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.
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.
In this episode I build on and take a different approach to things that I have written and spoke about in the past. Our vision of Nazis as the ultimate expression of political evil is not wrong in that Nazism is morally unsupportable, but exceptionalist views of Nazism blind us to dangers of Nazism returning. Obviously as a particular movement of a particular time it is unlikely (though unfortunately not impossible) that an overt self-identified “National Socialist” movement will become the ruling party in any contemporary state. That being understood, it is clear that all of the important and dangerous aspects that went into making Nazism what it was are on the rise in world politics, particularly the US and Europe.
Soon after Trump’s 2016 election I wrote of the “straw Nazis”, the street thugs, whose alarming presence was useful but ultimately expendable (https://ongenocide.com/2016/12/15/trumps-straw-nazis-a-horror-story/). I won’t say I was brilliant to predict that things would become more fascistic under Trump – anyone could see that. Looking back though I wrote a segment on how fascism would also have deepened had Clinton won with a less street-thuggish and more war-crimesy tone. I think Biden’s term in office bore out that point.
The truth is that Nazism was significant, but the individual Nazis weren’t any different than the other shitty people around the world. As Nazi ideas take hold more and more people become Nazis until it is just you random run-of-the-mill hairdresser or barista. It isn’t even about what these people believe either, it is about what they consent to be part of.
As long as we keep looking for straw Nazis we will be looking the wrong way when the actual Nazis take over.
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.
“In the Greek myth, Sisyphus, a mortal, is condemned by the gods to endlessly roll a rock up a mountain, only to have it fall back down again. Each time the rock rolls down the mountain, he pushes it up, and in the most optimistic telling of the story, he hopes that it will be the final time. This is his punishment for defying the gods and for imagining his life, his fate, equal to their own.”
In 2011 Edwidge Danticat made a comparison between Haiti and Sisyphus and my immediate reaction was to wonder if Prometheus was a better analogy. Both men were punished by the gods for daring to challenge their low station as mortals, but it was Prometheus who suffered the greater agony of daily torture. It seems to me that Haiti suffers a similar excruciation and torture that never ends. Their crime was to throw off the shackles of slavery rather than allowing their masters exploit them for another half century before generously freeing them to live in a country where everything, including all necessities of survival, would be owned by their former masters (the racist violent former masters who view them as subhuman animals).
Haiti’s punishment began with France returning, decades after Haiti broke free, to demand that they pay for the privilege of being independent or face military action. It took 122 years to pay the debt, which kept Haiti in chains of underdevelopment and is estimated to have cost a total of $US115 billion in lost wealth due to the compounding effects of underinvestment. That is over $US21,000 per adult in a country that has the lowest median wealth in the world ($US207 per adult). This impoverishment, though, is never enough. Every time the people of Haiti try to raise themselves the US (with the collusion of France and Canada) has been there to drag them down, sometimes through direct military intervention. The US occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, then supported the brutal regime of the Duvaliers, and helped oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the subsequent suppression of Fanmi Lavalas, the only popular political faction with a potential to govern democratically to exist in decades. While US clients enforce neoliberal piracy and police brutality, they have sham elections with pitiful turnouts so they can call themselves leaders. The instability has lead to gang warlordism. While wealth is shipped offshore, and US companies profiteer by lining their pockets with aid money, the people suffer violence, poverty and disease. In 2009 the US intervened to try to keep the Haitian government from implementing a rise in the minimum wage which was 22 US cents an hour. In 2010 a US contractor dumped raw sewerage from a UN peacekeeper base causing a cholera outbreak that killed about 9000 people and has yet to be eradicated.
Once the imperial mechanisms of oppression and greed are unleashed they are tireless and merciless. There is no room for peace and justice, nor room for simple honesty. The abusers paint themselves as saviours and camouflage their brigandage as “aid”. Those Westerners who do seek to act from fairness are overwhelmed by the greedy, the racist, the fanatical, and the paranoiac. Many Western officials, oligarchs and functionaries embody all of these traits. They loathe, they covet, they despise and they fear the possibility that their victims might one day develop strength. Unions, socialism, nationalisation, independent foreign policy, control of natural resources are all anathema. As circumstances change they alter the methodology of oppression. This creates phases, and what is happening in Palestine with a ceasefire can be seen as a phase-change in an ongoing genocide.
The nature and dimensions of this next phase can best be understood through an examination of the evolution of Balkanisation, neocolonialism and structural violence in the 20th century. To really understand what happens, though, it is necessary to leave aside any notions that legal concerns or humane sentiments play a role in these actions. This is a cycle of repeated and relentless violence premised on abstract notions of weakening and controlling nations as. Very few civilian or military personnel ever lose faith because they become aware of the human cost; in fact it is far more likely that people will question the morality of causing mass death and misery if they begin to question underlying mythology of moral righteousness at the centre of their imperialist ideology. This is very alarming in light of the current chauvinistic exceptionalism in the West generally, in Israel, and in the USA most especially.
