Where Will It End? The Limitless Depravity of the Renewed Assault on Northern Gaza
20.10.24
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A “genocide within a genocide” is taking place in northern Gaza, where Israel has specifically prevented any food, water, fuel or medical supplies entering since October 1, and where Israeli forces are involved in massacre after massacre, bombing and blowing up residential buildings and killing entire families, attacking and decommissioning the last three remaining partly-functioning hospitals, and picking off and killing anyone who dares to leave their homes via armed drones and snipers.
This is the manifestation of the “Generals’ Plan”, a diabolical initiative proposed by retired general Giora Eiland, which advocated for the enforced evacuation of the remaining 400,000 residents of northern Gaza — those unwilling or unable to obey previous evacuation orders — followed, after a week, by starvation and the execution of everyone who remains as a “terrorist.”
That plan was horrendous enough — especially because there is no legal basis whatsoever for regarding civilians who can’t or won’t leave a designated military area as “terrorists” — but its manifestation is even more horrific.
The starvation policy began on October 1 — before any evacuation orders were issued — and even when those orders were eventually issued, on or around the anniversary of October 7, the window of opportunity for anyone wanting to leave, or able to leave, was almost entirely non-existent, as Israeli forces moved straight into the plan’s extermination phase.
Even before the evacuation orders were issued, Israeli forces began targeting Jabalia refugee camp in particular, bombing residential buildings and schools sheltering displaced people, killing hundreds of civilians in massacre after massacre, and indiscriminately murdering civilians in the street, and this extermination policy has since spread throughout the north.
You won’t hear about this in the western mainstream media, which seems blithely unconcerned by the fact that the “Generals’ Plan” is already underway, and that it’s much more horrific than even Giora Eiland imagined, and you won’t see much of it coming directly from northern Gaza on social media either, because Israel has continued to target and murder — or to critically wound — every Palestinian journalist who has survived a year of targeting, in which around 175 journalists have been deliberately killed.
However, despite a spate of deliberate attacks on journalists in recent weeks, two young men in particular are still assiduously chronicling this screamingly vile policy of annihilation — Hossam Shabat and Anas Al-Sharif, who are both very active on X, which is where I’m following them, in real time, as they show and tell the truth to those of us who care, and, hopefully, can avoid chronicling their own demise.
Other crucial voices are relatives of those remaining in the north, who have been posting a steady flow of stories of massacres — often losing their entire extended families — and other voices noticing others who have been killed, either following up on their last words and actions, or being notified of their deaths and reporting them.
One example of the former is Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet, resident in the US, who was briefly disappeared and detained in Gaza at the end of last year, and who reported two days ago the sickening news that 19 members of his extended family had been killed, including his seven-year old cousin Sama, Fatima, his grandmother’s sister, two of her daughters and their children.
An example of the latter is the digital artist Mahasen Al-Khatib, who lived in Jabalia, and was killed in a bombing raid, just after completing a picture entitled, “We are burning”, inspired by the recent death of Sha’ban Al-Dalou. As the journalist Ahmed al-Mahdoun explained, the 31-year old Mahasen was a “creative and ambitious digital artist who was a beacon of hope for many in Gaza. She empowered hundreds of young Gazans to develop their digital skills and secure remote job opportunities with global companies.”
Both, however, are stories that are being repeated daily — even hourly — across the north, as well as another grotesque development: the decommissioning of northern Gaza’s hospitals, in a grisly echo of its profoundly illegal “war on hospitals” that began a year ago, complete with some of its more depraved components.
As of yesterday, the three surviving hospitals in the north had been forced to shut because of military attacks and a lack of fuel, leaving countless lives in peril, including newborn and premature babies. All three hospitals were repeatedly shelled overnight, killing or injuring dozens of people, including health workers, and causing serious damage to the hospitals. Israeli forces also “targeted hospital grounds despite patients and displaced people sheltering there”, as People’s Dispatch explained.
