Gaza: The Normalization of Genocide Through the Complete Complicity of the West and Its Colonization by Israel

25.10.24

Campaigners on the March for Palestine in London on February 2, 2024. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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For a year and three weeks, all decent people around the world have been shocked and disturbed, to an extent unprecedented in our lifetimes, by the intensity of the genocidal fury unleashed by the State of Israel on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, the Chicago-sized “reservation”, into which they were squeezed in 1948, as the nascent Israeli state, in a blood-soaked orgy of extraordinary violence, seized most of what had, for centuries, been Palestinian land.

For a year and three weeks, we have had to watch, powerlessly, as Israel has revisited the messianic genocidal intent that it first unleashed in an unfettered manner 76 years ago, when it erased Palestinian cities, towns and villages, murdering 15,000 civilians and expelling 750,000 others, based on an absurd historical and pseudo-religious claim to the land, dating back 2,000 years. Contextualizing this absurdity, some commentators have pointed out that Israel’s actions are the equivalent to the Italians laying claim to England because it was conquered by their ancestors — the Romans — 2,000 years ago.

This violent supremacism has underpinned the actions of the State of Israel ever since. Throughout the long years from 1948, Israel has refused to ever seriously consider that it should share this contested land with those who called it home. Those expelled — to refugee camps in neighbouring countries — were forbidden the right to return (despite that being a demand agreed upon by the United Nations from the very beginning), those in Israel had to struggle for years to even establish their right to exist as second-class citizens, while those in Gaza and the West Bank have been persistently targeted for marginalization, division, isolation and persistent depredation. Israel claims, risibly, to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, whereas the objective reality is that it is a violent European settler colonial project enforcing a repulsive system of apartheid.

In both Gaza and the West Bank, the conditions for any kind of a tolerable life have been particularly eroded in the 21st century — in the West Bank via a huge barrier wall, checkpoints and the fragmentation of contiguous Palestinian land to facilitate a massive expansion of new Israeli settlements, and in Gaza through a total land, air and sea blockade that was imposed in 2007, whereby Israel controlled every aspect of the entry and exit of goods and people, which led, quite accurately, to the whole of the Gaza Strip being described as an “open-air prison.”

In contrast to the Palestinians, those oppressing them have, for most part, no historical connection to the land, beyond their 2,000-year old religious fantasies. A hundred years ago, just ten percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish, and mostly co-existed peacefully with their neighbours. The aggressors, in their hundreds of thousands, arrived for the most part in the 1920s and 1930s, largely from eastern Europe and Russia, after the British, who were administering Palestine after the First World War, promised — in what seems to have been the deadliest promise in human history — a Jewish State in Palestine to the fanatical supporters of Zionism, a late 19th century settler colonial project with one aim, and one aim alone: to establish, by force, a Jewish homeland on land that, inconveniently, belonged to others.

After October 7 last year, when militants from Hamas and other organizations broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip and embarked on a brief and horrific killing spree in southern Israel, the floodgates to a new and almost unimaginably violent response opened within Israel, with a venomous intensity not seen since 1948.

Since October 7, every restraint on unhinged barbaric behavior that was established in the wake of the Second World War to try to prevent the atrocities of that particular conflict — and especially the Holocaust — from ever happening again has been shredded by Israel.

What the world has been slow to wake up to, however, is how, after an entire year of horrors beyond imagining — with a hundred Palestinians, mostly civilians, killed every single day, on average, and 200 civilians, every day, wounded, many so savagely that Gaza is now home to an avalanche of child amputees — what Israel is doing now, in northern Gaza, is, morally and legally, even worse than what it has been doing for the last year.

To contextualise this, it’s worth looking at how Israel’s genocidal assault has actually involved three different phases.

The first phase of the genocide

The first phase, which took place from October 2023 to May this year, involved relentlessly and systematically razing the Gaza Strip to the ground, from the north to the south, destroying or rendering uninhabitable around two-thirds of the homes of its 2.3 million inhabitants, and also targeting and destroying, or rendering inoperable most of its 36 hospitals, all of its schools and universities, mosques, government buildings, water supplies, sewage works, roads, factories, agricultural land, shops, cafes and restaurants; the list could go on and on.

