injustice always needed the concealment of a mask of temporary expedient. Even as generations were born and died Israel’s existence is only regularised by a fig-leaf of future just resolutions for Palestinian refugees and occupied populations.
In 1947 the UN General Assembly proposed a partition plan in Palestine. The British knew that Zionist paramilitary leaders would not accept this and they knew that the paramilitary forces (Haganah, Irgun and Lehi) would be able to take the entirety of Palestine. Britain gave a green light to Jordan to invade and occupy the West Bank. Her Majesty’s Government was sufficiently in favour of this move that they defied a UN arms embargo to supply necessary weapons. The reason that the British did this was to further their ends of power projection into the oil-rich Arab-populated lands of the region. They wanted Israel to be insecure – a bleeding sore and a permanent source of conflict with Arabs.
This was the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. Had Israel taken the entirety of Mandate Palestine the remaining Palestinian population would have been large, if not a majority. The sort of ethnic cleansing required to change that would have destroyed the Zionist pretext of fighting a war, especially in the absence of an “invasion” by neighbouring Arab countries. Likewise, a partition of Palestine would have been a huge injustice in itself, and yet would have left Palestinians in a far better position in future years and decades. A Palestinian state could have sought redress as a wronged peer with a theoretically equal voice in international fora. These are simplified counterfactuals, but I hope they illustrate that the end result of losing 78% of mandate Palestine was calculated (if only incidentally) to leave Palestinians in the weakest and least secure position possible. They were effectively pawns in game of world domination.
The US inheritors of British imperial designs achieved that world domination, and control of Middle Eastern oil was arguably the keystone of the architecture.
While we are on the subject of deranged schemes it is worth recalling that wilful Zionist fantasies of a land without a people for a people without a land were never sustainable. Even the most hardline “realist” revisionist forms of Zionism were and still are deluded. To cleanse enough of the Palestinian population to make a stable “democratic” Jewish state would take either the expulsion or mass murder of millions. Killing that many would immediately create a pariah state. On the other hand, expelling them does not erase them, their identity, nor their legal rights. People whose great-grandparents were expelled from Palestine in the Nakba still have a legal claim to the right to return. People being slowly forced out of the West Bank and Jerusalem have a right of return and if things continue as they currently are will have a clear case to be considered refugees rather than migrants. Israel cannot write the story they want no matter how much Palestinian blood they use.
What path does Mishra see by which Israel will now be able follow to achieve what it could not over eight decades of trying? How would this happen?
There is clearly a crisis in the US empire and in global capitalism. I think that this is why the Gaza Holocaust is happening. Israel could have stopped its current onslaught at any time before now, leaving a battered Gaza to suffer until it finds the next pretext for “mowing the lawn”. Instead it is relentless. It has also conducted unprecedented operations in Syria and the West Bank, and is trying hard to end the power of Hezbollah entirely. No one should mistake the fact that there is an urgency in these actions. Supporters around the world are also acting as if impelled, burning up political capital furiously to provide diplomatic and discursive cover for the most documented atrocities in human existence.
History is written by the winners, but how practically can Israel “win” in terms of full ethnic cleansing? If Egypt (for example) agrees to take the entire population of Gaza tomorrow there will still need to be a forced expulsion. It would be just the first difficult step in a long process that would cause a massive popular and institutional backlash.
The winners are always those who can write the history. By the same token, no victory will ever be complete until the story of the victory is believed. Who will ever believe in the triumph of Israel over the baby-beheading rapist terrorists with what we have seen? Even the biased Western media can’t spin everything, and Israel’s genocidal machinery is writing an indelible story of obscene criminality.
There is a global reservoir of digitally-enhanced folk-memory that will keep intruding into the mainstream, even reaching the confused victims of Western news media. Around the globe there is shared a language of chants and sayings such as “every Zionist accusation is a confession”. We know of unforgettable crimes that are seared into our hearts. We know names of the dead. We can inform people about Refaat Alareer, Hind Rajab, and Hossam Shabat. We have poetry. We have music. We have statistics; photographs; running jokes; books; documentaries, dedicated news outlets, websites, logos, a brand of cola, and a massive podcast ecosystem.
Palestine solidarity activists have, by pure circumstance, developed a durable shared identity. We have the gravity of the weight of all of the tears we have shed. That will stay for our lifetimes and when the contention dies it is our stories that will inform our friends, family and neighbours about what really happened. Israel cannot silence the voices of Palestinians with all its weapons and prisons, and it has no way of extinguishing the global voices of solidarity. We cannot be forced to stop and we have no reason to stop until Palestine is free.
Israel killed journalist Fatima Hassouna just the day after it was announced that a documentary about her was accepted to be shown at Cannes this year. It is hard to believe that this is a coincidence, and what they have done is to create another enduring symbol. What impact will that documentary have now? Can it be imagined that the people who watch it will ever be able to accept future Zionist lies? Assuming it was a deliberate act, the killing of this young woman is surely meant to demoralise. It is surely meant to be a brazen display of impunity. It is surely meant to force the flak-wary leaders and organisers of the Western world to commit further to the fictions of hasbara, trapping them in a web of absurdity. But they are skinning the sheep that their forefathers have profitably shorn for decades.
