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For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness” in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.

Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.

Completely supported by almost all the nations of the west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide, inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population — a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.

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56 years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets to mark the first Earth Day, to promote support for environmental protections, and, as it was described in a full-page promotional advert in the New York Times, to “start to reclaim the environment we have wrecked”, via “a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster”, and to “provide real rather than rhetorical solutions.”

In large letters, the ad proclaimed, boldly, “A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. Its carrier is man.”

The name, and the promotional messages, came via the legendary advertising copywriter Julian Koenig, whose campaign for Volkswagen, “Think Small,” was later cited by Advertising Age as the “greatest advertising campaign of the 20th century.”

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Reality means nothing to either the US or Israel, who launched an illegal and unprovoked war on Iran on February 28, and were then humiliated when Iran delivered devastating blows to the US’s outposts throughout the Gulf, pierced Israel’s defense systems, causing extensive damage that the Israeli authorities have desperately tried to hide, and dealt a massive blow to the world’s energy supplies by cutting off the transit of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

For the US, which had fallen for Israeli lies that the war would be swift, and that decapitating Iran’s leadership would lead to a popular uprising and the collapse of the government, this was a rude awakening, and after Donald Trump had spent days on his social media account posting increasingly unhinged threats against Iran, he suddenly backed down last Tuesday and announced a two-week ceasefire.

This was a tacit acknowledgement of defeat, but when a US delegation, led by Vice President JD Vance, headed to Pakistan for peace talks with their Iranian counterparts, they refused to leave their baggage of belligerent arrogance at home, and turned up with a delusional swagger, reflecting the depths of their leader’s derangement, and the extent to which their alleged “America First” policies has been entirely usurped by the tired old ghosts of the discredited neocon movement.

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Yesterday, as perceptive observers marked two and a half years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel cemented its reputation as an unprecedented pestilential sickness on the face of the earth, contaminating everyone who comes into contact with it through its relentless barbarism, by launching almost a hundred devastating aerial attacks on Lebanon in the space of just ten minutes, rising to 137 in total in the space of just half an hour, in what the genocidal entity proudly proclaimed as “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Could the exercise of evil have a more transparently accurate name?

The attacks, in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, which rivalled in intensity the most violent attacks on Gaza in the early months of the Gaza genocide, were clearly indiscriminate — acts of terrorism, completely destroying numerous apartment blocks in Beirut, for example, and meant to kill as many civilians as possible, following the template established in Gaza, for which Israel has never been held accountable. At least 303 people were killed, and 1,165 wounded, and social media reports provided grim accounts not of murdered militants, but of unjustifiably slaughtered women and children.

Also, as In Gaza, the Israeli authorities sought to defend their actions by plying the complicit western media with unverified and clearly risible justifications for their actions, just as they have done so cynically and successfully in Gaza for the whole of their uniquely depraved descent into monstrous and devious inhumanity over the last 30 months.

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Despite unprecedented global chaos caused by just two rogue nations — the US and Israel — who have wilfully eviscerated all the rules regarding the conduct of warfare over the last two and a half years, and massively increasing the geographical scope of their illegal actions over the last six weeks, campaigners across the US and around the world held their 39th monthly consecutive global vigils for the closure of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay last week.

On Wednesday April 1, campaigners gathered outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York City and Detroit, while other campaigners were outside the Houses of Parliament in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, and in Mexico City. The Saturday before, on “No Kings Day”, campaigners in San Francisco highlighted the rank injustice of the prison’s continued existence, with other campaigners, in Cobleskill, NY, joining on Saturday April 4, as part of weekly protests reflecting the demands of the times that have been running every Saturday for the last 25 years. There were also solo participants in Oakland, CA and in Liège, Belgium.

Please see below for photos from all of the vigils, and read on for my assessment of the importance of the vigils as part of wider resistance to the collapse into depravity  of all notions of any kind of moral order since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza 30 achingly long months ago.

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Many thanks to Chuck Mertz for having me as the featured guest on this week’s “This Is Hell!”, now in its 30th year, a Chicago-based “long-form political interview program”, broadcast live every Wednesday morning, and then made available as a podcast.

