The Killing Fields of Palestine

“If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished; for they are forever praying for evil against one another.” —Epicurus Exactly one month after the October 7th attack in Israel, Reliefweb (a UN-funded human- rights monitor) reported that “Over the past month, the Ministry of Health reported that more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including over 4,000 children. Overall, more than two-thirds of Palestinians killed in Gaza since 7 October are children, women, and elderly. The number of Palestinian children killed in Gaza in one month far exceeds the annual number of children killed in conflict zones around the world since 2019.” Israel and Joe Biden have questioned the death toll because the health ministry is run by Hamas. However, after conflicts in the past, independent examination always confirms the accuracy of the Ministry’s reports. The UN, the media, human rights groups, and even the US State Department all rely on these reports because they’ve been proven reliable. Journalists have already confirmed that casualties they knew, were on the list when it came out. There is no genuine reason to doubt these numbers, but I guess it does make for an effective escape from having to answer why your administration vetoed a UN call for a ceasefire in the face of a massacre. What is happening in the United States right now is beyond grotesque; Representative Brian Mast said on the House floor, “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, as is frequently said, I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War Two.” At the very same time, the House voted to censure Rashida Tlaib—the only Palestinian congressperson—for using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a slogan Palestinian peace movements have used for decades to advocate for their freedom. Israel has declared it anti- Semitic because any call to transform Israel from a Jewish-supremacist state into a peaceful democracy is anti-Semitic in the eyes of Zionists. And in Hollywood, actress Melissa Barrera was fired from her lead role in an upcoming movie for sharing an article written by Raz Segal—who is an Israeli historian, and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies—entitled: “A textbook case of Genocide.” When asked why Barrera was fired, the production company said it had “zero tolerance for anti-Semitism.” There has been a very real increase in anti-Semitism in the world, and many Jewish people have said they’re afraid. Those fears are not unfounded, as the number of hate crimes against both Jews and Muslims expanded dramatically since October 7th—and it’s not like those numbers were negligible before. But if opposing a nation-state’s campaign of violently ethnic cleansing a civilian population makes you a bigot, the word “anti-Semitism” no longer has any meaning. You would be counting hundreds of Jews among the guilty, including Holocaust survivors and their families who say that “never again” was supposed to mean something. I think we’ve reached the point where Jewish genocide scholars and Holocaust survivors are labeled as anti- Jewish extremists for opposing a genocide carried out in their name—talk about a “false flag operation” if there ever was one. At the same time, some people also seem unbothered by the fact that the most virulent anti- Semitic bile comes from pro-Israeli voices: last November, during the March for Israel—a rally to protest the calls for a ceasefire—pastor John Hagee (who also has ties to AIPAC) was invited by the Jewish Federations of North America to speak on behalf of Israel despite a long record of preaching anti-Semitism. He claims that Hitler was sent by God to make the Jews flee Europe and corral them into Israel.  Or take Elon Musk, a man who has publicly employed several anti-Semitic tropes; unbanned hundreds of neo-Nazi Twitter accounts to the platform's detriment, as advertisers hurriedly fled the platform now brimming with Jewish-hating fanatics; and recently there was a tweet that said, “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want the truth said to your face, there it is.” To which Elon Musk responded: “You have said the actual truth.” If that tweet seemed like gibberish to you, that’s because it thrives on classic anti-Semitic and white supremacist currents—invoking the “great replacement theory,” which posits that Jews are bringing in African and Muslim immigrants to European and Western countries, intending to cleanse the white race and undermine democratic values. Why are Jews the alleged masterminds in this conspiracy theory? Because they always are. It’s called “the longest hatred” for a reason. Despite all this, Musk was embraced by Benjamin Netanyahu as an ally of Israel. Zionism, it seems, makes for strange bedfellows. As for the “war” itself, Israel’s actions have been puzzling to many pundits trying to justify the harrowing images, videos, and statistics. The final messages from terrified Palestinians on social media, the stories of young children receiving emergency surgery without anesthetics or the journalists who keep reporting even after losing their families are heart-wrenching.  