Israelis are destroying the myths that have sustained 80 years of slow genocide. The frontline troops that have let their chauvinist self-belief and hatred of Palestinians lead them to make unwise advertisements of their own criminality, and the highest leaders seem to think that showing the world a face limitless brutality will create assent and compliance. How could anyone think that they will succeed this way?
The resistance is inextinguishable. That is why it is only a matter of time before Palestine is free.
Only a matter of time.
Only.
But time is not trivial. People are suffering and dying. This week we saw children incinerated in their tents. Their dying agonies should reach the world, should move the world, should shake the world like a thunderclap, but they are just another irreplaceable loss, their agonies another irreversible obscenity. Each day brings more. Perhaps that is the thing that made me feel the greatest sense of hurt when reading Pankaj Mishra’s assertion that Israel will can easily succeed in its genocide. By doing this Mishra endorses the delusion that keeps the violence going.
When I say that Palestinian liberation is inevitable it is not from optimism. It is not comfortable nor comforting because it means that each new day’s suffering is as futile and arbitrary as it is inhuman. What I mean to convey is that the more we do to end this, the fewer people will suffer. That is all.
This genocide no longer serves a purpose, not for Israel, not for the US. The US empire is retrenching, but like the cruel colonial powers of the past it is flailing destructively as it withdraws, its leaders believing they will never face justice. Maybe they are correct. Israel, on the other hand, cannot win this fight and with each passing day of violence they inflict future harm on their children and grandchildren. They inflict harm on their own future selves.
Others will pay a price too. Israel needs an international support structure to continue this Holocaust. Currently Western and many other leaders around the world are siding with power against what is right. We need to make them know that a time will come when they will pay. Their names will be dirt. Some may face prosecution. Everything is recorded. Everything is known. If they want to keep their careers they had better be in the vanguard of those who one day (as Omar Akkad says) will always have been against this.
Eighty years is too long to wait. Free Palestine before ‘28.
I am not Palestinian and I cannot claim to speak for Palestinians, but I give this work as a mere offering. I can only hope that it rings true in the minds of the people who must live the horrors we seek to end. To silence myself in deference to an identity would serve no purpose.
I am not Israeli. I see the issue of Palestinian freedom as an issue of oppressor and oppressed rather than as a two-sided conflict, yet I still acknowledge the humanity and inextricable interests of Israeli people in the issue and it’s necessary solution.
The only solution is a one-state solution. This is known to any who are honest and uncompromised by vested interests. A two-state solution would never have resolved issues such as the rights of Palestinian refugees whose origins lie in present-day Israel. These rights were recognised in UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Records of refugee status have been maintained through the decades. No political solution can erase the inalienable human rights of these refugees.
The two-state solution stands revealed now for the nonsense that it has always been. There is no plan to force Israeli settlers from the occupied territories. There is no hope for a Palestinian state with territorial integrity. The people of this state would have no protection from Israeli strikes and incursions. Western nations can not be trusted to respect any political autonomy in a Palestinian state because they freely delegitimise and sanction factions whose politics they dislike, labelling them “terrorists”.
Supporters of a two-state solution do not explain how they will establish justice by giving only 22% of the land of mandate Palestine to the Palestinians – they seem instead to think that because Palestinians are suffering they should be grateful to accept less than is their due.
The two-state solution has always been a false hope that is exploited by those who perpetuate a system of apartheid and perpetrate a genocide. The two-state solution has also been cynically used by supporters of Israel’s genocide. The two-state solution has been embraced by cowardly political leaders throughout the world who wish to pretend that they support peace and justice while throwing their energies into ensuring the continuation of violence and injustice.
From the inception of the Zionist project by the British Empire there has been a calculated strategy of keeping Palestinians and their allies on the back foot. They created a racial hierarchy of reporting and of policy. Despite the indigenous residency of Palestinians and the migrant status of most Jews, Jewish rights became something that were presumed and had to be argued against, while Palestinian rights were assumed to be null and had to be argued for.
Our leaders fear the consequences of opposing genocide and seem to think that they will never pay a price for supporting genocide. Such people obey lawless power and spurn powerless law, but true law is an instrument of the people and an expression of their power. When the people awaken, the leaders will rush to have been always against the genocide.
The racist double-standard continues. If a Palestinian commits a crime or atrocity it is taken as evidence of Palestinian terrorist barbarism, yet the very same act could be carried out by Israelis ten or one hundred times and the explanation is that it is a response to Palestinian terrorist barbarism.
