The Soul-Shredding Horror of Israel’s Unstoppable Genocide in Gaza

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Since the State of Israel broke the ceasefire agreement with Hamas after its first six-week phase ended on March 1, imposing a total ban on all supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel entering Gaza on March 2, and, on March 18, resuming its savage and largely indiscriminate bombing of a trapped civilian population, the silence of world leaders — and most of the world’s mainstream media — has confirmed their fundamental complicity in the most well-publicized atrocity that most of us have ever experienced in our lives.

Most of the world’s leaders and the mainstream media were already damned, of course, having failed to do everything in their power — or, in fact, anything at all — to stop Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza after the first few weeks, or certainly, the first few months of what was clearly a sustained project of extermination, incomparable in scale to anything except the original assault on the Palestinians in 1948 that led to the atrocity-soaked founding of the State of Israel, when over 15,000 Palestinians were killed, towns and villages were erased, to be replaced by new Israeli towns and villages, and 750,000 Palestinians were exiled permanently from their homes.

The erasure of Gaza, from those early months to the start of the ceasefire, 15 and a half months later, was so sustained that almost the entirety of its built environment was destroyed, including most of its housing, and, most cynically, its hospitals, its water supplies and its sewage treatment plants, and at least 50,000 people — mostly civilians — were killed, although the larger death toll, taking in indirect deaths, through disease, starvation, dehydration and the destruction of almost the entire medical and healthcare system, will run into the hundreds of thousands.

Under the terms of the Genocide Convention of 1948, Israel was clearly engaged in genocidal actions, defined in Article II as “the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”; namely, “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 “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

On January 26, 2024, in response to a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa, the International Court of Justice — the UN’s court, also known as the World Court — responded to the unprecedented horror in Gaza by issuing provisional measures that recognized the plausibility of an unfolding genocide, requiring Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of [the Genocide] Convention”, to “take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip” (including by senior Israeli officials, as chronicled in its ruling), and to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Israel, however, ignored the ruling, stepping up its military attacks, refusing to stem the tide of genocidal filth emanating from the mouths of its politicians, military figures and pundits, and responding to the demand for increased humanitarian aid by cynically pretending that the main aid organization in Gaza, UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), had been infiltrated by Hamas militants.

Throughout 2024, as, on a daily basis, Israel continued to demonstrate its complete contempt for the UN and the Genocide Convention, the world’s leaders continued to fail the Palestinians, refusing to take any action whatsoever to bring the genocidal assault to an end — failing to ban arms sales to Israel, failing to impose sanctions or to undertake divestment from Israeli companies and organizations, failing to condemn, unequivocally, the unprecedented destruction of an entire land and the remorseless extermination of its people, and failing to obey an astonishingly pertinent advisory opinion by the ICJ in July 2024, which declared that the entirety of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 was illegal, and ordered their complete withdrawal.

Throughout 2024, nothing stopped the acquiescence of politicians — and the media — in Israel’s relentless slaughter; not the screamingly illegal “genocide within a genocide” that was implemented in northern Gaza from October onwards (and which I covered assiduously at the time), nor the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minster Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, that were issued by the International Criminal Court in November.

How Israel has cowed, bought or colonized the minds of leaders in the west and in the Arab world

Instead, it was fundamentally apparent that the world’s leaders and the mainstream media were cowed, bought or had had their minds colonized by Israel. Some countries, primarily those in the Middle East, were cowed militarily by Israel and its partner in genocide, the US under the geriatric uber-Zionist Joe Biden. Other politicians, primarily in the west, were bought through determined, well-funded, decades-long efforts by lobbying groups to secure exceptional and unconditional support for Israel, whatever its actions, while other conspicuously pro-Israeli figures secured senior or influential positions in the media.

Most disturbingly, unquestioning support for Israel was secured through a process whereby non-Jewish, non-Israeli figures in prominent positions in politics and the press (Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and prominent EU officials spring most readily to mind) gave uncritical support through their friendship with, and identification with prominent Jewish individuals — often nominally liberal, but with a murderous blind spot regarding Israel — identifying with Israel to such an extent that they feel their wounds as their own, overlook their multitude of crimes against the Palestinians over nearly eight decades, and thoroughly dehumanize the Palestinians.

