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.

Editorial

Condemnation is rightly growing. But until concrete action is taken, western allies will remain complicit with these horrifying crimes

Wed 23 Jul 2025 19.53 CEST

July has been one of the deadliest months of the war in Gaza, with Israel killing one person every 12 minutes. The UN says more than 1,000 Palestinians have died trying to get food, mostly when they attempted to collect aid from hubs.

Behind these visible deaths lies the horror of systematic starvation: “minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed”, in the words of Prof Alex de Waal, an expert on humanitarian crises. More than 100 aid groups warned that it is spreading fast. At least 10 people died of hunger and malnutrition on Tuesday alone, said Gaza’s health ministry. Parents watch their children wither. Adults collapse on the street.

Never mind other essential needs – water, medical supplies, shelter. Even if food could be distributed fairly under the new system – and it cannot be – it is utterly insufficient. And even if more arrived, which might or might not happen if a ceasefire were agreed, life is not sustainable when brief periods of partial respite alternate with months of deprivation.

Starvation wreaks lifelong damage on physical and mental health, perhaps including that of future generations, and destroys societies as well as lives. People are forced to make impossible choices, such as deciding which of their children needs food most, and do desperate things, snatching food from others. These acts too leave lasting scars. While many aid groups have run out of everything, others say social breakdown has made distributing meagre supplies too dangerous for both staff and recipients. Israel blames looting by Hamas for the hunger. This, from a government which armed a criminal gang accused of seizing aid.

To deliberately inflict starvation upon a society is to take it to pieces. The genocide convention prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Even if the trickle of aid keeps most Palestinians alive – just – the deprivation can still destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.

Condemnation is rightly growing. On Monday, the UK and 27 other countries issued a tough statement attacking Israel for depriving Palestinians of “human dignity”. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called their assertion “disgusting”. But Israel’s other allies must keep working together. What matters is not what they say. It is what they do – including whether they impose sanctions and comprehensive arms embargos, and suspend preferential trade terms. Recognition of a Palestinian state is part of a necessary response, but not the only or most important issue.

Britain was right to place sanctions on far-right ministers, reinstate funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and suspend many arms exports. But these measures came too late, and they are still much too little. Kaja Kallas, the foreign policy chief of the EU – Israel’s biggest trading partner – has said that “all options [are] on the table”. But the bloc has yet to agree on action.

Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.

Ammiel Alcalay

Published date: 22 July 2025

Israel’s killing of starving Palestinians is built on a global order that has normalised the spectacle of violence, the silencing of dissent and the punishment of those who dare to resist

Palestinians, mostly children, push to receive a hot meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on 22 July, 2025 (AFP)

A grim and powerful act of protest has taken place in Gaza.

In the midst of the Israeli–US-imposed blockade on food and humanitarian aid – a policy that has already caused many Palestinians to die – a significant public figure has himself gone on hunger strike.

On Sunday, 20 July, Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza and long persecuted by the Israeli occupation for documenting conditions on the ground, announced a hunger strike.

“I am Mahmoud Basal, a Palestinian citizen, a free human being,” he declared. “For days now, I have been living on scraps of food, like more than two million citizens. Due to the lack of basic food in the Gaza Strip, I declare a full hunger strike in protest against the catastrophic famine striking Gaza, and in solidarity with more than two million people who have been left to face death by starvation amid shameful global silence.”

While Israel has long used food as a weapon – measuring out the bare minimum number of calories required to keep Gaza’s population on the brink of malnutrition – we are now witnessing the radical consequences of restrictions and blockades that have been normalised over decades.

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This strategy was infamously outlined in a 2008 Israeli position paper, Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines.

‘Unbearable loss’

Incremental yet relentless waves of dehumanising propaganda in western media and political discourse, reinforced by repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza that leave mass death and devastation in their wake, have brought us to the horrific present reality.

Now, Israeli forces target unarmed, starving people in search of food using snipers, artillery and drones – people who are then presented not as victims, but as trespassers on their own land.