As I write we have just witnessed weeks of stories of the brutality, torture, rape, starvation and medical neglect evident on the faces and bodies of those released from Israeli captivity. Our news media have greeted this with silence. Yet when three prisoners of war were released from captivity in a besieged and deliberately starved territory there is an international outcry over the fact that they are gaunt and weak. History will know and judge this reporting for the pro-genocide propaganda that it is.
We can no longer accept this racist framing. We can no longer try to meet disputants halfway when their minds are full of evil racist hate. We can no longer pander to the misapprehensions of the misinformed public. We must strike back mercilessly. Nonviolence does not mean that we will leave people with the comfort of their self-serving lies. If reality causes people pain the real culprits in their suffering are those who convinced them to live in the zone of genocidal fantasy.
Palestinians have been shackled ever since 1948 with the cruelty of having to negotiate for rights that were declared “universal” for everyone but them. They were made stateless in a Zionist settler colonial project that only took root because it was also a British and US imperial project.
The very people who made them stateless have used their own crime as a justification for treating Palestinians unfairly in negotiations. Their statelessness was used to defer recognition of their human rights as if they had somehow not yet achieved the status of human. Though framed as temporary this state has lasted generations and now the very same people treat the historic offences against Palestinian rights (which are still causing harm today) as a mere past grievance to be tutted about and shrugged off. The reaction to oppression that is framed as the problem, not the oppression itself, and the victims are expected to be penitent for their “terrorism” and offer recompense.
The Oslo “Peace Process” was a process leading to no possibility of peace, and the two-state “solution” is no solution. No matter how much Palestinian officials have offered to sacrifice they have been condemned invariably as intransigent for not agreeing to relinquish rights which they have no power to relinquish. Meanwhile Israel is trapped in a web of extralegal entanglement, shackled to the Palestinian people and their ultimate emancipation. The phrase “final status issues” was left hanging in the air after Oslo as a direful reminder that Israel can only exist in its current form by continuing a genocidal conflict indefinitely, or by seeking a brutal final solution of mass death and ethnic cleansing.
As long as Israel continues to insist on being a majority Jewish state controlling the majority of the former Mandatory Palestine they will be inimical to Palestinians. This has nothing to do with conflict, nor any action of resistance by Palestinian groups. Palestinians are enemies of the state of Israel merely by existing. The inalienable human rights of Palestinians cannot be realised while Israel exists on the terms its political leaders insist upon. Thus Israel has long been engaged in a slow but intensifying genocide that seems to be heading inevitably towards the logic of extermination.
For Palestinians the situation becomes ever more horrific. The violence keeps increasing in tempo and magnitude. Officials documented over 60,000 deaths in Gaza from October 2023 to January 2025. The vast majority of these were from the direct trauma of armed violence and they represent only a fraction of those who died prematurely through the total effects of war, including undocumented violent deaths as well as preventable deaths from health conditions, exposure, neglect, poisoning, and malnutrition.
Along with the shocks of armed mass violence, Palestinians face an ever more oppressive web of apartheid control. In Hebrew this is known as hafrada which, as with the Afrikaans word apartheid, can be translated as “separateness”.Like the Indian Pass Laws of California, the Nuremburg Laws, and South African Pass Laws these practices make a false pretence of serving a security purpose.
Apartheid practices cannot serve as a counter-insurgency strategy as they deliberately create a monolithic group based on ethnic identity, not on insurgent activity. Such a strategy seeks to incapacitate resistance rather than ending it, and because its oppression provokes the very resistance it claims to oppose, the ultimate logic is that security only comes from complete enslavement or extermination. Apartheid is inherently genocidal.
Enhanced by technology Israel’s apartheid tactics are ever more pervasive. The controlling electronic presence began by taking streets and public spaces then moved into homes as mobile phones were turned by spyware into bugs, trackers and hidden cameras. Through biometrics the techno-apartheid has invaded people’s bodies themselves. The digital world is full of paranoid spies and aggressive guards who pose real world danger. A post merely expressing a wish for Palestinian freedom can lead to time in a brutal political prison system under “administrative detention” or after being found guilty by a military court of “incitement”.
The control and fear is everywhere. Violent death can come from an innocent misstep. On February 10 2025 a woman who was 8 months pregnant was shot dead because she looked at the ground in a manner considered suspicious. Terror and coercion are constant and inescapable.
Israel also uses automated systems to control the bodies of Palestinians physically. The high technology approach of “frictionless” automated control is a dystopian abomination. It strips all autonomy from subjects, making all life a prison sentence of constraint and insecurity.
For both Israel and the US any challenge to a self-appointed imperium beyond their legal territory is to be met with fetishistically robotic forms of control and killing. The proponents become ever more murderous and inhuman by cultivating a fixation on clinical, sterile, detached “precision” killing. The victims die screaming in bloody chaos, in fear, and in agony, but we privilege the perspective of distant operators and their superiors who call this abomination “surgical”.