Later, as was captured on video, Israeli forces detained a large group of Palestinian men near the Indonesian Hospital, holding them in a large pit, in a horrible echo of images that shocked the world in November and December last year, when countless Palestinian men and boys were rounded up, and stripped and blindfolded in what looked uncannily like a prelude to mass execution. As with last year, some of these men are almost certain to be “disappeared” into Israel’s torture prisons for Palestinians, and there have also been reports of summary executions.
Ethnic cleansing and colonization
To the extent that there is any purported intent, beyond the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, to Israel’s renewed assault on the north, it is, apparently, to make the entire territory into a “closed military zone”, although anyone with any sense would recognize that this would only be a prelude to its long dreamed-of colonization by Israeli settlers, led in particular by the rabidly messianic settler politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who were given ministerial positions by Netanyahu as part of the coalition government he was obliged to create after the last elections in Israel in October 2022.
Just last week, B.M., the the anti-Zionist Hebrew prominent on X, reported a major event, “Preparing for Settlement in Gaza”, held by Netanyahu’s Likud Party, which is taking place now, and involves ministers, members of the Knesset, rabbis and other public figures.
According to Eiland’s plan, the remaining Palestinians of the north — if any survive — will be forced out to the south, squeezed into an ever smaller area of land, where around a million people are already teetering on the brink of extinction.
The plan to permanently force every single Palestinian out of the north was already evident a year ago, when evacuation orders were issued for the first time, followed by further evacuation orders in central Gaza and the south in the months that followed, until there was nowhere else to go, as the inconvenient barrier separating Gaza from Egypt got in the way.
To the extent that Israel’s supporters in the west have ever bothered to engage with the evident ethnic cleansing involved in the forced displacement of two million people from their homes, they have airily claimed that they don’t support any attempt by Israel to permanently seize Palestinian land in Gaza, and that they also insist that everyone displaced will eventually be allowed to return to their homes.
As Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, explained at a UN Security Council Briefing just last week, at which, for the first time, she spoke openly about the suffering of the Palestinians, the US endorses UN Resolution 2735 (agreed on June 10 this year), which states that “there must be no demographic or territorial change in the Gaza Strip, including any actions that reduce the territory of Gaza”, adding that “the United States’ expectation [is] that Palestinian civilians, including those evacuated from the north be permitted to return to their communities and rebuild.”
However, all of the above rather blithely ignores Israel’s stated aim, announced last December, to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum,” as Netanyahu reportedly told Ron Dermer, the minister of strategic affairs, when he tasked him with coming up with a long-term plan for Gaza’s future.
In addition, of course, as we’ve seen repeatedly, the US has, for a year, failed to do anything meaningful to stem Israel’s excesses, apparently allowing Netanyahu to humiliate it repeatedly whenever any “red lines” are even tentatively proposed, and persistently refusing to play its ace card — cutting off the supply of weapons that Israel requires to pursue its primary genocide (still ongoing elsewhere in the Gaza Strip), and its “genocide within a genocide” in the north.
Just last week it was revealed that, since October 7 last year, the US government “has approved $17.9 billion in security assistance for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere”, which is “substantially more than in any other year since the US began granting military aid to Israel in 1959.”
Israel’s “Final Solution”
To return to the present, the atrocities taking place in northern Gaza are so persistent that it is hard for those who care to even keep track of them all. Just five days ago, decent people around the world, in their millions, rose up in revulsion after footage was made available of Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year old student, burning to death in an attack on a camp for displaced people outside Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza, but that now seems an eternity away.
Even the killing of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, on Thursday, hasn’t dented Israel’s insatiable hunger for genocide, even though continuing to slaughter civilians after the death of the main organizer of the October 7 attacks is unconscionable, when such a definitive fulfilment of what is supposed to be the main aim of Israel’s year-long assault on Gaza — “eliminating Hamas” — has been achieved.
Instead, however, Netanyahu seized the opportunity to proclaim, “Today, evil has suffered a heavy blow, but the task before us is not yet complete”, while his supposedly more moderate rival, Benny Gantz, who resigned from the post-October 7th war cabinet in June, after disagreements about the course of Israel’s attacks, said that the “mission is not over”, and that Israeli forces would operate in Gaza for “years to come.”
