Two Years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: A Sickening, Unbridled Enthusiasm for Extermination That Shames the World

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The world as we know it died two years ago today, on October 7, 2023 — but not, as we’ve been incessantly bludgeoned into believing, because Palestinian resistance fighters who broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip went on a killing spree in southern Israel in a desperate response to 75 years of persistent oppression, apartheid and murder by the State of Israel.

Those attacks — horrific as they were, with 1,195 people killed and 251 others taken hostage (although it should be noted that no one knows how many were killed by Israeli forces themselves under the notorious Hannibal Directive) — were portrayed by Israel as a genocide, and as an existential threat to their very existence by sub-human monsters, but that was clearly untrue.

In the long history of oppression and resistance since the blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were killed and over 700,000 driven from their homes and permanently exiled, many, many times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed in repeated one-sided “wars” on Gaza — euphemistically and unforgivably described by the Israeli authorities as “mowing the lawn” — or have been killed in random executions, often for nothing more than throwing stones at soldiers, while, at any given time, at least 5,000 Palestinians, including children, have been held in brutal prisons, reserved solely for Palestinians, in which any kind of internationally recognized due process and justice has been deliberately erased.

The blunt truth is that, in response to the attacks on October 7, 2023, it is Israel itself that has been engaged in a genocide (as recognized most recently by an authoritative UN Commission of Inquiry), posing a demonstrably real existential threat to the very existence of the Palestinians, executed with such grotesque and sustained sadistic violence that it is the Israelis themselves who have been revealed as the truly barbaric monsters.

The shocking extent of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza

The facts speak for themselves. As the Government Media Office in Gaza reported just yesterday, and as was posted by Drop Site News, over the last two years “Israel has dropped over 200,000 tons of explosives on Gaza”, which is “roughly 13 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.”

Over 76,000 Palestinians have been killed or are missing, including at least 20,000 children and 12,500 women, although the true death toll, as I reported in August, is at least five times the official count, with up to 95% of those killed having been civilians.

At least 2,700 entire families, often consisting of dozens of members, from babies to grandparents, have been erased from the civil registry, and the entire surviving population — of around two million people — have been persistently displaced, as Israel has destroyed their homes — with 268,000 homes destroyed to date.

In its depraved war on Gaza’s hospitals, 38 hospitals and 96 health centers have been bombed, often repeatedly, and many have been destroyed completely. 197 ambulances have been targeted and destroyed, over 1,600 medical staff have been killed, and 362 others have been seized and “disappeared” into Israel’s unaccountable prisons, whose population has doubled to around 10,000, and where credible reports of torture, rape and murder have been widespread.

Education has been annihilated, with 95% of schools damaged, 668 bombed, and 165 completely destroyed, and at least 13,500 students and 830 teachers have been killed.

Fundamentally, the entire infrastructure of Gaza has been systematically destroyed — 94% of its farmland ruined, all of its fisheries, its water supply and sewage systems deliberately targeted and wiped out, as Israel has also engaged in a deliberate policy of starvation, with 120,000 aid trucks blocked, and 47 food kitchens and 61 distribution centers attacked. 650,000 children face death from hunger, and, via the almost constant sieges that Israel has imposed, many others face death from a chronic shortage of medical supplies and medical equipment, and of the fuel supplies required to keep generators operating.

All of the figures above only scratch the surface of the horrors inflicted on Gaza by Israel over the last 731 days. Almost no one is left to report on the ongoing atrocities, because of Israel’s persistent targeting and killing of journalists, and yet still — despite the fundamentally disproportionate slaughter of civilians, the clear war crimes involved in attacks on hospitals and journalists and starving an entire population, as well as the lawless brutality of Israel’s terror prisons — the genocide continues.

Israel’s fatal combination of victimhood and supremacism

For a majority of Israelis, shamefully, the evident genocidal intent of their government means nothing to them. The frenzy of hysteria that followed the October 7 attacks remains horrifyingly potent, the bottom line being that no one in Gaza is considered innocent, and total extermination is, therefore, justified. Only then, it is reasoned, will the Israelis, apparently the most disturbingly persecuted “chosen people” in history, finally have peace.

