Three Years of Gaza as a Ghetto of Genocidal Extermination
by Andy Worthington
| Oct 9, 2026
Israel is lost.
Every day for the last three years, the decent people
of the world — in our untold millions — have been sunk in a pit of moral
despair, weeping, having breakdowns or being permanently enraged by the most
extraordinarily depraved example of full-spectrum, live-streamed barbarism in
our lifetimes — the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by
the State of Israel.
The trigger for Israel’s ongoing genocide was, of
course, one particularly bloody day, October 7, 2023, when militants from the
Gaza Strip, which had been maintained by Israel as an “open-air prison” for the previous 16 years, broke out through the
perimeter fence and went on a killing spree in southern Israel in which 1,195
people were killed, and 251 others were taken hostage.
These are the bare facts, and, for anyone like myself
who is an intuitive lifelong pacifist, they are, of course, deeply unpalatable.
1,124 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals, who all had hopes and dreams and loves
and fears, were killed on October 7. 367 of them were members of the Israeli
security forces, while the rest, including 36 children, were civilians.
We should mourn them all, but we cannot regard their
deaths in isolation, because, in response, beginning on the evening of October
7, 2023 and continuing ever since, the Israelis have killed, at the barest
minimum, 75 times as many Palestinians over the last three years, including
over 21,500 children — at least 600 times as many children as were killed on
October 7.
In total, according to statistics with which no one
can seriously argue, 74,228 Palestinians have been killed and 175,188 injured
(many very severely so) by Israeli forces over the last three years, although
those figures are undoubtedly a serious undercount (see my notes at the end of this article). The remains of at least 8,000 Palestinians are
still buried under the rubble, and untold numbers of others are unaccounted
for, or are dying of secondary causes beyond the direct military attacks — of
starvation and disease, and of everyday ailments, grievous wounds or chronic
pre-existing health conditions, few of which can be adequately treated in a
healthcare sector that has been deliberately destroyed by Israel, and from
which it is still deliberately preventing the delivery of essential medical supplies
and equipment.
According to an invisible assessment of the relative
value of lives that Israel uses, and that has been shamefully adopted by most
western leaders, we’re meant, today, to continue mourning those who died on
October 7, 2023, while completely ignoring the genocidal carnage visited on the
Palestinians ever since.
In the narrative of unique trauma and victimhood that
Israel has maintained since October 7, the attacks on southern Israel were
entirely unprovoked, and those killed or injured in response — even though they
constitute over 10 percent of Gaza’s population — must all be regarded as
legitimate targets or as acceptable “collateral damage”, as Israel continues to
seek “total victory” in its “elimination” of Hamas.
That, of course, is untrue and unforgivable. The
attacks by Hamas militants and other Palestinian factions on October 7, 2023
didn’t occur in a vacuum, and were not the actions of terrorists who, entirely
unprovoked, sought to destroy the State of Israel.
They were, instead, a response — the bloodiest to
date, but a response, nonetheless — to 75 years of oppression by the Israelis,
dating back to 1948 when Jewish terrorist settler militias founded the State of
Israel in an orgy of genocidal violence, killing 15,000 Palestinians, erasing
500 towns and villages and forcing 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, and
into exile in neighboring countries, where their descendants still live in
refugee camps, as well as in the Gaza Strip, administered by Egypt, and in the
West Bank and East Jerusalem, administered by Jordan.
The militias were formed by Jewish settlers who
arrived in Palestine, mostly from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in their
hundreds of thousands from the 1920s to the 1940s, after the British
government, in the most ill-advised foreign policy decision in human history,
offered Jewish people around the world a homeland in Palestine in 1917, which
they proceeded to facilitate after they took over the running of Palestine in
1923 from the Ottoman Empire, defeated and dissolved after the Second World War.