Three years and three months elapsed between the formulation of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference on January 20,1942, and the liberation by British soldiers of the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp on April 15, 1945.
The Gaza Strip has been an extermination camp for over a year now, with the “Generals’ Plan” representing, in an almost indescribably depraved manner, the tightening of the genocidal noose in a systematic effort to justify the cold-blooded murder of 400,000 civilians, to add to the more than 50,000 already confirmed dead over the last year, and the many more — perhaps hundreds of thousands — dying and destined to die through deliberately inflicted secondary causes: starvation, diseases, untreatable wounds, medical complications including premature babies, as well as deaths from now-untreatable pre-existing medical conditions.
All this will happen, and will only get worse, unless Israel is somehow forced to bring to an end its multiple, overlapping genocidal actions.
Is Benny Gantz somehow anticipating that, to show how unbowed Israel is, and how committed it is to visiting on the Palestinians horrors of an even longer duration than were inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis, Israel’s all-annihilating actions will last throughout 2025 and 2026, and even into 2027?
Does he really think that any Palestinians will, by then, still be alive, trapped in a genocidal cage from which there is no escape?
Perhaps he thinks that, eventually, Egypt will be prevailed upon to finally open the door to a flood of dying refugees, or that the countries of the west — burning with anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment, and particularly consumed by institutional and populist Islamophobia, ramped up by the persistent demonization and dehumanization of the entire Palestinian population — will finally take pity on them, and establish sweeping refugee resettlement programs.
Where does it all end?
Beyond Israel’s transparently false claims that all of its genocidal actions are to “eradicate Hamas” and to “secure the return of the hostages” seized on October 7, the west’s relentless insistence that Israel has the “right to defend itself” fails to recognize that Israel sees this “right” (which is, in itself, a violent repudiation of international humanitarian law) as a license to eradicate everyone that it sees not only as a threat to its security, but also to its messianic claims to land that — quite explicitly under international law — belongs to others: to the Palestinians in Gaza, and in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where the same genocidal expansionism is also underway, and to the Lebanese in southern Lebanon, where the same genocidal expansionism has also been allowed to spread by the indulgent leaders of the west.
Is it not reasonable to expect that, unless it is stopped, the insatiable killing machine that Israel has become will insist that its security, and its notion of its own messianic destiny, can only be secured, and can only be satisfied through the slaughter of everyone who resists?
At present, around two million Palestinians are still alive in the Gaza Strip, along with 4.7 million in the West Bank, and around 350,000 in East Jerusalem. In addition, around 600,000 Lebanese live in southern Lebanon — or did before so many were recently forced to flee their homes.
I genuinely don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that every single one of these people — who are, of course, overwhelmingly civilians — is regarded as a threat by what is, by now, the thoroughly deranged State of Israel, freed of all constraints for an entire year, and now, it seems, living solely to kill.
How many more will die before those who have the means to do something about it — those who continue to sell it weapons, and to support it economically — realize that they have helped to unleash a monster so twisted that it is almost beyond our ability to understand the depths of depravity to which it has sunk?
In the weeks after the October 7 attacks, a popular Israeli slogan was “Kill Them All.” When challenged, some of Israel’s supporters would claim that it only referred to Hamas, but that was always a dubious claim, and, as the genocide intensifies after over a year of unprecedented slaughter, it is surely becoming more and more evident that it had a wider meaning — and that is the extermination of everyone perceived to a threat — from Rafah to Beirut, in Yemen, and, if Israel gets its way, in Iran.
For now, however, all eyes need to be on northern Gaza, where all of this depravity is on full display. Read about it, write about it, share everything everywhere.
