Israel and Palestine

My latest interview with Andy Bungay, recorded for his Riverside Radio show in London as part on an ongoing series of monthly interviews, and made available here as a stand-alone podcast. In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change. All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but our conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope, based on my assessment that societal tipping points may arrive unexpectedly when we are failed so persistently by our leaders, whichever political party they represent, as is very clearly the case right now.

My analysis of the significance of December 9 and 10, as the dates when the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. December 10 also marks the 40th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention Against Torture, and December 9 the 10th anniversary of publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s groundbreaking report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. In a world of increasing chaos and depravity, in which it can appear that the mechanisms put in place after the Second World War no longer have any meaning, I argue that, in fact, efforts to prosecute individuals for genocide, and for war crimes and crimes against humanity, initially by UN-backed courts, and, since 2002, by the International Criminal Court, shouldn’t be dismissed, as demonstrated by the recent arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. I also celebrate the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly on generations of young people, assess the significance of the Senate torture report, and note how both the US and Israel remain in the spotlight for the torture and abuse in their prisons — at Guantánamo, and in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians. I also note how the sands of time can shift swiftly, as has just happened in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has fallen, and his almost indescribably monstrous prisons have suddenly been liberated.

My report about the welcome ceasefire in Lebanon, hopefully bringing to an end Israel’s campaign of terror, which began two months ago with its pager attacks, and its assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and which has continued with tactics drawn from its 14-month assault on Gaza — devastating attacks on residential areas in Beirut and elsewhere, attacks on hospitals and ambulances, using false claims of Hezbollah involvement, and the forced evacuation and complete destruction of villages in the south. Sadly, as I note, the ceasefire has had absolutely no impact on Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, where, predictably, the non-stop atrocities of the last 14 months have continued, despite the arrest warrants issued last week by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Instead, just today, it has been reported that Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister for food security and a member of the Israeli security cabinet, has said that the Israeli military will “remain in Gaza for years”, even though he had no suggestions for how the almost entirely displaced population of over two million people, reduced to the barest subsistence-level survival, would be provided for, made no mention of reconstruction plans, and had nothing to offer regarding Gaza’s future governance, except for an insistence that Hamas would have no role in it.

In my latest article about Israel’s seemingly unending assault on the Gaza Strip and its people, I focus on what, to me, has always been the most disturbing aspect of Israel’s actions, and of the west’s largely unquestioning support — the widespread desire for the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. The trigger for my article was a video posted by the Israeli anti-genocide activist B.M., of the mother of a young woman killed on October 7, claiming, at a Knesset meeting, that there are “no uninvolved” in Gaza, and stating that “all of them have blood on their hands, all of them are guilty, and all of them need to be annihilated.” I examine how psychically disturbed it is to argue that 2.3 million people deserve to be killed for the death of one person, but note how widespread this sentiment is in Israel as a whole, and I identify its origins in the multi-generational entrenchment of persistent fear in the mentality of European settler-colonial projects, of which Israel is, fundamentally, the last in a long and bloody history of settler-colonial horrors, with added messianic fanaticism and a violently self-pitying obsession with portraying itself as history’s only victim. I also ask how the western powers who have fully supported Israel since last October can continue to do so when the supposed ally to whom they consistently pledge “ironclad” support is so extraordinarily genocidal, obsessed with the extermination of an entire people in a way that not even the US was in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and I try to untangle the mix of Holocaust guilt, manipulation by prominent pro-Israeli individuals and organizations, and the baleful resuscitation of western settler-colonial history that underpins it all.

My report about the extraordinarily welcome news that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has today issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For the last 14 months, blow after blow has rained down on international accountability, and the very foundations of, and viability of international humanitarian law, as shown by Israel’s impunity in launching a process of extermination in northern Gaza nearly two months ago, after a year of non-stop genocidal assaults on the whole of the Gaza Strip, in the ever-growing archive of compelling, but largely ignored reports by UN experts, and, just yesterday, by the US’s veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Today’s announcement, however, finally restores the credibility of mechanisms designed to ensure that no political leaders can get away with claiming that the rules don’t apply to them, and that they can endlessly indulge in war crimes and crimes against humanity against a trapped, besieged and starved civilian population that they have been persistently trying to exterminate. As Israel and the US, predictably, rail against the issuing of the arrest warrants, the rest of the west’s leaders, who have fully supported Israel, and the mainstream media who have done the same, ought to be quaking with fear today, as they recognize, I hope, that, as I describe it, “all their efforts to pretend that Israel, uniquely in history, has been entitled to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, have, all along, been legally indefensible.”

My recent hour-long interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio in south London, posted to my YouTube channel after it was broadcast, in which we discussed the ongoing horrors in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and my contention that our leaders, unable to accept that, for 40 years, their beloved neoliberalism has actually been killing us, have suffered a psychic derangement and have embraced endless war instead.

Key findings from, and my analysis of a significant report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued on October 10, dealing with Israel’s notorious and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians. Always brutal and fundamentally lawless, involving military courts and “administrative detention” (endlessly renewable imprisonment without charge or trial), the prisons, in which children are also held, along with women and men, have quadrupled their population since October 7, 2023, from around 5,000 “detainees” to around 20,000. Conditions in the prisons have noticeably worsened, with the ICRC prevented from visiting, on the orders of security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and with torture and abuse systematic and widespread, incidences of rape taking place, and over 50 “detainees”, including doctors abducted from hospitals, having died in unexplained circumstances. Much of the focus is on the notorious Sde Teiman prison, where “detainees” seized in Gaza have been held, although the abuse is widespread throughout the entire prison system, which, at various points, I compare with the US’s barbaric treatment of prisoners in the CIA “black sites”, at Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and Guantanamo, often finding that Israel has not only matched, but also exceeded the depths of depravity to which the US sank in its “war on terror.” This is my second article about the Commission’s report, the first having focused on its sections detailing Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals and its healthcare system.

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 aim 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 Israel settlements. 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.

Another necessary update about Israel’s ongoing assault on northern Gaza, where, it is abundantly and heartrendingly clear, a particularly malignant version of the “Generals’ Plan” for the ethnic cleansing of the whole area, home to 400,000 inhabitants, has been underway since the start of the month, and is now being implemented with unprecedented savagery. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in relentless bombing raids, all three of northern Gaza’s surviving hospitals have been violently decommissioned, the western media haven’t even realized what is happening (or don’t care), and Israel’s leaders, meanwhile, are still promising that Israeli forces will operate in Gaza for “years to come”, even after the killing of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, on Thursday. I point out how impossible the notion of continuing military operations in Gaza “for years to come” is, because, by then, quite genuinely, no Palestinian will be left alive, and I wonder whether western leaders — in the US in particular — have any intention of finally acting decisively to stop Israel before it matches the most notorious crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis in the Second World War. Without intervention, that is exactly where this unfettered genocidal fury is heading.

With the death of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader, the inevitable triumphalism of Netanyahu, and wider Israeli society, is fundamentally misplaced, as I explain here, because he died on the frontline, not hiding in a tunnel, as Israel alleged, and will therefore be an inspiration to the continued resistance to Israel’s occupation. However, the triumphalism is most fundamentally misplaced because his death exposes how Israel’s claims regarding its actions over the last year — eliminating Hamas — has effectively reached a dead end, and it will be increasingly difficult for Netanyahu and his ministers to now avoid an ever-brighter burning spotlight shining on what they are really doing in Gaza, which, from the beginning, has been a project of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and genocide, with the ultimate intention being to empty the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population, and to colonize it with Israeli settlers. Can the west really continue to support a seemingly ceaseless genocide when its true basis has now been so clearly exposed?