This isn't a 'war' — Israel is destroying a population

Starvation is just one weapon if eradicating 'the enemy' is the Netanyahu government's ultimate objective

Paul R. Pillar

Jul 30, 2025

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/hamas-israel-starvation/

The prospects for negotiating a ceasefire and an end to the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip appear as dim as ever. Israeli and U.S. representatives walked out of talks with Hamas in Qatar that had been mediated by the Qataris and Egyptians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about “alternative” means of achieving Israel’s goals in the territory.

President Donald Trump, echoing Netanyahu’s levying of blame on Hamas, asserted that “Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die.” Trump went on to mention a need to “finish the job,” evidently referring to Israel’s continued devastating assault on the Strip and its residents.

I have been thinking for a long time about the negotiation of ceasefires. Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote a book, “Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process,” which explored the diplomatic and military dynamics of how two belligerents negotiate a peace while simultaneously fighting a war.

What is taking place in Gaza now is mostly not a war, even though that term commonly is applied to the violence there. It is instead a largely unilateral assault on a population and its means of living. It is a situation in which one side, Israel, has — as Trump might put it — nearly all the cards.

The news stories emerging almost daily from Gaza are not about pitched battles between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas fighters. They are mostly not about battles at all. Instead, they are about the latest large-scale killing by Israel of Gazans, mostly civilians, at a rate that has averaged about 150 deaths per day since the current round of carnage began in late 2023. Civilians are killed largely with airstrikes but also more recently through getting shot while seeking ever-scarcer food.

Mass starvation has become perhaps the most gut-wrenching part of the Gaza catastrophe, and one where Israel has again tried to shift blame onto Hamas. A longtime Israeli accusation in endeavoring to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)—the principal international organization with the mission of aiding Palestinian refugees, including in Gaza—is that Hamas supposedly was stealing UNRWA-supplied food. Trump has echoed that accusation.

A study by the U.S. Agency for International Development (before the Trump administration dismantled the agency) of reported incidents of loss or theft of U.S.-supplied humanitarian assistance in Gaza found no evidence that Hamas has engaged in widespread diversion of aid. More recent press reporting shows that the IDF itself has found no evidence of Hamas seizing or diverting aid.

Israel’s opposition to UNRWA has nothing to do with Hamas or with theft of humanitarian aid. It instead concerns how UNRWA — because it is a United Nations agency explicitly focused on Palestinians — constitutes an international recognition that the Palestinians are a nation and that many of them are refugees from their homeland.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza got worse once Israel succeeded in pushing UNRWA aside. The U.S.-backed and Israeli-controlled alternative aid scheme is not only woefully inadequate in meeting immediate needs but also designed as an adjunct to Israel’s ethnic cleansing objectives. The limitation of aid to a few distribution points facilitates the forced relocation of surviving Gazans into what amounts to a concentration camp, as a possible prelude to removal from the Gaza Strip altogether.

Some aid has recently been dropped into Gaza by air. Airdrops are an ineffective and inefficient way of trying to relieve the starvation. The amounts delivered are a tiny fraction of what is needed. The cost of delivery is far higher than by land. As demonstrated by an earlier U.S. effort to deliver aid this way, some of the supplies are lost because they fall into the sea or, even worse, kill people crushed by falling pallets. But for some donors, an airdrop serves as a visually dramatic conscience-calming gesture.

For Israel, it serves as a distraction from the fact that the biggest impediment to getting humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip is Israel’s continued land blockade of the territory. Valuing that distraction, Israel itself has joined in the airdrop gesture. At the same time, however, Israel continues to allow only a trickle of aid to cross the land border, with many hundreds of truckloads left to spoil and be destroyed by the IDF.

In my decades-old book, I identified a type of war ending that is an alternative to a negotiated settlement as “extermination/expulsion,” meaning that the militarily dominant side physically obliterates its opponent or pushes it out of contested territory. Extermination/expulsion of the opponent is an appropriate label for Israel’s objective in Gaza.