* * * * *
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
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31 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Another necessary update about Israel’s ongoing assault on northern Gaza, where, it is abundantly and heartrendingly clear, a particularly malignant version of the “Generals’ Plan” for the ethnic cleansing of the whole area, home to 400,000 inhabitants, has been underway since the start of the month, and is now being implemented with unprecedented savagery.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in relentless bombing raids, all three of northern Gaza’s surviving hospitals have been violently decommissioned, the western media haven’t even realized what is happening (or don’t care), and Israel’s leaders, meanwhile, are still promising that Israeli forces will operate in Gaza for “years to come”, even after the killing of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, on Thursday.
I point out how impossible the notion of continuing military operations in Gaza “for years to come” is, because, by then, quite genuinely, no Palestinian will be left alive, and I wonder whether western leaders — in the US in particular — have any intention of finally acting decisively to stop Israel before it matches the most notorious crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis in the Second World War.
Without intervention, that is exactly where this unfettered genocidal fury is heading.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 2:53 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Pat Sheerin wrote:
I do believe that US and others are colluding to annihilate every single Palestinian. Are we utterly helpless? We are raising money to send to al-Mawasi but soon there will be no-one left. Can we do any more?
...on October 20th, 2024 at 3:34 pm
Andy Worthington says...
I don’t know what we can do, Pat, beyond actively raising money like you are doing and continuing to spread the word and trying to explain why our governments are all knowingly complicit in a genocide.
I see that, after Yahya Sinwar’s death, Joe Biden openly stated that, shortly after October 7 last year, “I directed Special Operations personnel and our intelligence personnel to work side-by-side with their Israeli counterparts to help locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders hiding in Gaza”, which suggests that US Special Forces have been on the ground in Gaza, deepening the US’s complicity in genocide (if $17.9bn in arms sales isn’t enough). https://x.com/GuantanamoAndy/status/1847071805535666550
And DeclassifiedUK has been assiduously reporting on British involvement too, most recently here, exposing Starmer’s complicity in facilitating those US Special Operations flights: https://www.declassifieduk.org/u-s-special-ops-flights-to-israel-from-uks-cyprus-base-surge-under-starmer/
How I hope that these criminals don’t get away with destroying any forum for accountability – the UN, ICJ, ICC – although that does seems to be their intention, in which case the creeping authoritarianism we in the west are already seeing will only get worse, and the spread of genocide will be completely unchecked.
Those armed quadcopters the Israelis have developed must look very tempting to – well, every political leader who isn’t on the side of the people.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 3:36 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Tamzin Jans wrote:
Andy, this article might interest you: https://www.solidarity.co.nz/international-stories/us-is-spending-28-billion-to-colonise-your-brain
...on October 20th, 2024 at 5:42 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Interesting, Tamzin. Thanks for that.
The opening paragraph:
“Whoever owns the narrative owns the world – and things just got a lot tougher for those of us opposed to the metastasizing brain cancer known as US influence campaigns – or ‘perception management.’ In a staggering increase in funding for propaganda and covert action the US House has passed the Countering the PRC (People’s Republic of China) Malign Influence Fund, kicking in an extra $1.6 billion. How they spend this and other influence funds will largely be a secret but, rest assured, your neural pathways are in their crosshairs. Politicians, generals, journalists, media outlets, influencers and all sorts of organisations will be bought and owned in an expanded effort to get you to accept the US narrative on China, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Syria and anything else they deem as necessary.”
What an absurd place Congress is, coming up with endless ridiculous names for legislative bills and other initiatives like the “Countering the PRC (People’s Republic of China) Malign Influence Fund.” Fortunately, the number of people immune to the propaganda is growing all the time, as particularly exemplified by the revulsion engendered by the US’s full support for the genocide in Gaza, and the longer that continues, the more people will see the light. The mask has fallen.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 5:43 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Kären Ahern wrote:
They have wanted annihilation all along or they would have stopped it! Harris will be no different, Trump would be even more brutal if it is possible! It is all for land theft, oil, gas, the canal, we need a General Strike, a new government!
...on October 20th, 2024 at 5:43 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Time will tell, I hope, Kären, how much they specifically knew about the extent of slaughter they were inevitably seeking to justify, how much they were being pushed by powerful pro-Israeli forces (or were fully complicit in those organizations’ malignant anti-Palestinian racism), and how much they were in cahoots with the arms companies, who, of course, have been making record profits.