“AI” near instantaneously generates death lists of any required number of targets. This is death by datafication. Those deemed terrorists are “proven” to be terrorists by the fact that a computer programmed to designate them as terrorists did so. It is a closed loop; a deadly tautology. In Gaza it is clear that the “AI” system was simply a fast way of producing “signature strike” victims based on phone movements, rather than any sightings of individuals. They use the phrase “artificial intelligence” as if conjuring magic, invoking a sophistication that doesn’t exist. These are just signature strikes produced with great rapidity. They probably produce far more false positives among civilians who haplessly carry unshielded mobile phones than positives among armed resistance members who evade such detection.
The self-fulfilling datafication that defines “terrorists” follows in a tradition of racists, fascists and other megalomaniacs. Those who used phrenology and physiognomy to “prove” low intelligence, criminality, and racial inferiority have been succeeded by racist digital heirs. A whole science is being developed to create a body of knowledge in which “Palestinian” is a subspecies of “terrorist”. This comes to predominate in the crafted and truncated epistimologies that dominate in bureaucratic, journalistic, political, criminological and (above all) military milieux.
The fascistic minds of the oppressors view all Palestinians as actual or potential monsters. They create cruel rituals to cement in their own minds the supernatural evil of their chosen enemies. Prisoners are stripped, blindfolded and bound hand and foot. They are forbidden movement and speech.
In WWII, Germany’s most fanatical SS troops were merely led in columns by scarce Allied soldiers, yet even a Palestinian child is treated like Hannibal Lecter. This is humiliation. This is often painful torture. This is dehumanisation that makes human victims into mere objects, and often obstacles, to those who have power over them. Yet the most important function of this ritual is to reify in Israeli minds the animalistic violence that they choose to see in Palestinians. The ritual sends a message that each Palestinian is like a lethal poisonous animal and could at any time choose to explode in an action-movie frenzy of homicidal/suicidal rage.
The weapons used to kill, maim, incapacitate and poison Palestinians; the technology used to monitor and control Palestinians; and the self-fulfilling racially-informed “science” that defines Palestinians are all developed in a dynamic discourse with other jurisdictions and with other target populations. We know that whatever we allow to happen to Palestinians will come to us in time.
Like the rules of the Jim Crow era in the former slave states of the USA, the rules of hafrada are the formal tip of an iceberg of wider ideology of violent racial supremacy. Among those in uniform the fanatical, the callous and the overly obedient can be equally deadly. Inevitably the disparity in power creates opportunities of impunity for rapists, sadists, and murderers. Palestinians have no meaningful protection from Israelis in uniform.
Out of uniform, civilians exercise nearly as much control enjoying nearly as much impunity as their official compatriots. The selfish and greedy take property, including people’s land and personal homes, with sanction and protection from the state of Israel. In this they act outside of their recognised territory and in ways that blatantly violate its own laws and constitution, with the two wrongs somehow combined into a grotesque legalistic parody of a right.
Settler fanatics inflict cruel harm for reasons beyond material gain. Out of hatred and fervour for the cause of a Greater Israel, they attack people, vanadalise homes, burn trees, kill or steal livestock, cut water lines and even poison wells. Israeli soldiers provide protection for them even when they are committing blatantly criminal and morally indefensible acts.
The complexity and diversity of the oppression of Palestinians cannot be summarised here. The historical nature of the Palestinian genocide is such that it has always sought to cloak itself by denying the existence of Palestinians as a people and by the outright erasure of important historical events such as massacres. As the lies of Zionist historiography were exposed, and as the Palestinian people fought successfully to show the world that they existed as such, the cloaking of the genocide shifted to the pretence of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.
After the First Intifada the genocide began to hide itself increasingly through a proliferation of trivialities. This is an expected part of genocide, which Lemkin first defined as encompassing everything from censoring poetry to the “organized murder” of millions of Jews. In genocide “different actions” are used to a single end. The slow and longstanding nature of the Palestinian genocide, and the requirements of Israeli hasbara (propaganda) dictate that its intensification came first came in the form of petty injustices creeping into every aspect of life, making simple existence a painful struggle.
Stolen land and homes, destroyed infrastructure, and demolished houses are made irreplaceable by Israeli authorities. Life is deliberately calculated to be intolerable and it has become clear that Israel is using this banal torment as a way of coercing young Palestinians into migrating away.
As the genocide intensifies the violence exceeds the bounds of pogrom and becomes a periodic Holocaust. There is no longer a credible pretence that the pauses between the massacres are opportunities to work towards a peaceful solution. That scam is played out. The era of plausible denial of genocidal intent is gone and we are in an era of implausible denial. Vanishingly few ordinary people believe Israel’s lies about its peaceful aims, but the international leaders need to pretend to believe the lies. (When the tide turns and reality finally pops the bubble of hallucinogens that enwraps the Western world, they will wring their hands and proclaim “nobody could have known”.)
As the genocide becomes ever harder to deny, the anti-Palestinians in all parts of the world have decided they will not concede a millimetre. They have doubled-down on embracing brutal and murderous bullying while becoming ever more histrionic about antisemitism and Israeli victimhood. They have backed themselves into a corner. There is no reasoning with them. They can only be defeated and forced to accept peace.