The ancient imperialist practice of divide-and-rule finds modern expression in practices such as partition, Bantustanisation, and sponsorship of separatism. The imperial and Great Power practice of fomenting and sponsoring ethnic separatism amongst enemy polities grew in the 20th century to include ideological, religious and sectarian forms of division which can be seen in US-backed colour revolutions and the sudden rise of the Islamic State. Currently the US empire has created a situation in which countries must either be “open” societies into which it can pour money and corrupt the system through overt and covert means, or they must choose to be undemocratic thus giving a pretext to the US to impose sanctions and use other covert means of destabilisation and enfeeblement.
Division and destabilisation operations are used as a form of undeclared warfare, notably being used to precede US-backed coups. TP-AJAX, the plan to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran, was originally a British plan taken over by the US. They started by attacking the economy, causing instability and scarcity, but above all causing fear. They fomented discontent and paid people to demonstrate, often with violence and destruction. As with roughly contemporaneous actions in Viet Nam and Guatemala they created false-flag communist terror attacks so that right-wing puppets could switch between denouncing the reformist government as themselves being crypto-communists, or as being incapable of dealing with communist insurgency. In the victim country and in the beltway halls of power, a wave of paranoiac fabulism is unleashed by imperial agents that would make a Q-anon fanatic seem like a Chomskyan realist. The terrorists are under the beds, in the wall cavities, and ready to leap out of laundry hampers. This creates a sense of panic; a sense of both a need and a license to use violence; and a sense that those who do not side with you are siding with the enemy. Variations on this playbook have continued to this day in dozens of different interventions.
The next part of the sequence is the most overt period of violence and destruction. This is the sort of shock that Naomi Klein wrote about in The Shock Doctrine. Discord and instability are sown to effect regime change and then the true violence is unleashed. For example, the destabilisation leads to a coup as above or as in 1965 Indonesia, 1973 Chile or 1993 Russia. Then, once a new regime is in place, they generally unleash mass violence and dismantle social and economic institutions (possibly facilitating mass expropriation by US, and possibly collaborator, profiteers). This pattern is not confined to coups. Regime change, in this instance, means substantively changing the way a target country works generally. Libya in 2011, for example, experienced a structural analogue in that the first shock of destabilisation created a new “regime” by creating the pretext for the second shock in terms of the violent aerial campaign launched by NATO. Equally, consistent with Klein’s depiction of the shock doctrine, you can see the same one-two punch system in the 1980 US presidential election where a radically neoliberal regime change (that arguably took hold while Carter was still in office) led to sudden “privatisation” and structural violence.
The third part is the new normal, which is likely to be a state of extreme deprivation and may involve intractable armed conflict and political fragmentation. It entails more divide-and-rule among other things. If a puppet leader has been put in place it is highly desirable that they be politically weak – divided from their own people and reliant on US support to survive. Though the US called its Cold War puppets “nationalists” (in contradistinction to the “internationalists” of the left) this was a heavy irony. The leftist enemies of US imperialism tended to be nationalist by default. Moreover US clients who developed nationalist tendencies were anathema and had to be removed if they put their own country first. In Viet Nam in 1963 and 1964 alone the US caused the overthrow of three leaders it had previously chosen, each on the basis of doing things they thought best for their country rather than doing what they were told. Similar things happened in other countries with one such incident bringing Saddam Hussein to power.
During this period many people suffer greatly, but their suffering is rendered mute and, more importantly, the hand behind it is made invisible. It took many years of activism, including difficult investigative journalism, to alert people of the mass deaths being inflicted on the people of Iraq by the US and UK. Desert Storm, the 1991 bombing campaign against Iraq, inflicted the sort of shock and degradation that created the vulnerability for later quieter forms of genocidal mass-murder. The following is an excerpt from my own previously published work:
“Desert Storm…, was as genocidal as previous bombing campaigns, the use of laser-guided weaponry and the incessant propaganda about accuracy serving only, in a sober analysis, to underscore the intentionality of the crime. The targeting of civilian infrastructure which had absolutely no bearing on the uneven military contest was the norm. For example, a baby milk factory was targeted and destroyed while the Pentagon blithely lied and said it was involved in making biological weapons. Ramsey Clark wrote afterwards that there were:
One hundred ten thousand aerial sorties in forty-two days by the United States alone. That’s one every 30 seconds. In an admission against interest, the Pentagon says U.S. aircraft alone dropped the equivalent of 7.5 Hiroshimas – 88,500 tons of explosives.
They say about 7% were directed…. They were intended specifically to destroy the life-support system of the whole country. … This is an assault you can’t resist. … The United States lost fewer aircraft in 110,000 aerial sorties than it lost in war games for NATO where no live ammunition was used. … There is not a reservoir, a pumping station, the filtration plant that wasn’t deliberately destroyed by U.S. bombing to deprive the people of water.
We knocked out the power. It doesn’t sound like a big deal. … But it meant, among other things, that 90 percent of the poultry was lost in a matter of days…. They lost over a third of all their livestock…. Another third was driven out of the country to save them. Because you couldn’t pump water.”
