The Ministry of Truth Reports a Ceasefire

“By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” —George Orwell, 1984 Outside the BBC’s headquarters in London stands a statue of George Orwell. The wall behind it features a quote of his: “If freedom means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” One wonders if the irony was truly lost on the designer—perhaps it was a private joke, easily lost on the suits working in the “Ministry of Truth.” And who could blame them for their ignorance? Orwell has long been praised in the West for his critique of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. The CIA paid for Animal Farm and 1984 to be translated and published in other languages and distributed copies in Asia; they also funded the movie adaptations but edited the scripts to carefully excise Orwell’s critique of capitalism. In his later years, Orwell himself drafted a list of writers he suspected of being Soviet sympathizers. And yet, he remained a life-long democratic socialist, writing almost exclusively for left-wing publications. Perhaps most ironically, what’s usually omitted from 1984 is that Orwell based the protagonist’s job on his experience working at the BBC. In the novel, the main character works for the records department of the BBC Ministry of Truth. His job is to edit news reports to conform to the Party’s ideology. After making the edits, he would discard the old version into an incinerator called “the memory hole” to be “devoured by flames.” Since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed. “I have the best means of judging,” Orwell wrote in a private letter, “what a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum [the BBC] is for the most part.” The final irony is that the quote featured behind Orwell’s statue comes from his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm. It was discovered in the original script after he died and published posthumously. While the book is a satirical critique of the Soviet Union, Orwell felt that the British shouldn’t feel too smug about themselves because, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.” Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. … The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. “In our country,” the final paragraph reads, “it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.” Yet these passages have been discarded into the “memory hole.” When two American scholars, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, carried out a systematic analysis of the US media in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988), they found that the media consistently skews coverage in favor of state ideology. Their findings were either haughtily dismissed or simply ignored. Evidently it’s unmentionable in the “Free Press” that some things are unmentionable. I draw your attention to these facts in light of recent events that I think have been severely distorted by the Western media. This case is curious for how obvious this distortion is. One might recall Orwell’s concept of “doublethink”: But it is also necessary to REMEMBER that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, ‘reality control.’ In Newspeak it is called DOUBLETHINK, though DOUBLETHINK comprises much else as well. DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. I am talking about the “ceasefire” in Gaza. Per the agreement, Hamas released all living hostages, as well as the remains of those they could reach. Many bodies, however, are buried deep under the rubble or in collapsed tunnels after being killed in Israeli bombardments. As soon as Hamas accepted Trump’s plan (more on that later), they warned that retrieving all the corpses would take not only time but also excavators and heavy machinery to clear the debris—which Israel doesn’t allow into the Strip. Meanwhile, Israel is required to stop killing and allow aid convoys into Gaza. Israel honored neither of these provisions. We’ll briefly deal with the aid first: According to the UN, at least 600 trucks a day would have to enter Gaza at minimum to avert the worst outcomes and relieve widespread suffering and malnutrition. Realistically much more aid is needed than that, but the agreement required Israel to let in the bare minimum—600 trucks per day. However, Israel has been slow-walking the process, only admitting an average of 94 trucks a day, according to the UN. “The situation still remains catastrophic because what’s entering is not enough,” warned WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus on October 23. “There is no dent in hunger because there is not enough food.” As for the killing: the so-called “ceasefire” was declared on October 10, between October 11 and October 29, an 18-day period, at least 211 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks (597 people injured). Here are some highlights: On Friday, October 17, an Israeli tank attacked a car in Gaza City killing eleven civilians of the Abu Shaaban family. The Israeli army claimed the car had breached their “yellow