The prevailing Israeli conception of the opponent, or enemy, in Gaza is the entire Palestinian population, an attitude that was already well rooted on the Israeli Right before the Hamas attack in October 2023 and has grown even stronger and wider since then. The deaths already inflicted, directly or indirectly, by the IDF have significantly advanced the extermination objective. The expulsion part has mostly been the stuff of internal Israeli deliberations, although it came more into the open when Trump gave Netanyahu’s government the gift of endorsing the ethnic cleansing with his Riviera-in-Gaza proposal.

Insofar as Hamas is defined as the enemy, the Israeli objective of extermination has been more explicit. The Trump administration has declared its support for Israel’s repeatedly stated objective of “eradicating” Hamas. Netanyahu, speaking to an internal IDF audience last year, said that “we will kill the Hamas leadership” and that this killing as well as acting “in all areas in the Gaza Strip” was part of “total victory” that would be needed before military operations would end.

The objective of extermination/expulsion is an obvious deal-killer. It makes no sense to expect the other party to a conflict to negotiate its own eradication.

Netanyahu also has other personal and political reasons to keep Israeli military operations going indefinitely. These include delaying his full reckoning with corruption charges and keeping intact his coalition with right-wing extremists who are especially vehement about eliminating or expelling Palestinians from Gaza and who strongly oppose a ceasefire.

For Netanyahu’s government, any talk of a ceasefire has little to do with getting closer to peace in Gaza. Instead, it is only a temporary pause in operations that this government finds expedient for whatever reason, be it logistical resupply, relief from diplomatic pressure, or something else. As with the ceasefire earlier this year, the Israelis will feel free to break it whenever they no longer find it expedient.

Hamas has wanted a ceasefire for some time, and why shouldn’t it? Much of its leadership has indeed been killed, and its ability to resist further Israeli attacks is badly battered though not eliminated. The longer the suffering of the Gazan population continues, the more that Hamas may lose support among those who blame it for triggering the devastation with its 2023 attack. The group has nothing to gain, and only more to lose, as the violence continues.

Throughout off-and-on ceasefire talks since last year, the main sticking point has been that Hamas wants a clear route to a permanent end to hostilities while Israel wants to retain the ability to resume its attacks. Hamas also has tried to use what few cards it has to gain relief for the civilian population of Gaza, by calling for unimpeded humanitarian aid and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from densely populated areas so that residents can return to their homes. In addition, it has sought freedom for some of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

Press reporting based on internal documents from the recent round of talks in Qatar shows that the Hamas negotiators worked closely and carefully with the Qatari and Egyptian mediators to try to craft a viable ceasefire agreement. Hamas had already agreed to the great majority of the content in a framework document that the mediators said Israel had accepted.

The amendments Hamas sought were mostly focused on relief for Palestinian civilians and aimed at getting greater precision and clarity in the framework agreement. For example, regarding withdrawals of Israeli troops, instead of the draft’s vague language about withdrawal to lines “close” to what was in the January 2025 ceasefire agreement, Hamas insisted that the negotiators talk in detail about specific lines on maps. The Hamas negotiators offered their own proposals that made some refinements of only 100 or 200 meters from the maps they finally were given.

Regarding release of Palestinian prisoners, in response to the vague framework language, the Hamas representatives wanted to negotiate specific numbers, to match the specific numbers of Israeli hostages to be released in the framework. On humanitarian aid, Hamas wanted a return to United Nations administration of aid distribution and a reopening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

Having negotiated seriously on these and other points, the Hamas representatives were taken aback by the subsequent U.S. and Israeli walkout and by Trump’s accusations about Hamas’s alleged responsibility for the breakdown.

Trump’s assertion that Hamas “didn’t really want to make a deal” and instead wanted “to die” is nonsense. The talks in Qatar ended because Netanyahu’s government decided it did not want to make a deal at this time. As with most things involving Israel, the Trump administration fell in line behind Netanyahu.

Blaming Hamas for continuation of the Gaza catastrophe is another instance of treating a Palestinian resistance group—whether it is Hamas or any other, and there have been many of them—as the cause of violence associated with the subjugation of Palestinians and occupation of their homelands, rather than as an effect of the subjugation and occupation.