All of the above are, quite clearly, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocidal actions, and yet, they were justified and fully supported by the majority of the west’s leaders on the basis that Israel had the “right to defend itself”, and that its two stated aims — “eradicating Hamas”, and rescuing the 251 hostages seized on October 7 — were both practical and legally permissible. Also noticeable was a collective amnesia, as the west conspired wholeheartedly to agree with Israel that the events of October 7 took place in a vacuum, and not as part of what, at the time, was a 75-year history of grave and systematic crimes against Palestinians by the Israelis.

In contrast, the truth about Israel’s “right to defend itself” was that, from the beginning, it wasn’t defending itself at all, but was exacting extraordinary vengeance that disguised even deeper and darker aims. The destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was clearly genocidal, involving “deliberately inflicting on [a] group [the Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, while the intensity of its attacks on civilian homes was a clear demonstration of the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as was the aftermath of this sustained destruction — the forced migration, over the last year, of the majority of Gaza’s population from the north and the centre of the Gaza Strip to the south, to promised humanitarian zones that never existed, where they barely subsist in makeshift tents, surrounded by filth and sewage, with barely any medical provision, and where they are still regularly attacked.

From the beginning, Israel never claimed that there were more than 30,000 militants in the Gaza Strip — less than 3% of the total population — and yet they destroyed, or rendered uninhabitable hundreds of thousands of homes through the use of AI programs, which, allegedly, provided them with accurate targets for anyone connected with Hamas or other militant groups.

Genocide through sweepingly ill-defined AI programs

In startling revelations in November, however, published by the Israeli-based +972 Magazine, it was made clear that this allegedly precise targeting was anything but. As +972 Magazine described it, the program “can ‘generate’ targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible”, and was described by a former intelligence officer as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.”

Israelis involved in implementing the program admitted that, as I subsequently described it, it “was not only being used to identify the supposed locations of senior Hamas leaders; it was also revealing the supposed homes of those who are merely ‘junior Hamas operatives’, and approving them for elimination despite the associated loss of civilian lives.”

As one source explained, chillingly, “Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.”

In a follow-up article in April, it was also revealed that, “for every junior Hamas operative that ‘Lavender’ [a second AI program] marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians,” superseding previous rules in which it was not regarded as acceptable for there to be any “collateral damage” during the killing of alleged low-ranking militants. The sources also explained that, “in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”, while, in one particular operation, to kill Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, the army authorized “the killing of approximately 300 civilians” in Al-Bureij refugee camp. A similar death toll occurred in June this year when 276 Palestinian civilians were killed in an operation to rescue four hostages in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

The +972 Magazine article also discussed, in depth, how the ‘Lavender’ program was fed information about most of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million inhabitants, looking for signs of militancy, and also allegedly analogous details throughout the general population, so that, for example, “being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, [or] changing addresses frequently” would be sufficient to become a target. As the sources also explained, the AI program “sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once [unknowingly] belonged to a Hamas operative.”

Throughout this AI-generated slaughter, no checks were ever made, known glitches in the system were ignored, and, as one source explained, when it came to targeting people in their homes — via a program disgustingly called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ — entire families were wiped out, often by mistake. As was explained, on a handful of occasions when post-attack reports emerged, it became clear that the specific target wasn’t present when the bombing took place. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn’t even home”, one source said, adding,”The result is that you killed a family for no reason.”

When ‘Lavender’ was set up, one source explained, the programmers “used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely”, so that “employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants”, were included. By extension it is readily understandable how a vast number of targets evidently weren’t anything to do with any Hamas militancy at all, for one simple reason, consistently overlooked in the west, where many countries have, via Israeli pressure, obligingly designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. The reality is that Hamas was the local government, responsible for running and maintaining the civil infrastructure of Gaza, with a military wing that was entirely unconnected to its civilian affairs.

Once the net was allowed to spread so widely and uncontrollably, however, everyone involved in the functioning of civil society could be described as a low-level Hamas member — bureaucrats, lawyers, policemen, judges, doctors, nurses, teachers, university professors, water engineers, firemen; again, the list goes on and on.

Crucially, however, even what was admitted — which absolutely shredded international humanitarian law regarding the protection of civilians in wartime and any notions of proportionality — failed to capture the true horrors of Israel’s actions.