Often, it seems, these politicians are not even aware that in doing so they are tapping into their own genocidal settler colonial histories, effortlessly reviving those long centuries when western countries terrorized the world with their startlingly vile white supremacism, their often bottomless cruelty to those they oppressed who dared to resist, and their apparently insatiable greed for other people’s land.

Although the waters are muddied somewhat by their guilt over the Holocaust, which has persuaded them, with the aid of influential lobbyists, to see the Jews as the unassailably pre-eminent victims — or even the only victims — of human atrocities throughout human history, the identification of white western leaders with the descendants of Zionist Jewish settlers from Europe is fundamentally colonial — the response to resistance by the colonized following a depressingly familiar pattern of ruthless dehumanization and extermination.

Israel’s relentless lies, and the murderous failure to distinguish between a resistance movement’s civilian government and its military wing

Israel also lied relentlessly to endorse its claim that it had a “right to defend itself” that included absolutely no restraints — beginning with the lies about 40 non-existent beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7, which created a hysterical enthusiasm for genocide that has been relentlessly promoted ever since — and also took advantage of its successful efforts to get most western countries to declare, long before October 7, that Hamas was a terrorist organization, without any distinction between its administration — public servants, essentially — and its military wing.

As a result, everything became “Hamas”, and western politicians and the media went along with it. When entire apartment blocks were destroyed, with families inside, the excuse was that Israel was targeting Hamas members who lived there. Even the revelations that Israel was using AI-driven programs to target and murder nothing more than “low-level” Hamas members — and that all sense of proportionality in warfare had been abandoned, as the deaths of hundreds of civilians was considered acceptable “collateral damage” when a single significant individual in Hamas was targeted — did nothing to dent western support.

Israel’s resultant sense of impunity, as well as absolutely shredding all the requirements, under international humanitarian law, for civilians to be protected and not targeted in wartime, allowed it to relentlessly murder civilians without even the vaguest pretence of military necessity, as has been seen and recorded repeatedly from, to cite just one particularly grotesque example, the numerous testimonies of visiting foreign doctors regarding the specific targeting and murder, by snipers and armed quadcopters, of untold numbers of children.

When hospitals were attacked and ambulances targeted, it was, according to Israel, because Hamas were using the hospitals as military command centers, and hiding fighters in ambulances, without any convincing evidence ever being provided. When doctors and medical staff were killed, or abducted and “disappeared” into Israel’s horrendous prisons for Palestinians, where some were subsequently murdered, only ripples of disgust surfaced in the west, and when journalists were deliberately targeted and killed, and Israel repeatedly declared afterwards that it was because they too were Hamas, and repeatedly produced shamefully unconvincing propaganda to supposedly justify their absurd claims, journalists around the world largely remained silent, protecting their careers at the expense of their colleagues’ lives.

The ceasefire, its destruction by Israel, and its latest ploy — coercion via starvation and the murder of civilians

When a ceasefire deal finally emerged on January 15, after being stonewalled for at least eight months, and more realistically for over a year by Benjamin Netanyahu, it seemed that the long and indescribably horrific genocide might be coming to a end.

The bombs stopped falling, the drones stopped flying and the armed quadcopters stopped targeting children, and the families of hostages seized on October 7 — persistently ignored or demeaned by Netanyahu, who prioritized genocide over their safe return — welcomed their relatives back, in exchange for over 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.

Humanitarian aid — vital supplies of food, water, medicines and fuel — was also allowed back in, and, a week after the ceasefire began, in what appeared to be glorious triumph of resistance and resilience over the most extraordinary adversity, around half a million Palestinians returned to their shattered homes in the north from the tent cities in the south that they had been obliged to establish after they were forcibly exiled over the previous 15 months.

Nothing, however, irked the hardline Israelis — particularly, Netanyahu, his fanatical far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and the bloodthirsty new defense minister Israel Katz, who replaced Yoav Gallant in November — more than Palestinians still being alive and celebrating their survival and resilience, even though what they were returning to what was, largely, an apocalyptic wasteland.

And so, on March 1, when the first phase of the ceasefire came to an end — with Israel having persistently stonewalled attempts to proceed to the second phase, which would have led to the return of the remaining hostages, and the definitive end of hostilities — Israel unilaterally declared that it was rewriting the rules, demanding the unconditional release of all the remaining hostages, the unconditional surrender of Hamas (to be followed by permanent exile), and claiming that it had the right to starve Gaza and to resume bombing it intensively, to persuade Hamas to comply.