line,” but that arbitrary line is not physically marked and no attempt was made to warn the family. On October 20, Israeli air strikes killed 26 Palestinians; then Israel announced they would “resume” the ceasefire. The way Tel Aviv tells it, Hamas broke the ceasefire first and provoked the air strikes—but even Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he believed Hamas “isn’t involved in that.” On October 29, Israeli bombardments killed 104 Palestinians overnight, including 46 children and 20 women, before Tel Aviv assured the world it “returned to the [ceasefire] agreement.” One doctor who works at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis told reporters that he couldn’t go on shift. “I could barely walk or do anything,” he said. “Yesterday, I barely survived. … Every time we wake up in this nightmare—they surprise us with the nightmare of returning to war.” One of the survivors of the strikes, Amna Qrinawi, standing next to the pockmarks and debris, asked: “What kind of ceasefire is this?” Indeed, it isn’t a ceasefire at all because Israel has not ceased firing. But the Party demands a ceasefire is happening. In perhaps the most dramatic illustration of doublethink, NBC News reported recently that “Even as the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel holds, Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces.” The article, titled “US Warns Hamas Against Violating Ceasefire as More Hostage Remains Returned to Israel”—a headline which itself acknowledges that Hamas is returning the hostage remains in compliance with the ceasefire but chastises them anyway—is not an outlier by any means. In a piece headlined, “Hamas Returns Bodies as Fragile Gaza Ceasefire Holds,” the Financial Times explains why aid has not been flowing into Gaza: “Israeli officials have accused Hamas of returning bodies too slowly, and threatened to limit the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza in an effort to pressure the militant group to accelerate the returns.” Completely omitted from this assessment is the UN Human Rights Council’s report finding that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip (see, “Two Years and Counting”). One can easily imagine a comparable article in Der Stürmer: “German officials have accused Jewish militant groups of undermining the Reich, and threatened to limit the amount of food allowed into the ghettos.” Another article from CNN that first spends 10 paragraphs detailing Israel’s unfounded grievance with Hamas for supposedly not releasing corpses quickly enough, similarly reported that “the ceasefire in Gaza is holding though not without coming under strain from the failure of Hamas to return all the bodies, the initially  slow entry of aid into the enclave, and continued, if isolated, incidents of killings of Palestinians in Israeli strikes” (emphasis added). Take note of the word “initially” to deceptively suggest the problem has already been resolved. Furthermore, while Hamas is directly mentioned and falsely blamed for not honoring the agreement—even though they are—Israel is not identified and their crimes—far more severe than releasing corpses at a slow pace—are minimized and partially excused by the “if isolated” caveat. On October 17, the same aforementioned day the Israelis killed eleven members of one family in Gaza City, CNN’s global affairs analyst Brett McGurk, who undermined the ceasefire negotiations when he worked for the Biden administration, wrote a piece headlined: “Why Hamas Remains the Greatest Threat to Trump’s Gaza Plan.” I’ll spare you the details, but McGurk never acknowledges the UN’s finding that Israel is committing genocide nor the chorus of genocide scholars who’ve reached the same conclusion. Like McGurk, the Washington Post claims that “Hamas’ enduring grip has significant implications for the future of Gaza and President Donald Trump’s peace plan.” Again peddling the bizarre lie that Hamas is the obstacle to a lasting peace. No wonder that polls continue to show record-levels of decline of trust in the media. One Gallup poll from last year (October 14) found that sixty-nine percent of Americans don’t trust the mainstream media. The Ministries of Truth evidently have their work cut out for them. (Credit to the media monitoring group FAIR for compiling a good number of those articles I quoted above.) Given the preponderance of misinformation that’s promulgated, unfortunately, by mainstream sources—if not intended to deceive, then at least to obfuscate the facts and prevent people from placing these events into a larger context—it’s worthwhile to briefly chronicle some underreported events leading up to this so-called agreement; as well as to contextualize Israel’s pattern of behavior regarding such diplomatic processes. In my article, “Blood and Soil,” from July of last year, I wrote about Israel’s pattern of evading and undermining peace processes stretching back to 1928, before the official founding of the state itself. The British then wanted the Zionists and Palestinians