How, otherwise, are we to explain that, beyond the alleged AI targeting program, over 900 entire extended families — many numbering over a hundred people in total — have been wiped out in their entirety in strike after strike that destroyed entire residential blocks? These attacks were so startlingly persistent in the early months of the genocide that Robert Pape, a US military historian, told the Associated Press in December, “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history”, which sits “in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”

Moreover, the complete annihilation of Gaza — far beyond any notions of AI-targeted attacks — was also made abundantly clear in genocidal statements that poured out of Israel from the very beginning, when senior officials openly called for the entire population of Gaza to be regarded as legitimate military targets. On October 13, 2023, Israel’s Prime Minister, Isaac Herzog, publicly stated, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved”, and on October 28, former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman stated, “There are no innocents in Gaza.”

The only concession given regarding innocence came about when, in February, on Israeli TV, the former Mossad official Rami Igra made the bizarre claim that, “In Gaza, everyone is involved. Everyone voted Hamas. Anyone over the age of four is a Hamas supporter”, although even this meant nothing, as Israel has murdered a huge number of children under the age of four in the months since.

A photo from the March for Palestine in London on November 11, 2023. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Moreover, calls to “kill them all”, with reference to the Palestinians, have become Israel’s unofficial new national anthem, as can be found in the almost uncountable number of calls, from every level of Israel society, for the extermination of every single Palestinian in the Gaza Strip. Just two days ago, at a settler conference calling for the colonization of Gaza, a young Israeli woman, speaking to Sky News, who described her as “friendly, open, eloquent and utterly sure of herself”, proudly declared, when asked what should happen to the Palestinians living in Gaza, “We should kill them, every last one of them”, adding, “And if the government won’t do that then we should just kick them out. This is our land. And we deserve it.”

How all this has been allowed to proceed unchallenged will, one day, be at the heart of cases against a roll-call of western politicians, media commentators, and prominent pro-Israeli individuals across the world — unless, that is, the very concept of international humanitarian law, of fundamental human rights, and of accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are destroyed.

The second phase of the genocide

Moving on to the second phase of Israel’s genocide, this occurred from June to September, when, having crossed the last “red line” supposedly laid down by the US — attacking Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip — Israel found itself running up against the one immovable obstacle to all its plans — the border with Egypt, which, stubbornly, the Egyptian government has persistently refused to open, as the only alternative to Israel’s steady policy of extermination: the expulsion of the entire remaining population of the Gaza Strip into the Sinai desert.

It was at this point that dissent within the Israeli government finally surfaced, as both Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, and opposition politician Benny Gantz, both members, with Netanyahu, of the three-man war cabinet convened after October 7, openly criticized Netanyahu for having no coherent plan for a “day after” in Gaza. Gantz resigned from the war cabinet on June 9, and the military’s concerns were exposed via reports in the Israeli media that “senior IDF officers had become concerned that the lack of an alternative to Hamas [as a post-war government] was forcing the IDF to return and fight in areas where they claimed Hamas had already been defeated.”

As the IDF got caught up in a guerrilla war, and displaced Palestinians were often displaced again as the military responded to regrouped Hamas activity by declaring new military zones and issuing new evacuation orders (sometimes ordering people to move back to where they had already come from), the fundamentally aimless slaughter of civilians — via bombing raids, snipers and armed quadcopters — continued, although, behind the scenes, a new and even more deadly and depraved solution to what looked, in many ways, like a military deadlock, was being discussed, paving the way for what is unfolding now, a “genocide within a genocide” that — extraordinarily, after a year of almost unimaginable atrocities — is now plumbing new depths of human depravity.

The third phase of the genocide, happening right now in northern Gaza

This third phase of Israel’s genocide began three weeks ago in northern Gaza, and it is so profoundly disturbing, and so morally and legally unacceptable, that all Israel’s claims of it having “the right to defend itself” and its stated aims of “eradicating Hamas” and of rescuing the hostages have fallen, like cheap props, to reveal the truth behind them, glimpsed all along, but now fully exposed: in reality, what Israel seeks, and has wanted all along, is nothing less than complete ethnic cleansing, accompanied by sweeping and indiscriminate extermination.

This has been apparent to anyone paying close attention to what Israel has said and done since October 7 last year, but, for Israel’s supporters in the west, it is an alarming wake-up call, shining a spotlight on their unquestioning complicity in every atrocity that Israel has undertaken over the last year.