Every aspect of this proposal was grotesquely illegal, as it explicitly suggested that the collective punishment of the entire civilian population of Gaza, and the resumption of their arbitrary murder, through the return of intensive bombing, was somehow acceptable.

As noted above, on March 2 Israel reimposed a blanket siege on the whole of the Gaza Strip, preventing the delivery of any food, water, medicines or fuel, and followed up, on March 18, with the resumption of its genocidal military assault.

Famine now stalks Gaza like never before, water supplies have almost completely run out, doctors have almost no medical supplies left to adequately treat an increasingly ill population, and, since March 18, at least 2,222 people have been killed, including at least 600 children.

I had thought, when the ceasefire began, that the revelations about the extent of the destruction of Gaza, made abundantly clear during the six weeks of the ceasefire, would spur the world to act decisively, if Israel dared to resume its atrocities, but, yet again, the world was largely silent.

The west should be profoundly ashamed of its failure to condemn what is, nakedly, the collective punishment and ongoing murder of an entire civilian population for dubious or unattainable aims. Regarding the safe return of the remaining hostages, for example, a ceasefire is manifestly the most practical course of action, and when it comes to the complete surrender of Hamas and their subsequent exile, not only is this completely unacceptable to Hamas’ military leadership; it also serves only to highlight the problem, created by Israel, of defining what “Hamas” actually means.

Given that Israel has murdered as many people as possible who were involved in the political administration of the Gaza Strip, has murdered their entire families, has targeted, murdered or abducted doctors accused of being “Hamas”, and has targeted and murdered journalists accused of being “Hamas”, it seems reasonable to assume that, in practical terms, Israel, so drowned in its genocidal lies, has become incapable of discerning any distinction between civilians and combatants.

Perhaps in tacit recognition of this problem of its own creation, Israel has blurred the distinction between Hamas and the civilian population by proposing the complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip (the surrender and exile of the entire population, in other words), as Netanyahu made clear in a sickening pronouncement on March 30, when he declared that the surrender of Hamas would not lead to peace, but would be followed by the expulsion of the entire civilian population.

When mass ethnic cleansing is the “reward” for Hamas’s surrender and exile, it no longer makes any difference who is Hamas and who isn’t. All Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, whether Hamas or not, will be gone, their fate reduced to a simple choice: mass extermination or complete ethnic cleansing. And it is, of course, resoundingly important to remember that that particular choice is itself spectral, as mass ethnic cleansing is a mirage. No one will offer to take in Palestinian refugees, either because, in the Middle East, it would trigger seismic political turmoil, or elsewhere, because anti-immigration sentiment is at an all-time high. In other words, then, all that awaits the Palestinians, trapped and unable to leave, is extermination.

Donald Trump and the resumption of Israel’s genocide

Again, the west has refused to engage with the enormity of the crimes put forward by Netanyahu, with the silence of most countries a direct result of their ongoing capitulation to the leadership — or the lack of it — provided by the US.

Under the addled Biden, this leadership involved total support for Israel’s genocide. Even as Biden’s mental faculties collapsed, he clung obsessively to the “beheaded babies” lies, and directed his fading energies into flickering genocidal rage.

Since January 20, of course, this leadership — or the lack of it — has been provided by Donald Trump, who openly declared his support for the complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip just 16 days into his deranged presidency, at a meeting with Netanyahu in the White House, when he framed it as being for humanitarian reasons, in a rambling and typically unhinged performance in which he seemingly surprised everyone, including Netanyahu, by also suggesting that the US should take over Gaza, and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump seems subsequently to have largely lost interest in Gaza, but his ethnic cleansing proposal was gleefully seized upon by Netanyahu and the far-right in Israel, for whom it is, of course, a long-cherished murderous dream.

With no pushback from Trump, who also endorsed the renewed assault on Gaza by calling for “the gates of hell” to be opened to secure the return of the remaining hostages — a cry also enthusiastically taken up by Israel’s leaders and its media — the west seems to have become largely content to shunt Gaza into the background, even as the atrocities reach a fever pitch of horror within Gaza itself.