After seizing control of 78 percent of Palestine at
its blood-soaked founding in 1948, the State of Israel proceeded, in 1967, to
seize the remaining 22 percent after the Six Days’ War, taking Gaza from Egypt,
the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Israel was condemned internationally for these
occupations, but, shielded by its perpetual ally, the US, ignored all UN
resolutions demanding its withdrawal, and established various punitive
mechanisms to consolidate its control — amongst them, the widespread arbitrary
imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial, killings with impunity,
the colossal expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, policed through
huge barrier walls and demeaning and dehumanizing checkpoints, and, in Gaza,
the entrapment and isolation of the entire population after Hamas won elections
in 2006, via a total land, sea and air blockade, in place since 2007, and with
the entry and exit of all goods and people strictly controlled and largely and
deliberately rationed or prevented.
In response to periodic rocket attacks by militant
forces within Gaza, Israel also undertook, every few years, what was
sickeningly and euphemistically described as “mowing the lawn” — military
attacks, lasting for weeks or months, in which thousands of Palestinians were
killed.
In total, between 1948 and October 7, 2023, an
estimated 100,000 to 130,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces,
compared to an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Israelis killed by Palestinians.
No one seeking to define the events of October 7 as
pure, unprovoked evil should be allowed to forget the previous 75 years of
Israel’s sustained oppression, dispossession and slaughter of the Palestinian
people — and that is without even getting into the alarming subtexts of that
particular day.
These include the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu was repeatedly warned of impending attacks, but chose not to inform the
intelligence services, the fact that former defense minister Yoav Gallant has admitted that Israel used the Hannibal Directive on October 7, killing an untold number of its own
people to prevent them being seized as hostages, and the fact that, despite
irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the almost unthinkably cynical lies that
were told about 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7 have never been properly refuted, and
continue to feed the seemingly endless genocidal hysteria, in some quarters,
that has transformed Israel into a state that now lives only to kill.
Western government’s complicity in endorsing Israel’s open-ended “right to
defend itself” and in designating Hamas as a terrorist organization
Despite the long history of Israel’s oppression of the
Palestinians, in which the events of October 7 were part of an ongoing conflict
between oppressed people on the one hand, and their almost infinitely
better-armed oppressor on the other, all of this was immediately forgotten, as
western leaders, simultaneously, endorsed Israel’s open-ended and undefined
“right to defend itself”, even though no such right exists in international
law.
Even worse was the endorsement for open-ended
barbarism that western countries had already given to Israel by helpfully
proscribing Hamas — in its entirety, and not just its military wing — as a
terrorist organization.
The US led the way, in 1997, while the EU, having
designed Hamas’s military wing as terrorists in 2001, expanded that designation
to include the entire organization in 2003. The UK, which also proscribed
Hamas’s military wing as terrorists in 2001, only belatedly — under the
ferocious Zionist Priti Patel — expanded that proscription to include the
entire organization in December 2021. Other notable countries that have
proscribed the whole of Hamas as terrorists include Australia, Canada, Japan
and New Zealand.
The problem with these sweeping designations are
two-fold. Firstly, they completely and deliberately erase the rights of an
oppressed and occupied people to militarily resist their occupation, as
enshrined in the UN Charter and recognized in the additional protocols to the
Geneva Conventions in 1977, and secondly, by erasing any distinction between
Hamas’s military wing and its administrative government, they have, in Gaza,
paved the way for Israel to be able to claim that almost anyone it has targeted
and killed was a terrorist.
It cannot be underestimated how cynical, devious and
wrong these ever-expanding western terrorist proscriptions are.
Firstly, Hamas are not terrorists; they are a
legitimate resistance movement, but secondly, and even more crucially, if an
entire government — and not just its military wing — is proscribed as a
terrorist organization, it becomes theoretically legitimate for Israel, as it
has demonstrated so sickeningly for the last three years, to target and murder
doctors and medical staff because they work for the Health Ministry,
professors, academics and teachers because they work for the Ministry of
Education, farmers because they work for the Ministry of Agriculture, judges
and lawyers because they work for the Ministry of Justice, all emergency
services workers, all of the police, all water engineers and sewage engineers,
and many, many other people whose work was, in any way, even tangentially
connected to Gaza’s administrative government.