Relentless propaganda and repeated Israeli assaults have brought us to this horrific present reality

On the same day Basal announced his hunger strike, poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha – displaced from his destroyed home in Beit Lahia to Egypt and, eventually, the US – posted on X: “Today was a day of unbearable loss. My cousin was killed, my wife’s brother and another cousin were wounded, and many of my friends from the neighbourhood returned with amputated limbs. These were young men – sons, fathers – who had to set out, desperate to bring back even a little food for their families.”

While Israel foments further chaos in Syria and Lebanon to divert attention and consolidate territorial control – part of a meticulously planned attempt to fully dominate the region – British surgeon Nick Maynard has reported consistent patterns of gunshot injuries at newly established aid distribution sites.

Noting “clear patterns of injury”, Dr Maynard described victims – mainly teenage boys – as being deliberately targeted in different parts of the body, depending on the day.

“On one day they’ll all be abdominal gunshot wounds, on another they’ll all be head or neck gunshot wounds, on another they’ll be arm or leg gunshot wounds…It’s almost as if a game is being played, that they’re deciding to shoot the head today, the neck tomorrow, the testicles the day after,” he said. 

Campus complicity

Meanwhile, in the US, the news cycle functions as a constant distraction – through contrived political scandals, economic chaos driven by the tariff mood of the day, or congressional hearings on “antisemitism” at US universities.

At these show trials, the university administrators summoned for questioning are themselves among the institutional actors who have hollowed out academia to its core.

Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites

Read More »

Research fields that develop the technical means to kill and control populations that resist, while manufacturing consent for those very policies, receive institutional priority due to corporate sponsorship.

Yet these same administrators stand accused of not doing enough to ban, silence, arrest, or otherwise suppress any expression of free speech on campus – so long as that speech supports Palestinian liberation or criticises US or Israeli policy.

All of this reinforces the false dichotomies of US institutional discourse – as if most, if not all, institutions were not aligned with the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.

Like a deer in headlights, Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez of the City University of New York (CUNY) feigned ignorance under Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s relentless interrogation, repeatedly claiming he “wasn’t aware of” or “did not know about” this or that individual or event.

Yet even before the hearings, and in hopes of appeasing the insatiable bloodlust of genocide denial, Rodriguez had already offered up four contingent CUNY professors – the most precarious segment of academic labour – as sacrificial lambs, ensuring their dismissal without cause due to their involvement in Palestine-related activism.

How did we get here?

Fading empires

The famine in Yemen, a result of the US-supported Saudi intervention and blockade that began in 2016, was neither live-streamed nor regarded as a significant component of US foreign policy.

Thus, the steadfast support of Ansar Allah, Yemen’s armed Houthi movement, for Gaza and Palestine can be made to seem “irrational” – as though there were no link between past atrocities and present resistance.

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As global power shifts towards multipolarity, and new alliances form along emergent trade routes, the US and EU have entered a phase of panic familiar to fading empires.

The years leading up to the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020 were characterised by some of the most massive public displays of political protest across the globe since the 1960s.

From the Great March of Return in Gaza and the Algerian Hirak, to mass uprisings in Iraq, Lebanon’s 17 October popular uprising, the Yellow Vests in France, and demonstrations in Catalonia, Chile, Hong Kong and beyond, the world seemed on fire.

But those determined to maintain power were often more attuned to the global resonances between these movements than many of the participants themselves.

New feudal order

As with the post-9/11 moment, the policies enacted in response to the pandemic reshaped societies almost overnight: restricting basic human rituals, from funerals to visiting the sick and elderly, while enabling massive wealth transfers.

People were taught to fear one another – to fear contact, proximity and community. New digital powers and the complete relativising of the principles of free speech and unrestrained movement transformed societies almost overnight.

Changes in civil liberties, economies, supply chains, trade routes – and almost every aspect of life – seemed to bring the future, so to speak, back to the past.

There is no justification for starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza – and claiming it can’t be stopped is a lie of the highest magnitude

That past is also the Cold War past that liberal democracies and a fading US empire continue to cling to, propped up by the perpetual manufacture of existential enemies.

In 1944, anthropologist Gregory Bateson – then working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA – remarked: “It is very important to sponsor spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors.”

Historically denied the means to defend themselves by far more powerful states, the present anguish of unarmed Palestinians searching for food to survive yet another day – in a world that has betrayed them on every front – is a harbinger to all rational people with eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to think, as we enter a new feudal order.