The “Generals Plan”, mooted last month, but implemented, without any fanfare, on October 1, and named after the retired general, Giora Eiland, who championed it, called for the complete depopulation of the whole of northern Gaza, where as many as 400,000 Palestinians still live (or did on October 1), having refused, or having been unable to comply with previous evacuation orders.

According to the “Generals Plan”, new evacuation orders would be issued, and, within a week, those who remained would be starved into submission, or summarily executed, on the unforgivably illegal basis that, if they refused to leave, they could all legitimately be regarded as “terrorists”, or, in a chilling echo of the “war on terror”, as “enemy combatants.” This malignant proposal has, of course, no basis whatsoever in international law, as civilians cannot magically become combatants if they refuse, or are unable to comply with a sweeping evacuation order that purports to transform entire civilian areas into military zones.

As well as being completely illegal in the most depraved manner — and also because it ignores the inability of many elderly people to leave their homes, or those with serious medical conditions, or those in hospitals, including the severely ill or  wounded, or premature babies on life support machines — the plan has also been implemented in a diabolical manner that has collapsed all of its supposed stages — willing evacuation, starvation and summary executions — into one.

The starvation came first, as all supplies — of food, water, fuel and medical supplies — were cut off on October 1, and mass killings and summary executions began just days later, with barely any opportunity given for anyone to flee, and with many of those who tried being targeted by snipers and armed quadcopters.

Day after day for the last three weeks, civilians have been relentlessly bombed in their homes, and sniper and quadcopter executions have continued to be widespread, while other depraved actions from the last year have also resurfaced — the horrendously illegal “war on hospitals” that was such a hallmark of the early months of the genocide, and the rounding up of civilians, forcibly separated by gender, with the women and children mostly forced to head south on foot, while the men — and boys over 14 — are sifted through, with an untold number arbitrarily disappeared, hooded and bound on convoys of trucks, and taken to Israel’s brutal and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians, where at least 10,000 people are detained in flagrantly lawless conditions, and where, as has been repeatedly reported (most recently by a UN commission of inquiry), torture, rape and murder are widespread.

A photo posted on X today (October 25, 2024), of doctors, nurses and displaced men and boys, separated from the women and girls, after the Kamal Adwan Hospital was invaded by the IDF. The photo was posted by Hossam Shabat, one of the few surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, who, with four colleagues, was targeted by Israel two days ago, via a media release that falsely claimed that they had all previously worked as “terrorists” for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

These latest horrors are finally starting to raise the tiniest of ripples of concern in western governments, because it is now so nakedly obvious that what is happening shatters its pretence that Israel’s aims are anything other than wholesale ethnic cleansing and extermination.

Israel was previously aware that any attempt to permanently claim land in the Gaza Strip as its own would cross a particularly glaring “red line” — in particular, the repeated resolutions passed by the United Nations confirming that Gaza (and the West Bank and East Jerusalem) constitute the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and, as was confirmed in a groundbreaking opinion by the International Court of Justice in July, that every aspect of their occupation is illegal.

As a result, throughout the entire first year of its relentless assaults on Gaza, Israel largely refused to be pinned down on its deeper, more long-term aspirations, but everything is now coming out into the light.

Although the “Generals Plan” proposed creating a “closed military zone” in the whole of northern Gaza, just this week, settlers — represented by the openly genocidal far-right minsters in Netanyahu’s coalition government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and by the fanatical settler matriarch, Daniella Weiss — held a two-day conference just outside the Gaza Strip, at which they made clear what is behind that plan: the colonization of northern Gaza and the creation of Israeli settlements.

Concerns about ethnic cleansing are also starting to reverberate in the west in relation to Lebanon, a sovereign nation that Israel began attacking on September 23, using its Gaza textbook to destroy entire residential blocks, and attacking hospitals, on the same spurious basis of targeting militants (this time in connection with Hezbollah rather than Hamas), forcing the evacuation of over a million people, and, while striking terror into cities including the capital, Beirut, focusing specifically, in terms of ethnic cleansing, on the whole of southern Lebanon, with the same intent, as in Gaza, to depopulate it, and then to claim it, occupy it and set up Israeli settlements.

The threat to us all

With the west now in the spotlight, as its indulgence of Israel’s unspeakable horrors, for an entire year, on the spurious basis of self-defence, has now been fully exposed as a charade, the time has come to fully reflect on how all of this has been supposedly justified by one single day of armed resistance, and how thoroughly bankrupt is the notion that these attacks occurred in a vacuum.