Automated warfare: how the impact of Israel’s attacks
on Gaza was multiplied through the sweeping use of AI-driven military targeting
Having directly facilitated the unbridled slaughter of
Palestinian civilians, western governments also failed to show any alarm that,
from the very beginning of Israel’s unprecedented attacks on Gaza, the
destruction was so intense that it resembled nothing less than some of the most
extraordinarily sickening campaigns of the last year of the Second World War —
the firebombing of Tokyo and the destruction of Dresden, and, in their
intensity, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It looked like carpet-bombing, which, after the
Vietnam War, was outlawed as a war crime in the 1977 additional protocols to
the Geneva Conventions, but it was actually even worse, as was only revealed in
November 2024, when Israel’s +972 Magazine published the first of two
revelatory articles that disclosed how, although there were undoubtedly many
elements of arbitrary and indiscriminate carpet-bombing in Israel’s devastating
aerial assaults, the Israelis had manufactured a cutting-edge excuse — the use
of military targeting driven by AI (artificial intelligence).
In the first of these articles, “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s
calculated bombing of Gaza” (which I wrote about here), the journalist Yuval Abraham, after discussions
with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community,
revealed how Israel had deliberately launched mass bombing
campaigns against what were described as “power targets”, including
“private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise
blocks”, to “create a shock” that would reverberate powerfully and “lead
civilians to put pressure on Hamas.”
Deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to
achieve a political aim is, of course, illegal under international humanitarian law, in which all parties to a military conflict “must at
all times distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives.” It is
also a central component of the additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions
of 1977, and its status as a war crime was spelled out in the Rome Stature of
1998 establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), which states that
“intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects
which are not military objectives”, constitutes a war crime in international
armed conflicts.
It should also be noted that deliberately targeting
civilian infrastructure to achieve a political aim is a hallmark of terrorism,
but, through the connivance of the most powerful states in the world, as
discussed above, only those resisting occupation and oppression are regarded as
terrorists, while state parties are, it seems, always to be regarded as beyond
reproach.
For those paying attention, Israel’s focus on “power
targets” was not new, as it first emerged, in 2006, as the Dahiya Doctrine,
named after a neighborhood in Beirut, during one of Israel’s many “wars” on
Lebanon, deliberately “targeting economic interests and the centers of civilian
power” that allegedly supported Hezbollah, to persuade the population to turn
on them.
In the first weeks of the assault on Gaza, as the
article explained, “Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, the
Palestinian Bar Association, a UN building for an educational program for
outstanding students, a building belonging to the Palestine Telecommunications
Company, the Ministry of National Economy, the Ministry of Culture, roads, and
dozens of high-rise buildings and homes — especially in Gaza’s northern
neighborhoods.” And this list is, of course, only a snapshot of the immense
destruction that Israel rained down on the whole of Gaza’s infrastructure.
A “mass assassination factory”
More shocking than this revival of the Dahiya
Doctrine, however, was +972 Magazine’s revelation of the existence of an AI
system, “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is able to “‘generate’ targets almost
automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible”,
creating what a former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination
factory.”
When Israel first began using AI in its attacks on
Gaza, in 2021, former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi said of it that it
“processes a lot of data better and faster than any human, and translates it
into targets for attack”, adding that it “generated 100 new targets every day”,
contrasting that with times in the past “when we would create 50 targets per
year” in Gaza.
AI programs require targeting parameters, however, and
it was clear that, to create so many targets, low-level Hamas members, who
would never have been targeted before, were included along with senior
commanders, and, in addition, all notions of proportionality and acceptable
“collateral damage” were swept aside.
The article noted how, according to the intelligence
sources, the “Habsora” program “generates, among other things, automatic
recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of
being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live”, and Israel “then carries out
large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these
residential homes.” These “assassination operations”, inevitably, included all
the members of the “suspected” militants’ families, but no one cared anymore.
One source explained that “a senior intelligence
officer told his officers after October 7 that the goal was to ‘kill as many
Hamas operatives as possible’, for which the criteria around harming
Palestinian civilians were significantly relaxed.”
