Peace and Justice Post

Consortium News, August 5, 2025

It is cold comfort that, in the very final stages of Israel’s genocide, media pundits such as Piers Morgan are finally ready to concede that a genocide may be about to happen.

Gaza under Israeli bombardment on Oct. 7, 2023. (Ali Hamad of
APAimages for WAFA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

Too many pundits, such as the interminably dim-witted Piers Morgan, are slowly, oh-so-slowly coming round to the idea that Israel might be committing a genocide in Gaza.

But of course, they are still dismissing as “anti-Semites” those of us who pointed out from the start that it was a genocide.

They hope to get away with this face-saving ploy only because the establishment media continues to ignore what happened before Oct. 7, 2023 — events that over many years had made clear Israel was readying to commit genocide — and would grasp a pretext when it arrived.

Here is a brief outline of some of the most pertinent factors:

1. In early 2008 — that is, 17 years ago — Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general, threatened that Gaza would face a “Shoah” — a word until then, strictly reserved for the Holocaust.

2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits and bombed its only airport.

From then on, food was tightly rationed, in what Israeli leaders called “putting Gaza on a diet,” while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called “mowing the lawn.” Gaza was effectively turned into a concentration camp.

Displaced Palestinians gather at a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip after fleeing their homes in an area under heavy Israeli aerial bombardment in the besieged Palestinian territory, Aug. 26, 2014. (UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan)

3. The siege was complemented by Israel’s gradual destruction of Gaza’s means of self-sufficiency: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave’s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza’s industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza’s electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.

Smoke and flames rise from a power plant in Gaza that was hit by missile strikes, July 29, 2014. (UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel’s goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming U.N. aid organisations were linked to Hamas “terror” in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity since Oct. 7, 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-U.S. front group, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.”

The “No Man’s Land” in what Israel calls the buffer zone along the Gaza-Israel border, 2008. (Kashfi Halford, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

5. With this as the background, the United Nations warned a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire.

In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting “42 knees in one day.” Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has warned.

New York City rally May 18, 2018, protests 70 years of Nakba and supports the Great Return March in Gaza. (Joe Catron/Flickr/ CC BY-NC 2.0)

Let us note too that Israel’s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza — and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave’s desperate plight — was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on Oct. 7, 2023.

5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the U.S. to join it in a pressure campaign on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave’s people would flood into Sinai — an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before Oct. 7, 2023, and has continued to do so since.

In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide — all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.

Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza’s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what’s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world. Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped — now.

It is cold comfort indeed that, in the very final stages of Israel’s genocide, media pundits like Piers Morgan are ready to concede that a genocide may be about to happen. None of that should obscure or excuse their 21 months of complicity in the genocide that unfolded before all our eyes. They did not know because they did not want to know.

Responsibility for every dead child in Gaza, every maimed child in Gaza, every orphaned child in Gaza, every starving child in Gaza, irreversibly damaged by malnutrition, rests firmly on their shoulders.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support. 

This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Anti-Semitism Gaza Blockade Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) Gaza. Genocide Jonathan Cook Nick Maynard Oct. 7 Piers Morgan

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 Josep Borrell

Europe’s silence has allowed the genocide of Palestinians to continue unchecked – undermining all it stands for

• Josep Borrell was the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy from 2019 to 2024

The Guardian, Fri 1 Aug 2025 10.00 CEST

If they survive Donald Trump’s attacks, the international courts will not deliver their final verdict for several years. But for all those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, there can be little doubt that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza, slaughtering and starving civilians after systematically destroying all the infrastructure in the territory. In the meantime, settlers and the Israeli army are every day guilty of serious, massive and repeated violations of international law and international humanitarian law in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Those who do not act to stop this genocide and these violations of international law, even though they have the power to do so, are complicit in them. This is unfortunately the case with the leaders of the European Union and those of its member states, who refuse to sanction Israel even though the EU has a legal obligation to do so.

The EU has many levers it could pull to exert significant influence on the Israeli government. The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and its main partner in investment and people-to-people exchange. It is also one of its major arms suppliers. The association agreement between the EU and Israel, established in 2000 after the Oslo accords, is the most favourable of all those concluded by the bloc with third countries. In addition to zero customs duties on its exports of goods and services and visa-free travel for its citizens, the agreement gives Israel access to several major European funding and exchange programmes such as Horizon and Erasmus.

However, article 2 of this agreement makes it conditional on Israel’s respect for international law and fundamental human rights. Whether or not to suspend it is therefore not a choice that the EU can make at will. Since the EU foreign affairs ministers found that Israel was not respecting these rights, EU leaders now have a legal obligation to suspend the agreement. Failure to do so would also be a serious violation of the association agreement with Israel.

However, despite all my efforts to this end when I was high representative of the EU, and despite the dramatic deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the increasing violations of international law in the West Bank in recent months, the EU and most EU governments have so far failed to use any of the levers available to them to exert pressure on the Israeli government.

As a result, faced with the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the EU has for more than a year and a half been unable to assert its commitment to fundamental human rights, its defence of international law and multilateralism, or its longstanding position in favour of the two-state solution. This inaction has already seriously damaged its geopolitical standing, not only in the Muslim world but across the globe. The stark contrast between the firm response of the European authorities to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and their passivity in the face of the war in Gaza has been widely exploited by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda against the EU. And with success, as we have seen in particular in the Sahel. This European double standard has also greatly weakened support for Ukraine in many developing countries.

By persisting in not suspending the association agreement despite its clear violation by Israel, in not blocking arms deliveries to that country despite the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, in not banning imports from illegal settlements despite the decisions of the international court of justice to that effect, by not sanctioning Israeli ministers and political leaders who make genocidal statements, by not banning Netanyahu from using European airspace despite the arrest warrant issued by the international criminal court, and by not supporting the judges of the court and UN officials sanctioned by the United States, the EU and its member states are discrediting themselves in the eyes of the world and undermining the international law and multilateral order they are supposed to defend. While under attack from Putin in the east and Trump in the west, the EU is thus deepening its isolation by cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

The leaders of the EU and its member states will probably be called to account in the future for their complicity in the crimes against humanity committed by Netanyahu’s government. And, with hindsight, Europeans will undoubtedly judge harshly their blindness to the genocide that is taking place. However, it is urgent to limit the damage now. The EU must finally decide to sanction Israel without further delay. This is the only language that can bring Israeli leaders to stop committing crimes against humanity.

• Josep Borrell was the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy from 2019 to 2024. He is president of the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, CIDOB

 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.

By Norman Solomon, July 28, 2025 

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

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.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.