Netanyahu in the past has found it expedient to treat Hamas as something other than the evil incarnate that Israel portrays it as today. Netanyahu earlier facilitated Qatari payments to Hamas as a way of building up the group as a counterweight to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.

This tactic was part of a continuing Israeli strategy to keep Palestinians divided, so that Israel can say that it “does not have a negotiating partner”—a line echoed by Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States. That approach is yet another indication of unwillingness to reach a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

Gaza: the “worst-case scenario of famine.”

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/07/30/world-is-watching-gaza/

The Israeli government’s genocide through starvation of the people of Gaza is at its most dire stage yet.

Despite the mainstream media consistently excusing and diminishing Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, the world is watching Gaza, heartbroken and outraged by the constant stream of images of starving children and families.

As organizers, in this moment, it’s our job to recognize the cracks emerging in support for genocide, bring in those who have been newly activated by the horror of this moment, and push even further towards a permanent end to U.S. support for Israeli genocide.

“The tipping point has already occurred”

The Israeli government has turned Gaza into the “hungriest place on earth,” deliberately starving Palestinians as a tool of genocide. For nearly two years, the Israeli military has been manufacturing a famine, carpet-bombing everything from homes to hospitals to refugee tents and systematically destroying life-sustaining infrastructure and making aid distribution all but impossible in Gaza.

Since the Israeli military unilaterally shattered the temporary ceasefire in March, it has blocked all aid from reaching the people of Gaza, setting up the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation instead, at whose aid sites Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors have murdered more than 1,054 Palestinians to date.

According to the WHO, a “worst-case scenario of famine” has now reached much of Gaza. A doctor returning from Gaza described the severity of the crisis, explaining that for thousands of people, mainly children, “the tipping point has already occurred” in their starvation. Massive surges in food and formula aid, he said, could decrease deaths in the coming months, but many people “have already passed the point of no return… death is unfortunately imminent for probably thousands of children.”

Our job is to bring people in.

As the Israeli genocide reaches new depths of horror, the images and testimony that Palestinians have been sharing for nearly two years have once again become impossible for the world to ignore. Even mainstream news outlets like the New York Times — which has consistently obfuscated, downplayed, and attempted to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza — is now printing photos of starving Palestinian children on its front page. 

The world’s eyes are on Gaza, and this means that more and more people around us, in our workplaces, our communities, our families, are horrified by what they’re seeing — but unsure what can be done to stop it, or where to begin.  

It’s going to take more and more of us speaking out, taking action, learning more about the root causes of this genocide, and joining organizations until we build enough pressure to win. 

Our role now is to invite more U.S. Jews into the Palestine solidarity movement, to help them understand that the U.S. and Israeli governments are directly responsible for these atrocities, and to mobilize them to take action with us as we keep pushing with everything we have in the fight for an end to the genocide.

The cracks are growing — so that’s where we’re pushing.

In recent days, many politicians who have actively enabled and funded the Israeli government’s genocide have started putting out statements about the starvation. Even Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, who smiled for a picture with international fugitive and genocide architect Benjamin Netanyahu only a few weeks ago, have in recent days put out statements on the starvation crisis in Gaza. 

These statements ignore that the Israeli government has intentionally created a policy of starvation, and many of these politicians continue supporting more weapons to Israel. So why do their statements matter at all? Only because they reveal cracks. They reveal that growing international and domestic pressure are literally forcing politicians to speak out and that the status quo of silent complicity is breaking. And this means that we must keep pushing with everything we have.

Where we go from here.

When these cracks appear, it’s our responsibility to take advantage of them. 

More politicians breaking their silence is an immediate opportunity to hold their feet to the fire, making clear that words mean nothing without action and demanding they work to end U.S. support for Israel’s genocide.

Our demands are clear. The UN must be given immediate and unfettered access to Gaza to surge in humanitarian aid, and there must be an immediate ceasefire and a permanent end to the genocide, which would include the Israeli militarye fully withdrawing from Gaza. The single most powerful way our movements can bring about these conditions is to force the U.S. government to stop arming Israel. As we bring people into our movement and continue to escalate our pressure, we will accept nothing else.