Whenever one openly advocates for a total blockade of food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine for a besieged civilian population, it becomes difficult to argue you’re not committing genocide. So the Western commentariat has had to twist themselves into pretzels to try and form a narrative that doesn’t make them look like animals. First, they claimed Hamas was the problem. They tried to rally the West by comparing Hamas to ISIS—a terrible comparison considering Hamas and ISIS are enemies, they are not the same in their ideology, their goals, or even their methods. But Netanyahu knows most Americans and Europeans know basically nothing of the Middle East—but they do know ISIS. The Balochistan Liberation Army might make for a better comparison, but when you’re making propaganda for an ignorant New York Times reading audience, it needs to be dumbed down considerably and appeal to emotion rather than reason. We are expected to forget that Israel kills far more people than Hamas: between 2008 and 2020, according to the United Nations, Israel killed 5,590 Palestinians, compared to 251 Israelis. We are expected not to know that Hamas offered multiple peace agreements over the years (in 1988, 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017) and that Israel rejected all of them. Pointing out these facts will doubtlessly get me labeled as a terrorist sympathizer or Hamas supporter—just to eliminate any confusion: I don’t like Hamas, I think all of their policies are unacceptable and I naturally deplore attacks on civilians. But I won’t pretend that Hamas’ policies or atrocities are worse than the Israeli or American ones. The United States and Israel are the single biggest obstacles to peace in this conflict. But if you’re still incapable of seeing anything but Hamas as the primary problem, consider this: Israel has been supporting Hamas for a very long time. Since the late 1970s, Israel started funding Hamas to create a religious counterweight to Arafat’s Fatah Party in order to undermine the secular nationalist movement which was gaining international support and could force Israel to make peace. It pleased Israeli officials when Hamas became increasingly radicalized, they saw it as an opportunity to expand their power. After Hamas won the Palestinian election, a US embassy cable revealed that Amos Yadlin, a General in the IDF was quite pleased with the result: “Yadlin said Israel would be ‘happy’ if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” Bezalel Smotrich—a far-right Israeli politician living in an illegally occupied Palestinian home—said in 2015, “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is a terrorist organization that no one will recognize, and no one will give it status in the ICC [International Criminal Court]. No one will let them lead a decision in the Security Council. The main pitch we are playing now is international delegitimization. […] Hamas, at this point, in my opinion, will be an asset.” Netanyahu himself said in 2019, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” On top of all of this, the very source of turmoil and violence is the occupation itself. In the West Bank, Palestinians are regularly killed, maimed, and dispossessed. They’ve slowly been forced into impoverished Bantustans. The Gaza Strip is in essence a concentration camp. In 2006, Israel “put Palestinians on a diet,” as Dov Weisglass put it.  It was a starvation diet, making meat, dairy, fruits, and vegetables rare luxuries in Gaza. Before Israel shut off all the taps last year, Gazans already had no access to clean water. They lack infrastructure, including toilets. Israel’s blockade also applies to medicine, and without freedom of movement, most people are prevented from visiting a hospital. Every now and then, Israel “mows the lawn,” which is a casual idiom for carpet bombings. Any 11-year-old in Gaza has already lived through three major bloodbaths, in 2012, 2014, and 2021—many did not survive this one. And then everyone acts surprised that Hamas exists; “whoa buddy, what’s got you radicalized all of a sudden? Must be that anti-Semitism, or barbarism inherent in your primitive culture.”  Ben Shapiro once said, “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” If Palestinians were treated like black people during Jim Crow segregation in the United States, it would be an immeasurable improvement. Nobel Peace Prizes would be awarded to whichever philanthropic statesman, brilliant benevolent diplomat had wrangled such a, previously believed to be impossible, peace agreement. That’s how bad things are. Noam Chomsky wrote: “The strategy [in Gaza] has been to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the people there—1.8 million as of [2014]—would be dropped into eternal oblivion. “But the ghetto proved to be rebellious and unwilling to live under conditions of strangulation, isolation, starvation, and economic collapse. […] In 1948, Israel pushed into the Gaza area (before it became a strip) hundreds of thousands of refugees it expelled from the northern Naqab and southern coast who, Israel hoped, would move even farther from Palestine. “For a while after 1967, Israel wanted to keep the West Bank as a township which provided unskilled labor but without any human and civil rights. When the occupied people resisted in two intifadas, the West Bank was bisected into small Bantustans encircled by Jewish colonies, but it did not work in the too-small and too-dense Gaza Strip. The Israelis were unable to “West Bank” the Strip, so to speak. So they cordoned it as a ghetto and when it resisted, the army was allowed to use its most formidable and lethal weapons to crush it. The inevitable result of an accumulative reaction of this kind was genocidal.” Zionists claim that the only reason Palestinians could possess any enmity whatsoever towards Israel is because they raise their children to be anti-Semitic.  “’ Oho!’ Said the pot to the kettle; ‘You are dirty and ugly and black! Sure no one would think you were metal except when you’re given a crack.’  ‘Not so! Not so!’ kettle said to the pot; ‘Tis your own  dirty image you see; for I am so clean—without blemish or blot—that your blemish is mirrored in me.” Israel directly funds Hamas, and the Israeli occupation is the impetus for them to exist, so who is supporting Hamas here? I assure you it’s not pro-Palestinian activists. But even the most bloodthirsty jingoists have trouble parsing what Israel is trying to accomplish. You can’t shoot an ideology or bomb an idea—America’s “war on terror” is proof of that, despite it being self-evident. Israeli rhetoric has also shifted from early in the assault, from “eradicating Hamas”—whatever that meant—to establishing “security”—whatever that  means. So what is going on here? Fortunately for you, I know exactly what Netanyahu is doing: “The main thing is first of all to strike them, not once, but several times. So painfully that the price they pay is unbearable. So far the price tag is not unbearable.” Netanyahu once said while he was being surreptitiously recorded by a journalist. “A large scale attack on the Palestinian Authority causing them to fear that everything is about to collapse… Fear is what brings them to—[someone asks what if the world says Israel is the aggressor] They can say whatever they want. […] Especially today with the US, I know how they are. America is something you can easily maneuver, and move in the right direction… And even if they say something, then they say something, so what? Eighty percent of Americans support us, it’s absurd. “Look, that administration [Clinton] was extremely pro-Palestinian, I wasn’t afraid to maneuver there. I was not afraid to clash with Clinton. I was not afraid to clash with the United Nations. What happened with the Oslo Accords? The accords which were ratified by parliament? I was asked before the [1996] elections, ‘Will you fulfill them?’ I said, ‘Yes, subject to reciprocity and minimizing pullouts.’ I gave my own interpretation of the agreements, in such a way that would allow me to stop the race back toward 1967 borders. How did we manage to do this? Nobody defined what ‘military facilities’ are, so I also defined them as being security zones. The entire Jordan Valley, for me, is a ‘military facility.’” That last part is him bragging about undermining the so-called peace negotiations. Something Israel has also done a lot, during every peace accords theater. One of the lesser-known, insidious ways, for example, was insisting the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] recognize Israel’s “right to exist” as a Jewish state. Not only is this absurd demand never made during any peace negotiations, for example, Mexico does not recognize America’s right to exist on half of Mexico, but it was also one-sided: Israel certainly does not recognize any Palestinian state to exist. Israelis also use the phrase “from the river to the sea,” except theirs ends with “the Israeli flag is all you’ll see.” Israel knew the PLO would never formally agree to that, they were essentially asking them to accept the Nakba as justified. And while the various “peace processes” were going on, Israel continued to expand its settlements in the West Bank—this is what led professor Avi Shlaim to say that “Netanyahu is like a man who pretends to be negotiating the division of a pizza while he keeps eating it.”  Palestinian statehood was also out of the question. And with the United States mediating the peace talks, Palestinian’s hopes of peace and self-determination were quickly dashed against the rocks. The fact that the United States, an active participant in this conflict, could credibly mediate the negotiations is a testament to how impressive their monopoly on the narrative is. What is currently happening in Gaza is simply another step towards the goal of a greater Israeli state; Israel is a settler-colonial society, after all. Just like its biggest supporters, the United States, Canada, and Australia—all settler-colonial societies themselves—the Israeli leadership throughout history has always wanted to do what European colonizers did a few centuries ago with total impunity.  These days, many people assert that Israel is not a settler-colonial society; they would not want me to point out that Theodor Herzl—often called the father of Zionism—wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, a British colonizer who colonized much of Africa, including the territory of modern Zimbabwe which they called: Rhodesia—that’s right, the pompous bastards named it after him. Herzl wrote, “I need you. In fact, all things considered, you are the only man who can help me now. Of course, I am not concealing from myself the fact that you are not likely to do so. […] But it is a big—some say, too big—thing. To me it does not seem too big for Cecil Rhodes. This sounds like flattery; however, it does not reside in words, but in the offer. […] You are being invited to help make history. […] It is not your accustomed line; it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen, but Jews. “But had this been on your path, you would have done it yourself