Yesterday was Nakba Day. The 15th of May 1948 was the day after the proclaimed birth of the state of Israel, but this was not when the Nakba started. To say something about the Nakba I am going to talk about the massacre at Deir Yassin which took place more than a month earlier. Many of you have heard of the Deir Yassin massacre, though it was not the greatest massacre of the Nakba nor more brutal than some others. It may be famous for the wrong reasons. It was, however, a key moment in the long genocide against Palestinians and in the blood-drenched establishment of the IDF.
The Nakba made refugees of over 600,000 Palestinians. Almost all fled on foot guarded by armed Zionists who would sometimes kill the refugees for sport. One Palmach soldier said it was because watching people walk was boring.
Most Israelis even to this day will try to tell you Palestinians only fled their homes because they were told to do so by the Arab states who went to war against Israel.
Do we believe them?
I couldn’t hear that. Do we believe them?
No, we don’t believe them, because as the great comedian Alexei Sayle tells us “They lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie!”
In reality, by this time 78 years ago 200,000 Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed. They did not leave their lives behind and flee for trivial reasons, they fled because of violence. This was not merely the fear of being caught in the crossfire of war, they fled because the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah forces were using violence against the civilian population to drive them out. They slaughtered civilian men women and children so as to ensure that others would know to expect no mercy. The first such massacre of this period began on December 31st in 1947. Haganah forces went in the dead of night into the residences of the town of Balad al Sheikh with orders to quote “kill maximum adult males”.
In another overnight operation Haganah forces went into the village of Sa’sa’. Their order read: “You have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many warriors as possible”, but according to Ilan Pappé, “warriors” should be read as “villagers” to properly understand the order.
The Haganah claimed that the village was a haven for Palestinian fighters?
Do we believe them?
I still can’t hear you. Do we believe them?
No, we do not believe them because they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie!
The Haganah forces met with absolutely no return fire as they killed people. Their were no fighters there, only murderers.
Then there was the Deir Yassin massacre carried out primarily by Irgun and Lehi, though Haganah were crucial as I will detail shortly. Deir Yassin was uninvolved in fighting and had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah who were based in nearby Jerusalem.
A report to the UN on the violence stated that “the killing of some 250… men, women and children, took place in circumstances of great savagery.
“Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities. Those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality.”
25 men and boys were paraded through a Jewish neighbourhood of Jerusalem before being taking to a quarry and mowed down with sub-machine guns.
Recently the number killed has been disputed, but the nature of the acts is not. In either case this was not the most prolific massacre of the Nakba. Historian Thomas Suarez suggests that it is more famous because it was carried out by right-wing militias which makes it easier for liberal Zionists to digest. In addition it is probably famous because the Haganah themselves spread the story of the horrors. It was their showcase massacre and they made sure that people knew the details. Young fanatics some of them still adolescents threw grenades into dwellings then shoot everyone with automatic weapons before finishing any survivors with knives and sabres.
But Deir Yassin may be famous for the wrong reason. This horrific bloodletting was also the true birthplace of the IDF. This was a systematic, documented and undeniable act of genocide – a co-ordinated calculated mass killing that showed a clear intent to visit destruction upon the Palestinian people as such. This is the real origin of the IDF.
Now, some of you may not know of the organisations I have mentioned, Irgun, Lehi and Haganah (which had an army of 5000 regular commandos called Palmach). These are the 3 forces that were combined on May 26 1948 to create the IDF. According to most Israeli and most Western historians Haganah were the moderates when compared with the openly terroristic Irgun and fascistic Lehi.
That is what they say of the Haganah, but do we believe them?
Well, do we believe them?
No, we do not believe them because they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie!
The Haganah was effectively the military arm of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and both were led by David ben Gurion. We know from their actions and from private documents that they always sought to establish a single ethnically-cleansed Jewish state, taking all of Palestine by means of violence, but they postured by condemning the fascism of revisionists like Ze’ev Jabotinski who openly talked about these things.