The Genocidal Partnership of Israel and the United States

by Norman Solomon | Jul 29, 2025 

https://original.antiwar.com/solomon/2025/07/28/the-genocidal-partnership-of-israel-and-the-united-states/

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.

The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.

“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”

Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”

Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza – bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals, Israel is still targeting healthcare workers (killing at least 70 in May and June), as well as first responders and journalists.

The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people” are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Kristallnacht happened two years later.

Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on Democracy Now! in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.”

Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said:

“What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”

In Israel, “compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,” Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, “the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.” The consequences “are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.”

The loudest preaching for a “rules-based order” has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of killing, maiming, and terrorizing. In addition to the joint project of genocide in Gaza, and the USA’s long war on Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, along with encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year.

Israel’s grisly performance as “a new Sparta” in the region is coproduced by the Pentagon, with the military and intelligence operations of the two nations intricately entangled. The Israeli military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone with at least 70 percent of its arsenal coming from the United States.

While writing an afterword about the war on Gaza for the paperback edition of War Made Invisible, I mulled over the relevance of my book’s subtitle: “How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.” As the carnage in Gaza worsened, the reality became clearer that the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Defense Department are essentially part of the same military machine. Their command structures are different, but they are part of the same geopolitical Goliath.

“The new era in which Israel, backed by the U.S., dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past,” longtime war correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote this month. The lethal violence from Israeli-American teamwork is of such magnitude that it epitomizes international state terrorism. The genocide in Gaza shows the lengths to which the alliance is willing and able to go.

While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United States, the genocidal results of the governments’ policies are indistinguishable.

American public opinion about arming Israel is measurable. As early as June 2024, a CBS News poll found that 61 percent of the public said that the U.S. should not “send weapons and supplies to Israel.” Since then, support for Israel has continued to erode.

In sharp contrast, on Capitol Hill, the support for arming Israel is measurably high. When Bernie Sanders’s bills to cut off some military aid to Israel came to a vote last November, just 19 out of 100 senators voted yes. Very few of his colleagues voice anywhere near the extent of Sanders’s moral outrage as he keeps speaking out on the Senate floor.

In the House, only 26 out of 435 members have chosen to become cosponsors of H.R.3565, a bill introduced more than two months ago by Rep. Delia Ramirez that would prevent the U.S. government from sending certain bombs to Israel.

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” the Congressional Research Service reports. During just the first 12 months after the war on Gaza began in October 2023, Brown University’s Costs of War project found, the “U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region” added up to $23 billion.

The resulting profit bonanza for U.S. military contractors is notable. So is the fact that the U.S.-Israel partnership exerts great American leverage in the Middle East – where two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves are located.

The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide.

Trump Shows Strong Support for Israel as Palestinians in Gaza Starve to Death

After the US and Israel quit ceasefire talks, Trump suggested it was time for Israel to 'finish the job'

by Dave DeCamp | July 27, 2025

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/07/27/trump-shows-strong-support-for-israel-as-palestinians-in-gaza-starve-to-death/

President Trump has shown strong support for Israel in recent days, while much of the world has been outraged over the images of Palestinians who are starving to death due to the US-backed Israeli siege on Gaza.

After the US and Israel quit ceasefire talks, Trump blamed the lack of progress on Hamas and suggested it was time for Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza. “I think they want to die, and it’s very, very bad,” Trump said on Friday, referring to Hamas.

For its part, Hamas has said that it was surprised by the US and Israel quitting the truce talks and that it was committed to continuing the process until a deal was reached.

In recent weeks, Trump has been claiming that a ceasefire deal was close, but now he is appearing to suggest that Israel should escalate its genocidal war. “They’re gonna have to fight, and they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of [Hamas],” he said.

Israeli officials told Axios that they weren’t sure if Trump’s comments were a negotiating tactic or a “green light” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to use even more extreme military measures. The report said the Trump administration was rethinking its Gaza strategy, but there’s no sign it’s considering putting pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire.