Never in history has a single, day-long killing spree by the military wing of an oppressed people caused the whole of the west to unite in endorsing, supporting and unconditionally arming a genocidal response of such extraordinary severity, only for it to be revealed, eventually, that, all along, it was nothing but a naked European settler colonial project involving either the ethnic cleansing or the extermination of an entire people.

Western leaders were so caught up in manufactured hysteria around faked claims of 40 beheaded babies and mass, systemic rapes, or so caught up in the excitement of mass murdering Muslims (as with Netanyahu’s visit to Congress in July, when he was greeted as the greatest hero in human history) that they completely overlooked the deadly context. The events of October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum; they came after 75 years of largely one-sided aggression (on Israel’s part), in which Gaza was regularly bombed and attacked in actions sickeningly described by Israel as “mowing the lawn”, and in which, over the previous 15 years, 20 Palestinians had been killed for every Israeli (around 6,000 Palestinians to 300 Israelis).

This was never about Hamas or the hostages; it was about taking final vengeance on a people that Israel had been working assiduously, for 76 years, to silence, and to force into abject helplessness, to kill as many of them as possible, and then to take over their land.

And yet, even now, as the wholesale ethnic cleansing or extermination of 400,000 people in northern Gaza is being so alarmingly exposed, western leaders — and, particularly, the western media — continue to indulge patently risible Israeli claims that every single one of its bombing raids, whose sole purpose has, by now, been clearly revealed as a more pretext for the mass extermination of civilians, is aimed at eliminating military targets, a persistent and pernicious lie that should have been irrevocably discredited.

The international body that is supposed to be able to stop exactly what Israel is doing — the United Nations, whose founding was supposed to prevent another Holocaust from ever taking place — has found itself unable to act, largely because of the veto power of the US, one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who, as the alleged “victors” in the Second World War, gave themselves the right to override the will of the majority.

The Security Council is the only body in the UN that can enforce action — implementing sanctions, for example, or establishing a peacekeeping force — but, stymied by the US, it is powerless, even after its court, the International Court of Justice, concluded, in January, that Israel was engaged in a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, and issued provisional measures to address the escalating atrocities, which were completely ignored by Israel, which, instead, launched a diversionary propaganda war against UNWRA, the UN agency responsible for providing aid to Palestinians, accusing it having been infiltrated by Hamas members involved in the October 7 attacks, yet another groundless lie that was, nevertheless, enthusiastically allied up by the western media, and by political leaders who rushed to strip UNWRA of its funding.

With the UN powerless, the responsibility for stopping the genocide rests with the powerful countries supporting Israel — primarily the US, but also Germany, the UK, and other countries in the west.

All, however, have allowed — or have willingly embraced — the colonization by Israel of their foreign policy, their sole purpose now being to support and defend Israel, however barbaric its actions, to keep providing it with weapons and military and assistance, and to continuing doing so even if it destroys the very existence of international humanitarian law, returning us to a world in which only might makes right.

Our leaders are ushering in a world of such depravity, unlike after the Second World War, when the surviving senior officials who were responsible for the Nazis’ Holocaust were tried and found guilty, that this time around Israel’s Holocaust of the Palestinians will not only go unpunished, it will become mandatory to celebrate it, it will provide a chilling template for future conflicts, especially those involving any kind of armed resistance to western- or western-backed oppression, and it will lead to a permanent erosion of free speech, the right to protest and the right to dissent in the west.

As Craig Mokhiber, the former UN official who resigned in the early days of the genocide, in protest at the powerlessness of the international community to prevent Israel’s actions, stated recently on X, “Israel and its proxies are creating the blueprint for the 21st century by bulldozing the boundaries of acceptable state behavior. If systematic torture, summary executions, massacres, murder of children, doctors, journalists, humanitarians and all civilians are acceptable, if international law is no longer in effect, if apartheid and genocide are now OK, we are all in trouble.”

He added that “Israeli proxies are also eroding free speech and human rights across the west”, and concluded by stating, “193 governments are watching. Don’t kid yourself. You could be next. Isolate the Israeli regime. Arrest its leaders. Deploy a protection force. Stop it here and now.”