It may seem hopeless to coerce the 16th most powerful military state on the planet when it has nuclear weapons and the apparently immutable support of the 1st and 6th most powerful military states, yet Israel lives by its international legitimacy. To survive it needs Western backing. We can, however, force Western governments to end their support of Israel’s genocide.
The legal and scholarly consensus has already been settled. The International Court of Justice may be subverted to rule against it, but the fact of the genocide is already established beyond reasonable doubt. At this stage the fight for formal recognition of the genocide has effectively become a litmus test of whether international law is real or merely a mask for the exercise of raw power.
The problem of the illegitimate exercise of power is nothing new. By nature, those with power do not respect the rule of law and are only constrained by the fear of arousing the power of the masses. International law has largely evaded democratic constraint and has been twisted into a system of imperial tyranny. This too is a spreading cancer.
If we do not win the fight to stop the Palestinian Genocide we will lose the most important battle in the fight against creeping global fascism. The US will continue to accelerate its claims to exercise universal jurisdiction beyond its borders, indicting and extraditing people who have never set foot in US territory. Moreover, given that Donald Trump has already claimed that he can ethnically cleanse Gaza under “the authority of the United States”, this means that the executive would not even be constrained by US law. Those countries too weak to resist will become zones of lawless power in the mould of the occupied Palestinian territories, or Iraq under occupation.
Meanwhile the fascist creep into domestic politics will be emboldened. Executive branches will increasingly rule through decree. Legislation will become codified tyranny by enacting “laws” that cannot be reconciled with justice. The police and judiciary will increase the level of colluding obeisance they make to plutocratic power expressed in ever more racist, sexist, classist, transphobic, and homophobic reaction.
The political conversation is the real battlefront that we need to fight on. Genocide apologists hide behind a mask of uncertainty that must be ripped away. The code of journalistic silence has to be broken and politicians must be made to show their hands, choose their side, and see who wants to vote for them once they admit that they support oppression and slaughter. Once the stampede starts, no moderate will want to be the last mainstream political hopeful to be cheerleading a genocide. The remaining fanatic anti-Palestinians will be left with their yapping constituents, revealed as the hateful fringe that they are.
In order to maintain a level of truthfulness we cannot allow the political conversation to be dragged back into the thickets of prevarication. The reality is stark and we cannot tolerate people finally acknowledging the simple morality of ending genocide only to then obfuscate the issue with manufactured complications about implementing the end of that genocide. We have to be sensitive to the human rights of Israelis, but we must accept that some people will pay a price. There is no reason, for example, that any settler who moved to occupied Palestinian territory as an adult should have any right to retain real estate or receive compensation. They are due only humane treatment and welfare provisions that are commensurate with their needs.
Along with many other facts in its favour, a one-state solution provides the clarity that will be needed to end the genocide and restore peace and justice. It is a simple matter of giving equal rights to all of the residents of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. Everyone equal. It may not be easy to achieve, but it is simple to understand and it is simple to demand. There is no other choice.
The rights of current citizens of Israel must be respected, but the resources of the state must be turned away from war and oppression and harnessed to act in recompense for everything that has been taken from Palestinians.
The new democratic state should not be expected to stand alone. The UK and the US owe a massive debt for all they have wrought and they can afford to pay in money and in construction. Those states who voted to partition Palestine also owe a special debt, but all UN member states owe something (if only for allowing Israel to exercise the rights of UN membership when it never even attempted to fulfil the conditions under which it was admitted by complying with UNGA Resolution 194). A revitalised and relegitimised UN can take on the project of building a new Palestine.
Respect should be paid to religious and cultural Jews, to the Hebrew language, and to the name Israel. The new Palestine will be a land that celebrates indigeneity and immigrant culture as complementary. Palestine will be both a bicultural land with intrinsic “Palestinian” and “Israeli” characteristics, and a multicultural land that has always been a fabric woven of many changing threads.
I am not being idealistic. These seeming ideals are just a framework, and within that framework there may be many injustices. Without this framework, however, there will only be endless strife and suffering. Without this both peoples face a future that is bleak. Israel has already become a pariah in much of the world. It cannot resolve its problems with the methods it is currently pursuing. All it can do is fall off the cliff of madness that it teeters on. If Israel’s thought leaders had real freedom of thought they would know this. The world will never forget the Gaza Holocaust, and they will never forgive the next such slaughter. Once Israel becomes too much of a liability the US will no longer protect it or its people. The time to move towards real peace is now.
I have watched events descend into worse and worse violence and destruction. Each time I think this can’t go on; this is too much; the world will not stand for this any longer. And then it just goes on. Most Westerners don’t even get to see the horrors that we see in our social media. The genocide must inevitably end, but if we don’t end it – if we don’t wake the world’s outrage – then the alarm that finally wakes the world will be body count so big that even the Western media and Western politicians cannot ignore the stench of the mass graves. How many people have to die before the world accepts the inevitable?