… From prewar levels of 450 litres per person per day in Baghdad, supplies were 30-40 litres. This was not safe to drink but while “the water authority has warned that the water must be boiled, there is little fuel to do this and what exists is diminishing.” Conditions outside of Baghdad were most probably worse in most instances. “The mission concluded that a catastrophe could be faced at any time if conditions do not change…”
Professor Thomas Nagy found declassified documents, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) studies, which showed that the US clearly calculated and comprehensively understood that its bombing and subsequent embargoes would cause massive civilian deaths, particularly to children. Nagy concludes:
For more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives. The United Nations has estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions, and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason.
No one can say that the United States didn’t know what it was doing.
The figure of 500,000 dead children comes from a 1996 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report which has been seriously criticised for its methodology. The absolute numbers were, at this time, debatable but according to first-hand accounts disease and malnutrition had reached levels which beggar belief. I could here quote John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, Kathy Kelly, or a number of others who saw with their own eyes and documented the suffering, but I will return to Ramsey Clark:
During last week, which I spent in Iraq, my fifth annual inspection since the sanctions were imposed, I visited ten hospitals in four governates which have nearly 15 percent of all hospital beds in the country. Conditions are tragic. Lighting is dim, even in operating theaters, for lack of bulbs. Wards are cold. Pharmacies are nearly empty with only a minor fraction of needed medicines and medical supplies. Most equipment, X-ray, CAT scan, incubators, oxygen tanks, dialysis machines, tubes and parts for transfusions and intravenous feeding, and other life-saving items are lacking, scarce, or inoperable for lack of parts. Simple needs like sheets, pillows, pillowcases, towels, bandages, cotton balls, adhesive tape, antiseptic cleaning liquids are unavailable or scarce. Surgery is at levels below 10 percent of the 1989 numbers in all ten hospitals.”
By 1995 it was known that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been effectively neutralised, but once the UN security council authorised the use of force in 1990 it was possible for the US and/or UK to veto any rescinding of that authorisation, so they started a cruel game of pretending that there were still WMD while undermining the inspections regime in numerous ways. The sanctions were to continue for another 8 deadly years, and if the UNFAO figure of 1 million excess deaths including 500,000 children might have been exaggerated in 1996 it should be remembered that this was less than halfway into the genocidal sanctions period.
As outcry began to grow, the sanctions were transitioned to a new “oil-for-food” programme. This was no real change. The programme was under the umbrella of the UN but was controlled by the US and UK. In 1989 the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned citing the sanctions and “oil-for-food” programme as “genocide”. His successor Hans van Sponeck would also resign and then write a book called “A Different Kind of War” which detailed the genocide, while avoiding the use of the term (perhaps because of the politics of a German national using the term), though he would later admit the validity of its usage.
The sanctions regime might have succumbed to international pressure if it were not for the advent of the Global War on Terror. By the time public pressure had rallied once more to end the genocidal sanctions the US was ready for the next phase of genocide – another shock campaign then a genocidal occupation, fomenting a civil war and trying to further partition the country, then arming their putative enemy, which would become the Islamic State, to inflict further chaos and suffering on the people of Iraq. The cycle is never meant to end and you can guarantee that right now there are plans in the US to enact further attacks on the nation and people of Iraq under the rationale of the “containment” of Iran.
Iraq is only an illustrative example. The same logic applies in other places, always slightly different, but always with merciless resolve. Many places that the US decides to view with interest end up in a state of permanent low-intensity conflict. Places like Somalia join Haiti in being sights of normalised dysfunction. Afghanistan was inflicted with a brutal and pointless 2 decades of war only for the US and its collaborators to hand back a much more divided and degraded country to a much more bitter and stubborn Taliban. Everywhere Africom’s “anti-terror” tentacles reached found themselves facing vastly increased terrorism and everywhere in Latin America that the War on Drugs penetrates finds themselves with more drugs and more violence. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, they simply looted then destroyed. Palestine stands out for a number of reasons, but it is not exceptional. That is why historical analogues can point us to what happens next.
During the oil-for-food programme in Iraq the stated humanitarian purpose of the system became a cruel irony. The main mechanism used to this end was the control the US and UK wielded over what was allowed in to Iraq. They would deem certain essential items to be “dual use” – meaning that they might be used for military purposes. This is self-evidently open for abuse.
In 1991 Israel started controlling the entry of goods into the Gaza Strip. This intensified after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the strip and then became a full-time blockade in 2007. Israel uses exactly the same “dual use” pretext as was weaponised against the people of Iraq. The most prominent basic needs that are denied as dual-use are drugs and medical equipment and construction materials. The denial of these items after assaults such as Israel has executed against the territory causes predictable suffering and predictable excess death. It is intentional pre-meditated structural violence causing death. It is a war crime and it is an act of genocide as detailed under Article II (c) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The sooner we mobilise against these acts of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction”, the fewer people will die. If it is not stopped then ultimately this phase of genocide will take more lives than the Holocaust that has just ended. Ultimately, though, the genocide against all Palestinians will continue. Every day brings more news of increasing violence in The West Bank and East Jerusalem. The only end to this is a free Palestine. We can and must exert as much pressure as humanly possible to bring as much relief and safety to people in the Gaza Strip, but they will never be safe until they are have full political control and human rights. It is the need to suppress them as a people, to prevent them from exercising their autonomy and inalienable rights, that causes Israel to keep inflicting violence as if somehow this will rewrite history and erase the right of Palestinians to live freely in their recognised land of origin.