There is no justification whatsoever for the forced starvation and wanton killing of Palestinians in Gaza, now or ever. And the idea that mechanisms to stop it are unavailable or do not exist is a lie of the highest magnitude.

The day after Basal’s declaration, a young Egyptian activist at the Hague chained shut the Egyptian embassy gates, scattered flour across the pavement, and smashed eggs against the entrance in protest. In that moment of small, defiant spectacle, a whole edifice of lies appeared to fall apart.

The only conclusion we can draw is that we are witnessing a deliberate effort to showcase the impunity of power, an effort designed to annihilate the very possibility of political reciprocity, justice and law.

This monstrosity must be defeated, at any cost – and everything must be remembered, in fine detail, to hold those responsible to account.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic and scholar. He is the author of more than 25 books, most recently Controlled Demolition: a work in four books, and his co-translation of Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece. He is Distinguished Professor at Queens College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

Badri Raina

The Wire, 27/Jun/2025

The genocidaires of the past gave no food packets; they only killed. Trump and Netanyahu do both at once.

Palestinians inspect the damage at a school used as a shelter by displaced residents that was hit by Israeli military strike and killed at least 36 people, in Gaza City, on Monday, May 26, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI

You just may have noticed that a new ingenious modality of mass murder has been in operation in Gaza.

Call it game-hunting, safari style.

Recall how when some royals used to be taken on a tiger shoot, a bait would be tied to a tree so a big cat could be drawn to it for the dignitary’s  convenient aim.

So now, dangerously famished Palestinian children, women, old folk on spindly legs are got the better of by being drawn to the bait where ostensibly benevolent patrons are ready to hand out food packets.

As soon as they rush to the bait, the guns blaze. As most are eliminated, some manage to grab a packet or two, proving to the world  how the scheme remains such a success at both ends – some get to eat, salving the qualms of those upset at being accused of allowing genocide, others swell the ranks of the dead, facilitating the grand project of ethnic cleansing.

When did the world see so clever a two-timing enterprise?

The genocidaires of the past gave no food packets; they only killed. Trump and Netanyahu do both at once. What could be smarter? And how could anyone object, not that anyone is objecting.

You see, the killings in Gaza are game-hunting; in Ukraine it is people who get killed.

Which brings home another sad reality: Curse me if you will, but as a true follower of the Sanatan Dharma, I have been having trouble reconciling Dharma with ethical indifference to the mass murder of a whole innocent population.

Nothing is closer in exclusionary genius to Hindutva than Zionism

I am unable to swallow the trick that my noble nation’s so-noble government played in the United Nations General Assembly.

Where 149 countries voted in favour of demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and the resumption of humanitarian aid operated by the United Nations, Naya Bharat abstained from voting.

Perhaps we were setting up an example of how to eat the cake and have it too: after all, nothing is closer in exclusionary genius to Hindutva than Zionism, and nobody more consequential for ensuring Viksit Bharat than Trump, Musk, the Pentagon, Silicon Valley etc.

So, at one canny stroke of turning our face away from genocide, we accomplished the feat of not annoying either of our pals, not knowing how badly this Trump fellow would behave subsequently.

But these are risks great governments have to take in the larger national interest. After all, as Vishwa Guru, the worst we can do is to take sides.

Then, did we not also abandon our so-close friends in the SCO by abstaining there as well when the organisation to which India belongs issued a statement condemning Israel for attacking Iran?

Nobody may thus accuse us of inconsistency in our extraordinary  foreign policy towards the comity of nations.

Now that I am arguing the case, I say mea culpa  for  not being able to square these cunning decisions with my Sanatana Dharma.

So, give me time and I will follow the leader whose  finesse in these matters I have thus far been too incapable of absorbing.

In the meanwhile, the Mecca/Medina Islamic world more than matches us in their brand of sagacious cynicism towards the game-hunt in Gaza.

Also Read: If Trump Turns Tyrant, Can Others Be Far Behind?

As to the fussy International Criminal Court, their warrant of arrest against the conqueror of Palestine and the elimination of innocents remains a residual pinprick from a queasy but defeated world that no longer exists.