Israeli officials also told Axios that Trump has applied virtually no pressure on Netanyahu to end the slaughter in Gaza in recent months. “In most calls and meetings, Trump told Bibi, ‘Do what you have to do in Gaza.’ In some cases, he even encouraged Netanyahu to go harder on Hamas,” one official said.

While meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland on Sunday, Trump was asked about the images of starving children in Gaza. The president said people were “stealing the food,” a reference to Israel’s unfounded claims that Hamas has been stealing massive amounts of aid, then quickly pivoted to different topics.

In other comments, Trump said the issue of food shortages in Gaza was an “international problem,” not a “US problem.” But Israel is reliant on US military aid to sustain its military operations in Gaza, and Trump has the power to end the genocidal war by leveraging that support.

Israeli 'thugs' board Gaza-bound aid ship Handala in international waters

Israeli forces intercepted the Handala aid ship en route to Gaza, detaining activists, journalists and European politicians

By Elis Gjevori

Published date: 26 July 2025

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-thugs-board-gaza-bound-aid-ship-international-waters

Israeli troops stormed the Gaza-bound Handala vessel in international waters on Saturday, halting its attempt to deliver aid to Palestinians in the besieged enclave.

The raid was broadcast live by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, showing soldiers confronting unarmed passengers as they sat on deck with their hands raised, singing the anti-fascist anthem “Bella Ciao”.

The Handala, carrying 19 activists, including European MPs and two Al Jazeera journalists, was intercepted roughly 100 kilometres west of Gaza, and around 50 kilometres off Egypt’s coast. Activists say the boat was carrying humanitarian supplies and attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza.

“There is no threat from our side,” one crew member said during the broadcast, which was cut shortly after troops boarded the ship.

A video released by the flotilla captured an exchange between Israeli forces and Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Huwaida Arraf. “This is a civilian vessel,” she said. “In international law, any blockade that deliberately starves a civilian population is a violation of international law.”

“You are deliberately starving civilians and children before the eyes of the world,” she added, accusing Israel of violating its responsibilities under international humanitarian law.

French MEP Emma Fourreau, also on board, posted on X that Israeli ships had approached the vessel and that she and others planned to throw their phones into the sea. Al Jazeera Arabic later reported three Israeli naval vessels had moved in after a drone was spotted overhead.

A livestream later showed at least six Israeli soldiers boarding the vessel. Those on board appeared calm, wearing life jackets and sitting with arms raised.

Israeli officials had earlier stated their intent to enforce what they claim a “legal maritime security blockade” on Gaza. The military has yet to issue an official statement on the operation.

Among those detained were French MPs Fourreau and Gabrielle Cathala. Jean-Luc Melenchon, head of their party France Unbowed, denounced the storming by Israeli troops. "Netanyahu's thugs boarded Handala. They attack 21 unarmed people in territorial waters where they have no right. A kidnapping in which two French parliamentarians are victims," he posted on X.

Melenchon demanded the French government take action.

The Handala’s crew had said in advance they would launch a hunger strike if detained. Gaza remains under siege, with aid agencies warning of mass starvation.

The incident echoes a similar event on 9 June, when Israeli forces intercepted another Freedom Flotilla ship, the Madleen, which carried 12 activists, including Greta Thunberg.

Film Review: James Gunn’s Superman cements Israel’s villain status in the American imagination

James Gunn’s new Superman movie, which draws an analogy between Israel and the villainous country of Boravia, demonstrates how Israel's idealized image in American culture has been shattered by the widespread acknowledgment of Palestinian oppression.

By Mitchell Plitnick  July 18, 2025 

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/film-review-james-gunns-superman-cements-israels-villain-status-in-the-american-imagination/

SUPERMAN
Directed by James Gunn
129 minutes, DC Studios, 2025

Editor’s Note: This article contains very mild spoilers.

“Truth, justice, and the American way.”

Those words are the long-time tagline of the DC comics character, Superman. They are not as prominent today as they have been in the past, but for those us, like me, who were great fans of DC comics in the 1970s and 1980s, they still defined Superman. 

