Two Years and Counting

In 2006, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé—a renowned and consummate scholar, not an extremist by any means—wrote an article for the Electronic Intifada titled, “Genocide in Gaza.” He wrote that Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip was clearly designed to exterminate the Palestinians one corpse at a time; hoping that if they kill enough people, the rest would flee “to escape the inferno.” “A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave few thousands dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign—the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory.” In a follow-up article four months later, Pappé reflected on his use of the word genocide: “I hesitated a lot before using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. Indeed, the responses I received, including from some leading human rights activists, indicated a certain unease over the usage of such a term. I was inclined to rethink the term for a while, but came back to employing it today with even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.” Ever since, Ilan Pappé has defined “Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip as an incremental genocide,” urging the term “should be insisted upon.” As he predicted, the bodies piled up. It did not escape the notice of a good number of Holocaust survivors either, who saw eerie parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany. Perhaps the most outspoken critic was Dutch physicist Hajo Meyer. Hajo’s parents died in the camps. He was caught by the Gestapo in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz. After 10 months there, he was one of around 7,000 prisoners to barely survive when the death-camp was liberated by the Red Army. Something he attributed to mere luck. After the war he became a physicist, and when he retired he learned woodworking, making violins. He also became politically active, especially after visiting Israel: I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by the Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of ‘blood and soil’ in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people—coerced ghettoization behind a ‘security wall’; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival—force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians. In 2003 he published a book titled, The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. “Zionism and Judaism are contrary to each other,” he explained in an interview. “Because Judaism, as I learned it—the reform movement—is highly, highly ethical. And so you cannot connect Zionism with ‘highly ethical.’ You can only connect the words ‘aggressive,’ ‘oppressive,’ ‘stealing,’ [and] ‘robbing’ with Zionism. But not ‘highly ethical.’ … [Zionists] have given up everything that has to do with humanity, with empathy, for one thing: the state. The ‘blood and soil,’ just like the Nazis. … They don’t give a damn about the world. The only thing they give a damn about is this Zionist state, Israel, and nothing else. And they don’t care if the Jews go down, because they have nothing to do with these Jews who live elsewhere and don’t want to come to their blessed and paradisaical country called Israel.” In 2011, Hajo went on a speaking tour titled “Never Again For Anyone.” The backlash was predictable: some tried to paint him as an enfeebled senile man who never spoke about politics before losing his mind, and now suddenly this Holocaust survivor was being exploited by cruel anti-Semites; while others just smeared him as an anti-Semite directly. When he was asked about the smears, Hajo responded: “[It’s] like one of the important Nazi leaders, Göring, said, ‘I determine who is a Jew.’ And so the Zionists determine who is an anti-Semite. … I cannot get higher honors than to be one of the people like Jimmy Carter, or Noam Chomsky, or Norman Finkelstein, and former [Dutch] Prime Minister Dries van Agt. So I’m very proud to be an anti-Semite.” He died in 2014, a few days after his 90th birthday. One month earlier, tired as he was, he had given his last interview. “If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals,” he said. “The brainwashing of the Jewish Israeli populations is going on for over sixty years. They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being.” “My message for the Palestinians is that they should not give up their fight,” he added. “If they give up, they might lose their self-esteem with the ongoing humiliations by the Israeli Nazis. Fight with human means. It is justified to show to the Israeli Zionists that you are a force to reckon with. Fight with stones, with weapons. Yes, also with weapons. … If we Western democratic societies don’t support the Palestinians in their fight, we must feel ashamed if the Palestinians are annihilated. The US and the European Union must show their teeth.” For occupied people, fighting back is indeed justified: UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43, adopted in 1982, “Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” And no one would dispute that the Palestinians—residing in the Occupied Territories—are under military occupation. Four generations of Palestinians were born in the Gaza concentration camp or the West Bank and East Jerusalem Bantustans. The valiant efforts to peacefully protest the occupation by younger Palestinians were smashed with unmoored violence (as I’ve described in “Blood and Soil,” which I politely ask you to read). Two years ago on this day, Gaza’s orphans, rather than dying quietly like they were supposed to, broke out of the camp and decided to die fighting as hard as they could. The famed Gaza scholar Norman Finkelstein