Why these judges and prosecutors in the Hague should be receiving either the world’s attention or their salaries from honest tax-payers is a conundrum that may also be up for resolution should Trump and Netanyahu go from strength to strength, should the grand nations of Europe continue to behave with  customary sophistication, and should rising stars like Narendra Modi  show the way to  moral  fusspots whose understanding of great events and great ideas remains atavistic.

So help us god, and so may  the Palestinian lambs-to-the-slaughter know that they serve a noble and mighty purpose in their canonical sacrifice.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.

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Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg speaks surrounded by other participants in the latest Freedom Flotilla Coalition effort to deliver shipborne aid to Gaza, during a June 1, 2025 press conference in Catania, Italy.

(Photo: Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)

“No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide,” said climate activist Greta Thunberg, who is aboard the Madleen.

Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, Jun 02, 2025

A dozen Palestine defenders including climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and a French lawmaker set sail from Sicily on Sunday aboard a boat carrying humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, many of whom are starving amid Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege and decadeslong naval blockade of the coastal enclave.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) said it launched the sailboat Madleen—named after Gaza’s first and only known fisherwoman—from Catania, Italy at 4:00 pm local time Sunday “in direct defiance of Israel’s illegal and genocidal blockade.”

“Madleen symbolizes the unyielding spirit of Palestinian resilience and the growing global resistance to Israel’s use of collective punishment and deliberate starvation policies,” FFC said in a statement Sunday. “The ship is carrying urgently needed supplies for the people of Gaza, including baby formula, flour, rice, diapers, women’s sanitary products, water desalination kits, medical supplies, crutches, and children’s prosthetics.”

The international volunteers aboard Madleen include Thunberg, French Member of European Parliament Rima Hassan, German refugee advocate and FFC steering committee member Yasemin Acar, Brazilian FFC steering committee member Thiago Ávila, Al Jazeera reporter Omar Fayad, French doctor Baptiste Andre, French journalist Yanis M’Hamdi, Turkish engineer Şuayb Ordu, and crew members Mark Van Rennes, Reva Seifert Viard, Pascal Maurieras, and Sergio Toribio.

“I am aboard Madleen because silence is not neutrality—it is complicity,” said Hassan, who is banned from entering Israel due to her outspoken support for Palestinian rights. “The Palestinian people in Gaza are being starved and slaughtered, and the world watches. This ship is not just carrying aid, it is carrying a demand: End the blockade. End the genocide.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/DKYncvpo_kl/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=14&wp=1620&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org&rp=%2Fnews%2Fgreta-thunberg-gaza-aid-ship#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A2993%2C%22ls%22%3A155%2C%22le%22%3A155%7D

Thunberg said that “we are seeing a systematic starvation of 2 million people. The world cannot be silent bystanders, Every single one of us has a moral obligation to do everything we can to fight for a free Palestine.”

The Madleen‘s launch came a month after the Conscience, another FCC aid vessel traveling in international waters off Malta, was attacked twice, presumably by Israeli forces. No one was harmed in what FFC said was a drone strike on the ship. However, the activists were forced to abort their humanitarian mission. Israel has not commented on the incident.

Madleen also set sail nearly 15 years to the day after Israeli forces raided a Gaza Freedom Flotilla convoy carrying humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza. The attack—which also came in international waters—left nine people including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan dead.

FFC said Sunday that the “unarmed and nonviolent” mission “poses no threat” and “sails in full accordance with international law. Any attack or interference will be a deliberate, unlawful assault on civilians.”

Those aboard the Madleen said they were aware of the dangers they faced. Israel has killed numerous Western activists and journalists who document its human rights violations over the years, and just last month Israeli troops opened fire on a group of international diplomats visiting the illegally occupied West Bank two days after three involved countries issued an ultimatum to stop annihilating Gaza.

“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,” a tearful Thunberg said during a Sunday press conference. “Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity.”

“And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide,” she added.

Some Israelis and their supporters took to social media to wish harm upon the activists. In the United States, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) alluded to past Israeli attacks on Gaza aid flotillas in a social media post saying, “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!”

Israel strongly refutes allegations that it is committing genocide in Gaza. South Africa has filed, and dozens of nations support, a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination and starvation as a weapon of war, in Gaza.