They were also one of several reasons why, although my youthful passion for comic books leaned much more toward DC than its rival Marvel in those days, I didn’t care much for Superman. I liked the idealism he was supposed to represent, but his simplistic presentation and, more than anything, his deference to authority was a message my young and rebellious self was profoundly uncomfortable with.

So how is it that in 2025, James Gunn’s new movie, Superman, has delighted me and many others by striking the biggest cultural blow to date against the United States’ mindless support of Israel, even as it commits war crimes and guns down innocent Palestinians on a daily basis?

The dynamics of this movie are fascinating to watch, but the responses are much more important.

‘Boravia’ is Israel, and is the bad guy

Since Superman premiered, there has been a lot of chatter about it. The film broadly tells the story of Superman intervening against Boravia—which, both in the movie and in the comic book lore it is drawn from is presented as an Eastern European country—conquering its neighbor Jarhanpur—clearly depicted as an economically and physically ravaged country populated by people of color, many of whom are visibly Muslim. The scenario is inescapably evocative of Palestine. 

“Superman has gone woke” is one extremely popular attack on the film. That one is rooted in Superman’s clear message supporting the rights of immigrants, but it also goes hand-in-hand with the complaint that the character has been warped by the “liberal media” to condemn Israel.

Even leaving aside the notion that Superman, as a character, ever represented anything other than kindness and caring for all, even if in a highly pro-American way, the arguments are silly. Anyone who is familiar with the character would recognize Superman’s simple argument when he is criticized for stopping the surrogate for Israel in this film, Boravia, from slaughtering innocent and helpless civilians: “People were going to die!”

Superman’s strength as a character is his idealism, which often spills over into extreme naivete, and his determination to treat all life as precious and equal. That’s what the crowd whining that “Superman has gone woke” just can’t grasp.

Since Israel, Palestine, or any other country—save the United States, of course—is not mentioned in Superman, the metaphor of Boravia can be interpreted, or denied, at the viewer’s whim. But to do so, one has to ignore the unambiguous evidence in the film. 

James Gunn, who wrote and directed Superman, insists that Boravia and its neighboring country Jarhanpur, are not direct references to Israel and Palestine, but his explanation is very telling. 

“When I wrote this the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening. So I tried to do little things to move it away from that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East… [the movie depicts an] invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country,” which he said “really is fictional.”

Just from the statement that “the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening,” we can tell that Gunn is not deeply learned in Israel and Palestine, although what he probably meant was that October 7 had not yet happened (he started writing the film in late 2022) and neither had the overt genocide in Gaza. As such, it may be fair to take him at his word that he was referencing a broader idea.

But it’s an inescapable reality that the powerful country vs a helpless people describes Israel and the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. 

Sure, in addition to Israel and Palestine there are a few parallels with Russia and Ukraine. But that allegory doesn’t really fit since Boravia was said to be a close U.S. ally. Plus Ukraine, while certainly not the military power Russia is, is clearly far from helpless in the face of Russian aggression. 

The deep relationship between the Boravian dictator (who speaks with a thick Russian or Eastern European accent and looks like a caricature mix of Benjamin Netanyahu and David Ben-Gurion) and the American corporate sector resembles Netanyahu, even while his alienation from the American political sector might evoke Putin a bit more.

But the Israel-Palestine metaphor is clearly there. It may have been one among several examples of the political dynamic in Gunn’s head, but what emerges on film is unmistakably influenced by Israel, even if not solely so. 

Gunn likely did not want to be too on the nose with his allegory, although he pretty clearly failed at that effort. More importantly, this movie is the foundation for what he and his backers at Warner Bros./Discovery hope will be a multi-billion-dollar franchise to rival that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He wants the political debate to enhance the film and its legacy, not to overwhelm it, so some degree of space to be evasive about politics is prudent.

More important than the writer’s intentions, though, is that the political conflict depicted was so quickly seen for what it is.

Profound culture shift

In the past, even the very recent past, it would have been unfathomable for an American summer blockbuster film to show Israel, even a metaphorical Israel, as an invading, corrupt country whose neighbors were in such terror they had to pray for a superhero to save them, or all hope would be lost.

