Gaza and the Palestinians’ Inalienable Right to Self-Determination
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Reflecting on Donald Trump’s tiny mind, in which he has the attention span of a toddler, and is only interested in simplistic outcomes that he can use to bolster his own delusional self-image as an extraordinary victor and savior, the peace deal for Gaza that he announced three weeks ago, including the ceasefire that began on October 10, is the most startling example of his solipsistic view of reality, and his inability to think deeply, or with any nuance, about any given topic for longer than it takes to draw in breath and exhale.
It is unreservedly commendable that the negotiations to end Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip have, for the last 20 days, prevented Israel from resuming, on a permanent basis, its merciless enthusiasm for the relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza, although it has broken the terms of the ceasefire deal on numerous occasions, requiring the intervention of US baby-sitters to keep it from breaking down, and, yesterday, embarked on its most violent violation yet, killing over a hundred Palestinians, including at least 46 children, and injuring over 250 more, in numerous air strikes.
Before these attacks, Gaza’s Media Office assessed that Israel had committed 80 violations since the ceasefire began, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230. Those totals now stand at more than 200 killed, and 500 wounded. The average daily death toll may be less than it was before the ceasefire began, when between 60 and a hundred Palestinians were being killed every day in direct attacks, but it is a sign of Israel’s arrogance, its sense of impunity and its complete contempt for the value of any Palestinian lives that it has killed and injured so many, claiming to adhere to the ceasefire deal while switching it on and off at will, without any repercussions.
Peace in Gaza? Despite Ceasefire and Hostage Releases, Palestinians Are Shamefully Sidelined As the World Plans a Colonial Takeover
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UPDATE October 23: For anyone interested in hearing me talk about Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan” for Gaza, what it means and what the future may hold, please check out my latest podcast with Andy Bungay, recorded on Sunday October 19, in which, over 50 minutes, we discussed this and other topical issues; in particular, the rise of the far-right, and the lamentable role played in its promotion by social media.
What kind of peace deal is this, when those it affects — the Palestinians subjected to illegal occupation by Israel for the last 58 years — are not supposed to have any say in their future?
Although those of us who don’t subscribe to the all-consuming genocidal death cult that Israel has become over the last two years are overwhelmingly relieved that the non-stop bombing and destruction of the Gaza Strip has stopped as a result of the recently-agreed ceasefire, we refuse to endorse the back-slapping celebrations of those who undertook and facilitated the genocide, their ongoing efforts to sideline the Palestinians themselves in negotiations about Gaza’s future, and the failure of the international community to recognize that, right now, what is most important is the urgent delivery not only of humanitarian aid on an unprecedented scale, but also of significant amounts of ground-clearing and reconstruction equipment, to avert what, otherwise, will be a cataclysmic humanitarian catastrophe already set in place by Israel.
For all but seven weeks of the last two years, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been subjected to a policy of genocidal extermination by the State of Israel that has been so sickening in its depravity that decent people around the world — in their billions — have become so thoroughly disgusted by its actions that they will never again sleep easily or know anything resembling joy until the Palestinians secure their own independent state, and until Israel’s leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, past and present defense ministers Yoav Gallant and Israel Katz, president Isaac Herzog and far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — are held accountable for their monstrous genocidal crimes.
For these billions of people worldwide, including the entire Muslim world and roughly two-thirds of the populations of the countries of the west, there can also be no peace until the leaders of those western countries who have supported and enabled the genocide — the same people hypocritically celebrating yesterday at Donald Trump’s “peace summit” in Egypt, and hoping to whitewash both Israel’s monstrous crimes and their own complicity in those crimes — are also held accountable.
The Slow But Significant Erosion of Israel’s Genocidal Impunity in the West
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As the second anniversary looms — in just nine days’ time — of the attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023 and the start of Israel’s sickeningly disproportionate and still ongoing genocidal response, it seems increasingly unlikely that the occasion will be marked by even the tiniest fraction of the outpouring of collective support that was on display two years ago, when world leaders queued up to declare that Israel had an open-ended and irresponsibly undefined “right to defend itself.”