Officials in Gaza say that more than 192,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured since Israel launched its assault and siege following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, a figure that includes at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble and hundreds of mostly children who have died from acute malnutrition and lack of medical care.

Around 2 million Gazans have also been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, amid Israel’s campaign to starve, conquer, indefinitely occupy, ethnically cleanse, and possibly recolonize the coastal strip.

Each side accuses the other of thwarting cease-fire efforts. On Saturday, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff rejected what he called Hamas’ “totally unacceptable” proposal for a truce in which 10 living and 18 dead Israeli hostages would be exchanged for an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy toldDemocracy Now! on Monday that a cease-fire proposal mediated by Witkoff is “a bad deal for the Palestinians that will allow Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing of Gaza” and “walks back the commitment for a permanent cease-fire, Israeli withdrawal, and allowing in of humanitarian aid.”

Critics accuse Netanyahu of prolonging the war in order to delay his own criminal corruption trial.

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Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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By Ilan Pappé, Znet, April 23, 2025, 6 Mins Read

The Palestinians do not have the luxury for Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small but important step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed.

The responses in the Western world to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians?

Why is the Democratic Party in the US complicit, directly and indirectly, in sustaining the daily inhumanity in Palestine—a complicity so visible that it probably was one of the reasons they lost the election, as the Arab American and progressive vote in key states could, and justifiably so, not forgive the Biden administration for its part in the genocide in the Gaza Strip?

This is a pertinent question, given that we are dealing with a televised genocide that has now been renewed on the ground. It is different from previous periods in which Western indifference and complicity were displayed, either during the Nakba or the long years of occupation since 1967.

During the Nakba and up to 1967, it was not easy to get hold of information, and the oppression after 1967 was mostly incremental and, as such, was ignored by the Western media and politics, which refused to acknowledge its cumulative effect on the Palestinians.  

But these last eighteen months are very different. Ignoring the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank can only be described as intentional and not out of ignorance. Both the Israelis’ actions and the discourse that accompanies them are too visible to be ignored, unless politicians, academics, and journalists choose to do so. 

This kind of ignorance is, first and foremost, the result of successful Israeli lobbying that thrived on the fertile ground of European guilt complex, racism and Islamophobia.  In the case of the US, it is also the outcome of many years of an effective and ruthless lobbying machine that very few in academia, media, and, in particular, politics dare to disobey.

This phenomenon is known in recent scholarship as moral panic, very characteristic of the more conscientious sections of Western societies: intellectuals, journalists, and artists.

Moral panic is a situation in which a person is afraid of adhering to his or her own moral convictions because this would demand some courage that might have consequences. We are not always tested in situations that require courage, or at least integrity. When it does happen, it is in situations where morality is not an abstract idea but a call for action.

This is why so many Germans were silent when Jews were sent to extermination camps, and this is why white Americans stood by when African Americans were lynched or earlier on enslaved and abused.  

What is the price that leading Western journalists, veteran politicians, tenured professors, or CEOs of well-known companies would have to pay if they were to blame Israel for committing a genocide in the Gaza Strip?

It seems that they are worried about two possible outcomes. The first is being condemned as antisemites or Holocaust deniers, and secondly, they fear that their honest response would trigger a discussion that will include the complicity of their country, or Europe, or the West in general, in enabling the genocide and all the criminal policies against the Palestinians that preceded it.

This moral panic leads to some astonishing phenomena. In general, it transforms educated, highly articulate, and knowledgeable persons into total imbeciles when they talk about Palestine. It disallows the more perceptive and thoughtful members of the security services from examining the Israeli demands to include all Palestinian resistance on a terrorist list, and it dehumanizes the Palestinian victims in the mainstream media.

The lack of compassion and basic solidarity with the victims of genocide was exposed by the double standards shown by mainstream media in the West, and in particular by the more established newspapers in the US, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. When the editor of Palestine Chronicle, Dr. Ramzy Baroud, lost 56 members of his family—killed by the Israeli genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip—not one of his colleagues in American journalism bothered to talk to him or show any interest in hearing about this atrocity. On the other hand, a fabricated Israeli allegation of a connection between the Chronicle and a family in whose block of flats hostages were held triggered a huge interest by these outlets and attracted their attention.