by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial, and because it presupposes understanding of a development which will take twenty or thirty years. […] What is the plan? To settle Palestine with the homecoming Jewish people.” It’s amusing to remember that the early Zionists were also secularists. On the one hand, they used God as a justification for colonialism (probably to appeal to European Christian Zionists), and on the other hand, they didn’t believe in God. When the Peel Commission recommended a partition plan for Palestine in 1937, the Zionist Congress rejected it because they wanted all of Palestine. Others, like Ben-Gurion (Israel’s founder and first Prime Minister), said they should take whatever was being offered to them just to get a foot in the door, and then work to expel all Palestinians later. He said it was “the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine.” The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote, “Ever since June 1967, Israel has searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied that year without incorporating their indigenous Palestinian population into its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a ‘peace process’ charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.” And Patrick Wolfe, an expert in settler colonialism, wrote: “As Palestinians become more and more dispensable, Gaza and the West Bank become less and less like Bantustans and more and more like reservations (or, for that matter, like the Warsaw Ghetto).” Ever since then, the Nakba, the Six-Day War, and the perpetual expansion of settlements (which Netanyahu recently announced would drastically expand) are all part of a slow-footed campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Zionist credo is “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Therefore, the Nakba—which means “catastrophe” in Arabic—which violently expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948, had not only removing the native people but also their culture, as a goal. That’s why lesser-known parts of the Nakba were, for instance, the theft of thousands of books, and the cultural appropriation of Palestine’s cuisine (among other things). Humus, arak, and falafel have all been claimed by some Israelis to be Israeli inventions; falafel is even Israel’s national dish, despite its invention tracing back to Egypt almost 66 years before the Israeli state’s founding. There is even a song about this from the ‘50s, “Every child knows that macaroni is Italian. The Austrians in Vienna have tasty schnitzel and the French eat frogs, the Chinese eat fine and delicate rice and the cannibals eat ocher. And we have falafel, falafel, falafel. […] Only we have falafel, falafel falafel, […] for this is the national meal of Israel.”  Israel still claims that there is no such thing as “Palestinian culture.”After the lie of, “This was an empty stretch of desert when we found it,” collapsed, the Israelis pivoted to saying that a few savages who lived there before 1948 left voluntarily with complete goodwill because they didn’t have any culture to speak of anyway. “We can’t destroy a culture that never existed,” they claim—the concept of any “culture” in “Palestine” before the Jews was surely invented by anti- Semites. It’s staggering that this complete ahistorical sophistry doesn’t garner more outrage from revered academic institutions in the West. It might have something to do with our own colonial histories, after all, America, Canada, and Australia roughly followed the same playbook. One other part of settler colonialism is how it goes hand in hand with genocide, Deborah Bird Rose once pointed out that all the native has to do to oppose settler colonialism is to stay at home. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (mercifully it’s known colloquially as “the genocide convention”), a genocide is being committed if any one of five criteria is met with the “intend to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” 1. “Killing members of the group.” As of publishing: 38,066 since October 7, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (92% civilians, 14,350 children, and 8,620 women) 2. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” 71,220 injured, so far. And due to Israel's blockade of supplies, children are getting amputated in hospitals without anesthetics—I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that’s both mental and  bodily harm. 3. “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” A recent analysis from Johns Hopkins University says that “Our projections indicate that even in the best-case ceasefire scenario, thousands of excess deaths would occur, mainly due to the time it would take to improve water, sanitation and shelter conditions, reduce malnutrition, and restore functioning healthcare services in Gaza. […] Traumatic injuries followed by infectious diseases would be the main cause of excess deaths.” Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician who’s worked extensively in Gaza, recently told Al Jazeera, “There is a combination of malnutrition, starvation, and thirst. This triangle will cause more deaths. In Gaza what is needed is water and food—and it’s all available from the neighboring country. But Israel is stopping the entry of food and water to the people of Gaza, which is a huge war crime. How can the world just sit idly by and watch children dying from starvation? This is not a tragedy. This is a man-made, meant-to-be starvation, forced upon the people of Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces…. It’s part of the elimination of the Palestinian people.” 