The question is how can we change things now that the newsworthy part of the genocide is over, and that is exactly why the US and Israel have done things this way. Many people know about the NATO air campaign against Libya, but regardless of their feelings on that intervention, very few people in the Western public know what has happened in the country since then. Once something drops from the top headlines of a 24-hour news cycle the number of people who know of it shrinks drastically. When people are better informed through alternative media, actively searching for information, or a social media feed based on their own predilections, they are liable to overestimate how broadly such things are known.
People are mostly opposed to Israel’s violence in Gaza, but it pays to think about the emotional affect as well. The emotive stories that have been in the headlines are the deaths on October 7 2023, the plight of Israeli hostages and their deaths or repatriations, the mass rapes on October 7, and the beheaded babies on October 7. Two of those things are completely fictional, but they provide more passionate intensity than the many actual Palestinian beheaded babies and raped Palestinian prisoners. We need to provide the greater context and since we don’t get to choose the bulletin headlines that means getting people to expand the amount of education they allow in to their unquiet and overstimulated brains.
If 25% of the population are committed anti-Palestinian and 25% are committed pro-Palestinian, then it is really the other 50% that we must concentrate on. Because of the emotional weight of the information (and, frankly, conditioning) they have received they view Hamas as barbaric savages and Israelis as being like us (though perhaps with the Israeli government being a bad right-wing government). Israel, by these lights, has every legitimate reason to attack and indeed to wipe out the intractable irrational savage murderers of Hamas. These are, after all, fanatical animals that will never accept Israel’s right to resist. But then, Israel has killed a lot of civilians and you can’t really blame everyone for what Hamas does; but then, you kind of can because they clearly support Hamas; but then, some of them are just kids; but then, Hamas is using them as human shields and Israel has no choice; but then, they seem to be taking things to excess; but then, if they don’t finish the job this may all have to happen again and that means even more dead children; and so forth ad infinitum.
Our challenge is to break through the manufactured synthetic ambivalence enthralling half of the population. One advantage that we have is that the numbers do not lie. Palestinian deaths so greatly exceed Israeli deaths that the Israeli narrative cannot withstand the weight. We must push for real estimates of total deaths caused and fight to correct those that misrepresent the body count as an “estimate” when it must clearly understate the total number of deaths. The current body count of around 46,000 Palestinians is likely to represent less than 20% of the total. We must also work to make people know that the violent deaths and the deaths through deprivation are all brutal and tragic. There is no hierarchy of suffering nor of victimhood. People’s suffering should be measured by the number affected, not some qualitative distinction that effectively makes some people less human than others.
Our efforts also have the advantage that any role-reversal will immediately reveal the double-standards involved. If we aim some of our informational effort at getting people to reflect on how they would feel if the identities of the actors were reversed this can create a permanent habit of mind. Our greatest asset, though, may be the anti-Palestinians. They have no room for adjustment. Any significant challenge will lead to outright denial and aggression because their narrative is too fragile for them to concede anything. We will win once half of the confused public starts to see the anti-Palestinian people for what they are. They have been accorded an unearned legitimacy for far too long and once people see them for what they are the media and politicians will have to adjust.
To effect these changes we must maintain our visibility and extend educational outreach. We have to keep Palestine on people’s minds and show them that the genocide continues and that Israeli aggression was not a finite response to Hamas, but rather a permanent state of affairs. Most people’s minds are part of the way there already, but we need their hearts. We need them to feel the pain of the daily humiliation and persecution and the unending insecurity. We need them to see the cruelty of the apartheid – both the callous impersonal cruelty and the personal fascistic aggression.
In short, the real job in front of us is simply to get about 25% of the population to think what it must be like to be Palestinian.
“The ceasefire isn’t peace. It’s just a pause, and pauses don’t heal wounds, they just give you time to feel them.” Mohammed Marwish – “Reflections on the Ceasefire in Gaza”
A ceasefire in Gaza does not mean the end of genocide and it does not mean the end of mass killing. The ceasefire is bringing in a new phase. In truth, Israel itself needed this. There have been growing morale problems in its military and economic pressures on the home front. There is also pressure on foreign governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end their support for Israel’s genocide. We must therefore be careful not to mistake the fatigue of a butcher whose arm is tired for a lessening in bloodlust. There was also an apparent decision in the US to time the ceasefire with the change of Presidential administration, presumably as a wayto funnel any discussions about its role into vituperative dead-end arguments about partisan politics. Israel seems to have had some foreknowledge of this and the Knesset earlier passed legislation to ban UNRWA timed so as to cause the greatest possible harm and suffering with the least possible coverage and reaction. This is a foretaste of the way genocide will continue under the “ceasefire”.
