The pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC is attacking Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) after she became the first Republican member of Congress to label Israel’s actions against the Palestinians in Gaza a genocide.
According to Al Jazeera, in a fundraising email to supporters on Thursday, AIPAC called Greene’s remarks “disgusting” and accused her of betraying “American values” for calling Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza a genocide, which aligns Greene with many human rights organizations and genocide scholars, including Israeli ones.
“You expect anti-Israel smears from Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,” AIPAC said in the email, referring to two House Democrats known for their critical view of Israel. “But now, Marjorie Taylor Greene has joined their ranks – spouting the same vile rhetoric and voting against the US-Israel alliance.”
AIPAC said Greene was now the “newest member of the anti-Israel Squad” and claimed her view was a “betrayal of American values and a dangerous distortion of the truth.”
Greene has referred to Israel’s actions as genocide at least twice in posts on X. In her first post, Greene said that it’s “the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”
In another post, the Georgia congresswoman said many Americans are “against radical Islamic terrorism, but we are also against genocide.” She has also repeatedly referred to Israel as “nuclear-armed Israel,” making her one of the first members of Congress to directly acknowledge Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
AIPAC is known to spend big on pro-Israel candidates and is likely going to fund an opponent of Greene’s when she comes up for election again. The pro-Israel group has also targeted Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the only other Republican in Congress to offer significant criticism of Israel and who consistently votes against aid to Israel.
This outcome adds to a growing list of union-led actions across Europe in solidarity with Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Ana Vracar reports.
Dockworkers in Genoa, Italy, protesting forced complicity of Italian ports in Gaza genocide, June 2025. (Unione Sindacale di Base via Peoples Dispatch)
Italian port workers secured a significant win last week in their ongoing resistance to militarization and arms transfers, as shipping operators decided they would not unload military cargo destined for Israel from the vessel COSCO ShippingPisces — returning the containers to their point of origin instead.
“We were informed today that the three containers carrying military equipment, destined for La Spezia and transported aboard the COSCO Pisces, will not be unloaded in either Genoa or La Spezia,” the union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) said on July 29. “This decision marks a tangible result of union action and the pressure exerted by USB.”
Costco Pisces in the Dutch port of Rotterdam in 2019. (kees torn/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
This outcome adds to a growing list of union-led actions across Europe in solidarity with Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where at least 60,000 people have been killed by the Israeli occupation.
“From Greece to Liguria, as previously demonstrated with the support of French dockworkers, the network of dockworkers across Europe and the Mediterranean has shown that stopping war logistics is possible, legitimate, and necessary,” Unione Sindacale di Base wrote.
Following the announcement, a planned Aug. 5 strike was called off. However, Genoa dockworkers have pledged to continue mobilizing against the arms trade. They have also announced plans for an international assembly on Sept. 26–27, which aims to lay the groundwork for a sector-wide strike.
“We are not alone: our struggle unites Marseille, Piraeus, Hamburg, Tangier,” trade unionists declared earlier in July. “If the war comes through the ports, the response must come from the ports.”
Unione Sindacale di Base logistical workers continue to expand their campaign on the principle that strikes are a legitimate tool in the fight against war, militarization and forced worker involvement in arms trafficking.
“Law 146/1990 speaks clearly: war operations are not essential services, and a strike is legitimate if it serves to defend collective security and constitutional order,” the union noted. “Stopping arms is not just a political choice, it is a right.”
Locally, from Genoa to Brescia, workers’ actions are disrupting the chains that fuel massacres and armed conflict, USB emphasized. Their mobilization against the arms trade, including strikes, is backed by a growing international solidarity bloc.
“Dockworkers in Europe, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere will not become accomplices of the murderous state of Israel and its allies – the USA, NATO and the EU,” the All-Workers Militant Front (PAME) wrote in a statement of support to dockworkers in Italy. “They will not allow ports and infrastructure to become instruments of war for the slaughter of people by the imperialists.”
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
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
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.
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 AlgerianHirak, 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.