4. “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” So far, 12 out of 35 hospitals remain, although they barely function, hospitals were already lacking supplies before October 7, and now they are almost out of everything including electricity and staff. South Africa argued in its international legal case that the attacks on hospitals have functioned to hinder safe births. A Chicago doctor who went to help in Gaza, told a story about a pregnant doctor who delivered her son via c-section, and instead of resting in bed for several days (as is recommended), she walked out of the hospital later that same day because they needed the beds. 5. “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another.” Great news, Israel is in the clear of this one, they don’t steal children and assimilate them into Jewish life like the European settlers did with Native Americans, they just kill them with bombs and starvation. Given these facts, South Africa, which has some experience with apartheid regimes, has accused Israel of breaching the genocide convention. Many left-wing commentators have also become more comfortable with the word. However, looking at the history of Palestine, the question has to be asked, when was this not a genocide? Since 1948, and certainly after ‘67, there has been a very slow, careful, incremental erasure of the Palestinian people—“killing them softly,” as they say. Just 10 years ago, in 2014, Mads Gilbert, the same doctor I quoted above, said in a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) report: “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage. Prevalence of anemia in children under 2 years in Gaza is at 72.8 percent.” The report continues, “Freshwater pumping stations in Gaza City are also stopped due to lack of funding for fuel, severely impeding an already insufficient public water supply. […] Fifty percent of the Gaza Strip's population receive running water supply for six to eight hours once every four days only; 30 percent receive water for six to eight hours once every three days only. […] Solid waste in Gaza City is now largely collected by approximately 250 open donkey carts, hired by the Municipality as an emergency project, to substitute the lack of motorized garbage collection trucks. […] The garbage collection workers have so far been working two shifts, but is reduced to one shift due to money and fuel constraints, severely impeding capacity.” It goes on like that for several pages. In September of 2023, Reliefweb sent out a press release titled, “2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank.” That number has more than doubled, in an area, remember, that has no Hamas fighters in it whatsoever. One reason I focus so much on children is because even the people whose brains have been marinated in hasbara zealotry, can’t feasibly claim that an 8-year-old is a Hamas militant. Before non-profit relief agencies were shut down (with the connivance of the West) they were estimating that over 90 percent of deaths were civilians. The amount of children sent to an early grave is a good litmus test to use during the fog of war to tell how many civilians are being slaughtered—children are not the only innocents being murdered, though. It’s important to keep that in perspective. Now, fascism isn’t light on the ground in Israel, many Palestinians are arbitrarily detained without a scheduled court date, and reports of torture have been leaking out for years. And when Israel released some of those prisoners, the IDF confiscated cookies in the West Bank to keep them from celebrating. Israel also, infamously, gave Ethiopian Jews long-lasting birth- control injections without their knowledge or consent. And it used to be official IDF policy to kill its own people to prevent them from becoming hostages, it was called the “Hannibal directive.” However, ever since October 7, Israeli citizens have been targeted more drastically. There has been a sharp rollback on freedom of speech: the government announced that saying (or posting on social media) anything that could negatively affect the morale of the military would result in criminal charges. One Arab woman with Israeli citizenship was charged with terrorism after changing her WhatsApp status to “May God protect them.” Her arrest was filmed while she pleaded, visibly terrified, that she meant Israel, “May God protect Israel,” but it was too late. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab and Minority Rights in Israel, said: “This law is one of the most intrusive and draconian legislative measures ever passed by the Israeli Knesset since it makes thoughts subject to criminal punishment.” Adalah’s spokesperson, Ari Remez, called it “McCarthyism on amphetamines.”  