This imbalance in humanity and solidarity is just one example of the distortions that moral panic brings with it. I have little doubt that the actions against Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students in the US, or against known activists in Britain and France, as well as the arrest of the editor of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, in Switzerland, are all manifestations of this distorted moral behavior.

A similar case unfolded just recently in Australia. Mary Kostakidis, a famous Australian journalist and former prime-time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter, has been taken to the federal court over her—one should say quite tame—reporting on the situation in the Gaza Strip. The very fact that the court has not dismissed this allegation upon its arrival shows you how deeply rooted moral panic is in the Global North.

But there is another side to it. Thankfully, there is a much larger group of people who are not afraid of taking the risks involved in clearly stating their support for the Palestinians, and who do show this solidarity while knowing it may lead to suspension, deportation, or even jail time. They are not easily found among the mainstream academia, media, or politics, but they are the authentic voice of their societies in many parts of the Western world.

The Palestinians do not have the luxury for Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small but important step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed—firstly to stop the destruction of Palestine and its people, and second, to create the conditions for a decolonized and liberated Palestine in the future.

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January 29, 2025

The Ugandan judge, Julia Sebutinde, fanatically adheres to the Israeli agenda as she leads the World Court during its adjudication of genocide charges against that country.

By Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone 

With new countries joining South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and a ceasefire potentially enabling war crimes investigators to gather fresh evidence of Israeli atrocities, a leadership shakeup at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) threatens to undermine the campaign for legal accountability. 

The ICJ’s President Nawaf Salam resigned on Jan. 14, to become prime minister of Lebanon, and was succeeded by Justice Julia Sebutinde of Uganda.

Many observers were stunned when Sebutinde voted “no” on all resolutions introduced by South Africa in January 2024, placing herself in opposition to all ICJ judges, including her Israeli colleague, Aharon Barak. 

Sebutinde swearing in as an ICJ judge in March 2012. (UN Photo/ICJ/ANP-in-Opdracht/Gerald van Daalen)

The Ugandan judge rejected the court’s call for the Israeli military to halt deliberate assaults on civilians, end its policy of forced displacement, and cancel its planned invasion of Rafah. 

In a previous advisory case on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, Sebutinde insisted that Palestinians had not been subjected to any military occupation whatsoever. In fact, she concluded that Israel may have the right to maintain a permanent presence in the West Bank and the whole of Jerusalem on the basis of purely biblical claims.

Sebutinde’s opinion opened with a lengthy history of the Israel-Palestine conflict that blended well-worn Zionist propaganda with the Old Testament. In rejecting her colleagues’ ruling declaring Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal, she resorted to accounts of the Jewish presence in the biblical land of Israel, omitting any mention of U.N. resolutions or international law. 

“There is substantial evidence that Jewish people lived in the region of ancient Israel between 1000-586 BCE. This period corresponds to the era of the United Monarchy under Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and the subsequent divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The evidence includes archaeological findings in the City of David…” Sebutinde insisted. 

“The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) offers detailed accounts of the history, culture, and governance of the Israelites during this period. While these texts are religious in nature, many scholars consider them valuable historical documents.”

Her opinion was so extreme, and so shot through with theological commentary, it prompted Uganda’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adonia Ayebare, to declare her “ruling at the International Court of Justice does not represent the government of Uganda’s position on the situation in Palestine.”

Ayebare on Jan. 13. (UN Photo/Loey Felipe)

After probing deeper into Sebutinde’s bizarre dissent, a Princeton University graduate student named Zachary Foster discovered that large sections of it had been plagiarized from sources including neoconservative operative Douglas Feith and the Jewish Virtual Library.

So what accounted for Sebutinde’s defiance in the face of the entire ICJ panel and her own country’s diplomatic corps? Had she been handled by malign external forces? Or was she driven by deeply held personal passions?

Israel’s history of bribing, threatening and blackmailing officials around the world — and destroying those who forcefully oppose it — is well documented. 

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, fell under heavy Mossad surveillance after he introduced warrants for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, Yoav Gallant. In October, 2024 when an anonymous accuser brought forward allegations of sexual harassment against Khan, there could be little doubt an Israeli hand had finessed the scandal.

