Israel’s Collective Genocidal Sickness, the West’s Complicity, and the Messianic Colonialism Behind It All

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If your son or daughter was murdered, and you responded, in your grief, by suggesting that 2.3 million people should be murdered in retaliation, and if, moreover, you had the means to fulfil your vengeful fantasies, mental health experts would be alarmed, and would seek an urgent intervention.

This, however, is what happened not just to individuals, but, collectively, to almost the whole of Israeli society after the deadly attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, in which, according to official Israeli figures, 1,068 Israeli citizens and 71 foreign citizens were killed, and 251 others were taken back to the Gaza Strip as hostages.

That is a significant number of people, and no excuse can be made for it — although strenuous efforts to claim that it occurred in a vacuum, as if through the exercise of pure evil for its own sake, fail, crucially, to recognize that it happened as the result of a multi-generational conflict between a colonial oppressor (the State of Israel) and an oppressed and occupied people (the Palestinians) that has been ongoing for 76 years, and that has involved, over the years, and before the latest horrors, the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, in numbers that dwarf the number of Israelis killed over that same period.

Since October 7, and Israel’s monstrously violent response, in which at least two-thirds of Gaza’s entire infrastructure has been destroyed, at least 50,000 people — mostly civilians — have been killed, and almost the entire population has been driven from their homes, the notion that what the State of Israel has been seeking is the complete extermination of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip has never been far from my mind, encouraged, from the very beginning, by senior Israeli officials, who made clear their genocidal intent.

The numerous examples include the defense minister Yoav Gallant stating on October 9 that he had ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza and that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel” and that “everything is closed”, and his comments the day after, when he told Israel troops, “I have released all restraints … We are fighting human animals … Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.” Also of huge significance was a statement on October 12 by Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who said, unambiguously, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true.”

As the 1948 Genocide Convention explains, the complete extermination of a people is not necessary for a genocide to take place; instead, it is the intent that must be identified, the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, by, primarily, “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, and/or “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

On all of these counts, Israel has clearly been engaged in a genocide in Gaza, as the International Court of Justice recognized in January, when, in response to a case brought against Israel by South Africa, they warned of a “plausible genocide”, and ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of [the] Convention”, via “provisional measures” that Israel then contemptuously ignored.

Since January, equally damning opinions have followed — by the ICJ, in July, regarding the illegality of the whole of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967, via a UN Committee of Inquiry establishing war crimes and “extermination” in Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, and the brutally lawless state of its prisons for Palestinians, via two reports by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, entitled, “Anatomy of a Genocide”, and “Genocide as colonial erasure”, via another UN Committee recently establishing that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”, and, most recently, via the unprecedented issuing of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The everyday genocidal corruption of the Israeli psyche

In recent days, I’ve been preoccupied by a video posted on X by the anti-genocide activist B.M., based in Israel, in which he added subtitles in English to what he accurately called “an openly genocidal rant”, delivered at a recent Constitution, Law and Justice Committee meeting in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) by the mother of a young woman who was murdered at the Nova Festival on October 7.

“I would like to address all the higher-ups, I hear all kinds of decisions and I do not understand how it could be that what you care about is the good of our enemies, and not the good of our soldiers”, she said, adding, crucially, “How do you tie their hands and prevent them from fighting without restrictions against monsters? No, no, no uninvolved, there is no such a thing. All of them, all of them have blood on their hands, all of them are guilty, and all of them need to be annihilated.”

This was the source of my opening paragraph, in which I reflected on the horror of a bereaved mother believing that it is entirely appropriate that 2.3 million people should be murdered as revenge for her daughter’s murder, but it is, of course, just one example of the normalization of extreme genocidal intent — involving the extermination of the entire population of the Gaza Strip — in the Israeli psyche.

Another notable example concerns a podcast called “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, Israel’s longest-running English language podcast, in which, in one broadcast, the hosts, Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein, fantasized about the following: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second.”

From the violently angry to the apparently flippant and off-hand, the most monstrous genocidal intent — calling for or fantasizing about the complete extermination of 2.3 million people — has permeated Israeli society ever since October 7 last year, with barely a murmur of dissent anywhere in the west, whose political leaders and mainstream media have, for the most part, provided absolutely uncritical support for all its war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.

The extraordinary extent of western complicity 

Western leaders and media gatekeepers have provided this uncritical support on the basis that Israel has “a right to defend itself”, as though the restraints imposed by international law are simply incapable of exerting any kind of limits on how Israel behaves militarily. On occasion, when challenged, broken and corrupted politicians like David Lammy, the British foreign secretary, have suggested that what is happening is not a genocide, because not enough people have been killed, as though the death toll is not mind-bogglingly grave and sickening enough in and of itself, and as though he has never actually read the Genocide Convention, which does not measure genocide through “a numerical threshold”, as 37 NGOs explained to him in an open letter.

