Israel and Palestine

My update on the horrendous situation in northern Gaza, following an Israeli attack, on Sunday night, on displaced civilians and medical patients in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza, in which a video captured a 19-year old student being burned alive. This image has gone viral, prompting widespread outrage, and I can only hope that it helps people to understand that the attack on the Al-Aqsa camp is just part of a truly depraved plan to empty the whole of northern Gaza of its 400,000 remaining residents. In theory, this involves issuing evacuation orders, and letting everyone leave, but the reality is far worse, as Israel is forcing the remaining hospitals to close, cutting off all supplies of food, water and medical supplies, engaging in increasing numbers of bombing raids, and also killing those who try to leave, via the use of snipers, and armed drones and quadcopters.

Key findings from, and my analysis of a hugely significant report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued on October 10, which found that “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”

My latest article, providing urgent updates about deadly new developments in northern Gaza, largely ignored in the western media. Coinciding with the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, and the start of Israel’s year-long genocide, a horrific new plan has been initiated by the Israel military — to empty the whole of northern Gaza of its remaining 400,000 inhabitants. The plan, first publicized last month, is intended to create a “closed military zone” in the whole of the north of Gaza, with those still living there given just one week to comply with evacuation orders before they will, inevitably, be regarded as terrorists who can be killed. To secure its aims, however, Israel is already killing civilians, in bombing raids, through the use of armed drones and quadcopters, and via snipers on the ground, with additional reports that soldiers are going house to house and summarily executing those they find. A total siege has also been imposed, preventing the delivery of any food, water, fuel or medical supplies. Evacuation orders have been issued for the last three hospitals in the north, even though 300 critical ill patients have nowhere to go, and journalists have been specifically targeted, with one killed today, and several severely wounded.

My account of Israel’s descent into unparalleled depravity over the last 365 days, drawing on and summarizing my experiences of being perpetually sickened by the relentless evidence of uncountable atrocities committed by Israel and recorded and live-streamed by Palestinians themselves, and by the public glorification of these crimes by their killers, who, shamefully, have been relentlessly defended and supported by most western leaders, as the international community’s “rules-based order” has effectively collapsed. I also look at how, marking the anniversary of the October 7 attacks last year, Israel is now repeating its war crimes and crimes against humanity in Lebanon, and seeking war with Iran, and, in Gaza, is marking the anniversary by launching the Gaza genocide Part 2, which involves once more bombing and invading northern Gaza to deal with the 300,000 to 500,000 Palestinians who have resisted every effort to remove them over the last year, so that northern Gaza can become a “closed military zone”, where, eventually, its rabid settlers can eventually realize their long-cherished dreams of colonizing it with luxury beachfront properties built on the corpses of murdered Palestinians.

This is meant to hit hard, and I hope it does. It’s my analysis of how, faced with the the gravest threat humanity has ever experienced — wildly accelerating climate collapse, which will make the planet uninhabitable for humans, and probably in the not too distant future — our leaders have, instead, suffered a massive psychic collapse, unable to accept that, as I describe it, “everything our neoliberal societies have worshipped and profited from over the last 40 years is killing us”, and have “collectively retreated into a broken psychic landscape in which, as so often in human history, if faced with something uncomfortable — as, in this case, our own wilful and self-imposed extinction — they have chosen to slaughter everyone instead, and to lay waste to human environments to make them uninhabitable.”

A long read in which I highlight the profound and consequential differences between those who see the events of October 7, 2023 as having occurred in a vacuum, and who seek to justify their extraordinarily murderous response as some sort of necessity borne of their perceived “exceptionalism”, and those who, in contrast, correctly understand that the events of October 7, however horrendous, were part of a 57-year history of, on the one hand, occupation, oppression, apartheid, murder and brutal arbitrary imprisonment, and, on the other, the resistance to it, and that nothing can justify an open-ended military response of such severity, and involving the indiscriminate slaughter of so many civilians that it not only invites comparisons with the most brutal regimes in history; it also threatens to fatally undermine the international “rules-based order” established in the wake of the Second World War to try to prevent such atrocities from ever taking place again. In an attempt to understand the position taken by those who are trapped in a bubble of exterminating fury focused on the events of October 7, I draw on a recent and revelatory article by the renowned scholar Omer Bartov, written after a recent and disturbing visit to his home country, and I also seek to understand the position taken by most of the leaders of the west, whose unquestioning support for this unending aggression makes a mockery of their claims to hold any kind of moral high ground, has led to the disturbing and unprecedented suppression of internal dissent, and also threatens, eventually, to lead to them being held complicit in the grave crimes that have been taking place over the last ten and a half months.

Linking to and discussing an interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, which I’ve published as a podcast on my YouTube channel. In the 50-minute interview, recorded on July 13, and featured on Andy’s weekly show, we spoke about the UK General Election, and my relief at being rid of the cruel, corrupt and incompetent post-Brexit Tories. However, I also expressed my doubts about the incoming Labour government led by Keir Starmer, with worries about his authoritarianism, his approach to protest (and here I discussed the recent draconian sentencing of five climate activists for a Zoom call), and his support for war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We also spoke about the new political landscape in the UK — or England in particular — where there are now five main parties, but they are not adequately represented in Parliament because of the antiquated and unjust ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, and how we desperately need a proportional representation system to properly reflect voters’ choices. We also spoke about the release of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, after five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh, and how his release was a ray of light in an otherwise darkening world, and we also spoke about the ongoing injustices of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 30 men are still held, 16 of whom have long been approved for release.

My report on a devastating advisory opinion on July 19 by the International Court of Justice regarding Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) over the last 57 years, and concluding that it is, and always has been in contravention of international humanitarian law. Despite the unprecedented breadth and depth of the opinion, Israel has been ignoring rulings, opinions and resolutions regarding the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1967, and yet nothing has led to it ever being restrained. This opinion needs to be followed by sanctions — hopefully via the UN General Assembly — or international humanitarian law and the United Nations itself will end up throughly discredited.

My recent interview with Chris Cook, on his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, about the UK’s recent General Election, and also about Israel’s horrendous prisons for Palestinians, following the release of a particular prisoner, Moazzaz Obayat (also identified as Muazzam Obayat), horribly broken by torture, who compared the prisons to Guantánamo. As I explained to Chris, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re even worse.

My analysis and endorsement of the evidently reasonable assessment, by three health experts, in a letter to The Lancet, that the true death toll in Gaza massively exceeds the 37,396 direct deaths, as most recently reported last month, because of the indirect deaths involved in every conflict — those resulting from disease, the destruction of health facilities, and the absence of food and water, for example — and may be at least 186,000, if not many more. It’s somewhat surprising that it’s taken so long for medical experts to make an assessment, given the long history of research into indirect deaths, which has established that indirect deaths in the ‘90s and 2000s were “between three and 15 times the number of direct deaths.” The experts chose a ratio of 4:1, but, had they chosen 15:1, the estimate for the total number of dead would be 600,000. Shamefully, the western media have almost entirely ignored the assessment, but it’s important that those of us who care about bringing Israel’s genocide to an end publicize it as much as possible, to try to maintain pressure to end this unforgivable slaughter.