At each point of new unprecedented horror the anti-Palestinians, in Israel and beyond, have shown that there is no limit to their genocidal thinking. It should be clear now to everyone that there is no crime too ghastly for them to justify, there is no line that can not be crossed. It should also be clear that Israel will only increase its violence over time. Without Palestinian liberation another holocaust is inevitable. It is the global public that must decide that this cannot continue. The people of the West in particular must have a culture change towards democracy and accountability.
We must internalise this struggle, then externalise it.
[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.
Al-Haq, the oldest and most established Palestinian human rights organisation, released an important report about genocide in Gaza, but it should not be important at all. Everyone should already understand that genocide is an established fact. Al Haq should not feel any need to further state that obvious fact. The report should be a matter of academic interest, detailing a grotesque aspect of the deadly campaign in Gaza. There should be no official or scholarly doubt over the gravity, lethality, unjustifiability, and criminality of Israel’s acts in Gaza; and above all there should be no denying their intrinsically genocidal nature. Instead there is yet another powerful and heartrending report trying to break through the wall of equivocation that our media, politicians, scholars and civil society create. (By “equivocation” I mean the practice of portraying the most unambiguous issue of our time as being a quagmire of uncertainty and controversy.)
Al-Haq’s report details a practice of displacement and concentration. It is important to note here that 20th century history revealed the crucial and baleful role that population concentration plays in oppression and mass violence. This was recognised by theorists like Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, but also by Raphäel Lemkin. Lemkin invented the term “genocide” and later explicitly linked the idea to “concentration camps”, but he did not mean the term in the rigid sense of institutions that were explicitly labelled as such by the states that created them. He wrote, for example, of “concentration camps” used in the genocide against Plains Indians in 19th century USA. The name itself is not important, it is the concentration of a population in areas without the normal collective autonomy and social functions that is important, whether they be named “camps”, “reservations”, “ghettos”, “strategic hamlets”, or “safe zones”.
These concentration zones are always extreme and intense sites of structural violence. Normal structural violence is described by Dr Paul Farmer as “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way…. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people….” In concentration zones structural violence is intensified by the destruction of normal social arrangements that allow for mutual aid and collective self-defence. Victims in concentration zones are stripped naked of all but the most primitive protection and reduced to a status akin to that of livestock unable to resist being herded or separated or ultimately culled.
All structural violence is created and maintained through acts and threats of physical violence, but in a concentration zone these acts are far more frequent and they are by nature omnipresent. It could be towers, wires and guards; or it could be drones, airstrikes, snipers, and threatening texts. The people within the zone cannot escape the heavy weight of potential death that is laid upon them. With or without barbed-wire the result is an entire population confined to a place where ordinary life is abolished. Mimicking the situation of displacement camps, concentration zones make the temporary vulnerability and loss of autonomy of refugees into a permanent twilight of contingent life. Left to their own devices people in refugee camps will reconstitute a way of living (however immiserated) but these concentration zones are kept in hellish condition of dysfunction. Concentration zones are a product and producer of dehumanisation, making extermination ever more thinkable, ever more practical, and ever more proximate.
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prohibits both “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Clearly these are outcomes intrinsic to the creation of concentration zones. By nature such acts of concentration are genocidal on the surface, but can it be merely an allowable expedient of war? In short, no. It can never be justified as “unintentional” (though you would think otherwise from the way our legal, political, journalistic, and scholarly institutions have repeatedly and reliably whitewashed Western genocides). As I will explain, the logic of concentrating a given racial, ethnic, national or religious group as such en masse (i.e. on the basis of their belonging to the group) is genocidal and justifications of military necessity do not and can not withstand scrutiny.
Mao Zedong said that “The guerilla must move among the people as a fish moves in the sea”. He was only saying what imperialist counterinsurgency leaders have believed for a long time. The first acknowledged “concentration camps” were those arising from the Spanish “reconcentration” programme. The stated aim could validly be put in terms of drying the sea in which the guerillas swam. Equally validly, though, it can be seen as an aggression against the people themselves, an expression of animus from a hostile military overlord.i Needless to say these first concentration camps imposed cruel imprisonment conditions that led to mass deaths from starvation and disease. Soon afterwards the British replicated the process, the counterinsurgency rationale, the unspoken animus, and the cruelty, deprivation and mass death. The Germans used concentration camps in both its West African and East African colonies with the same horrific outcomes with the added atrocity that celebrated Nobel Laureate Robert Koch murdered thousands in medical experiments.