In one case, involving “a single top Hamas military
commander”, the sources explained how the Israeli military command “knowingly
approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians” during his attempted
assassination. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths
[permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in
previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage”, one
source said.
In addition, the sources “confirmed that the Israeli
army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including
homes”, and that, as a result, they knew “the number of civilians who are
likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target.”
“Nothing happens by accident,” one source said,
adding, “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because
someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it
was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas.
These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how
much collateral damage there is in every home.”
Another source, clearly appalled, said, “To my
understanding, today they can mark all the houses of [any Hamas military
operative regardless of rank]. That is a lot of houses. Hamas members who don’t
really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and
bomb the house and kill everyone there.”
Sweeping and ill-defined human targets
Even graver revelations emerged in a follow-up article in April 2024, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing
Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza”, which I wrote about here, in which six Israeli intelligence officers spoke
about an AI program specifically used to “mark all suspected operatives in the
military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including
low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets.”
The sources explained that, “during the first weeks of
the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many
as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible
air strikes”, exceeding the total number of militants — 30,000 — estimated to
be in Gaza.
As the sources added, during this period, “the army
gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no
requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to
examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” One source “stated
that human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s
decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about ’20
seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the
Lavender-marked target is male.”
“This”, the article added, “was despite knowing that
the system makes what are regarded as ‘errors’ in approximately 10 percent of
cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose
connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.”
The sources confirmed that those identified were
generally targeted in their homes — “usually at night while their whole
families were present — rather than during the course of military activity”,
because it was “easier to locate” them there. The sources also revealed that
one particular tracking program was, sickeningly, known as “Where’s Daddy?”
The sources also explained how, once the decision was
made to target all low-level militants, there was no other option but to turn
to AI to make the decisions, which were beyond the capacity of human operators
to check. “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives]
automatically”, one source said, “That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic,
target generation goes crazy.”
In an explanation of how sweeping the program was, the
article stated that the “Lavender” software “analyzes information collected on
most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass
surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular
person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ”, giving everyone a
rating from 1 to 100, based on “how likely it is that they are a militant.” The
program was then instructed “to locate these same characteristics — also called
‘features’ — among the general population.”
Anyone “found to have several different incriminating
features”, the sources explained, “will reach a high rating, and thus
automatically becomes a potential target for assassination”, even though the
“features” incriminating them might be nothing more than “being in a Whatsapp
group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing
addresses frequently.”
One source explained how often mistakes were made,
stating that a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to
his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in
his house with his family. This happened often.”
Expanding the program to include civilians
While everyone should be horrified that such an
imprecise system was used automatically to generate targets for killing without
any human oversight, the sources also revealed how easily the system strayed
into defining civilian employees of the Hamas government as legitimate targets
when its parameters were tweaked to make up for shortfalls in the numbers of
targets required by death-hungry commanders.
One source talked about “times when a Hamas operative
was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of
civil defense personnel, police officers.” This particular source thought that
“it would be a shame to waste bombs” on them, because, although “they help the
Hamas government, they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
While this source appeared to be blithely unaware of
the illegality of targeting civil defense personnel and police officers,
another said he was “bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they
used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil
defense workers in the training dataset.”
This source also explained the perils of expanding the
program to include civilians working for the Hamas government, because doing so
“made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms
were applied to the general population.” In the source’s words, “Since it’s an
automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this
decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian
communication profile as potential targets.”
I’ve previously written extensively about +972
Magazine’s revelatory articles about the horribly flawed AI-driven military
targeting in Gaza, and the loosening of any definitions of proportionality and
acceptable “collateral damage”, and I’m doing so again in this article because
they are so crucial to understanding how horrific AI-driven military targeting
is, and how it has been used to justify the extraordinary and unacceptable
death toll in Gaza.
I’m glad to see that, with Rachel Szor, Yuval Abraham
has expanded his coverage into a documentary film “NAZA” (“collateral damage”), which has caused hysteria in Israel because it so clearly conveys crucial truths about
how sweeping genocidal intent can be disguised as clinical military accuracy.