When some Israeli hostages were released, they told reporters that despite being traumatized they had been treated relatively well in captivity; they were given food (the same food the Hamas fighters ate), water, and medicine and described their captors as kind (which differs wildly from torture reports from Israeli prisons, might I add). The Israeli government instantly suppressed the footage and asked the media why “it wasn’t handled better?” A Channel 12 reporter said that it “could have been managed better,” before adding, “Anyone sane should understand that medical attention she [the hostage, Yocheved Lifshitz] was given was intended to keep their bargaining chips alive and not from the kindness of their hearts.” Another reporter called it a “disaster.” Some Israelis have claimed that the IDF shot at some of its citizens on October 7th to prevent them from being taken hostage. While it’s unconfirmed, the Israelis did have to revise their death tally of October 7 down by about 200 after they mistook severely burned corpses of Hamas fighters for Israeli civilians. That could mean that either Hamas blew up 200 of its own fighters—which is unlikely—or the IDF killed them, thinking they were Israelis. Whatever the case, it’s likely something we’ll be hearing more about years down the line. In Gaza, the IDF has gone to great lengths to convince the world that it’s not committing genocide, even staging photo-ops of IDF soldiers next to boxes labeled “Medical Supplies” in English, from a Hebrew-speaking country to an Arabic-speaking concentration camp. But, there have been a few moments from which Israel’s true strategy can be gleaned. In December, the IDF sheepishly admitted to shooting three of its own hostages. They had fabricated signs saying “help” and “three hostages,” when the IDF arrived they emerged, hands in the air, shirtless (to show they weren’t wearing bomb vests), and the IDF opened fire on them. Many people were confused as to why they would do that—the reason is that they thought they were Palestinian civilians (i.e. the enemy). And in January, the IDF had to admit they were purposefully demolishing civilian homes (a war crime) when 21 IDF soldiers got blown up by their own mines which they were currently installing, because the tank stationed outside watching their backs was hit by a Hamas-fired RPG, which accidentally set-of the explosives. Talk about a lucky shot. One of the soldiers that died, posted a TikTok of himself, tauntingly and childishly dancing with one of those mines, mocking the Palestinians that he was going to raze their homes. Then that mine killed him, a consequence of his war crime. While all death in war is tragic, this one is a little less so… it’s even a little funny. That brings us to one more disturbing part of this sordid chapter of human history: social media. While war crimes have always been documented on film, this is the first time I’ve ever seen such debauchery openly celebrated and venerated on social media. I can’t adequately describe to you the casually grotesque nature unless you’ve seen it yourself; one of the videos features an IDF soldier in one of those brown inflatable dinosaur costumes, loading an artillery shell in, I think a howitzer, and then dancing atop a tank to party music after firing the weapon. Others depict IDF soldiers mocking prisoners or cooking in destroyed homes. Another depicts soldiers lighting medical supplies on fire in the back of an aid truck. One video shows a soldier banging on a door, shrugging when no one answers before the camera pulls back revealing a destroyed home with only the front door left standing in the rubble. In another, a soldier mockingly says we should renovate Gaza before his friend walks in and presses the shot exploder’s plunger; the first soldier reacts with sarcastic disappointment as behind them a massive explosion can be seen destroying houses. It’s horrifying to think that the Nazis might be gleefully filming their crimes against humanity for a cheering crowd of disgusting sycophants. I’ll always remember reading about Sderot, where Israelis would gather on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, laughing and cheering when they saw and heard bombs being dropped at night. This level of sickening cruelty is only possible if your foe has been completely dehumanized—turned into an Untermensch. When the UN first attempted a ceasefire, Israel’s delegation showed up with yellow stars pinned to their suits. Israeli officials compared October 7 (and implicitly, calls for a ceasefire) to the Holocaust. Tell me, what if an Arab government in Tel Aviv drove Jewish people out of their land, some into partitioned cantons, others into a concentration camp, and subjected them to all I’ve just described, and when the Jews inevitably revolted—a sort of intifada in the spirit of the Maccabean Revolt, still celebrated during Hanukkah—the Arab government, let’s say the PDF (Palestinian Defense Forces), said “We are fighting human animals” (as Yoav Gallant said in October) and proceeded to kill, as I mentioned, in just one month, more Jewish children in Gaza than children died in all combat zones around the world since 2019. That number was around 4,000 (rounded down) when that report came out—it’s now at least 12,300 (which are the ones we know for sure, the real number is likely around 14,350) children that we know of. 38,066 deaths overall. To our eternal shame. And a PDF soldier says on TV (as Avraham Zerbiv recently did) “I see victory… I see that they don’t have one house [not] destroyed… I see hundreds of thousands fleeing like Nakba, walking towards exile!” And when someone tells an American congressman, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies—that’s my taxpayer dollars, going to bomb those kids.”And he replies, “I think we should kill them all.” Like Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee recently did, with very little outcry. No one would be confused about what that was if it was happening