You can find my hour-long interview on the “This is Hell!” website here, the full show on the website here, and on Patreon, where you can also make a donation to support the show, if you’d like to contradict Chuck’s assertion that it is “broadcast without the virtue of money or the vice of political agenda.”

I’ve also embedded it via Soundcloud below, and I very much hope that you have time to listen to it.

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The ever-growing shadow of depravity engulfing the world has grown so huge in recent weeks — since the unprovoked and illegal war launched by the US and Israel on Iran, and, simultaneously, Israel’s renewed assaults on Lebanon, and an increase in its violence in the occupied West Bank — that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the original sin that led to this situation — Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip — began 900 days ago today.

It’s also easy to overlook the fact that today also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, the fearless 23-year old Palestinian journalist whose smile, and whose relentless energetic enthusiasm for recording Israel’s crimes, lit up phones and social media reports and news broadcasts around the world.

As he said in his final message to the world, written in anticipation that he would be killed, “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”

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Anyone paying attention knows that, since October 7, 2023, when the State of Israel began carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip on a scale so grotesque that it can only realistically be compared to the impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, all sense of proportionality in warfare has been eviscerated, and has been normalized to such an extent that Israel, and its lapdog the US, are now engaged in similarly disproportionate attacks on Iran, and with Israel also extending its depravity to Lebanon.

While some of this blatant violation of international humanitarian law can be traced to Israel’s relentless contempt for any attempts to restrain its military actions, dating back decades, the truly shocking and soul-shredding intensification of its military actions over the last 29 months, in which the US has finally moved from being Israel’s main backer to being a fully-fledged partner, has primarily been facilitated through both countries’ embrace of military targeting powered by AI (artificial intelligence), which has both promised and delivered military targets on a scale that is hundreds or thousands of times faster than what was previously possible, although, crucially, with little or no human oversight to address profound problems with the accuracy of the targeting.

To provide some necessary background, proportionality in warfare seeks to minimize the loss of civilian life during military operations, and its key definition comes from the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which sought to apply rules governing warfare in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The Additional Protocol specifically addressed the protection of civilians, and, in Article 51, established protections against indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, providing two particular examples of attacks that “are to be considered as indiscriminate”, which have subsequently provided a benchmark for assessments of proportionality.

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On March 4, the “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place in Washington, D.C., New York City, Detroit, London and Brussels, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade, and with campaigners in Cobleskill, NY joining us on Saturday March 7, when Gavrilah Wells, an Amnesty campaigner from San Francisco, also sent photos from AIUSA’s Human Rights Conference and AGM in Washington, D.C.

These were the 38th successive monthly vigils for the prison’s closure, after I initiated them in February 2023, following the example established by campaigners in London five months before, securing the support of friends and colleagues across the US, and in Brussels and Mexico City, who, ever since, have shown an implacable commitment to keeping Guantánamo and its many injustices visible, in defiance of the tendency of politicians and the mainstream media to behave as though it no longer exists.

I’m hugely impressed that so many vigils took place given the proximity of the date to the all-encompassing horror of the launch of the illegal and unprovoked joint US-Israeli “war” on Iran just four days before, which, like a black hole of injustice, has understandably swallowed up almost everyone’s time and energy.

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It’s worse than we thought.

While dirty, demented grandpa Donald, increasingly unhinged, keeps failing asleep and then waking up and indulging in bouts of incoherent ranting, he has already accomplished what his minders always intended: to bring together the two most twisted, delusional, genocidal, pseudo-religious movements in modern history —  Zionism and Christian Zionism — and to launch an apocalyptic war on their behalf.

Donald Trump, of course, as a malignant narcissist, has no God but himself, and the same is true of his chief Zionist manipulator, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a slippery devil of a being who has dominated Israeli politics for much of the last 40 years, and who has, over the last 29 months, finally emerged in his true colours, as the bearer of nothing but mass murder and destruction without restraint.

Using the Palestinian resistance movement’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 as an excuse, Netanyahu, leading a political establishment and a population that are almost entirely supportive of his bleak vision, has drawn on violent Iron Age religious texts to finally manifest the true apocalyptic intent of the genocidal Zionist settler-colonial cult whose first victory was the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

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