It seems pretty clear that money is the key to a lot of it – along with that troubling “exceptionalism” that Israel has wielded with such impunity since its founding. But there’s no going back now for those of us who have seen the light, now that the mask has fallen in the most horrific manner possible; now it’s a question of whether, to defend themselves, all those responsible will succeed in destroying any mechanism for accountability.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 5:44 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Zoon Imran wrote:
There is no end to this & the US is heading this genocide so why would they even bring a stop to it bro’ … When such barbarity takes over and is witnessed globally & that is even livestreamed and the imperialists warmongers and coward Middle Eastern entities like SA & UAE is backing it full throttle and they are all together busy building their plans accordingly with demonic impunity gifted to them by the UN & all Rights Org’s than there is no end 😡
...on October 20th, 2024 at 5:45 pm
Andy Worthington says...
You’re right, of course, Zoon, but every day, as the deaths mount, and the barbarity increases, we’re genuinely in uncharted territory. There will, I am certain, be more voices recognizing that this is grotesque beyond anything we have been asked to endure before, let alone to endorse, and, crucially, I think more voices will be raised that will compare this to the Nazis, but with the added horror that Israel isn’t even hiding what it’s doing, and exults in it like a nation composed entirely of psychopaths and sociopaths.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 5:45 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Zoon Imran wrote:
Andy, it’s not just about recognition anymore bro’, i agree more & more voices will be added and they are, this is our hope, but an end to this i see none and the feeling of utter helplessness just eats one up and i am not even in the presence of actual hell as they are, every moment of their breath drawn knowing it might be their last, but then the breaths which continue to engulf in those horrors and it’s not their last, the ones captured in sadism of torture of the most atrocious kind……….with just no end 😢💔
...on October 20th, 2024 at 9:49 pm
Andy Worthington says...
What more can I say, Zoon? It consumes anyone with a heart, and we’re not even living it. Death is all there is, the genocide infecting the whole world like poison. Those with any kind of sensitivity or empathy weep, while others are caught in a kind of numbness as reality collapses, and the real evil – those whose hearts are lost – support it, or, even worse, exult in it.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 9:49 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote:
The U.S. is allowing this. A bullsh*t Christian nation.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 9:50 pm
Andy Worthington says...
With bullsh*t bat-crazy Zionist Christians, in vast numbers, Richard, who support Israel because it’s all tied in with some crackpot prophesy about the return of Christ. We don’t hear enough about them, tbh.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 9:50 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Annalise Zaverdinos wrote:
Andy, they are a very important cog in this nightmare machine.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 9:51 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Very much so, Annalise – and there’s an Al Jazeera feature about it here from last December: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-bottom-line/2023/12/26/why-do-evangelical-christians-support-israel
...on October 20th, 2024 at 9:52 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Joan S. Livingston wrote:
For the members-only Rapture, of course, Andy.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 11:12 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, exactly, Joan. “Members only”, like in Israel – some peculiar outcome, in both places, of settler colonialism and ‘Manifest Destiny’, or Israel’s ‘promised land for the chosen people’, filtered through organized religion’s manipulation of modern capitalist entitlement. Both places where the ‘settlers’ are never at home, because they live fundamentally unrooted lives on stolen land.
...on October 20th, 2024 at 11:12 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote:
They are a crackpot bunch for sure, Andy. But the real controllers of power are the Jewish Zionists I believe. That’s where the big money and power lies. They own the MSM, so they make the narrative.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 9:16 am
Andy Worthington says...
I believe there are tens of millions of them, Richard, so I think they definitively play a role in the politics of numerous Congresspeople, but I take your point, of course. It’s AIPAC, who take pride, and publicly declare that they own most members of Congress that are the problem, along with other powerful lobbying groups, and the fervent supporters of Israel, whether Jewish or not, at very high levels in so many businesses, in the media and the entertainment world.