– She names 48 corporate actors, including arms manufacturers, banks, tech companies, energy giants, academic institutions, alleging they are directly linked to broader ‘economy of occupation’ sustaining Israeli actions
GENEVA
Israel is responsible for “one of the cruelest genocides in modern history,” the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory said on Thursday, accusing Tel Aviv of weaponizing Gaza as a testing ground and calling for sweeping international action, including a full international arms embargo and the suspension of trade and investment ties.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” Francesca Albanese told the UN Human Rights Council, presenting her latest report. “In Gaza, Palestinians continue to endure suffering beyond imagination. Israel is responsible for one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.”
Albanese said official figures count over 200,000 Palestinians killed or injured, but leading health experts estimate “the true toll is far higher.” She denounced the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – Israel’s new aid mechanism in Gaza, with hundreds of associated deaths to date – as “a death trap – engineered to kill or force the flight of a starved, bombarded, emaciated population marked for.”
Profits from genocide
She grimly highlighted the economic gains made during the war, noting that in the past 20 months, arms companies have reaped huge profits by supplying Israel with weapons used to bombard Gaza.
“Arms companies have turned near-record profits by equipping Israel with cutting-edge weaponry to unleash 85,000 tons of explosives – six times the power of Hiroshima – to destroy Gaza,” she said.
The report also pointed to 213% gains on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange since October 2023, describing a stark contrast: “One people enriched, one people erased.”
Accusing Israel of using the war to “test new weapons, customized surveillance, lethal drones, (and) radar systems,” Albanese warned that Palestine’s defenselessness had made it “an ideal laboratory for the Israeli military-industrial complex.”
She named 48 corporate actors, including arms manufacturers, banks, tech companies, energy giants, and academic institutions, alleging that they are directly linked to a broader “economy of occupation” sustaining the Israeli state’s actions.
Among the most important firms mentioned in the report are Amazon, Microsoft, BNP Paribas, Booking, and Korean HD Hyundai, according to her report.
“Weapons and data systems brutalize and surveil Palestinians,” she said. “Colonies spread –financed by banks and insurers, powered by fossil fuels, and normalized by tourism platforms, supermarket chains, and academic institutions.”
Later in a press briefing in Geneva, Albanese said she had formally notified all companies named in her report, sharing with them “the facts that I found in violation of international law.”
She emphasized that her work went “beyond what has been done in other similar cases,” explaining: “For each of them, I have provided a detailed analysis, a case by case legal analysis, so where I found their nonconformity with international law translating into violation of the right of self-determination, other human rights violations and even war crimes or crimes against humanity, and to an extent, in which case it could be embroiled in the crime of genocide.”
According to Albanese, 18 companies responded to her findings, while the others did not. Of these 18, she said that “only a small number” engaged with her in good faith, while the rest denied their wrongdoings.
Referring to those in denial, she said: “They don’t understand international law clearly. They think that international law is there to make excuses.”
‘Responsibility to abstain’ or cut ties with ‘economy of occupation’
Under international law, she said, even a minimal connection to this system carries clear responsibility. “There is a prima facie responsibility on every state and corporate entity to completely abstain from or end their relationships with this economy of occupation.”
In a direct appeal to UN member states, Albanese called for bold steps: “Member states must impose a full arms embargo on Israel, suspend all trade agreements and investment relations, and enforce accountability, ensuring that corporate entities face legal consequences for their involvement in serious violations of international law.”
She also called on businesses to act, stressing: “Corporate entities must urgently cease all business activities and terminate relationships directly linked with, contributing to, and causing human rights violations and international crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Albanese said she no longer believed ignorance or ideology were sufficient explanations for global inaction. “In the face of genocide – so visible, so livestreamed – these explanations fall short.”
She concluded with a call for civil society to play its part, saying: “Trade unions, lawyers, civil society groups, and ordinary citizens should encourage such behavioral change from the side of businesses and governments by pressing for boycotts, divestments, sanctions, and accountability. What comes next depends on all of us.”
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.
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.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
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.
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.”
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.”
By 
Peace and Justice Post 
You must be logged in to post a comment.