The Haganah, as we have seen, were responsible for many massacres. And even though it was Irgun who carried out the most notorious bombing of the mandate period when they killed 91 people in the King David Hotel in 1946, it was the Haganah that had carried out the more deadly bombing of the ship Patria in 1940, where 267 Jewish refugees from Europe were killed because Haganah’s leaders preferred to see them dead than see them sent away from Palestine. And even though it was Lehi that openly fought to ally with the Nazis, it was the Haganah that actually reached out to the Third Reich and even smuggled Adolph Eichmann into Palestine disguised as a journalist in order to negotiate an agreement with the Nazi regime. And furthermore it was the Haganah who were the ultimate force behind the Deir Yassin massacre.
By the time of Deir Yassin the strategy of ethnic cleansing had been formalised. After different approaches had been entertained it was decided to implement Plan D (or Plan Dalet after the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet) on March 10 1948. They claimed that Plan D was meant to protect Jewish civilians by temporarily removing nearby Palestinian populations that might Palestinian resistance fighters.
Do we believe them?
No, we do not believe them because (all together now) they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie!
Plan Dalet was a plan of ethnic cleansing – a plan of genocide. They cleansed whole cities like Haifa whose non-Jewish population was reduced from 65,000 to 4000. 400 to 600 Palestinian villages were razed. It is very clear that from the beginning the intent was to permanently erase the people from the land and after hostilities ended the Israelis took every measure to make sure that Palestinians could not reclaim their land and property. Those who left but despite the dangers returned were still legally designated “absentees” by Israel, denied citizenship, denied their homes, their land, their businesses. The state of Israel was built on this stolen property. Jewish settlers owned little of the land and far less of the commercial infrastructure. They needed terror and murder to grab these things.
The Haganah wanted to keep their own hands clean so they brought Irgun and Lehi in to massacre the peaceful residents of Deir Yassin, not despite the non-aggression agreement they had with the village but because of it. Then as now, the peace and coexistence they claim to want would not give them the ethnostate they desired. It is not the actions of Palestinians that threatens them it is and always was their existence – the existence that they now refer to as a demographic threat.
So the Haganah brought these others in to do the dirty work. It was the first joint operation of the three militias. It was the first action of what was to become the IDF.
The IDF would murder and rape and torture throughout the rest of the Nakba in places like Tantura, al-Dawayima, and Abu Shusha. They used biological warfare on civilians in what was called Operation Cast Thy Bread. They deliberately spread typhoid and dysentry with notable success in the city of Acre.
The IDF was born out of this genocidal slaughter and they still claim to be the “most moral army in the world”.
You aren’t going to tell me you believe them are you?
No, you do not believe them because they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie!
Thanks to the IDF the desert bloomed with death, grief, loss and dispossession. They made a stateless population greater in number then their entire citizenry. Both inside and outside of Mandate Palestine their victims would face lives of oppression, discrimination, poverty, vulnerability and frequent violence. As we all know, they still do 78 years later. The Nakba will not be over until all of those who suffer this exile are able to return. The Nakba is still with us and it will be with us until Palestine is a free state with rights for all of its people. It is time for all Palestinians to be able to go home.
I want to talk today about the growth of fascism and the death of humanity in Israeli society.
With the passage this week of a draconian death penalty law that is effectively designed only to applied to Palestinians, more people around the world than ever are noticing that Israelis are in a very dark place. The scenes from the Knesset following the vote were not of solemnity, nor determination, nor regret. We saw instead scenes of glee, scenes of great pleasure at the prospect of the horrific form of violence. We saw unabashed, unhidden, unafraid displays of joyous sadism. Many of us here will know that this is not new. Shocking words and acts of racial hate have been increasingly easy to find among Israelis in recent decades.
In 2015 a settler called Amiram Ben-Uliel murdered 3 members of the Dawabsheh family. 18 month-old Ali Dawabsheh burned to death, an innocent dying in intense agony and helpless terror. His parents lived for some weeks before each in turn died of the burns they had received. Hussein Dawabsheh, Ali’s grandfather, was taunted by Jewish settlers outside the court proceedings. They chanted in Arabic “Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill”
A settler called Limor Son Har-Melech called the murderer a “saint”. She was also a co-sponsor of this death penalty bill. She has openly said that Palestinians must be executed if they kill Jews but Jews should only be imprisoned for killing Palestinians. When 8 soldiers were indicted for raping a prisoner she said that those who prosecuted Israeli personnel for such acts would themselves be “charged and prosecuted as the lowest of traitors.” In the knesset she angrily berated a doctor for saying that a 4 year-old Palestinian should have pain killers when their arm is amputated. On another occasion, 18 months into the holocaust waged on Gaza, she was angered by mention of starving children, calling it “horrific” to address the issue when Israeli children were killed on October the 7th. There is also a video of Son Har-Melech from 2005 encouraging her then 2-year-old son as he vowed to “kill the Arabs”.