Historically Israel does not honour ceasefires. This is a deliberate strategy on its part to normalise its violations of ceasefires and establish a de facto claim to have a routine right to use armed violence outside of their recognised borders.
It will surprise no one who knows the history of “ceasefires” in Lebanon and Gaza to read that Israel had continued murdering people. 80 inhabitants of the Gaza strip were killed by Israel in the first 12 days of what is called a “ceasefire”. In the meantime the military violence in the West Bank keeps increasing, especially in and around Jenin, while settler violence increases and looks ever more ominous. Israeli leaders have openly talked of applying lessons learned in Gaza to Jenin, where 14 people have been killed in this one week of “ceasefire”. Hundreds of residents have been forced to move after being given Gaza-style “evacuation orders”. Meanwhile Israel, which is thought to have violated the “ceasefire” in Lebanon around 100 times in its first week, has not removed its forces and at last count as I write has massacred 22 Lebanese civilians trying to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.
Israel’s mockery of the concept of a ceasefire, of power parity, and of reciprocity itself extends to their treatment of released prisoners. As they have in the past, they increase the numbers of Palestinians they take from the occupied territories even as they release an agreed amount. One day after they released 90 prisoners they took another 64 into custody. Since then they have raided Jenin on multiple days taking significant numbers into custody.
The state of Israel continues to reinvigorate norms of might makes right, wherein their extraterritorial and extralegal murder and abduction of people is treated as a regular and accepted part of life. The events of the last 15 months have created a new watershed at which a higher level of violence is rendered invisible to Western editors, politicians and pundits. Actual deaths of Palestinians will be reduced in value far below mere potential Israeli deaths, let alone actual Israeli deaths. Once again, footage, column inches, gigabytes and megapixels will all be focussed more on the plight of Israelis who must live in the fear that the people their government kills every day might find ways of striking back. In the name of security Israel will keep killing and killing and killing; one here, another here, four more here, just a small family over there. Nothing that would mean anything to a Western news gatekeeper. Yet this horrible unspoken killing will likely be only the tip of the iceberg, while the Israeli siege kills far more people through deprivation than it does through armed violence.
If a ceasefire beds in Israel will find it difficult to restart the Holocaust with the same level of violence, however history suggests that they will push the boundaries of the term “ceasefire”. In all Palestinian territories the higher levels of armed violence that have taken hold will continue. More to the point, though, having reduced the people of the Gaza Strip to a condition of extreme vulnerability, Israel will use deliberate acts of deprivation to kill people just a surely as with force of arms. If Israel is not stopped the next few years will come to feel like the second phase of the Gaza Holocaust, and like the first phase it will seem inexplicable to the people suffering through it that the world is letting this happen.
If Israel does not keep killing as many people in Gaza with bombs and bullets and missiles and drones, it does not mean they will be killing fewer people over time. Even drastic drops in deaths through traumatic injury and starvation will not translate into a correspondingly drastic drop in excess mortality.
The current condition of the people in Gaza is so reduced that they are vulnerable to deaths from disease, deprivation, exposure, despair and malnutrition. The genocide is going into stealth mode, cloaking itself in the passive voice even more thoroughly than it has previously managed. This has happened before. By preventing the necessities of life from entering the Gaza strip Israel can kill more people with far less attention and without the pressure to end the killing. The killing will be slower, but not necessarily much slower.
Genocide does not mean that a certain quantity of people must die, yet it is entirely possible that people in Gaza will continue to die prematurely at levels that will quickly reach hundreds of thousands within a few years. There is a clear precedent for this outside of Palestine. After the destruction of Desert Storm the US instituted a genocidal sanctions regime that is estimated to have caused one million Iraqis to die of preventable disease and malnutrition.
There are other precedents that I will outline in part 2 of this article. In these precedents a moment of crisis and shock in which massive deadly force is unleashed is followed by endless “low intensity” conflict, political and social fragmentation, and deadly structural violence. Armed violence persists, but at lower chronic level that seems strangely incurable. With the compliance of news media the structural violence is made invisible to people and the instability is made to seem endemic so that over time the deadly genocide appears as a normal state of affairs, even to the point where it seems that the victims themselves create the misery through their own deficiencies. This is predictable as part of the future in all of occupied Palestinian territories, because it has already happened, because it was already happening. The Gaza Holocaust has ushered in a heightened level of violence beyond the Gaza Strip, but this is an intensification of existing processes. Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories face greater suffering in the coming years than the considerable suffering they faced before October 2023.
Despite this some Palestine solidarity organisations seem determined to support this new phase of genocide by signalling to the public that the ceasefire changes everything, even when amongst themselves they clearly understand that this is not the case. Unconsciously they are letting the public misapprehension about the situation dictate their strategy rather that critically reflecting on it and reacting appropriately. It is very important that the public is kept awake despite the heavy sedative pressure that the media and political establishment will exert on them. That means that visible activism should be maintained as is for quite some time even as efforts shift in future months to outreach, education and BDS activities.