Ignoring the peculiar (but also illuminatingii) example of concentration camps in the German Third Reich, there is a clear pattern established here. These early examples alone serve to elucidate the current case in Gaza. Clearly concentration practices cause harms constitutive of genocide as outlined above. Intent is baked into the practice because the harms are intrinsic and it is not possible to undertake coordinated actions such as building camps, violently forcing unwilling masses into those camps, and manning those camps without clear intent. If the concentrated group is a protected categoryiii (assuming this is not merely a short-term displacement), then the acts are therefore genocidal. The Al Haq report details many ways in which, without actually constructing a camp in the “safe zone”, Israel has taken equivalent and even more elaborate measures to concentrate the people into an area where normal life is abolished in every practicable way.
The claim throughout history is always one of military necessity, but it must be made very clear that the existence of a military rationale does not preclude genocidal intent. Quite apart from the fact that these practices have a long history of being militarily counterproductive, even if there were military benefits the genocidal nature is undeniable. The intent is to take actions that cause harm to the protected group, therefore the harm is intentional. The analogy sometimes used is that if I shoot someone dead in the street I cannot then claim that I did not have intent to murder because I didn’t specifically want them dead (e.g. I wanted their sneakers and the expedient I chose was to shoot them in order to facilitate the acquisition). If the act is wilful then motive is immaterial to the criminal intent of the act. If proscribed harms are being done to a protected group in order to achieve a counterinsurgency goal the acts are still genocidal even if the military goal is furthered by those acts. It is actually worth taking a second to think about the moral bankruptcy of those people who suggest that it is okay to commit these acts and they are not genocidal by reason of having a military motive.
Concentration is inherently genocidal and I think there is an illuminating parallel here with the use of economic sanctions that target entire populations. Like many genocidal practices, such sanctions are normalised to the point where anyone suggesting that they constitute the crime of genocide has traditionally been treated like a lunatic, but the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s changed that to some extent. In reaction the US and its minions such as the UK have of late been very careful to stress the “targeted” nature of contemporary sanctions. In the past, however, it was openly stated that “pain” was to be inflicted on national populations in order to induce them to act against their governments. This “pain” translates to serious suffering, premature deaths and sometimes mass deaths amongst individuals who suffer this purely because of their membership of the national group. Only a despicable racist would think it acceptable that the US government and its Western cronies could inflict such suffering for their own ends. And only a despicable racist would lend any credence to the galling arrogant claims made in these circumstances that the suffering is inflicted in the best interests of the victim group. This sham of benevolent intent towards the victims is a ghoulish habit seen often in genocides, where even the desire to exterminate may be couched in terms of humane euthanasia.
The Al-Haq report contains many chilling and sickening details of the humanitarian pretences adopted by Israel during repeated acts of forcible displacement. The report links these to ongoing genocidal acts, but for me the fact of continued concentration is in and of itself a clear indication of genocide. It almost becomes a problem that there are too many ways in which Israel’s action in Gaza have been clearly genocidal since October 2023. The Gaza Holocaust should be understood in similar terms to that of the Nazi Holocaust. Even though the scale is much less, they are both overdetermined as genocides. Genocide is manifold by nature, but current actions far exceed the norms of genocide. It must be understood that there is no “Gaza Genocide”, there is a Holocaust arising from an ongoing Palestinian Genocide.
The Palestinian Genocide itself has happening for 76 years at a minimum. It is easy to infer the existence of genocide from the circumstances which make the Palestinians enemies of Israel by dint of their mere existence. If Israel wanted to end the genocide it would have to seek a political solution that returned sovereign autonomy to all Palestinians and settled legitimate grievances. That would mean complying with, among other things, the part of UNGA resolution 194 which reads “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” The only way that would leave a “Jewish State” would be with massive compromise and expense. (Massive, that is, except by comparison to the endless billions that have been poured into the genocide by Israel’s international sponsors who clearly do not want an end to the genocide. The US and UK seek to dominate the Middle East by using Israel to permanently destabilise the region and have done since the Balfour Declaration).
Without according rights owed to all Palestinians, actions taken by Israel to control Palestinians in 1948 borders (recognised Israeli territory), 1967 (occupied territories), or diaspora settings (such as Lebanon) are unavoidably inclined to be genocidal. Legally Palestinians have considerable leeway to take action in self-defence and against occupation. This includes armed attacks against Israeli forces even in recognised Israeli territory. By nature Israel’s responses are certain to cause serious harm to Palestinians as such because ultimately it is the continued existence of Palestinians as such that is the source of the problem for Israel. Zionist leaders have always claimed that Palestinians have a choice to act a certain way that would end Israeli violence, but that was never the case and the growth of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory in the last 20 years makes even the pretence a transparent mockery. Apart from leaving their homeland, there is nothing conceivable that Palestinians can do to end Israeli violence against them, so the violence of the occupation itself is intrinsically and inescapably genocidal.
Concentration such as we have seen in Gaza is an act of genocide, one of numerous instances. Of late there have been some who say that “genocidal acts” may somehow exist as a technical truth that does not justify saying that “a genocide” is occurring. I cannot think of a more evil twisting of thought. The basis of this perversion is that the victims cannot possibly be considered worthy of being labelled victims of “a genocide”, so if the law literally enumerates multiple ways that they are victims of genocidal acts, it all must in some manner be a less meaningful, less condemnable thing – something (not coincidentally) that our leaders do not feel obliged to act forcefully to stop.