David Miller, a British academic who won a significant employment case in the UK this year, when, after being dismissed from Bristol University for alleged antisemitism, an employment tribunal found that he was unfairly dismissed and subjected to discrimination because his “anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a philosophical belief and as a protected characteristic” under Section 10 of the 2010 Equality Act, recently spelled out the battle lines even more starkly. In a post on X, he wrote about how the State of Israel — under its Zionist government — has turned the entire world into a war zone.

As he described it, “The war in the Levant has no borders, because Zionism has no borders. So when you, in Britain or France or Germany, are having mosques shut down and Muslim homes are raided and academics are fired and journalists are arrested by ‘counter-terror’ police, that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel. Your state is at war with you because the State of Israel is at war with you. And the soldiers of Zion have penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy; penetrated the media to make you a public enemy; and penetrated political parties to create extremist foot soldiers who will execute their strategies in government.”

Miller urged all clear-minded people in the west to recognize this, and to “wak[e] up from the stupor of denialism to accept that there is a global, maximalist, eliminationist war being waged against Islam and Muslims (and all dissenters to Jewish supremacy) by the State of Israel.”

As he added, “Understand that the Zionist movement, and Jewish supremacists in general, fight this war by occupying institutions, whether the state or local activist groups or your council or even your mosque. It’s not just about ‘the lobby’ and mega-donors. The war goes all the way down, street to street, everywhere in Europe. Wherever you find Jewish supremacists, you will find the war. Confront it where you find it.”

As he proceeded to explain, urging a move away from mass public protests, which, while they they were “symbolic and raised morale in Palestine in the early days of the war, do nothing material to prevent the genocide or create accountability for its perpetrators”, it is crucial to recognize that “the perpetrators of this genocide are all around you. Donors to the IDF and to other Zionist institutions may be on your street or in your workplace and certainly in your neighbourhood or your city. Zionist ‘charities’, which funnel cash for the purpose of Zionist terrorism, or to advance the cause of Jewish supremacism, are in all the major British cities. They cannot be allowed to operate as normal while perpetrating this genocide. We in Britain may not liberate Palestine, but Palestine may liberate us.”

Miller is undoubtedly correct. The effects of “iron-clad” government support for Israel’s shameful, lawless, murderous apartheid regime over 76 years (leading now to a genocide) have infected every aspect of our lives in the west. We can all tell, if we reflect on it, that Hollywood, for example, refuses to allow any product to emerge that humanizes the Palestinians or portrays their struggle as valid — while persistently reinforcing notions of the Jewish people as the only victims of history through films dealing with the Nazi Holocaust.

In addition, it is all too clear, alarmingly, that the major newsrooms of the west are also controlled by individuals who, if they are not Zionists themselves, support Israel to such an extent — or perhaps, in some cases, fear reprisals to such a extent — that a genocide has been taking place for a year with so little outrage expressed on TV or in our newspapers that anyone not paying much attention wouldn’t even know that a genocidal entity that purports to be our friend is slaughtering babies and children with such malevolence and glee that even the most violent offerings of our entertainment industry — war films, dystopian imaginings, the entire genre of “horror” — is being superseded by reality.

If you think any of the above sounds alarmist — or even, more depressingly, “antisemitic” — then you’re either not paying attention, or are complicit in horrors beyond tolerance. Nothing defines the times we are living in with such absolute moral clarity as the need to not only stop Israel’s genocide, but also to throughly repudiate the repugnant basis of its undertaking — the sickness at the heart of Israeli society, which slaughters with sickening glee, while still insisting that it is the victim — and to recognize that, in the west, no one with any connection to Israel can be trusted unless they too thoroughly repudiate its actions and the sick mentality driving it.

If we don’t come together to condemn these horrors, to repudiate them and to remove from positions of power and influence everyone invested in justifying them, the future looks very bleak indeed. Not only will Israel feel free to exterminate the entire Palestinian population, and much of the Lebanese population, but we in the west will find ourselves silenced, losing our jobs or imprisoned, in a dystopian future in which armed quadcopters fill our skies with their merciless buzzing, and any movement that looks like establishing meaningful resistance will be suppressed without mercy.

* * * * *

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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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

15 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    My latest long read about Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, focusing on the horrendous policy being implemented in the north, to ethnically cleanse or exterminate the entire remaining population, of around 400,000 people.