I don’t know how we deal with this, although I’d suggest that we need to very specifically boycott whatever and whoever we can. In the end, though, how are we to address the roots of the violent, dehumanizing sickness that advocates for this genocidal slaughter and that is used to justify everything that Israel does?
...on October 21st, 2024 at 9:16 am
Andy Worthington says...
Kären Ahern wrote:
I feel so broken I cannot even weep. I did music today, to release emotions through my throat and fingers into the atmosphere. I should go out in the forest and primal scream. I am fairly certain my associates in Jabalia and Nuseirat Camp I have been raising money to get aid for and feed have been exterminated. Blackout of communications and the IDF Military shots of blindfolded men being taken to the excavated pits seemed their final fate … upon which Israel will attempt to build their insane development over the bones of the murdered, rightful owners. We said until we meet again in a time of peace, in another world, the last time we communicated, the last journalist who was left to film. The sweetest man risking his life to record their last days.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 9:18 am
Andy Worthington says...
That’s such a powerful and sad analysis of the situation, Kären. Our societies – and certainly our leaders and our media – can’t seem to properly comprehend that these are real people being slaughtered on an industrial scale – slower than the Holocaust, and in a larger area, but on exactly the same basis as the Nazis’ extermination of the Jewish people in WWII.
Real people. Completely innocent of any military involvement in anything whatsoever. And often, so often, lovely, bright, talented, caring family people being slaughtered by people whose very humanity has been subsumed by a genocidal rage sweeping throughout their entire society.
Last night I saw a thread on X of genocidal statements made by a dozen soldiers, writing in excruciating detail about why everyone in Gaza should be exterminated, and then I think of Israelis racially mocking the Palestinians, in their sick videos where they black out their teeth and pretend to be monkeys. This is normalized behaviour in Israel, but I’m glad to say that, where I live, people have mostly moved on from this type of vile racism. Israel should be shunned, reviled and excluded, but instead we’re supplying them the weapons for their self-declared righteous genocidal slaughter. It really does make me sick to the pit of my stomach every single day.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 9:18 am
Andy Worthington says...
Damien Morrison wrote:
horrific its just unending the brutality the murder the horror … are we dying Andy … as a species … it seems that way.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 9:19 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, our leaders and media executives are now, officially, spiritually dead, Damien, while Israel itself is a zombie nation, but one, disgracefully, in which the zombies are given an endless supply of devastatingly, disproportionately powerful weapons.
As for the rest of us, we are many but we have no power. I do have hope, though. We’re clearly the only interesting people left, as the deniers get consumed by non-stop anger, and those trying to pretend that collapse isn’t happening slip into a kind of permanent numbness.
But you’re fundamentally right, of course. This is the time of a kind of soul death, as demonstrated, most compellingly, by the fact that this ceaseless slaughter is being allowed to happen.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 9:20 am
Andy Worthington says...
Richard Greve wrote, in response to 19, above:
I don’t think the answer will be found in the West, Andy. It is too taken over by Zionists in every sphere – government, mainstream news, Hollywood, university donors who muzzle descent and political parties that are bought.
It may come from the Brics group who will have huge economic power that hopefully sanctions Israel, the US and any supporter of this madness of genocide and ethnic cleansing. This is the only glimmer I see.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 5:59 pm
Andy Worthington says...
I share your hopes about the BRICS countries, Richard, but I have to say that it’s essential for our continued survival to de-Nazify the countries of the west, where the mask has fallen from the powerful people you mention much more than ever before.
I thought the “war on terror” was bad enough, but this, astonishingly, is an even more intolerable step further, an effort not only to endorse a genocide, but to hunt down anyone who opposes it. The political class in the west – outside of times when certain western countries were openly fascist – hasn’t, in our lifetimes, dared to suggest that any kind of political dissent is absolutely prohibited, and must be punished.
We’ve been free to criticize our leaders, for example, and have only generally run into trouble if we’re not white and have mobilized a movement of sufficient size that the elites perceive it as a threat.