A settler called Itamar Ben Gvir was in court the day his fellow settlers taunted a grieving man of over the cruel murder of his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Ben Gvir was the defence lawyer for the murderer, whom he still openly supports. Ben Gvir at that time had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. Goldstein committed a brutal mass-murder in 1994, killing 29 Muslim Palestinians who were praying during Ramadan, before himself being beaten to death by survivors. His grave is treated by Jewish fascists as a shrine. Ben Gvir is reported to have taken his wife to the graveside on their first date.
People may have seen Itamar Ben Gvir recently pouring champagne to celebrate the passage of the death penalty act. He is Israel’s current minister for National Security. He loves to yell at and bully those he calls “terrorists”. He visited prisoners taken from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters. He taunted and yelled at these people who had been abducted on the high seas and held illegally, calling them “terrorists” but he himself has criminal convictions for inciting racial hatred and supporting a terrorist organisation.
A settler called Bezalel Smotrich is Ben Gvir’s close political ally. He is the current Minister of Finance, and Minister of Transport, and he is a Junior Minister of Defence. He is the main perpetrator in the ongoing ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank which is a flagrant violation of international law and innumerable resolutions by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly. He has what he calls a “decisive plan” of flooding the West Bank with settlers. As a journalist wrote “When this happens, the Palestinians are supposed to understand that they have no chance to get a state of their own, and they would have to choose between one of the three options – a life of subjugation under Israeli rule, emigration, or death.” He also supports the genocidal cleansing of Gaza saying in 2024: “There are no half measures … [only] total annihiliation. ‘Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’ There is no place for them under heaven.”
Smotrich is another vocal supporter of Ali Dawabsheh’s murderer. He refused to call the attack terrorism which he claims can “only be violence carried out by an enemy within the framework of war against us”. He supports a shoot to kill policy for Palestinian stone throwers. When 17 year-old Ahed Tamimi was arrested he tweeted that she “should have gotten a bullet, at least in the kneecap”.
I could also mention Smotrich’s violent and obscene homophobia, or the time Ben Gvir told Beduoins “we will mow you down. We are the landlord here!” I could list evidence of their fascist nature all day, but I will spare you that.
Smotrich and Ben Gvir combined their two parties into one for election purposes so that neither party risked falling below the threshold in their proportional system. This was an idea suggested by Benjamin Netanyahu. Together the parties polled 10%, yet these two junior coalition partners seem at times to almost run the country. It is almost as if the main ruling party and its leader uses their open extremism as a cover and a source of deniability for his own extremism. Not that we could ever relate to that in our own country, right?
Settlers like Limor Son Har-Melech, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir provide this cover for all Israelis. They want to pretend that this is not who they are, but it is. There is a German saying from WWII: “If a Nazi is sitting at the table, and ten others are sitting there chatting with him, you have eleven Nazis at the table.” It is not just the 10% who voted for these extremist parties who support their extremism, it is those who voted for Likud which has openly supported them and for the other parties that are willing to work with them. Their settler extremism is actively supported by every Israeli that is not opposed to the settlements in the occupied territories and every Israeli who believes Palestinian resistance is a form of terrorism. Almost every adult Israeli is at that table, the table that means they are the Nazis.
Jewish Zionists inside and outside of Israel will be very offended to be called Nazis, but my answer to them is that if they are so hurt by being called Nazis then they should stop being Nazis. It is not as if I invented the idea that Zionists are Nazis, David Ben Gurion himself called the revisionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler”. A little over a decade later, though, Ben Gurion spearheaded the Nakba, doing everything that he had once called Jabotinski a fascist for advocating. Nothing illustrates better than this that the table of Nazis is Zionism itself.
This new law shows the world that behind the racialised and Islamophobic excuses about self-defence, Israel is a society in the grip of racial hatred and now is the time that we must hammer that home to the public so that they ask more of their politicians and more of the media too.
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.
On Genocide 