Gorged on generations of dehumanization, in which the possibility of any kind of empathy has been ruthlessly suppressed, Israelis, in significant numbers, routinely regard everyone in Gaza as Hamas, failing to distinguish between administrative officials and resistance fighters, accepting that everything and everyone in Gaza is Hamas-related, and even, most horribly, shrugging off the murder of babies and children in vast numbers because all of them will, it is accepted, otherwise grow up to be “terrorists.”

This extraordinary dehumanization has only been made possible through a combination of two factors in particular: Israel’s permanent self-identification, because of the Holocaust, as the most conspicuous victim in the whole of human history (or even, solipsistically, as the only significant victim ever), slamming up against a horrendous supremacism in which, having been recklessly given Palestine as a “Jewish homeland” by its post-First World War caretakers, the British, Israelis have convinced themselves that, uniquely, they have a God-given right to someone else’s land, apparently dating back millennia, which allows them not only to rewrite history, pretending that the Palestinians don’t exist, but also murderously endorses their notion that, for both their safety and as a fulfilment of their supremacism, it is somehow justifiable to do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.

Israelis seem, for the most part, to have forgotten that a combination of supreme victimhood and arrant supremacism only ever hollows out those who act on it, and that the only way to secure the safety that they crave is to abandon their supremacism and to find a way to live in peace with the Palestinians, most obviously through the compromise of returning to them all of the land that they have been illegally occupying (as the International Court of Justice confirmed last July) since their victories in the Six-Day War of 1967, when they conquered and began their murderous domination of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Today, as western countries should reflect on the horrors in which they, for the most part, are horrendously complicit, having indulged Israel for decades, and having given the a green light for genocide on October 7, 2023, when they endorsed a shamefully undefined “right”, on Israel’s part, to do whatever it felt it wanted to do “to defend itself”, those countries’ limited retreat in recent months still fails to address their absolute complicity in the most well-publicized, western-backed and ongoing atrocity of our lifetimes.

And while it remains to be seen if Donald Trump’s so-called “Peace Plan” will actually deliver peace, it should also be noted that, perhaps above all, what those relentlessly supplying arms to Israel over the last two years have been doing — primarily, the US and Germany, but also many other countries including the UK — is not only handing over their sovereignty to Israel, but also doing so in service to the arms companies and tech companies who are the only people who have really profited from this incessant carnage.

Most of all, though, on this heart-breaking anniversary, what is particularly needed is a recognition by all those who have facilitated and supported in any way the grotesque failure of all notions of the need for human restraint over the last two years to recognize that they were wrong — that safety cannot exist though the barrel of a gun, or through vaporizing children by dropping 2,000-pound bombs on them, that apartheid and colonial extermination can never bring peace, and that, above all, genocidal self-pity and messianic covetousness are two of the most demonstrable failures of the human imagination that it is possible to act upon.

Note: This is my 64th detailed article analyzing and commenting on Israel’s genocide over the last two years. Those articles, recording my ongoing perceptions of the horrors of the genocide, were published in 2023 on October 11, October 17, October 24, November 1, November 8, November 14, November 18, December 3 and December 17, in 2024 on January 18, January 26, February 1, February 18, March 20, April 5, April 16, May 6, May 15, May 27, June 9,  July 11, July 23, August 21,  September 1, October 7, October 9, October 13, October 15, October 17, October 20, October 25, November 1, November 21, November 26, November 29, December 10 and December 29, and this year on January 17, January 21, January 23, January 28, February 10, March 17, March 19, March 25, April 5, April 14, April 29, May 7, May 17, May 22, May 28, June 18, June 20, July 2, July 21, July 30, August 11, August 22, August 26, September 19, September 28 and September 30.

Please also feel free to listen to my new online single ‘O Palestine’, a collaboration with my son Tyler (beatboxer The Wiz-RD), a slice of pop reggae protest music, with all the proceeds from online sales going to a worthy cause — the Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led aid project on the ground in Gaza.

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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”, 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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