    Through a review of the first year of Israel’s assault, in which it claimed “the right to defend itself”, for which it received unconditional support from most of the government’s of the west, whilst also claiming that its aims were “eliminating Hamas” and rescuing the hostages seized on October 7 last year, I demonstrate how, with the implementation of this latest phase of its attacks, it has crossed a line into actions that cannot be defended through any of the excuses noted above.

    Israel has crossed a line by seeking to depopulate the whole of the north of the Gaza Strip, prior to it being declared a “closed military zone”, because the wholesale ethnic cleansing it has been undertaking for the last three weeks (allegedly to force everyone to evacuate to the south), accompanied by the intensity of its extermination of the civilian population, is making clear that its alleged aims of only pursuing military targets is nothing but a lie, behind which, as with Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon, stands a now-exposed and profoundly illegal hunger for repopulating northern Gaza, and southern Lebanon, with Israeli settlements.

    In northern Gaza, civilians are being slaughtered in their hundreds, in attacks on homes and schools sheltering displaced civilians, hospitals are, yet again, being attacked, where desperately ill patients, including children, who cannot evacuate anywhere, have been killed just today, the only journalists still alive to show the world what is happening are being targeted, and civilian men and boys, separated from the women and children, are, yet again, being stripped and bound and “disappeared”, taken to Israel’s unaccountable torture prisons for Palestinians.

    I also focus on how western complicity in these crimes is being exposed like never before, as Israel’s pretence of self-defence has evaporated, and stress how important it is for those of us in the west to recognize how our governments have been so thoroughly colonized by Israel that our own freedoms are also gravely threatened, because, to protect Israel and to continue supporting its actions, despite their startling brutality and illegality, our leaders seem determined to permanently erode the right to free speech, the right to protest and the right to dissent in any meaningful manner whatsoever.

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    As a sign of how inadequate mainstream media coverage is, the Guardian has, today, finally addressed the implementation of the “Generals Plan” for the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, via analysis by Bethan McKernan, based in Jerusalem. As she assesses the various strategies discussed within Israel in recent months, she suggests that, although the IDF and the Israeli government “deny carrying out a deliberate ‘surrender or starve’ campaign and say the new offensive is necessary to stop Hamas fighters regrouping”, the “Generals Plan” “forms a clear blueprint” for Israel’s actions in northern Gaza over the last three weeks.

    Then, however, she states, without commenting on it, that “Senior Israeli defence officials recently told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the government’s wider aim was now annexing large parts of the Palestinian territory.” Her failure to add any analysis is pretty disgraceful, to be honest, as she should have added something like, “even though that is completely illegal under international law, and exposes how Israel’s stated aims over the last years of its operations in Gaza – to ‘defend itself’, to ‘eliminate Hamas’ and to rescue the hostages – have given way to a much more troubling position, whereby Israel is now claiming that it has some kind of ‘right’ to permanently seize Palestinian land.”

    She should also have mentioned the ruling in July by the International Court of Justice, which definitively ruled that Israel’s entire 57-year control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) is illegal, and ordered Israel to end its occupation. The violent land grab underway in northern Gaza is a blatantly contemptuous repudiation of the Court’s authority, and any conscientious reporter should have discussed it.

    Here’s the article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/26/israel-generals-plan-clear-north-gaza-palestinians

    And here’s my analysis of the ICJ ruling in July: https://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2024/07/23/what-now-after-the-world-court-condemns-as-unlawful-israels-entire-57-year-occupation-of-the-palestinian-territories/

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    Annalise Zaverdinos wrote:

    Absolutely HORROR UPON HORROR. What is going to be “acceptable behaviour” in wars going forward? 1,000 dead used to shock us … but now apparently we need tens of thousands to make the powerful even blink. Murdering and taking DOCTORS prisoner? Seriously???

  4. Andy Worthington says...

    Good to hear from you, Annalise – and your sense of outrage is absolutely appropriate. It seems to me that what’s happening in northern Gaza is that, having spent a year determined to ethnically cleanse the whole of northern and central Gaza through ordering everyone to evacuate to the south, Israel is so furious that some people dared to refuse to leave – either because they were too elderly or too ill, or because they possessed a defiant spirit of resistance – that their twisted minds have concluded that, this time around, no one must be allowed to resist.

    And when the order is for complete ethnic cleansing, that leads to the horrors we’ve been seeing for the last three weeks, where, in particular, the plight of the elderly and the ill, who cannot evacuate, is completely disregarded, and the “logic” of the mission even extends to the three surviving hospitals, which must be destroyed or decommissioned to force everyone to leave.