Far from being a time to pause this is a time to work towards increasing efforts. It may be that momentum is lost, but the less we lose now the less we need to regain later. We can no longer pretend that our role is to apply pressure so that the Powers That Be will finally recognise the injustice and act to re-establish the International Rules-Based Order. Legal avenues and formal political participation at various levels of government are important tools, but ultimately it will only work as expressions of wider democratic pressure coming from a public roused to action in very large numbers. It should be obvious by now that protecting Israel’s right to commit genocide is such a key strategic plank of US imperial power that it is willing to call in all favours and spend any amount of political, cultural and economic capital to maintain the Zionist outpost to control the oilfields of the Middle East. Throughout the West, leaders in politics, media and commerce have shown themselves to be slaves of an authoritarian obedience to power even at their own expense, and those chains can only be broken by the realistic threat that they will lose their positions, their money, and their power if they do not change. Many will simply have to be driven out of public life.
The fact is that all around the world Zionists have absolutely committed totally to their cause. They have left no room for compromise and we have no choice but to see this through to its completion. As Abby Martin told TRT World: “There is no way forward except for the total liberation of Palestine.” The Gaza Holocaust has been a mask-off moment and we now know that the Zionists thorughout the world have transitioned to full-fat fascism. They believe that controlling information creates reality in a literal sense and they cannot be reasoned with or debated. You cannot show them images of dead and mutilated children, cities turned to moonscapes, prisoners being tortured, or mass graves and cause any change in their beliefs. It is only when people lose their illusions and discard the myths that they regain their humanity.
Consider the example of Piers Morgan who has tried to position himself from the beginning as some form of honest broker willing to criticise the Israeli government. In the last 16 months he has been made to confront some of the horrors of the genocide, though he manages to remain ignorant of some inconvenient facts to a remarkable degree. His schtick means that he cannot simply deny and gainsay everything he is confronted with otherwise he would serve no purpose. He would be another Eylon Levy or Danny Danon or Mark Regev. These people are useful for rabble-rousing among anti-Palestinian zealots, but they have become liabilities in the general public whilst there is an awareness of the mass deaths that Israel is causing among innocents. Morgan’s role is not to deny everything it is to cast doubt, throw shade and sow confusion, but as more atrocities are exposed and proven he is forced into extreme positions. In a conversation with Tucker Carlson he endorsed the deliberate killing of children as a moral act “if there is a world war and it threatens the entire world”. It is hard not to conclude that he is shifting his moral goalposts by changing the way he views the context so as to make room for defending the documented systematic killing of children that has been occurring. It is a reminder that although spreading emotive information about the human costs of genocide is important, it may be more important to challenge the one-sided framing of the causes of violence. Israel does not have a right to use armed violence and claim self-defence and Morgan should have been challenged on that from the first time he bullied guests into accepting that framework. If people can use foundational myths to legitimate one murder, they will simply increase the perceived stakes to justify one million murders.
Some people never admitted that Adolf Hitler did anything wrong, and there was no way of making them do so. The answer to this problem was to ensure that a consensus existed among the general society that Hitler’s crimes were real and inexcusable. Zionist or Nazi, the only way to push fanatics out of the mainstream discourse in our decadent society will be to rouse the passion of the majority against them. Above all that means creating certainty. Currently the average person does not like what Israel has done in Gaza, but they are kept in a space of extreme ambivalence, if not confusion, by the constant repetition of Israeli hasbara in our media. The fact that polls show that the public mostly sides with Palestinians in simple binary terms, should not fool activists into think that the public really grasps what is going on. They are kept in a fog of uncertainty and made to feel that some aspects of the situation are very complicated and difficult. They are told repeatedly that the causes of violence in Palestine are ancient enmities and they are not given any reason to question that lie.
Hasbara can be thought of as propaganda, but the word means “explaining”. Western media has been very careful to always leave room for people to give credence to the hasbara – the Zionist explanation – often by simply leaving out the parts of the news that blatantly contradict said hasbara. We need to create education and awareness so that people understand that Israel’s explanations do not create the controversy that people are led to believe. There are no two sides to this and once a majority understand this the politics will have to shift. Once that motion starts it will create its own momentum as each new Israeli atrocity or attempt at diplomatic bullying is seen for what it actually is. At some point many of us crossed a line in our lives when our received notions of Arab savagery, Israeli nobility, Islamic fanaticism, and Jewish urbane humanism no longer persuade us that the victim is the murderer. As much as we need to end the distortions of emphasis and viewpoint and scale in our media, we also need to convince people to believe the evidence of their own eyes.
Israel is still killing people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and in Lebanon. It is not going to end. They will be committing even worse crimes by putting a genocidal stranglehold on goods entering the Gaza Strip. This has happened before and it has cost many lives already. The people who dies from preventable and treatable diseases are just as precious. They and their loved ones must often endure the agony of knowing that they are being murdered through a system of detached cruelty and banal evil.