A writer would have come to the studio with a script like that, even one where the allusion to Israel was obscured to a much greater degree, and it would have been tossed out. There might be fear of backlash, or it simply might be that this concept would be seen as too challenging for Americans who still hold on to the mythical image of Israel as either the poor victim of the ravenous Arab and Muslim hordes or the plucky little state that rose to become a military power and key American ally. But that didn’t happen here.

The fact that Gunn wrote this movie is notable enough. But Warner/Discovery spent $225 million to make it and anticipates another $125 million in advertising. That’s a significant investment. Moreover, they have two more high-budget films in the works, eight more in development, as well as two more television series in production and five more in pre-production.

If Superman failed at the box office or caused a backlash that might lead to boycotts of DC media, it would be a disaster. But there hasn’t been a hint of trepidation or pressure on Gunn to soften this message. Warner Bros./Discovery CEO David Zaslav is known for his frugality, his willingness to scrap projects just for tax breaks, and for a relatively conservative approach. He obviously didn’t see this as much of a risk.

A movie painting Israel in a villainous light reflects the change in generations as well. After all, the older audience, the folks still denying the real nature of Israel, is not the target of this film. Nor am I, as a man in his late 50s. It’s younger people, and they see Israel differently.

No going back to an idealized Israel

More than just reflecting that shift, a movie like Superman entrenches it culturally in a way that all the political activism, analysis, protests, and even exposure of the truth can’t. It normalizes the view of Israel as an aggressor state. That’s why it provokes denial from the likes of far-right Israel backer pundit Ben Shapiro and hysteria from other pro-Israel zealots who don’t deny the reality of the movie.

Consider the words of the far-right, racist Israeli rapper known as Hatzel (The Shadow): 

“Instead of presenting a character who defends the weak and fights for justice, they turned it into a disgusting political caricature, where Israel (under a different name) is portrayed as a fascist state, a warmonger, and a close ally of the U.S., which supplies advanced weaponry to fight ‘poor and miserable farmers (the good Palestinians) with pitchforks and stones.’ And Superman? He comes to save them from bloodthirsty Israel. This is literally a film of incitement against us… And I will tell you here, clearly: The liberal Jews in America are the main contributors to anti-Semitism in the U.S…There is no greater enemy to an Israeli than the progressive American Jew.”

The bile and hate of this racist activist are typical of the responses from the pro-Israel and Israeli far-right. But as much as they might rant, they can’t avoid the fact that the world now sees what Israel does every day, and that a more realistic understanding of Israel is becoming not just a debating point or a political issue but a part of the cultural zeitgeist.

It’s not just about Israel. Superman goes to great lengths to present the hero as an independent actor, following only his own ethical code. The other superheroes in the film are sponsored by a huge corporation. They eventually come around and help Superman, but it takes a while.

This might have been what pleased me most. The second blockbuster movie about Superman, back in 1980, ended with Superman flying through space carrying an American flag. But the U.S. comes off very badly in this movie.

Superman is betrayed by the U.S. and handed over to his nemesis, Lex Luthor, who imprisons him. He is told he has no rights since he is an alien (i.e., immigrant). The U.S. also continues to back Boravia throughout the movie, and Superman is criticized for interfering in the murderous Boravian operation without American authorization. As more of the nefarious plot is uncovered, the U.S. government stands by doing nothing and never taking responsibility for its actions. Only the superheroes are working to save the day.

Superman doesn’t only challenge the long-held, false image of innocent Israel, it also challenges Americans’ fecklessness, the ease with which its government is manipulated, and its blind, greedy, self-serving arrogance. Of course, it treads lightly on this point; again, there is only so much Gunn wanted to dive into political issues. It is, after all, a light-hearted fantasy movie that is expected to launch a series that will bring in a ton of money.

But Superman proves there is no going back to the idealization of Israel that was kick-started back in 1960 when Paul Newman romanticized Israel’s creation in the film Exodus, and boomed after the 1967 war. The delusion about Israel’s colonialist birth and apartheid life has been shattered by the exposure of its genocidal present. And a movie like Superman ingrains that shattered image into our culture. This, like Superman himself, might just provide a bit of hope in these dark times.