Genocidal intent and the persistent implementation of
genocidal actions
Nevertheless, the main thrust of Israel’s actions
remains what it has been since the beginning — genocidal intent, as openly expressed by senior government officials immediately after October 7, and as manifested not
only through broadening the scope of acceptable “collateral damage” beyond
anything previously imagined in its disguised carpet-bombing, but also through
its destruction of almost the entirety of Gaza’s built environment, and its
persistent, and almost incessant sieges on supplies of food, water, fuel and
medical supplies.
The Genocide Convention specifically defines genocide as “acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group”, including, inter alia, not only “killing members of
the group”, and “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group”, but also “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Everything Israel has been doing over the last three
years has been designed not just to kill, but also to “deliberately inflict on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part”, as I have discussed in most of my nearly 100 articles over the last
36 months.
While the sieges have been almost relentless,
punctuated only briefly for a six-week period during a ceasefire in January and February 2025, and have not even been
adequately relieved since the supposed ceasefire over the last year — the terms of which Israel has deliberately and persistently
flouted — the entire
history of the last 36 months is one of relentless efforts to kill the
Palestinians by all means imaginable.
A brief list of the almost bewildering number of grave
crimes that have taken place includes Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s entire
healthcare sector and the “war” on its hospitals and its doctors, through invented and illegal assertions of the
hospitals’ use as Hamas “control and command centers”, its evacuation orders
for almost the entire population to supposed safe zones that were subsequently
bombed, its destruction of water and sewage systems, its withholding of fuel
for generators, its snipers and armed quadcopter drones persistently targeting
civilians, and especially children, the rounding up and abuse of countless civilians, many of whom subsequently
disappeared into Israel’s brutal gulag of torture prisons for
Palestinians,
overseen by the monstrous Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the
license to kill anyone regarded as remotely suspicious at any time, the brazen
murder of five-year old Hind Rajab and her family, the brazen killing of foreign aid workers, the brazen point-blank murder of 15 paramedics and aid workers and the botched attempts to hide the evidence, the “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza from October 2024 to January 2025, when everyone was
ordered to evacuate, and those who remained, for whatever reason, were regarded
as “enemy combatants” who could be summarily executed, the killing fields established by the joint US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian
Foundation (GHF) as a murderous alternative to the aid supplied by UNRWA and
international NGOs, and the targeted killing of journalists in numbers never witnessed before in times of war,
and subsequent slanderous allegations that they were all Hamas operatives.
This list barely scratches the surface of the enormity
of Israel’s genocidal depravity, and, throughout, it has wheedled and lied
about everything it has done, and has continued to deny any wrongdoing, even as
its pundits, former politicians and members of the public have openly declared
that everyone in Gaza should be killed, even children, because they will only
grow up to become terrorists.
While Israel’s genocidal intent has been widely
recognized, and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November
2024, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, no significant opposition to
its actions has been undertaken by any of its western supporters, even as it
has expanded its horrors into the West Bank, where government-backed settler
violence is ever-increasing, and southern Lebanon, where it has inflicted Gaza-style destruction and
extermination on
the Lebanese people, under the same genocidal context of conflating Hezbollah
with Lebanese civilians, and indiscriminately slaughtering as many of them as
possible.
Throughout, the US, whether under Joe Biden or Donald
Trump, has continued to supply Israel with weapons, as has Germany, and,
throughout the west, pliant governments have embarked on furious authoritarian clampdowns on their recalcitrant citizens.
The ever-growing backlash against Israel
Despite this, the people have refused to be cowed. Recent polling shows that the people are prevailing over the
complicit politicians — and the largely compliant mainstream media. Israel’s
carefully cultivated support for many decades — through bribery and bullying —
has collapsed, with polls showing that it is hated by a majority of people in a
majority of countries worldwide.