Now, however, Israel has prevailed upon our countries to criminalize all criticism of a foreign government, via their weaponization of “antisem*t*sm”, and it seems pretty clear to me that, having achieved this suppression of any and all dissent via Israel, our leaders will make sure, soon enough, that this bleeds into a future in which criticism of our own governments will also be outlawed, especially as they are all complicit in crimes whose depravity cannot be whitewashed.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 6:00 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Deborah Emin wrote:
Andy, I feel that sickness and have felt it for decades. The US was founded on genocide and racism, slavery. Stolen land. Stolen people. Starvation tactics. The purposeful spreading of disease. The glorification of humiliation and sadism. It filters through human history to such a horrific degree that I have often said to my friends that there was a glitch somewhere in human evolution. No other sentient being has behaved as humans have and do. This enormous brain is a liability to any sort of peaceful co-existence. We consistently disrupt the network of life for profit and power. Humans are a plague on this planet and I have lost most sympathy for those who must constantly promote war and brutality with the mistaken belief that that is the only and best solution. For the first time in my life, I am ashamed to be Jewish.
...on October 21st, 2024 at 11:06 pm
Andy Worthington says...
That is such a powerful analysis, Deborah, and everything you say about the US and its history was, of course, also undertaken by my home country, the UK, over many centuries, the only real difference being that we didn’t engage in a genocide at home, and stopped just short of actually enslaving the innumerable indigenous working class people whose toil powered the engines of the Industrial Revolution.
I can’t argue with your assessment of the unmitigated brutality of so many killers throughout history, whose derangement regularly preoccupies me, and it definitely seems to be connected to our brains, and, crucially, our consciousness, the inability to accept death, or the anger that comes from being too conscious.
However, I do – still – take comfort from the fact that it is cooperation not competition that has led to our success – children who have to be looked after and nurtured for years and years, miracles like universal friendliness, which means that, everywhere we go on earth, some fundamental curiosity and kindness means that we are much more likely to be safe than not, and our creativity – our singing (which all earth’s creatures seem to love), our music, writing, art. We can be so amazing. If only the killers understood …
...on October 21st, 2024 at 11:07 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Deborah Emin wrote:
And there’s the rub, is it not, Andy? But I appreciate you and the work you do. I don’t wander this planet in fear. But I know that we are so flawed and that too many have profited from those flaws. Sending love your way.
...on October 22nd, 2024 at 2:50 pm
Andy Worthington says...
And sending love back, Deborah. Let’s hope that, against all the odds, it will be enough.
...on October 22nd, 2024 at 2:50 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote:
We are supposed to feel sorry for the Israeli soldiers apparently.
“Their accounts offer a rare glimpse into the brutality of what critics have called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “forever war,” and the intangible toll it takes on the soldiers who participate.”
“The former soldier has spoken publicly about the psychological trauma endured by Israeli troops in Gaza. In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.””
I have too many thoughts on this and not enough time to type them. I’d be preaching to the choir anyway.
“‘He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him’: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide”:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israeli-soldiers-ptsd-suicide-intl/index.html
...on October 24th, 2024 at 9:10 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, the racist bias is so horrific, Anita – Israelis interviewed as though they’re our own, people like us, while Palestinians, when they’re not being completely ignored (which is most of the time) might garner the odd crumb of pity for the destitution they’ve been driven into by Israel, but almost no one in the media ever bothers to reflect on the rich lives they lived before the genocide began, and how, fundamentally, they were just like us – much more so than the Israelis, in fact, with whom any objective analysis reveals that the most valid comparison would be with the most obnoxious, swaggering people who do so much damage to our own countries.
That said, I do think that the focus on Israeli soldiers’ PTSD is worthwhile, and was struck by the damage caused to this particular individual by the actions in which he took part, as it’s a glimpse into a tsunami of PTSD that may well overwhelm Israeli society in the years to come. War brutalizes everyone forced to take part in it, however heavily propagandized they are, and not even the ‘Chosen People’ are immune to it.
...on October 24th, 2024 at 9:10 am