We must do our best to bring freedom to Palestine because the genocide will continue until this is over. The best way to understand deadliness of this phase is to look at the genocidal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990’s. The events show the power of the US empire to replace one mode of genocide with another as required. Imperial powers do not relent and they will not ever tire or recoil from the inhumane expedients that create their hegemony. The only way out of this is a full conscious movement of solidarity between the masses at the “core” and those at the “periphery”. The nature of imperial genocide is found beyond war and conquest and massacres, it is found in neocolonialism, neoliberalism, structural violence and the perpetual suffering that is inflicted as a matter of course by the implacable and fanatical mass-murderers that wield power in the Western world.
The “ceasefire” has left a situation in which misery and death will continue of it own accord, but which will be aggravated and accelerated by the structural violence brought to bear. Chris Hedges’ article “The Western Way of Genocide” opens:
Gaza is a wasteland of 50 million tons of rubble and debris. Rats and dogs scavenge amid the ruins and fetid pools of raw sewage. The putrid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rises from beneath the mountains of shattered concrete. There is no clean water. Little food. A severe shortage of medical services and hardly any habitable shelters. Palestinians risk death from unexploded ordnance, left behind after over 15 months of air strikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes and blasts from tank shells, and a variety of toxic substances, including pools of raw sewage and asbestos.
Hepatitis A, caused by drinking contaminated water, is rampant, as are respiratory ailments, scabies, malnutrition, starvation and the widespread nausea and vomiting caused by eating rancid food. The vulnerable, including infants and the elderly, along with the sick, face a death sentence. Some 1.9 million people have been displaced, amounting to 90 percent of the population. They live in makeshift tents, encamped amid slabs of concrete or the open air. Many have been forced to move over a dozen times. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed or damaged. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, universities — Israel blew up Israa University in Gaza City in a controlled demolition — cemeteries, shops and offices have been obliterated. The unemployment rate is 80 percent and the gross domestic product has been reduced by almost 85 percent, according to an October 2024 report issued by the International Labor Organization.
In Part 2, I will discuss the phase that comes after this intense destruction – a Sisyphean curse of slow genocide that the West inflicts on its former colonies and potential rivals.
[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.
To continue its genocide Israel must first convince the world that it is fighting a war. It targets civilians and claims they are “human shields” who have become collateral damage. It leaves Palestinians with no choices, demanding of them the impossible, and then claims that they are choosing war. Israel simulates war to commit genocide.
The “thinking” behind Israel’s tactics of genocide in Gaza is not directly practical. In practical terms it would be easier to simply name a “final solution” of extermination and work from that basis. Yet the current modalities of genocide are crucial in creating a fiction of war, a lie that the one-sided violence of genocide is warfare in the sense characterised by Clausewitz as being “policy carried out by other means”, which is often quoted with the word “policy” replaced by “diplomacy”. In the case of Israel we can also say that diplomacy is genocide carried out by other means. Israeli diplomacy invariably aims to create the fiction of war – a sense that the violence inflicted by Israel is a form of two-sided “conflict” rather than the one-sided murder that it is.
None of this is without precedent. Genocide is always a process, not an event. Colonial genocides in particular are seen at the time as a series of asymmetric wars, each treated by the aggressor as having separate causes and aims.
The most complete sequence of colonial genocide can be seen over the centuries violent expansion by the English, then British, then USA killing and dispossessing the indigenous people of what is now the continental USA. This genocide (or these genocides) began as discrete events of massacre and warfare, becoming increasingly more asymmetric. Treaties and interregna of “peace” became means of ethnic cleansing and periods of “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (a punishable act of genocide as described in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Through this time clearly genocidal non-warfare acts such the slaughter of bison and the promulgation of genocidal ideology were ongoing. The genocide grew in sophistication as it moved West, reaching California as a combination of bureaucratised and systematic mass-murder that would be a direct inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s genocidal policies.
When the victims are reduced to a tiny fraction of the original population with an even tinier fraction of the dominion that they once held the genocide does not end. Genocidal policies enter new phases. Some tribes are declared extinct so that survivors have no recognised identity nor historical claim against dispossession. Children are taken then sent to residential schools to “kill the Indian, and save the man” (frequently without achieving the latter). Other policies aim to destroy languages and other foundations of cultural identity. This leads to the last phase, that of assimilating the remnants. This phase is perhaps better exemplified in Aotearoa, Canada and Australia but is broadly indicative of the sequence of genocide in the US. In the last phase the surviving population is inducted at the bottom of the class system. The systems of class oppression are used on them as inherited from British class society, but enhanced by a racial element into “structural racism”. In this phase (which may still be considered genocidal) state instruments of coercion fall unevenly on the remaining indigenous population. Ideologically, like the lower classes, it is made to seem natural that they would need to be subject to greater surveillance, control and correction by the state. This expresses itself through the violence of policing and criminal justice and through the violent and prescriptive aspects of the state “welfare” apparatus. One indication that this can legitimately be thought of as genocide is the sobering fact, for example, that more Canadian indigenous children are taken from parents now by the state than were taken at the height of the acknowledged “genocide” enacted through the residential school system.