Sebutinde’s fanatical adherence to Israel’s agenda does not appear to be the product of manipulation or enticement, however. The views expressed in her dissent on the South African case were much more likely a reflection of the Christian Zionist belief system she developed as a member of Watoto, a Pentecostal megachurch in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. It was there that Sebutinde says she developed her worldview under the tutelage of a Canadian pastor and End Times aficionado named Gary Skinner. 

“The godly values of integrity, honesty, justice, mercy, empathy, and hard work that the Skinners and Watoto Church instilled and nurtured in me, over the years, account for who I am today and have immensely contributed to my incredible career as a judge in Uganda and a judge at the International Court for Justice,” Sebutinde proclaimed during a June 2024 ceremony for the launch of a new branch of the church in downtown Kampala.

‘End Times Scenario’

Since he founded Watoto in 1984, Skinner has instilled a virulently anti-Arab strain of Christian Zionism in his congregation of 36,000 in Kampala. In a 2021 sermon entitled, “Israel: The Greatest Sign,” Skinner spun together an assortment of cherry-picked biblical verses with potted history to justify Israel’s military control over historic Palestine. He punctuated his jeremiad with an admonition to his parishioners and gentiles everywhere: “If you bless the Jews, you will be blessed. If you curse the Jews, you will be cursed.”

Like all Christian Zionists, Skinner saw Israel’s foundation as the fulfillment of prophecy: “May the 14th, 1948,” the tinny-voiced preacher proclaimed, 

“and on that day, little four or five foot three David Ben Gurion, with his lion like hair, stood up and declared: ‘The Jewish nation reborn,’ to be called Israel. For 2400 years, no Jewish flag had flown over Israel until that day… but God fulfilled his prophecy by bringing them back the greatest sign of the any moment return of Jesus.” 

Minutes later, Skinner emphasized that Israel’s existence as a self-proclaimed Jewish state 

“is the most dramatic sign that Jesus is about to return. What’s going to happen ahead of us — Israel is that barometer,” the preacher continued. “What happens to Israel is a sign of the End Time scenario. The national rebirth of Israel is the greatest End Time sign we have.”

In his sermon, Skinner also boasted of Watoto’s donations to an array of evangelical charities inside Israel through the church’s FIRM Israel initiative, including some that promote religious conversion. “We, as a church, give a lot of money every year to support God’s work in Israel,” he stated, beaming with pride, “because we know that God has a plan for the nation, and it’s the greatest sign of His return.”

Skinner’s eschatological view of history clearly informed Sebutinde’s dissent against the ICJ ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Though Uganda’s Foreign Ministry condemned her radical opinion, powerful evangelical figures inside the country with close ties to the presidency hailed her as a heroine. 

“Not all heroes wear capes,” declared Patience Rwabwogo, an influential Pentecostal preacher in Kampala. “Julia Sebutinde has made a historic stand at the ICJ. May God always remember her for mercy and may Uganda as a nation always be found on the Lord’s side.”

Rwabwogo happens to be the daughter of Yoweri Museveni, the flamboyantly evangelical president of Uganda, whose wife Janet – a close ally of Watoto Church – is known for her biblical interpretations of history. 

Museveni at an investment conference in London in January 2020. (Graham Carlow, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

Frank Kisakye, a Ugandan constitutional scholar, argued that the endorsement of Sebutinde’s ICJ dissent by Museveni’s daughter demonstrates the judge’s opinion was “almost certainly informed by the terms of Genesis 12:1-3,” the verse interpreted by Christian Zionists to mean that anyone who blesses the Jews will be blessed, and was therefore “wholeheartedly sanctioned by the Ugandan Pentecostal movement.”

Now at the helm of the ICJ, Sebutinde gains the power to break a deadlocked vote, and may be able to undermine the South African case in a more substantive way than before. With Israel likely to shatter the Gaza ceasefire, time is running out for war crimes investigators. But the Ugandan judge appears to be operating on a schedule free from earthly concerns, dictated instead by the End Times.

The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

This article is from The Grayzone.

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

Tags: Adonia Ayebare Christian Zionists Douglas Feith End Times Gary Skinner ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan International Court of Justice (ICJ) Jewish Virtual Library Julia Sebutinde Max Blumenthal Uganda Watoto Yoweri Museveni Zachary Foster