By now, the outright lies that fuelled approval for Israel’s genocide — lies about 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes — have been thoroughly debunked, and the scale of Israel’s revenge has been so horrific that none of its supporters can credibly ignore the blunt truth that, in response to the 1,195 people killed on October 7, 2023 (including an untold number killed by Israel itself under the Hannibal Directive), Israel has routinely been killing the same number of Palestinians every few weeks for the last 100 weeks (at least 60,000, officially, but almost certainly many times more), and that, despite their protestations to the contrary, the vast majority of those killed have been blameless civilians, amongst them at least 20,000 children, as I discussed in my recent article, Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%.
Israel has so carefully cultivated support in western governments and in the mainstream media — and has so flagrantly ignored UN resolutions without punishment for decades — that it thought it could exterminate the Palestinians, in response to October 7, and get away with it, seeking to hide the extent of its dehumanizing genocidal intent through its usual combination of lies, threats, distortions and self-pity, and also seeking to hide the appalling truth that its true purpose was to destroy the whole of Gaza to make it unliveable, while killing as many people as possible in the vain hope that those who somehow managed to survive would subject themselves to what was euphemistically described as “voluntary migration.”
UN Report Confirms Genocide in Gaza, But the World Still Shrugs, Even As Israel Erases Gaza City
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Four days ago, ripples of concern briefly surfaced in the global media, as a UN Commission of Inquiry — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — issued a devastating 72-page report establishing, definitively, that the State of Israel is engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and has been throughout the whole of the last 23 months.
The Commission of Inquiry — chaired by Navi Pillay, who, over the last 30 years has served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal dealing with the Rwanda genocide, and at the International Criminal Court, and who was also, from 2008 to 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — was established in May 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, and its latest report follows on from other devastating reports over the last year.
One of these was in October last year, focusing on Israel’s exterminatory “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, and its extraordinarily brutal treatment of Palestinians in its prisons, which I wrote about in detail in two articles at the time — UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals and UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.
Israel Cries “War Crimes” as a Hospital is Hit by Iran, While Sickeningly Ignoring its Genocidal 20-Month “War” on Gaza’s Hospitals
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In Iranian attacks on Israel yesterday, as part of its ongoing retaliation for Israel’s initial unprovoked attacks a week ago and its repeatedly ongoing aggression, an Iranian missile reportedly struck the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, the largest hospital in southern Israel.
Iranian sources claimed that, rather than striking the hospital, they had struck two military targets nearby, “the Israeli Defense Forces’ Command and Intelligence (IDF C4I) headquarters, as well as a military intelligence facility located in the Gav-Yam Technology Park.” The hospital is located between the two sites, and, according to Iran, “sustained minor damage from the blast shockwave.”
Israel disputed this, claiming that it was a direct attack, and footage showing a plume of smoke rising from the caved-in top of the building would seem to vindicate their analysis.
However, even if the hospital was directly hit, a third possibility has not been addressed. According to reports, a barrage of 20 to 30 Iranian missiles were aimed at the Beersheba area and other targets, so it may be that, while targeting and hitting the military targets, another missile inadvertently fell on the hospital.
Israel’s Attack on Iran Marks the Pinnacle of Netanyahu’s Long and Deranged Obsession with Seeking Israeli Security Through Endless War
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In the last week, Benjamin Netanyahu has opened up a fifth front in his claimed efforts to ensure the safety of Israel, launching an unprovoked attack on Iran on the basis of claims — which he has been making for the last 30 years — that Iran was close to establishing a viable nuclear weapons program.
No evidence exists to suggest that Netanyahu is correct. Just three months ago, in testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed that the United States intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
In addition, US negotiators were engaged in active discussions with the Iranians regarding their nuclear program when Israel launched its unprovoked attack. These had been taking place since April 12, with a sixth round of talks scheduled for Sunday June 15, but these talks were, of course, scuppered by Israel’s actions.
600 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Has Humanity’s Light Been Forever Extinguished?
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Today, May 28, marks the 600th day of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, a milestone of such shame and horror that the words to describe it adequately don’t even exist.
In the last six days, since my most recent article, Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies, the growing discomfort with Israel’s increasingly savage treatment of the Palestinians over the last three months has not led to any of the “concrete actions” threatened by the UK, France and Canada in a strongly-worded statement, and has not lifted the starvation blockade condemned by 22 foreign ministers.