While western leaders — and, perhaps, major media figures — will, I believe, one day be held accountable for their complicity in knowingly pretending that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions have not been taking place in the Gaza strip for nearly 14 months, it continues to be fundamentally inexplicable that — at least since the ICJ ruling in January — they refused to accept that Israel had to be stopped.

It’s not as though they even have any contemporary reference point for the scale of Israel’s still-undimmed and unparalleled sense of revenge and retribution.

Take 9/11, for example. Had it been a nation state that attacked the US mainland on September 11, 2001, it seems reasonable to assume that an assault akin to Israel’s relentless annihilation of the Gaza Strip would have happened. But Al-Qaeda wasn’t a nation state, and although the US (and their allies) took vengeance on the Afghan people, and later, for entirely spurious reasons, on the Iraqi people, they never even came close to the Israelis’ notion that revenge demanded the total extermination of 2.3 million people.

I concede that, in terms of the loss of life, the US managed, at the very least, to make sure that, for every one person killed on 9/11, 200 Muslims died in Afghanistan and Iraq, where a conservative estimate of the collective death toll is 600,000 people. And if you were to ask the most racist, gung-ho members of the military, they would probably try to claim that many of these people were terrorists.

Nothing, however, comes close to the dehumanization of the Palestinians by Israel, or the hunger for their complete extermination. In terms of numbers, that ratio from the “war on terror” now seems too have been replicated by Israel, because, as medical experts have established, it is entirely reasonable to suggest that the indirect deaths from Israel’s exterminating policies mean that the true death toll will be over 200,000 — or, in other words, 200 Palestinians for every one Israeli killed on October 7.

However, Israel hasn’t even remotely run out of enthusiasm for killing Palestinians in Gaza, and is still slaughtering civilians in their hundreds every day, as they seek to ethnically cleanse the whole of northern Gaza, and, when it comes to justifying their actions, they continue to behave as though it is acceptable because, to cite that notorious phrase again, there are no “uninvolved.” Everyone is guilty, from the just-born baby to the oldest of great-grandparents, and, fundamentally, everyone is regarded as a terrorist.

It’s important to ask where this particularly extreme dehumanization came from, although the answer to that is quite simple — unless you’re amongst the majority of the Israeli people.

Israel as the last European settler-colonial project

Israel, as a nation state, was founded in blood in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered and 750,000 exiled forever from their ancestral homes. This happened because hundreds of thousands of Jews had been invited by the British, the then-custodians of Palestine, to come, mostly from Europe and Russia, to set up a Jewish homeland on somebody else’s land in the 1920s and 1930s, massively outnumbering the existing Jewish population, who had been more or less peacefully coexisting with their Arab and Christian neighbours. The claim that Palestine somehow “belongs” to the Jews because of ancient religious prophesies is as absurd as Italians invading England and claiming it as their own because they conquered it 2,000 years ago.

Israel, then, is a European settler-colonial project, and like all settler-colonial projects it is based on conquest and subjugation on the one hand, and fear on the other. That fear is that the indigenous people might rise up, which, of course, encourages even greater repression. Largely unknown to the settler-colonial mentality is another, darker whisper that they try to hide: that they are never at home, because they stole other people’s land and are living on it.

This explanation partly explains why the US power base is so overwhelmingly supportive of Israel; because they too are a settler-colonial nation, still afflicted by the same hunger for conquest and subjugation, and the same unvoiced fears — in the US, primarily, of the former slaves, rather than the indigenous Americans who were largely exterminated by the end of the 19th century. And as with Israel, they also carry the settlers’ buried existential crisis: that they are never at home, because they stole someone else’s land.

This aggression and this fear isn’t something that should have so easily gripped countries in Europe, because most of our colonial oppressions — truly horrific, and in many cases enduring until comparatively recently — took place abroad, and not at home.

However, two additional factors are also at play; firstly, collective European guilt because of the Holocaust (and the long centuries of Jewish persecution that preceded it), and, secondly, the presence of prominent pro-Israeli individuals in positions where they have a powerful influence on politics and the media. We need only look at cowed newsrooms and editorial departments to see how fearful the mainstream media has become of upsetting sensibilities in connection with Israel, and, in politics, to look at how political lobbying has been so persistent and so successful that no one is allowed into a position of power unless they are loyal to Israel.