    In essence – disregarding, for a moment, the brave resisters, who don’t want to abandon their homes forever, because they know they’ll never be allowed back – the core of this latest deadly phase of the genocide is a war on the weak, the elderly, the ill and the disabled, those who cannot evacuate, but who are marked for death because of it.

    If that’s not a cause for alarm in the west, then I don’t know what is.

  5. Andy Worthington says...

    Following up on the siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital yesterday, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital’s director, who tried to keep it functioning while besieged and attacked for three weeks by the IDF, was forced to surrender with his staff, and has now disappeared, presumably into an Israeli torture prison. There’s a short video here featuring this brave dedicated doctor having to surrender with two staff members: https://x.com/GuantanamoAndy/status/1849943303048888831

  6. Andy Worthington says...

    Earlier, the Israelis killed a doctor, Dr. Mohammad Zahir, inside the Indonesian hospital. I doubt this will even be mentioned anywhere in the western media: https://x.com/GuantanamoAndy/status/1849816933178204164

  7. Andy Worthington says...

    It’s extremely difficult to ascertain exactly what’s happening at Kamal Adwan Hospital, after yesterday’s raid by Israeli forces, in which the entire medical staff were forced to leave, most were obliged to strip down to their underwear, and were blindfolded and taken elsewhere – presumably to one of Israel’s torture prisons for Palestinians.

    It seems that Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, the hospital’s brave director, who was seen having to surrender yesterday, has also been “disappeared”, but the fate of the hospital’s patients remains unknown – with the exception of the handful of children in the ICU who died after Israeli forces hit the hospital’s oxygen supply.

    For Al Jazeera, Hani Mahmoud suggests that 150 or so patients, many critical ill, and including many children, are still trapped inside the hospital, with – now – no medical staff, and no food or water. https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/1850093483698291047

  8. Andy Worthington says...

    In a horrible update, it is now being reported that the Israeli military has killed – presumably in a targeted attack – the teenage son of Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital. Israel’s depravity knows no limits. https://x.com/NourNaim88/status/1850120780094317022

  9. Andy Worthington says...

    Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that Dr. Abu Safiya hasn’t been abducted, that he attended his son’s funeral, and is back at the hospital, still trying to keep his patients alive. He wrote (translated from Arabic), “This lofty mountain that stood firm, runs Kamal Adwan Hospital under bombardment and death. He bids farewell to his son Hossam this morning, then returns to his work, patient, steadfast, and content.” https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1850131498063499292

    As of yesterday, there were apparently 15 seriously ill patients, including children, in the ICU, although several of them are thought to have died after Israeli attacks struck the hospital’s oxygen supply. https://x.com/EuroMedHR/status/1850132619066855815

  10. Andy Worthington says...

    Annalise Zaverdinos wrote, in response to 4, above:

    Andy, you put it so well, thank you. I am so angry and heartbroken right now for the people of Gaza who have lost everything. EVERYTHING.

    Again, thank you for all your work.

  11. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks for the supportive words, Annalise. It’s the least I can do. These horrors have taken over my life, as they have for anyone who retains their fundamental humanity, and as a writer I can only try to play my part to counter the refusal of the western media to unequivocally condemn Israel for its actions over the last 55 weeks.

  12. Andy Worthington says...

    Tamzin Jans wrote:

    The worst aspect of all this is that the Western hegemonies are denying the aid of other nations who want to stop this genocide!

  13. Andy Worthington says...

    The international order is broken, Tamzin. The majority of the countries of the world want to help the Palestinians and stop Israel, but the UN’s ability to act is undermined by the US veto power in the Security Council. It’s also troubling how inadequate the response to this unprecedented year-long slaughter has been in general from Muslim countries – and particularly the oil-rich Arab countries.

  14. Andy Worthington says...

    Aasifa Reshi wrote:

    Thanks always, Andy. May the violent and belligerent white imperialism shatter – and waiting for justice and peace.

  15. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks for the supportive words, Aasifa. It’s very definitely white western imperialism against the rest of the world, isn’t it, and hopefully its death throes. It’s relentlessly depressing beyond belief to see hw there are no depths of depravity to which Israel won’t sink, and no horrors sufficient to awaken empathy and outrage in the hearts of western leaders and most of those in charge of the western media.

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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