The Gaza Holocaust is an extreme and overdetermined instance of genocidal acts occurring in the circumstance of a long extant and historical genocide. Concentration in the “safe zone” is just one of the many acts in this Holocaust that we should recognise immediately as being genocidal. Al Haq’s report almost seems redundant, yet we need to break through. We need to support those who write such unambiguous works and do not undermine them with qualifications, equivocations or false equivalences. Sadly this is not just about our ongoing unsuccessful attempts to end the slaughter in Gaza. When a ceasefire comes that will not end the suffering and death. We must realise that we are also fighting for the lives of the survivors and to prevent future victims of the next onslaught in Gaza, or in the West Bank, or in southern Lebanon, or ultimately perhaps anywhere in the world.
Notes:
i I want to be very clear that animus is not a requisite of genocidal intent. You do not need to harbour a personal hatred of a group to commit genocide against that group. Hitler himself would affect a dispassionate view of the “Jewish race” in order to fit genocide into the faux-ethics of social Darwinism. Notwithstanding this there is a very important misunderstood role for animus in genocide. Genocide is generally a product of militarism. In all empires, in times of armed conflict, and in times where an internal enemy is portrayed as a military threat (circumstances which cover the vast majority of genocides) decision-making often devolves to racist, chauvinistic, or otherwise hateful military leaders. Even under norms of civil control once the military is involved in state action it is military leaders that make decisions over whether people live or die. They decide what is militarily expedient even if there is civil control over strategy and those tactical practices may be the most deadly part of a genocide. We have been widely remiss in our failure to incorporate into analyses the psychological tendencies of military commanders who, (by selection and through the reinforcement of culture) are aggressive, domineering, authoritarian, and ideologically chauvinistic regarding nation, branch, regiment etc. (I would be very surprised if there were not also a bias towards racial, religious, ethnic, political and cultural chauvinism that is significantly more pronounced than among the general population).
The importance of military decision-making is that it feeds into a dynamic that inclines towards genocide. Even if we ignore, for the moment, considerations of genocide there are other serious matters of illegality and immorality. Tactics of concentration or other military responses that either displace risk onto non-combatants (e.g. use of human shields or disproportionate use of firepower as under the US “force protection” doctrine) or inflict collective punishment, are all morally and legally invalid. The only legal and moral way to deal with an insurgency (assuming it enjoys some level of popular political support) is a political and policing approach. This does not necessarily preclude the involvement of military personnel, but history has shown repeatedly that the normal military response to insurgency is to treat the associated civilian population as the enemy.
The dynamic that needs to be understood very clearly is that treating civilians as hostile is predictably and inevitably counterproductive in counterinsurgency (Malayan Emergency notwithstanding) and blended political/military approaches (such as the US employs) tend only to produce an illegitimate and hated collaborator class. On the other hand the typical military approach to counterinsurgency is very functional in committing genocide. Thus, when such things stretch on for years and even decades the genocidal intentionality is writ large.
ii It is fascinating that the Nazi regime instituted a prison camp system for those considered political and social enemies of the Reich and from the first (Dachau) referred to these camps as “concentration camps”. It is one of many facts demonstrating that Nazi ideology was overtly based on prior imperial practices, but adapted for a greater totality. In the long run the concentration camp system would actually function in much the same manner as its imperial forebears (though admittedly at a larger scale and within an extensive complex of ghettos, labour camps, death camps, POW camps and death squads). The Nazi innovation of rounding up the internal enemy in concentration camps wasn’t entirely unprecedented (e.g. the Tsarist and Soviet use of penal colonies for political dissidents, or equally the British and French use of penal colonies for political crimes and class repression), but the clear identification with the imperialist practice was new. Equally this innovation did not die with the Third Reich. During the Cold War US client states would also use camps for internal enemies, especially immediately after right-wing coups, and authoritarian socialist regimes (especially China) have used comparable camps in different forms and times.
The Nazi concept of the Konzentrationslager was that of a zone of lawlessness and naked power. They saw the innately genocidal aspects of concentration camps (whose harms stem like night follows day from the radical disempowerment of individual and society) and decided to harness that mode of oppression for wider purposes. A lesson that must not be ignored is that this mode immediately began expanding and permeating society.
iii In contrast political groups are not under the supposed “protection” of the genocide convention. Politicide, however, is not a lesser evil. The evil of these practices is in how much suffering they cause. The crucial thing to bear in mind is that neither is ever never morally justifiable. To inflict harm on someone because of their intrinsic group identity or because of the political beliefs they hold is always wrong and condemnable. You might want to think of that next time you come across people justifying lethal action because the person was a “communist” or “Hamas” or even “terrorist” without some realistic indication that they were an actual combatant.
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
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 5th 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.
On Genocide 