Faced with moral disgust on an unprecedented scale, there are, finally, signs
that at least some corrupt western governments are starting to recognize that
three years of a genocide that Israel still doesn’t want to end, in which
civilians are still being killed on a daily basis without any possible
justification, and Israel’s leaders — Netanyahu, defense minster Israel Katz and the two far-right
ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — are only stepping up their
genocidal rhetoric is increasingly difficult to defend, and that a genocidal
“forever war” is not what they signed up for when those calls from Tel Aviv
came though, three years ago, telling them all, in no uncertain terms, that
they must openly declare in unison that Israel has “the right to defend
itself.”
How can Israel be allowed to continue “defending
itself” when all it is defending itself against is the lives of civilians, from
Gaza to the West Bank and Lebanon, who continue to be regarded as legitimate
targets because Israel has deliberately forgotten how to distinguish between
civilians and combatants?
How can Israel be allowed to continue “defending
itself” when it wants dead anyone who, even in their thoughts alone, poses a
threat to its claims that it has a God-given right, 3,000 years old, to
everything in the Levant that it eyes up as its own, and that, if the
indigenous people won’t recognize that, they all deserve to be killed; or, in
an even more extreme interpretation, that they all must be killed to ensure
Israel’s safety, and to cement its divinely-ordained rights?
In recent weeks, as the leadership of the Labour
government passed from the staunchly Zionist Keir Starmer — who was put in
place to defend Israel at all costs, even though he was an empty shell lacking any leadership skills — to another
Zionist appointment, the rather more palatable Andy Burnham, one
appointment — of Ed Miliband, the only Jewish person amongst Labour’s Zionist
elite, as foreign secretary — led, finally, to a recognition that Israel has
been committing unacceptable crimes under international law, which has largely
been buried over the last three years.
In a speech in Parliament, which was supposed to be a “comprehensive reset” of
UK policy towards Israel, but which was, nevertheless, largely full of ongoing
support for the genocidal entity, Miliband managed, at least, to support the hugely important findings of the International Court of Justice in July 2024,
declaring that Israel’s entire post-1967 occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and
East Jerusalem is illegal, and to demand its withdrawal and an end to
complicity in its crimes by UN member states, and also recognized the findings, in September 2025, of the UN’s Independent
International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory,
including East Jerusalem, and Israel, that Israel was engaged in war crimes in
Gaza. (The UN Commission also found that Israel was engaged in a genocide, but
Miliband wasn’t prepared to go that far).
He also condemned Israel for its proposed E1 settlement in the West Bank,
which would completely cut off the West Bank from East Jerusalem, and prevent
any notion of a future two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine question, to
which most western nations, nominally at least, claim to be committed, and
announced the imposition of sanctions. Eight Muslim-majority countries followed his lead, while, just two days ago, over 500 European former
ministers and senior officials urged the EU to take action.
Of course, all of this means very little against a
backdrop in which the government refuses to do anything meaningful to isolate
and punish Israel, but I believe Ed Miliband to be a decent man, and, at the
very least, a weather vane for a wider recognition, upheld with such endurance
by campaigners over the last three years, that Israel’s behavior, its
unwillingness to even contemplate bringing its depravity to an end, and the
ever more unacceptable utterances of its leaders have reached a point that is
no longer either tenable or tolerable for those in positions of power to
continue to give it unconditional support.
“Zionism is racism”
On Sunday, the UK’s Green Party went even further,
with party members passing a motion declaring that “Zionism is racism”,
proposed by the British Palestinian artist Lubna Speitan on behalf of
Greens4Palestine. The full text, and a detailed explanation of the reasons why
the motion was proposed, are available here.
The motion stated, “The Green Party declares itself to
be an anti-Zionist party”, adding that it “rejects attempts to normalize the
racist subjugation and oppression of Palestinians; to equate anti-Zionism with
antisemitism; to deny or minimize Palestinian human rights; to create
hierarchies of racism; and to normalize or attempt to justify apartheid, ethnic
cleansing or genocide.”
The motion also affirmed that “definitions of
anti-Jewish discrimination should not equate Jewish identity with Zionist
ideology or political practice. As with any ethnicity or faith group, no single
political ideology should be ascribed to an entire people.”