Trump’s baleful influence is also apparent in the increasing intensity of Israel’s murderous actions in the West Bank, where the far-right’s dream of annexing the entire territory also seems to have been given the green light, adding to the endorsement of the particularly poisonous dream of a Greater Israel, swallowing up more and more of the Middle East, which was facilitated by Joe Biden through his failure to stop Israel from attacking and invading Lebanon, and from seizing land in Syria as the Assad regime was helpfully removed from power, to be replaced by Islamic terrorists who, conveniently, have accepted the poisoned chalice of power in exchange for supporting Israel.

Is the growing dissent within Israel our only hope?

What hope now remains for an end to the genocide in Gaza may lie within Israel itself, where, in particular, the betrayal of the hostages is most keenly felt. The pressure exerted by the hostages’ families, as well as a growing fatigue within the military, is largely credited with having encouraged Netanyahu to agree to the first phase of the ceasefire, and, since he abandoned it, the fate of the estimated 24 surviving hostages has led to regular and sustained protests accusing him of deliberately sacrificing them to preserve his coalition government by pandering to the rabid genocidal enthusiasm of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, enabling him to cling to power to prevent his own prosecution on corruption charges from proceeding.

On Saturday, as protests were planned across Israel, Haaretz reported that Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, said, “An agreement to bring all our children home could be signed tomorrow morning. An entire nation is being deceived. We are told that military pressure will return the hostages — it only gets them killed.” Zangauker accused Netanyahu of sending IDF soldiers into “an endless war with no clear objective and no plan for the day after.”

In addition, the fatigue in the military is an increasing phenomenon that shows no sign of abating. After nearly 19 months of military action on numerous fronts, the new IDF chief, Eyal Zamir, who, last month, drew up plans for continuing the military onslaught in Gaza, has already changed his mind, after numerous visits to Gaza in which as Haaretz described it, he has found “an exhausted, worn-down army that’s buckling under the weight of its missions in multiple arenas”, which also “desperately needs reinforcements”, but “is rent from within by growing disagreements over the war’s goals.”

The discontent is clear, as, several weeks ago, Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Shin Bet (Israel’s security agency), and a former commander-in-chief of Israel’s navy, with 17 other high-profile colleagues, “took out a full-page advert in two major Israeli broadsheet papers”, in which, as Ayalon described it, “we made clear that the very fabric of the state of Israel and the values on which it was founded are being eroded.”

He added, “The truth is that our hostages in Gaza have been abandoned in favour of the government’s messianic ideology and by a prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu who is desperate to cling to power for his own personal gain. Our government is undermining the democratic functions of the state to shore up and protect its own power. It is forcing us into a perpetual war with no achievable military objectives and which can only result in more loss of life and hatred.”

On April 10, nearly a thousand reservists and retired officers in Israel’s air force followed up on the adverts, signing a letter “urging the Israeli government to agree to a deal with Hamas to return hostages, even at the price of stopping the war in Gaza”, as the New York Times described it.

The signatories declared that “the war serves mainly political and personal interests”, adding that “continuing the war does not benefit any of its declared goals, and will cause the deaths of hostages, IDF soldiers, and innocent civilians”, and it was subsequently “endorsed by nearly 1,000 academics”, as The New Arab explained.

Netanyahu’s office responded by declaring that “statements that weaken the Israel Defense Forces and strengthen our enemy during wartime” were “unforgivable”, and promised to “discharge active-duty reservists who signed the letter”, but the mutiny was far-reaching. As The New Arab also explained, more than 250 former Mossad officials signed a letter initiated by former senior Mossad officer Gail Shorsh, calling on the government to end the war and prioritize the return of the hostages, which was also “endorsed by three former heads of the Israeli intelligence agency, alongside dozens of current and former department heads.”

In another petition, “over 200 Israeli military doctors in various reserve units expressed alarm over the prolonged fighting”, writing, “As medical officers, we serve in the reserves out of a commitment to the sanctity of life. We warn that continuing the fighting and abandoning the captives is contrary to these values.” The doctors added that the war “appears increasingly driven by political and personal interests rather than security needs.”

