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Over the last 18 months, the veneer of civilization has worn so thin that the darkness is pouring in, threatening to engulf us all.

It all began, of course, on October 7, 2023 — not with the attacks by Hamas and other militants in southern Israel, but with Israel’s response, which, almost immediately, very evidently involved implementing the “Final Solution”, with the full support of the US and most other western countries, to what was perceived as the long-standing “problem” of the Palestinians refusing to patiently and non-violently submit to a grotesque system of apartheid, to being expelled from their land, or imprisoned within it, or to being murdered indiscriminately, or imprisoned arbitrarily in brutal and fundamentally lawless prisons at the hands of their aggressors — monstrous injustices played out incessantly over the previous 75 years.

In all of the violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the long decades since the brutal, blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 750,000 exiled, nothing — not even the 1,139 deaths on October 7 (even discounting the as yet untold number of those who were killed by the Israelis themselves under the Hannibal Doctrine), or the more than 2,300 Palestinians killed in the longest of Israel’s previous military assaults on Gaza, for seven weeks in 2014 — can compare with the almost entirely relentless slaughter and destruction of the last 554 days, in which almost the entirety of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and, at the barest minimum, over 50,000 people have been killed, most of whom were civilians.

Not content with engaging in the industrial-scale slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, gleefully advocating genocide while pretending it is the world’s only perpetual victim, and has an infinite right to “defend itself” without any constraints whatsoever on its actions, Israel has also worked assiduously to promote its narrative in the west, having spent decades embedding itself in the corridors of power, and in newsrooms, and also, in recent years, aggressively promoting a legally-implemented definition of antisemitism that involves not, as it should, targeting the sweeping and indiscriminate hatred of an entire people that typifies all forms of racism, but by pretending that antisemitism actually means opposing the actions of the Israeli government, even when, as has been the case for the last 18 months, that government is manifestly engaging in a genocide.

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