to Jewish people, nor would people be shy about comparing it to Nazi Germany. This is not something that anyone with even a crumb of humanity can support. Western politicians, including the so-called liberal ones like Joe Biden, and Keir Starmer in England, have shown, categorically without a shadow of a doubt that all this talk about human rights and concern for democracy and the well-being of the world was as vacuous as it sounded from the beginning. During the war in Iraq (2003), I remember people saying that “America lost its moral authority.” I think it’s cute people think America still (or ever) had any “moral authority” to begin with, but it was nevertheless a blow to customary international law in the eyes of many people. In March of 2022, the US and NATO announced that Russia was committing war crimes by using cluster munitions—cluster munitions are frowned upon because the fragmented bombs don’t always explode and burrow into the ground and end up killing a lot of civilians in the post-war period. People are still dying and losing limbs in Laos to this day from US cluster bombs. I remember reading an article in 2016 about a boy playing soccer and accidentally setting off an explosive that took his hand off. “We have seen the use of cluster bombs,” NATO Secretary-General said in March 2022, “[And] the use of other types of weapons which would be in violation of international law.” Then, in July of 2023, I saw a headline titled: “The US will provide cluster bombs to Ukraine and defends the delivery of the controversial weapon.” Instead of claiming, like a year earlier, that the use of such weapons constitutes a war crime, now they said that Ukraine would use them “responsibly” and was therefore legal. They may claim that’s what they meant to say in 2022, but I can’t read their minds, that’s not what they said. ( The US also used cluster munitions in Iraq. ) Another war crime by the Russians was attacking hospitals, unquestionably a war crime. However, Amnesty International reported in August of 2022 that “Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians,” and pointed out that Ukrainian soldiers used hospitals as military bases, in violation of international law, which were subsequently attacked. That is, of course, still a war crime on Russia’s part, given that they’re still hospitals. But in Fallujah, American soldiers also attacked a hospital. They threw the patients off their beds and shackled them on the floor next to the doctors. When they were asked why they’d attacked it, they said it was a propaganda agency for the rebels—their evidence? It was releasing casualty figures. They were publicizing the number of civilians they were treating (as all hospitals do) for injuries, and it was making the United States look bad. And in Israel, most hospitals have been attacked, even destroyed, by the IDF. Also, in late January, Israeli troops raided the Ibn Sina hospital in the West Bank dressed as patients, nurses, and doctors—which is a very serious war crime on several levels—and shot a couple of patients in their beds. Out of these three disgusting countries, Russia has the best excuse—it still doesn’t justify it, it’s not good enough, but it is the best excuse. Only the leader of one of these three countries is considered a war criminal in the West. This should be the decisive end to this charade of benevolent Western humanitarian intent. It’s farcical to hear these monsters talk about peace and democracy whilst indulging glutinously in the worst human impulses imaginable. They are directly supporting this genocide, both diplomatically and by continuing to arm the IDF to the teeth. The US with its various cronies also widened the war to Yemen, when the Houthis imposed a blockade in the Red Sea on Israeli trading vessels. The Houthis, themselves victims of genocide by the US-client state of Saudi Arabia, are trying to make Israel's actions more costly—a noble goal. It's exactly what we should be doing. The US also bombed Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq, targets that are only there because of American fuck-ups. Just to make sure we antagonize every Muslim in the region; I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences. Where do we go from here? Honestly, it’s not up to me or you—it’s up to the vampires in power. But you can donate to UNRWA, it’s the largest relief agency in Gaza and the only organization capable of reaching anywhere north of the Strip. Western governments are refusing to fund it after Israel claimed a small handful of their volunteers supported Hamas on October 7—I don’t know if that’s true, given that Western powers never so much as asked for a smidgen of evidence, but it doesn’t matter either way. As for Palestine and Israel, there is one solution: the one-state solution. One state in which all Jews, Muslims, and Christians (even Atheists and Buddhists, etc, etc.) can live together in harmony as equal citizens under the law. Like they once did under Ottoman rule. One man, one woman, one vote. To quote Ilan Pappé one last time: “What we need is to overcome the intellectual, physical, and cultural fragmentation that Israel imposes on us, Palestinians and Jews, and to strive to come back to something far more organic and integrated so that the third generation of Jewish settlers and indigenous native people of Palestine could have a future together.” From the river to the sea, Palestine will one day be free… I hope.