compared it to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in August of 1831—the deadliest slave revolt in American history. Turner’s instruction to his 70 rebells was simple: “Kill all the white people.” For about 3 days, the rebels went house to house, beheading white babies in their cribs with hatchets and hacking families to pieces, some were disemboweled. In all, about sixty white people were murdered. Mobs of white men, some part of organized militias, retaliated by massacring around 120 random Black people, most of whom played no part in the revolt. Today, Nat Turner is remembered as a national hero, and his rebellion is sometimes referred to as the first war against slavery (the Civil War being the second). At the time, however, Nat Turner was naturally vilified by white Americans, but with a notable exception: William Loyd Garrison, founder of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, wrote in the aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion: What we have so long predicted—at the peril of being stigmatized as an alarmist and declaimer—has commenced its fulfilment. The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another, has been made. The first drops of blood, which are but the prelude to a deluge from the gathering clouds, have fallen. The first flash of lightning, which is to smite and consume, has been felt. The first wailings of bereavement, which is to clothe the earth in sackcloth, have broken up our ears. … Ye patriotic hypocrites! Ye panegyrists of Frenchmen, Greeks, and Poles! Ye fustian declaimers for liberty! Ye valiant sticklers for equal rights among yourselves! Ye haters of aristocracy! Ye assailants of monarchies! Ye Republican nullifiers! Ye treasonable disunionists! Be dumb! Cast no reproach upon the conduct of the slaves, but let your lips and cheeks wear the blisters of condemnation! …For ourselves, we are horror-struck at the late tidings. We have exerted our utmost efforts to avert calamity. We have warned our countrymen of the danger of persisting in their unrighteous conduct. We have preached to the slaves the pacific precepts of Jesus Christ. We have appealed to Christians, philanthropists, and patriots, for their assistance to accomplish the great work of national redemption through the agency of moral power—of public opinion—of individual liberty. How have we been received? We have been threatened, proscribed, vilified, and imprisoned—a laughing-stock and a reproach. Do we falter, in view of these things? Let time answer. If we have been hitherto urgent, and bold, and denunciatory in our efforts—hereafter we shall grow vehement and active with the increase of danger. We shall cry, in trumpet tones, night and day—Wo to this guilty land, unless she speedily repent of her evil doings! The blood of millions of her sons cries aloud for redress! Immediate emancipation alone can save her from the vengeance of Heaven, and cancel the debt of ages! “It took uncommon courage to take Garrison’s stand,” Finkelstein wrote. “A $5,000 price was put on his head in North Carolina while Georgia offered the same amount to anybody who would kidnap him and drag him for trial. The ‘radical’ podcasting universe of our day wouldn’t risk two ‘likes’ and one ‘share.’” Finkelstein, however, would echo Garrison’s principled stand in the aftermath of October 7: The 2,000 young men who burst the gates of Gaza on October 7, 2023, had been born into a concentration camp. For fully two decades they had been immured in a 25-mile long by 5-mile wide sliver of land that was among the most densely populated places in the world. The vast majority of them could never hope to leave but only to pace each day the camp’s suffocating perimeter; never aspire to gainful employment or eat a full meal; never expect to marry or raise a family. Abandoned by everyone, they were ‘remaindered’ to languish and die. To expedite this process, Israel periodically launched ‘operations’ visiting death and destruction on Gaza: thousands methodically mowed down; homes and critical infrastructure systematically pulverized. It might sound like the script of a bad B-movie, but on the night of October 6 each of those 2,000 men probably kissed his mother, then his father, goodbye. Forever. And then each silently vowed to vindicate the remorseless torture of a twilight existence, and to avenge the murder of a grandparent, sister, brother, niece, nephew by that Satanic power that crushed their lives. ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings,’ Hegel famously said, ‘only with the falling of the dusk.’ That is, one only acquires wisdom into an epoch with the ripeness of time. It’s still high noon and thus too soon to resolve what verdict History will cast on the slave revolt in Gaza on October 7, 2023. The onslaught against Gaza since October 7, 2023, has quickened the tempo of this genocide; it is no longer “incremental” but fast and absolute. Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholar Raz Segal was one of the first intellectuals to use the word following October 7. In an article for Jewish Currents titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” published on October 13, 2023, Segal wrote: “Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?” The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: ‘1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. The acts listed in the Genocide Convention that Segal mentioned don’t themselves  constitute the crime of genocide; as the convention states, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” (my emphasis) This is usually the most difficult part to prove, especially given that the usual legal standard of mens rea (guilty mind), or “criminal intent,” is much higher for genocide cases, requiring dolus specialis (special intent). But, as Segal put it: Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so. Since Segal published his essay, Israel has committed another act listed in the convention: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” A little more than a year into the onslaught, another Israeli genocide scholar, Shmuel Lederman, joined an ever growing chorus of experts using the long-taboo G- word. Canadian international lawyer William Schabas said in 2024 that Israel was “absolutely” committing genocide. Eventually they were joined by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, headed by Melanie O’Brien. The Dutch-Turkish genocide scholar, Uğur Ümit Üngör said that there probably are scholars that don’t think it’s genocide but “I don’t know them.” In July 2025, they were joined by the well-respected professor Omer Bartov, who wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled: “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know it when I see it.” “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov wrote. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.” Besides individuals, international human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) have also concluded Israel is committing genocide; as have two important Israeli organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Israel still insists that it’s not targeting civilians, though they imposed a “total siege” blocking all food and water from entering, how is that not targeting civilians? My grandparents went to a pro-Palestine solidarity meeting where they read aloud a list of names of confirmed victims, organized by age group, starting with the babies. After ten hours, they had only gotten up to the four year olds. Due to the crippling attacks on hospitals—by direct sieges and bombardments from the IDF that are maliciously targeted at healthcare workers and hospital infrastructure, and also indirectly via the blockade of medicine and medical equipment—great numbers of children needed to undergo surgical amputations without anesthesia. Last year, on October 9, Lisa Doughten of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs testified before the Security Council that Gaza was officially “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.” Meanwhile, Commissioner-General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini reported that, “Basically, we have every day ten children who are losing one leg or two legs on average. This gives you an idea of the scope of the type of childhood a child can have in Gaza.” Children are not merely victimized by bombardments, IDF snipers are also deliberately shooting children. According to multiple Western doctors who have volunteered in Gaza, Israeli soldiers appeared to be playing a kind of sick game of targeting specific body parts. Doctor Nick Maynard, an experienced British surgeon at Oxford University Hospitals, who worked in Gaza multiple times, told Zeteo that “there were clusters of particular body parts being injured on particular days.” His colleagues who’d also worked in Gaza noticed the same pattern. Now these were all teenage boys ranging from eleven to fifteen, sixteen. And one day they would be coming in predominantly with gunshot wounds to the head or the neck—most of them died, clearly. The next day there’d be gunshot wounds to the chest. The next day the abdomen. The next day the legs or the arms. And one day, which was at the end of my third week on the Saturday evening, four young teenage boys—13, 14—came in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles. Now this clustering of injuries was so striking, the numbers on some days were so great it was inconceivable that it could have been coincidence. And it appeared to us like there was a game of target practice being played. In the same interview, Dr. Maynard also mentioned that upon entering Gaza, “we all had our luggage searched. We were given pretty strict instructions … not to take anything [the IDF] were likely to confiscate from us. Colleagues of mine took in some baby formula about a week after I had gone in because we’d sent messages out saying, ‘We need baby formula, we’ve got babies literally dying.’ There were four newborns [who] died the week before I got there, because there was no formula feed. And some American doctors I knew who [arrived] about three days after me, had all brought in formula feed in their luggage and they all had it removed from their luggage by the Israeli border guards and taken away; and very specifically the formula feed, nothing else. That’s all they took out of their luggage, every single container of formula feed was taken away.” Besides the games of “target practice,” Israeli soldiers have found other ways to amuse themselves: Early in the genocide, Israeli soldiers filmed themselves launching mortars while dancing in dinosaur costumes; they filmed themselves playing with lingerie they’d found in the bombed out homes of Palestinians, or with toys belonging to Palestinian children. Earlier this year, IDF soldiers blew up a civilian house (another war crime if anybody still cares to keep score) with colored smoke as part of a gender-reveal party. “It’s a boy!” they yelled as blue smoke erupted from the pile of rubble that was someone’s home. Besides taunts, other amusements for the Israeli Nazis include torturing civilians (and sometimes UN aid workers)—one Palestinian man was literally raped to death by Israeli soldiers, something even the New York Times had to acknowledge. IDF soldiers have kept Palestinians in metal cages, photographed them while naked, withheld food and water, put out