With the genocide, it has become uncomfortably apparent that these processes have been so successful that nation states in the west are serving Israel before their own interests, and, in the process, are prepared to tolerate and support a genocide, and to destroy the very basis of the laws established after the Second World War to try to prevent such horrors from ever happening again.

Perhaps this shocking complicity will finally turn with the ICC arrest warrants, which have at last exposed a truth that, until last week, western leaders evidently through could be endlessly deferred — except in the US, which would rather destroy international law and any notion of an international order than stop Israel’s genocide. However, it is still appallingly apparent that, while a clear majority of the citizens of the west care deeply about what is happening to the Palestinians, and are not fooled, if they ever were, by Israel’s absurd apartheid-washing propaganda that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, our leaders are still reluctant to properly confront what Israel is and what is stands for.

“Manifest destiny” and gentrification

In many ways, I think, western politicians and the media are much more inclined to support Israel’s allegedly “urbane” city dwellers than they are to support its messianic settlers. The latter, it must now be clear — exercising extraordinary power in Netanyahu’s coalition government via the two far-right settler ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, one the national security minister, and the other the finance minister — want nothing less than the total colonization of the Gaza Strip, and the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and, if they could get their way, a Greater Israel stretching into Lebanon, Syria and beyond.

When pressed, these messianic fanatics — and their equally fanatical colleagues, like the settler evangelist Daniella Weiss — suggest that the five million Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory should “voluntarily emigrate”, even though there is nowhere for them to go, as no other country will take them, not least because the land is their home, and they have a right to it under international law. Scratch the surface, however, and this alleged “humanitarian” deportation plan is nothing more than a cover for unceasing slaughter.

While most of the settler mentality has rather too much of a wild west flavour for Europeans, for many American Republicans it is redolent of the “manifest destiny”, with which they conquered the whole of the US in the 19th century. City-dwelling Democrats, in contrast, are much more likely to see urban Israel as consisting of people like “us”, civilized people beset by savages (a deep-seated anti-Arab racism that refuses to recognize how educated and capable the Palestinians are), with, as I see it it, a particularly horrendous undertone.

This undertone involves a belief that, against these “savages”, the apparently urbane, upwardly mobile, successful Israelis are actually engaged in cutting-edge gentrification, planning to turn Gaza into a luxury beach resort, and having demonstrated, through Israel’s very existence, that “civilization” can blossom in what would otherwise, apparently — and, again, in a racist denial of reality — be an infidel desert.

In this particular twisted modern western mindset, the entire Israeli project is actually a grand gentrification project, an ambitious version of the gentrification that constrained western planners can only do piecemeal in western cities, as they destroy neighbourhoods where the poor inconveniently live on land that the rich want — a process of colonialism repackaged as 21st century progress.

And just as Israel’s supporters in the west admire this supposedly gentrified outpost of western values, many Jewish people in the west have been even more seduced by the lies — projecting onto Israel the baseless notion of a violent, paranoid apartheid state as a “refuge” from persecution, taking the gentrifiers’ arrogance so much to heart that they relocate to Israel, or take second homes there, gaily disposing of Palestinians from their homes as they do so, and raising uncomfortable questions, as with their non-Jewish Zionist supporters in the west, about which country’s interests they are actually serving.

This dream, at least, now seems to be crumbling, as many of the gentrifiers flee, Israel’s economy starts to collapse under the weight of living for nothing any more except the endless, pointless butchering of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, and as the noose of international justice finally begins to tighten around the necks of Netanyahu and Gallant, who, whatever else happens, will find forever more that there are few countries anywhere in the world where they can safely travel.

However, even as western leaders anxiously consult with their hitherto spurned legal advisers about questions of complicity, the great aching horror still remains: Israel is still killing Palestinians every minute of every day in Gaza, is still, via Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, enabling ever greater violence in the West Bank, is still bombing Lebanon as though it were Gaza a year ago, and is still, again via Ben-Gvir, holding 20,000 Palestinians in prisons so vile that they would make the most brutal dictators blanch.

If the Israelis themselves are still so consumed with genocidal fury that they can’t see that they need to change course, and with the US apparently lost, we need these long-spurned legal advisers in the west to tell their leaders, in no uncertain terms, that, if they don’t act to curb Israel’s apparently insatiable hunger for endless genocide, they will not only be held complicit in the undertaking of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide; they will also lose their own humanity, and, in the process, will be responsible for turning back the clock to an age where only brute force reigns, and no one, however depraved their actions, can ever be held accountable for anything they do.

Surely a much better course of action is, simply, the one that Israel and its most bullish allies won’t recognize. All Israel has to do is to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders, as persistently demanded by the UN and other international bodies, and hand over full sovereignty and self-determination to the Palestinian people.

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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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