I have gone on this digression regarding genocide in the US because it is such a comprehensive example of genocide. It is not only complete but it is fractal, such that different pieces can be carved out and will still show much the same thing an a smaller scale in time and space. The elements of genocide tend to follow a progression, but when one modality is to the fore it does not mean that others are absent. This is true of the genocide against Palestinians which is expressed differently for Palestinians in Gaza, those in Areas A, B, and C of occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and those Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. All of the elements of colonial genocide that I have described are there.
The dominant modality or idiom of genocide against Palestinians we see at the moment is akin to that of nineteenth century California such as described in Benjamin Madley’s eye-opening 2017 book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. The most obvious differences come from the vastly expanded capabilities that technology gives the state of Israel, but the basic structure is the same – the maximum amount of surveillance, control and categorisation juxtaposed with systematic mass killing. The killing can be linked to open espousal of extermination by some elements of the Israeli state (military, government, capital and ideological/media) but the exterminatory nature is deniable in that it is not implemented in a direct comprehensive manner. The logic of extermination is there in the totalising nature of the choice of whom to kill. Though Israel often effects genocide by eliminating crucial people, such as medical or educational staff, we have ample evidence now that on the whole Israel’s violence is aimed at all Palestinians as such. The fact that there is no “final solution” does not mean that it is not a process of extermination. Over time, however, if not ended this genocide will follow the same path that other colonial genocides have followed, destroying Palestinians as such. If the current upsurge in genocidal violence becomes a new norm (like Operation Cast Lead which became a precedent for systematic mass-murder carried out with impunity) then Palestinians will effectively be cleansed from the occupied territories in one or two decades at most.
This genocidal slaughter is all underwritten by fake peace processes, the fake “two-state solution” and a form of diplomacy that (as I already stated) amounts to genocide carried out by other means. In the recently published What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? author Raja Shehadeh tells of personally attending a fake peace conference at which he was scolded for calling the occupied territories “occupied”. Shehadeh concludes that “[r]eal peace would mean a reconfiguration of the myth….” A peaceful democratic Jewish state is no longer possible and the actual apartheid state that exists cannot and could never survive without conflict.
Fake “peace” diplomacy is in fact conflict diplomacy designed to ensure that a plausible state of conflict always exists as cover for a genocidal process (which has a clear direction of travel along a road towards total erasure of Palestinians as such from the occupied Palestinian territories). I have referred to this as Israeli diplomacy, but in truth it is US diplomacy also. The Oslo process was designed by the US and it led to an impossible situation for Palestinians. There was literally nothing real that they could concede in return for peace and statehood, but Israel was able to create and maintain a façade of making demands for security. It is a paper-thin pretence that is completely belied by their settlement activities and much else besides. There is no legitimate reason why the US would accept any of this if they were at all invested in the “Oslo process”, the “peace process”, or the “roadmap for peace”. On the contrary, the US spent decades repeatedly insisting that “final status issues” (i.e. those that actually lead to peace) are an exclusively bilateral concern and did not shift that position as Israel systematically and ostentatiously made any promised resolution impossible. The consistency of the US in this regard reveals the bad faith in which they drew up the parameters of this “peace process”. This means, ipso facto, that they are the knowing architects of the fake peace process, which is to say the permanent conflict process that is a crucial foundation of the ongoing genocide. Therefore, this is a US genocide.
It is by no means abnormal for those committing genocide to use a pretext of armed conflict as cover for their activities. When Lemkin invented the term genocide he stated that: “For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” This sentiment seems to be echoed in the words of another person – Adolf Hitler (also, in a way, an authority on genocide). Hitler wrote: “This partisan war has its advantages as well. It gives us the opportunity to stamp out everything that stands against us.” As a rule, if armed conflict is serving as a pretext for another undeclared policy, that policy must certainly be genocide.
There are good reasons for believing that Israel cannot achieve its aims through genocide because the world has changed since similar colonial genocides succeeded. But that is only true if we make it true. Those people lost to historic genocides were almost voiceless, but the problem now is not voicelessness, it is deafness. The deafness of Western leaders and those of certain lackey countries. They cling to a malicious malevolent mendacious obtuseness. It is violent genocidal racism that hides behind specious arguments and a phoney concern for Jewish safety. Central to all of this toxic hatred is the fiction of war – the pretence that a stateless impoverished people pose a threat to the 6th most powerful military in the world – a contention based on the racist notion that Palestinians reject peace because they have an irrational hatred that drives them to perpetuate a conflict in which they lose much more than their powerful enemies.
It is foul fascist nonsense, this victim-blaming fiction of war. There are no half-measures left to us in response. We need to drive the genocide supporters and genocide deniers off the air and out of office. Moreover, the genocide will not end until Palestine is free. A ceasefire will not bring real peace, just a different phase of genocide. Only a single democratic state and an international commitment to reparation and stability will bring peace, justice and an end to genocide.
On Genocide 