cigarettes on them, unleashed attack dogs to bite them (including children), urinated on them, and forced them to act like animals. It’s in actions like these that Israel’s European roots are brightly displayed, bringing to mind events like torture at Abu Ghraib and the British conduct in India, where the King’s men would sometimes enforce “crawling orders,” making the Indians walk on all fours like animals in certain districts. In Jamaica, the British would punish slaves by having another slave defecate in his mouth, which would then be wired shut for four to five hours. This is the type of “civilization” that Europeans exported to Palestine. Finally, a few weeks ago on September 16, after two years of this horror, a commission from the UN Human Rights Council published an exhaustive report concluding what we already knew: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In presenting the commission’s findings at a UN press briefing, Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission, did not mince her words: “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.” Whereas on October 6, 2023, Israel was the West’s sacred cow, two years later the UN found it’s committing genocide. A blight unto the nations. The debate is over. Finished. There is no ambiguity or excuse left to defend that infernal little ethno-state. It’s over. Among the many signs I saw at a recent pro-Palestine protest was one that read, “we are the majority” (as well as “hot people hate genocide,” which amused me), and it’s true. Poll after poll has revealed that over half—i.e., the majority—of Americans and Europeans want to cut off aid to Tel Aviv. The fact that all of these countries are still deeply committed to Israel (to put it mildly) despite both the wishes of their populations and the UN finding of genocide, ought to spark some questions about whether these “democracies” are worthy of the name. In recent days, the Western press has been enthusiastically heralding the achievement of “peace” in Gaza due to Trump’s “peace plan.” This is downright farcical. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so obscene. On July 31, 2024, Israel assassinated Hamas’ chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ more moderate and political wing, with a missile attack on Doha, the Qatari capital. An act so grotesque it deserved far greater condemnation than Israel received from the West (one wonders what would happen if Putin struck Warsaw). Earlier this year, on September 9, when Hamas leaders gathered again in Doha to discuss a US-proposed ceasefire agreement, Israel launched another, thankfully unsuccessful, attack. Having crushed the negotiations, the US and Israel drew up their own “agreement,” which they foisted on Hamas. “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr. President, or if they supposedly accept it and then basically do everything to counter it—then Israel will finish the job by itself,” Netanyahu said when he and Trump unveiled their 20-point plan. “This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done. We prefer the easy way, but it has to be done.” “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas,” Trump replied. “But I hope that we’re going to have a deal for peace, and if Hamas rejects the deal … Bibi you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do. Everyone understands that the ultimate result must be the elimination of any danger posed in the region. And the danger is caused by Hamas.” Since October 28, 2023, Hamas has been offering to release the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held without trial, and a ceasefire. The issue is not Palestinian intransigence, as is usually suggested, but Tel Aviv’s rejection of any deal that ends the siege on Gaza. This has been well documented by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, for example, at Drop Site News. In Scahill’s recent piece on Trump and Netanyahu’s 20-point plan, he spoke to Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian academic and director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University. “This plan is a malicious attempt to achieve through politics what the war of extermination could not achieve on the ground,” Al- Arian said. “This includes ending the resistance, withdrawing weapons, releasing [Israeli] captives without a complete withdrawal, maintaining security, political, and economic control over Gaza, and imposing international tutelage. … [It’s] perpetuating the Israeli narrative that the challenge is a security one related to Israeli security needs, not to ending a military occupation, Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and ongoing aggression.” “There is no negotiation here,” he added. “There is an American plan. It was modified by some Israeli points and possibly some Arab points. And it’s given to the resistance as a ‘Take it or leave it’ thing.” Furthermore, there is no mechanism in the agreement that forces Israel to live up to it’s pledge. Here, too, Israel is the problem: the most recent demonstration of that happened last March when Israel unilaterally broke an agreed upon ceasefire. To call this “peace” is a nauseatingly bad joke. It brings to mind a poem by Bertold Brecht: WHEN THE LEADERS SPEAK OF PEACE The common folk know That war is coming. When the leaders curse war The mobilization order is already written out. THOSE AT THE TOP SAY: PEACE AND WAR Are of different substance. But their peace and their war Are like wind and storm. War grows from their peace Like son from his mother He bears Her frightful features. Their war kills Whatever their peace Has left over. Two years and counting. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.