In addition, the motion also affirmed “the Palestinian
people’s inalienable right to self-determination, including the[ir] right … to
resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation”,
and acknowledged, correctly, that “the struggle to achieve that liberation by
all available means under international law is legitimate.”
It also endorsed “the call from Palestinian civil
society to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against
Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”, and
called for “the release of all Palestinian prisoners of conscience (including Marwan
Barghouti), the end of the
use of administrative detention of Palestinians by Israel, and the treatment of
Palestinian combatants in accordance with international humanitarian law.”
Domestically, the motion also called for “the removal
of Palestine Action from the list of proscribed organizations” under the
Terrorism Act 2000 — the UK’s single most unacceptable act of punitive
authoritarianism on behalf of Israel — and called for “the release of all
prisoners detained for non-violent direct action in support of Palestinian
rights and the end of the genocide, apartheid and the illegal occupation of
Palestine.”
It also supported “the establishment of a single
democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its
capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and
their descendants.”
In explanatory notes, the motion made clear that
“Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation – and, now it
exists, the continuity – of an ethno-nationalist Jewish State in historic
Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population”,
adding, “The real, material manifestation of Zionism has been the historic and
ongoing dehumanization, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and
destruction of Palestinians … based upon European settler-colonial systems of
domination and oppression, which has also created racial hierarchies between
Jews of different ethnicities in Palestine.”
Zionism as genocide, and its inevitable end
None of this ought to be even remotely contentious.
Zionism, founded in Europe in the late 19th century, was, explicitly, a
movement to create a national state for Jews in Palestine, where a mixed
population of Muslims, Christians and Jews had been living for centuries, with
a Muslim majority from the 12th century onwards, and with, at the start of the
British Mandate in 1922, Muslims making up 78% of the population, Jews 11% and
Christians 10%. Zionism, however, sought to establish a Jewish majority state,
explicitly occupying as much of the land as possible, and with as few Arabs as
possible.
It’s a sign of how deranged the discourse protecting
Israel has become that the backlash against the Green Party motion has been
immense. No one seems to want to recall that, 51 years ago, in 1975, the UN
General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism. That was withdrawn in 1991, under pressure from Israel and President George H.
W. Bush, but it not only remains as true now as it was in 1975; Israel’s
actions over the last 35 years — and, especially, over the last three years —
have confirmed, more than ever, that it is a racist endeavor of such ferocious
depravity that its leaders — and far too many of its people — now believe not
only that the unending slaughter of Palestinian civilians is divinely ordained,
but also that the Palestinian population should not just be minimized, but
erased entirely.
Polling in Israel shows around 80 percent support for the forced
expulsion of the Palestinians, which is not only unforgivable in and of itself;
it also conveniently ignores the fact that there is nowhere for them to go.
While the most fanatical settler enthusiasts, like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and
the monstrous settler matriarch Daniella Weiss fulminate endlessly about the
need for other countries to step up and fulfill their dream of the “voluntary
migration” of the Palestinians, the world’s nation states either recognize that
this would be the greatest example of mass ethnic cleansing in modern times,
and want nothing to do with it, or, in many cases, are so consumed with a
rising tide of far-right anti-immigrant sentiment that they are seeking to
close their borders entirely, and certainly won’t open them to welcome a
displaced people who have been designated, collectively, as terrorists, not
only by those seeking to get rid of them, but also by their own governments.
As I have repeatedly stated, the illusion of
“voluntary migration” is nothing less than a deliberate and deeply cynical
smokescreen for the continuing extermination of the Palestinian people.
No one, of course, has any idea how all this will end,
whether Israel, as would be morally appropriate, will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and the
self-inflicted mental health costs of its own genocidal violence, or whether
the world will, eventually, isolate it as a pariah state, as happened with
South Africa. No route is clear to the realization of either a two-state or a
one-state solution, but the people of the world are adamant, by a clear
majority, that a no-state solution of steady and relentless extermination is a
moral stain that can no longer be tolerated.
Israel is lost, and terminally so. Only the means of
its collapse and its epitaph remain to be written.