Instead, after Netanyahu barked insults in response, accusing Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of supporting Hamas, and ignoring the 22 foreign ministers’ entreaties to “allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza immediately and enable the UN and humanitarian organizations to work independently and impartially to save lives, reduce suffering and maintain dignity”, Israel has continued its merciless and unsupportable military attacks, still killing, on average, a hundred people a day — almost all civilians — and, yesterday, imposing a new humanitarian aid delivery system that immediately collapsed into violence.
The deaths over the last week have been horrific, including the bombing of a former school, where displaced families were sheltering, which led to dozens of deaths, and a grimly iconic image of the silhouette of a young girl, engulfed in flames, seeking to escape the inferno, and the targeting of the home of a renowned paediatric surgeon, Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, killing nine of her ten children, whose charred bodies were delivered to Nasser Hospital while she was on duty.
Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies
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In international relations, when your “friend” treats you with arrogant condescension, you have to calibrate your response based on your power relationship with them. If that “friend” is the US, then rocking the boat too much might have serious repercussions, but when your “friend” is Israel, a country that wouldn’t even exist without your economic backing, and which has been demanding and receiving “ironclad” and unconditional support for a 19-month long genocidal assault on a territory it has illegally occupied for the last 58 years and is now threatening to exterminate completely, not responding, in the end, seems to be nothing more than succumbing to patterns of bullying and abuse.
Since its blood-soaked founding in 1948, when it killed 15,000 Palestinians and expelled 750,000 others, Israel — with the support of the US and other countries in the west — has been allowed to carve out for itself an exceptionalism that has enabled it to consistently subvert international law without ever being held to account.
Despite illegally occupying the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, imposing a horrendous system of apartheid, strangling Gaza and illegally colonizing the West Bank, repeatedly murdering Palestinians with impunity and establishing a prison system of exceptional brutality and lawlessness, its status as the world’s pre-eminent victim, because of the Holocaust, has allowed it to behave like an indulged sociopathic teenager, or as an entire nation of indulged sociopathic teenagers.
Unparalleled Depravity as Israel Implements Its “Final Solution” for Gaza
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On the night of May 15, and throughout the darkest hours of the morning of May 16, the genocidal State of Israel, as it promised ten days before, launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan that is nothing less than its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, a plan as inhuman and depraved as the “final solution” that the Nazis approved for the “Jewish problem” at the Wannsee Conference in Germany in January 1942, which led, in the years that followed, to the industrial-scale expansion of extermination camps.
It ought to be inconceivable that this is happening, because, for 15 and a half months, from October 2023 to January this year, Israel had already been engaged in relentless genocidal assaults on the trapped civilian population in Gaza, in which almost the whole of the built environment was destroyed with Hiroshima-like fury, and at least 50,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
For six weeks, from January 19 until March 1, the ceaseless slaughter and destruction seemed to have finally come to an end, via a ceasefire deal in which the bombing stopped and humanitarian aid resumed, and Israeli hostages, seized on October 7, 2023, were exchanged for around 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.
Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza
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Israel’s latest plan for the Gaza Strip, approved by the Security Cabinet on May 5, has, astonishingly, managed to plumb new depths of screamingly illegal depravity in a 19-month genocidal campaign in which screamingly illegal depravity has, from the very beginning, been the norm.
The new plan, which theoretically aims “to destroy Hamas and rescue [the] remaining hostages” seized on October 7, 2023, has four main components: firstly, the permanent military occupation of the Gaza Strip; secondly, the forced displacement of the entire surviving population to a small portion of land in south; thirdly, the conversion of that small portion of land into a concentration camp; and, fourthly, the illusion of “voluntary migration”, behind which extermination — via direct killing, starvation and, probably most potently, medical neglect through the almost complete destruction of medical supplies and equipment — will continue until everyone is dead.
This isn’t how it’s being described in news reports, because it’s a truth that eludes most mainstream journalists and their editors, who have been cowed into submission by pro-Israeli bias for so long now that they have forgotten that their job is supposed to entail them analyzing information rather than simply regurgitating it unquestioningly.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
