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It’s over two weeks since Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, and, after a brief flurry of mainstream media activity, in which the immensity of his war crimes and crimes against humanity (for which he was never indicted)  was largely whitewashed through mentions of how, although he was a “divisive” figure, he was also a towering presence in US politics, the media moved on, only waking up again yesterday when his funeral service was held in Washington, D.C., at which former presidents and vice presidents, lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices all ignored the horrors of his legacy.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden attended, as did former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Also present were the Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi. former House Speaker John Boehner, former national security advisor John Bolton, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan.

Biden’s attendance struck me as particularly grimly appropriate, because his “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which he referred to the attacks of October 7, 2023 as Israel’s 9/11, has always struck me as nothing less than a transfer of Cheney’s lawless and violent post-9/11 policies of vengeance from the US itself to Israel, a parallel made all the more alarming because, of course, Israel is a foreign country, even though Biden’s actions did more than any previous president to foster the illusion that, actually, the US is nothing more than a colony of Israel.

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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.

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On the same day that the Israeli Knesset gave “preliminary approval to a bill to impose Israeli sovereignty on the occupied West Bank”, as Al Jazeera described it, accurately calling it “a move tantamount to annexation of the Palestinian territory, which would be a blatant violation of international law”, over 3,300 km away, in the Hague, the International Court of Justice delivered a blistering condemnation of Israel’s existing failures to “fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law” as the occupying Power in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; namely, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, first occupied in 1967.

In an advisory opinion relating to 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”, the Court’s eleven judges unanimously ruled that the State of Israel was required “to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services” — from all of which, despite persistent and risible protestations to the contrary by senior Israeli officials, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been horrendously deprived, though various “sieges” on all essential supplies, for most of the last two years.

The Court also ruled, by ten votes to one, that Israel was required “to agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip, including relief provided by the United Nations and its entities, in particular the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], other international organizations and third States, and not to impede such relief.”

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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.

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Is it real? Dare we hope? Is there really going to be a ceasefire in Gaza? Will hostages be exchanged, will humanitarian aid be allowed to flood into Gaza, staving off mass starvation, and additional widespread deaths through the destruction of the healthcare sector and a rigid siege on vital medical equipment and supplies, and will there really be a durable end to Israel’s genocidal hostilities?

To secure the return of its remaining hostages, and to fulfil Donald Trump’s desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, will Israel really end its hostilities, and wean itself off what, for the last two years, has been its remorseless addiction to killing Palestinian civilians? On average, every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day for the last 731 days, Israel has been killing civilians — babies, children, women and men — all while falsely claiming that it is “defending itself”, seeking to “eliminate Hamas” and secure the return of all the hostages seized on October 7, 2023.

Will Israel really abandon its true aims — the steady, relentless extermination of the Palestinian people (behind a mirage of “voluntary migration”), and the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip to make it unliveable, so that its vile, long-cherished dream of colonizing the whole of Gaza — and then doing the same in the West Bank — can finally be fulfilled?

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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.

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With just two days to go until the unforgivable second anniversary of the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and with hopes diminishing that the ‘Peace Plan’ pushed by Donald Trump will actually bring the grotesque and seemingly endless murder of Palestinian civilians to an end, the timing seems appropriate for the release of ‘O Palestine’, a new song of mine, which I wrote in the early months of Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, and opposing the genocide and western support and complicity.

The song was recorded as a collaboration with my son Tyler (beatboxer The Wiz-RD), on which I play guitar, Wurlitzer piano and Hohner Bass 2, with Tyler beatboxing, and it was produced by the great Charlie Hart, best known for working with the late Ronnie Lane, who also produced The Four Fathers’ last album, Songs of Loss and Resistance.

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After nearly two years of the most horrific live-streamed genocide in history, the majority of the world’s eight billion people, shocked and appalled to varying degrees, want nothing less than an end to the ceaseless murder of Palestinian civilians and the total eradication of the Gaza Strip, the provision of humanitarian aid and medical supplies in vast quantities, and the reconstruction of Gaza.

They — we — also want the establishment of Palestinian autonomy so thorough that Israel can no longer treat Palestinians as vermin to be slaughtered in the pursuit of the malignant dream that has been the driver of its existence since its blood-soaked founding 77 years ago — the total control of all Palestinian land, and the complete subjugation, disappearance or extermination of the entire Palestinian population.

The 20-point “Peace Plan” unveiled by Donald Trump at the White House yesterday, which Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting after alienating most of the world at the UN General Assembly last Friday, seemed to accept, appears, at first glance, to finally offer the promise of an end to Israel’s relentless genocidal assault on Gaza’s trapped and starving civilian population.

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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.”

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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.

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