In addition, “Over 1,600 veterans of the Paratroopers and Infantry Brigades, along with more than 170 graduates from elite military programmes, have also signed letters demanding an end to the war”, stating their belief that the ongoing military campaign “does not contribute to any of its stated goals”, and over 1,500 Israeli current and former Israeli armoured corps soldiers have also signed a letter “asserting that continuing the war no longer serves [its] initial objectives”, with signatories including two former Israeli army chiefs of staff and the former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

As The New Arab added, “More than 150 former Israeli naval officers have also joined the growing call, signing a joint letter echoing the demand for the return of captives and an end to hostilities.”

In a follow-up article on April 24, The New Arab noted that, over the previous two weeks, “over 140,000 Israeli civilians, reservists, and veterans” in total had “joined the Air Force’s call, issuing letters of their own urging for immediate cessation of hostilities and a hostage deal”, also noting that “a wave of reservists is also refusing to show up for duty.”

In an article in the Guardian today, Ami Ayalon noted that “the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public” agree with the many thousands of former government officials, members of the military and academics mentioned above. As he stated, “70% believe there needs to be a comprehensive end to the war in return for bringing our hostages home, and an election as soon as possible so that this government can be replaced.” He also called for support from abroad from Jewish communities, and from those who see themselves as Israel’s friends, to “express their support for the Israeli people and not an extremist government committed to unravelling the fabric of the state”, commending the 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews who recently spoke out, and now find themselves facing disciplinary action after “multiple complaints.” As Ayalon wrote, “These people are true friends of Israel. It is not easy to speak out and I commend them for their bravery. I know that they will now face a backlash.”

Israeli empathy with the Palestinians on Holocaust Memorial Day

As the Guardian noted on April 25, opposition to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has also, finally, led to a growing number of Israeli citizens also awakening to the horrors of what is being done in their name to the Palestinian people, or finding the courage to finally dissent publicly. The newspaper explained that, “As the country’s most powerful politicians, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a ceremony” marking Holocaust Memorial Day “at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, three Holocaust survivors in their 80s stood at the entrance holding a sign aloft: ‘If we have lost our compassion for the other, we have lost our humanity.’”

In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, many thousands of protestors, including descendants of Holocaust survivors, “stood holding photos of Palestinian children who had been killed since the war began”, while others “lined the roads of the city dressed in black, holding out empty pots to symbolise the starvation of those in Gaza.”

Without a trace of irony, the Guardian’s reporters stated that, for many in Israel, “the horrors inflicted in the 7 October 2023 attack, when thousands of Hamas militants stormed kibbutzes, towns and cities in southern Israel and committed terrible atrocities, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking 251 hostages, including a nine-month-old baby”, had “left them cold to the plight of any Palestinian”, failing to note that they themselves had, in their reporting, conspicuously failed to mentioned the thousands of Palestinian babies slaughtered by Israel, or their own newspaper’s persistent refusal, in common with most western media, to admit that the ongoing genocide had also, apparently, “left them cold” too.

Fortunately, the words of the Holocaust survivors were far more powerful and poignant than the reporters’ own evasive commentary. 80-year old Veronika Cohen, a Holocaust survivor who was born in the ghetto in Budapest, said she had come to protest because “I don’t think we can remember our suffering without acknowledging the suffering of Gaza, the deaths of tens of thousands of children, the starvation that’s going on this minute, for which we are partially responsible. It occupies the same place in my heart.”

Cohen “acknowledged”, as the Guardian described it, “that she was in the minority in Israel when it came to speaking up about the terrible cost of the war to Palestinian life”, explaining, “People here see Palestinians as the other and that’s why they have created a barrier.” As she added, however, “They have managed not to feel their pain and I find that incomprehensible. To me, when I read the stories of their suffering in Gaza, it blends completely into how I feel about the Holocaust.”

Her eyes “filled with tears as she recalled seeing a recent photo of a young Palestinian boy whose arms had been blown off by Israeli missile strikes in Gaza”, as she explained, “The news story said that when he woke up from his operation, the first thing he did was turn to his mother, and he said: ‘how will I hug you now?’ To me, that’s a Holocaust story. And that’s why we are here: to try to awaken people to their pain in any way we can.”

Ilana Drukker Tokotin, 87, who spent her childhood in hiding from the Nazis, also spoke to the Guardian, telling the reporters, “The saying is never again; that means never again for anybody. That’s really what we’re standing here for.”