to agree to treat each other as equals—in other words, the natives would not be given special status versus the settlers. The Zionists never thought the Palestinians would agree to it, so they championed the idea. To their shock, the Palestinians agreed as well. As soon as they did, the Zionists instantly withdrew their support for the agreement; Palestinians would have no equal say in the soon- to-be realized Jewish supremacist state. Some years later, when Israel lobbied to join the United Nations, the international community conditioned membership on Israel’s cooperation with international law. The UN had already affirmed the right of the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba to return to their homes—Israel would have to live side-by-side with the Palestinians. Seeing no other choice, Israel signed the May Protocol, recognizing the right of return—an established concept in international law—for Palestinians. The next day, Israel was granted full UN membership status. Their first act as a member state was to withdraw its recognition of the May Protocol. Contrary to their rhetoric bemoaning that they have no “partner in peace,” the Israelis are not interested in peace. Evidenced by the fact that when they finally get peace, they reject it. Every time. This time is no different. Israel did not want to agree to this plan. I know because they already rejected the same agreement in September 2024. A veteran Israeli negotiator, Gershon Baskin, was already negotiating with Hamas prior to October 7. In November 2012, Baskin had negotiated a deal with Hamas. When his Palestinian counterpart presented the final draft to Hamas’ military chief, Ahmed Jabari, for approval, which he was expected to give, Israel assassinated him a few hours later in an air strike and started another round of mass slaughter under the well-known banner, Operation Pillar of Defense. Haaretz’s senior military analyst wrote at the time: Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable. It seems a view had developed that Israel needed to strengthen its deterrence against Hamas rather than reach agreement with it on a period of calm. In the view of the defense establishment and the prime and defense ministers’ bureaus, a cease-fire agreement might have undermined Israel’s deterrence and weakened its image of resolve. Bolstering its deterrence, in this view, would be achieved by killing Jabari, who was liable to respond affirmatively to the offer of a long-term cease-fire. In this way, Israel’s leaders killed three birds with one stone: They assassinated the man who had the power to make a deal with Israel; they took revenge on someone who had caused more than a few Israeli casualties; and they signaled to Hamas that communications with it will be conducted only through military force. …If they knew it was possible to reach a cease-fire agreement … without going to war, why did they assassinate Jabari, and thereby also assassinate the chances of achieving calm without shooting? Gershon Baskin continued his talks with Hamas and was involved, after October 7, with the talks in Doha as an independent Israeli mediator. Baskin wrote on his blog on October 9 (one day before the “ceasefire” went into effect): This deal could have [been] done a long time ago. Hamas agreed to all of the same terms in September 2024 in what became known as the “Three Weeks Deal” that I had received in writing and voice message in Arabic and in English. But at that point the response of the Israeli negotiators was that “the Prime Minister did not agree to end the war.” Even though the “Three Week Deal” proposal landed on the desk of President Biden, his person in charge, Bret McGurk, refused to sway from the bad deal that he was negotiating. I met with members of the American negotiating team in October 2024 and they were as frustrated as I was in their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table. The Qataris invited me to Doha in October 2024 and I presented to them the deal that Hamas agreed to, which they were fully aware of but they said without the American adoption of the plan, nothing could be done, because the obstacle was Israel, not Hamas. That is the same message I received from the Egyptian intelligence—Hamas was ready for a deal to release all of the hostages, not to govern Gaza any longer and to end the war. But Israel was not ready. In their brazenness, the Israelis openly contradicted the incessant rhetoric coming from the Democratic Party at this time (dogmatically repeating the phrase “working tirelessly for a ceasefire,” which even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shamefully parroted in her DNC speech). “God did the state of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period,” former Israeli ambassador Michael Herzog exclaimed. “We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.” Donald Trump, less committed to the Zionist project than Joe Biden, driven more by an insatiable lust for adoration and golden shiny things, which the Nobel Peace Prize symbolizes