Genocide and Israel’s Defense Ministers: From “Human Animals” to “Terror Nests” and Endless Vengeance
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Largely overlooked amongst the grotesque collection of messianic, supremacist enthusiasts for genocide who make up the leadership of the State of Israel — in particular, of course, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the two far-right ministers in his coalition government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — is the figure of Israel Katz, a longtime “hardliner” and ally of Netanyahu who was appointed as the defense minister in November 2024 after Netanyahu sacked his predecessor Yoav Gallant.
Now 70 years of age, Katz first emerged publicly as a far-right student agitator at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1980s, opposing what he saw as “Arab students’ campus violence”, when he was suspended for a year for tying the university’s rector, the renowned chemist Raphael Mechoulam, to a chair using a rope. A former solder, whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Romania, he has been a member of the Knesset since 1998, and had held numerous ministerial positions, mostly under Netanyahu, since 2003.
Israel Katz as the epitome of relentless genocidal intent
For the last 18 months, Katz has been the epitome of relentless genocidal intent. In a statement issued after his appointment, he spoke of his intention to secure “victory over our enemies and to achieve the goals of the war: the return of all hostages as the most important moral mission, the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the containment of Iranian aggression, and the safe return of the residents of the north and south [of Israel] to their homes.”
The First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Depths of Moral Depravity Unmatched in Modern History
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Today is the first anniversary of a day that changed the world, when militants from the paramilitary wing of Hamas, the political and administrative organization responsible for the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, 141 square miles of land sealed off from the outside world since 2007 by the State of Israel, broke out of their open-air prison, and, with militants from other organizations, embarked on a brutal killing spree in southern Israel.
The attacks left 1,195 people dead — of whom 739 were Israeli civilians, and 79 were civilians of other countries — although no one knows how many of the dead were killed by Israel itself, via the notorious Hannibal Directive, which advocates killing their own people to prevent them from being captured. 251 hostages were also seized and taken back to Gaza, where many have since died — some, undoubtedly, killed by Israel itself — because of their government’s refusal, since last November, to negotiate a ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
The October 7 attacks were horrendous, but Israel’s response — launching a relentless all-out assault on the Gaza Strip, which has lasted for a whole year, and is still, malevolently, ongoing — has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, a death toll so disproportionate, borne of destruction so remorselessly vindictive, that it has plunged us into depths of moral depravity that most of us have never witnessed.
The World As We Know It Came to an End on October 8, 2023, Not October 7
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For the last 320 days — that’s just seven weeks short of an entire year — the State of Israel has been engaged in the most brazen and visible genocide in the whole of human history, publicly supported by most of the governments of the west, murdering the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip (mostly civilians, and half of them children) at an average rate of 125 a day, or five every hour, in an onslaught on a trapped civilian population that is unprecedented in its scale and ferocity.
These figures come from the most recent assessment, by the Gaza Strip’s shattered Health Ministry, that over 40,000 of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million (2% of the entire population, or 1 in every 50 of its inhabitants) have been killed over the last ten and a half months, although the true death toll is undoubtedly many times higher.
As Dr. Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, told the Guardian, “This number, 40,000, includes only bodies that were received and buried.” In addition, “About 10,000 airstrike victims were thought to remain entombed in collapsed buildings”, Dr. al-Hams said, “because there was little heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins looking for them.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