Alon-Lee Green, the co-director of Standing Together, an organization that involves Israelis and Palestinians committed to mutual peace, said, “There has been a complete unwillingness among many here to engage with the human cost of the war in Gaza, even anger to anyone who expresses empathy for Palestinians, but I think after the government restarted the war, something is beginning to shift. This killing is done on the land we share and by our own hands. How can we ignore that any longer?”

At one of the protests, Noa First, 46, an artist “clutching a photo of baby girl D’na Khatib”, said, “It’s unbearable to see the faces of these children, who are no different to my children, who were killed by us.” She added, “My grandparents fled the Holocaust in Germany. I’m so glad they are not alive on this remembrance day to see what Israel has become.”

The world is upside down

While it remains to be seen if these examples of Israeli dissent can somehow shift sentiment in Israel more widely, western countries, led by the US, continue to do Israel’s bidding not only through their military support for Israel, and their refusal to openly and unequivocally condemn its actions, but through alarming, and often draconian clampdowns on freedom of speech and the right to protest.

This has been most prominent in Germany and the US, who supply Israel with most of its weapons, but the clampdowns have plumbed alarming new dystopian depths in the US since the return to the White House of Donald Trump, whose inner circle is packed with hardline paid or colonized supporters of Israel, and who, during his election campaign, was paid $100 million by the prominent Israeli supporter Miriam Adelson to further the Israeli cause.

As the bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, the inversion of reality effected by Israel since October 7, 2023 is now taking over almost the whole of the western world, whereby a genocidal aggressor is a perpetual victim, and countries in the west, having already dutifully agreed to implement laws and guidelines that equate criticism of Israel’s actions with antisemitism, are now openly putting Israel’s requirements before their own national interests, with the Trump administration abducting, imprisoning and seeking to deport legal US residents and foreign students for being involved in protests against the genocide.

The most prominent is Mahmoud Khalil, kidnapped from the lobby of his apartment block in New York in front of his pregnant wife, a US citizen, whose “crime” was to have been a negotiator in discussions between the student organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and university officials regarding divestment from Israel, which was supported in a referendum by a majority of students, and who is now languishing in an ICE mention facility in Louisiana, fighting his planned deportation.

Another prominent kidnapping case is that of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was abducted by ICE agents on a street in Somerville, Mass., and who is also held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. Her “crime” was to have been one of the authors of a student op-ed calling for the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”, to apologize for statements made by the university’s president, and to “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.”

In these, and many other cases, the Trump administration is carefully bypassing a direct confrontation regarding freedom of speech, protected by the precious First Amendment, and is, outrageously, seeking to deport these individuals under a barely-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the Secretary of State the authority to deport non-citizens when they have “reasonable ground to believe that [their] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Who could have foreseen, just 19 months ago, a dystopian reality so grave that, when an actual genocide is taking place, day after day, in the Gaza strip, US legal residents and foreign students daring to criticize Israel’s actions in a resolutely non-violent manner, as protected by the First Amendment, would find themselves the victims of witch hunt, as the “America First” administration of Donald Trump reveals that, like so many of the other morally delayed countries of the west, they are actually an “Israel First” administration, seeking to quash any criticism of Israel that would not be leading to fraught deportation battles if those individuals has exercised their right to criticize the US government, which, for now at least, is still allowed.

Israel has turned the world upside down, and while we must all hope that, in the US at least, judges will eventually manage to restore some semblance of a moral compass, what the slipping of the western mask of civility has revealed, above all, is how a depraved darkness within Israel itself has been deliberately spread so thoroughly throughout the western world that we are left gazing at the face of a renascent fascism, leeringly suggesting that there is nothing to protect any of us.

The US may think that it is using Israel to further its own domestic fascistic aims, but the reality is that they are merely echoing the evil emanating from Israel, which continues to radiate a darkness on such a scale that it recalls some of the greatest atrocities in human history.

Note: For the whole of this week, the International Court of Justice is hearing submissions regarding the “Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, which I’ll be reporting on soon. Verbatim records can be found here, and I also wholeheartedly recommend the video of the submission by Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, one of the lawyers representing Palestine.

* * * * *

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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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