in a kind of lavish synthesis, was more determined to push some kind of agreement down everyone’s throat. One American proposal, formally endorsed by the Israelis, was accepted by Hamas on August 18, 2025, making major concessions. Israel never responded, merely launching a major ground operation in Gaza City and announced plans to sharply escalate displacement operations. I suppose that sufficed as a response. Another American proposal, amended by the Qatari mediators, Hamas negotiators, and Gershon Baskin, was delivered to Hamas’ leadership on September 8, 2025. “I was on the telephone with the American side at the same hour that the Qataris were presenting to Hamas the final American proposal,” Baskin wrote. “Then Israel bombed the home of Khalil al-Haya,” a senior Hamas official, and killed his son, along with four office workers and a Qatari security officer, and wounded al-Haya’s wife, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. Baskin continued: On September 10 one of the Hamas negotiators contacted me and said that the whole leadership survived the attack and that the Qataris had instructed them to not go out and not to use their telephones at all. Hamas was convinced that the attack could not have happened without the agreement of Trump. Despite the American denials, Hamas no longer trusted that Trump and the Americans were working in good faith. The proposed American guarantees were no longer relevant. I was requested by the Americans to tell the Hamas leadership that the Americans had nothing to do with the attack and that the US and President Trump were still committed to reaching an agreement to end the war. Hamas’s messages to me were that they had no faith in the Americans because Israel could not have attacked in Doha without the American agreement. On September 10 at 1:22 am Witkoff sent me the following message: “We had zero to do with this. They (the Israelis) have apologized to us. Their statement confirms this. And the President’s Truth Social post attests to it.” Then, according to The Times, “Arab leaders infuriated with [Israel’s] Doha strike went to the White House where Baskin’s plan formed the basis for what would become Trump’s 20-point plan.” The Israelis were allowed to make some alterations before the plan was presented at a joint press conference on September 29. It was presented as a take-it-or-leave-it deal: “If Hamas rejects the deal,” Trump said, “Bibi, you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do.” The deal required Gaza to completely disarm and welcome Israeli military occupation—effectively putting an end to the armed and organized Palestinian resistance, giving Israel the win that their military was unable to exact on the ground. “This put Hamas between a rock and a hard place,” Mouin Rabbani told Jacobin. “On the one hand, it couldn’t accept this proposal without committing political suicide, but it also couldn’t reject it because the ball had been thrown into their court by the Arab and Muslim leaders, who, rather than rejecting the revised proposal after Netanyahu visited Washington, went along with it.” Hamas managed to escape this unenviable position between Scylla and Charybdis by playing to Trump’s vanity. They profusely thanked Trump for finally making peace in the Middle East, something no other president had done! Hamas would gladly accept most of President Trump’s epic and handsome peace plan. Some details, however, such as the future governance of Gaza and disarmament, would have to be worked out later. Trump swiftly called Netanyahu to relay what he thought was good news. The details of that phone call were leaked to Axios. Netanyahu told Trump “there is nothing to celebrate.” Trump reportedly shot back, “I don’t know why you’re always so fucking negative. This is a win. Take it.” Then Trump took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to publicly tell Israel to knock it off. “Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE,” Trump wrote. “Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly!” Within three hours, unable to risk defying the United States, Netanyahu ordered the IDF to pull back and agreed to Trump’s deal. The next day, Trump gave an interview to Axios. “I said, ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory.’ He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.” And so, Trump rammed a kind-of “ceasefire” down the throats of the begrudging Israelis. But the Israelis are not done. They will either succeed in reigniting the unrestrained genocidal violence of the last two years, or they will lower the temperature and revert back to the “incremental genocide.” Whatever happens, it will depend on Trump, because the US calls the shots in this relationship. Palestinians can only achieve liberation if the international community intervenes and forces a genuine peace agreement down Israel’s throat; ending the occupation and recognizing the right of return. Until that happens, the reality on the ground is by no means a “ceasefire.” At least not in Oldspeak.