Moshe Yaalon, a former member of the ruling Likud party, was defense minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2013 to 2016 during the 2014 Gaza War. In comments on Saturday, Yaalon criticized the current Netanyahu government.
“The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse — look at the northern strip,” Yaalon said.
When asked to clarify if he meant Israel is currently conducting ethnic cleansing or is headed in that direction, Yaalon pointed to what is happening on the ground in northern Gaza today.
“There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating in Jabalia. They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,” he said.
The northern cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia have been under a total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign that’s following an outline known as the “general’s plan.” In those areas, Israeli troops are demolishing homes, so Palestinian civilians have nowhere to return.
Yaalon’s comments sparked a strong backlash in Israel, but he doubled down on Sunday. In another interview, the former defense minister said the term ethnic cleansing was “accurate” and asked “no other word for it.”
He pointed to Israeli ministers who openly call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the establishment of Jewish settlements. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said that it may be possible to cut the population of Gaza in half within two years through “voluntary emigration,” though there is nothing voluntary about the displacement in Gaza that’s happening today.
This is the keynote talk I gave on Nov. 1 at the conference, The End of Empire, at University of California Santa Barbara. The conference was organized by Professor Butch Ware, who is also the Green Party’s vice-presidential candidate. University administrators banned all publicity about the talk on university social media accounts.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
Transcript
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,400 people have been killed and over 1.2 Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
But this is a lesson that is nevr learned.
How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.
By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel istalking about months more of warfare — its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.
Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.
All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya Sinwar. It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, one of the founders of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, and who founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat, who I also knew. But the daily humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders. There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwar’s place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point over and over and over.
Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestiniansin Gaza, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.
Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.
Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.
But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.
Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.
This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter, when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.
Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.
We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure.
We cannot plead ignorance.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.
This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry.
The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afgnaistan, replicating what they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.
“After the war,” Nick Turse writes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance.
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.
We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Industrail slaughter – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cyniucally, calls “mowing the lawn.”
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents. Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to bekilled. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked.
Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.”
Israel has killed at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.
“Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,” the U.N. reports. “More than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.”
In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA, a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban almost certainly ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.
Israel has expanded its “buffer zone” along the Gaza perimeter to 16 percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza into “a shrinking, unsafe ‘humanitarian zone’ covering 12.6 percentof a territory now reconfigured in preparation for annexation.” Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting the aim of a permanent presence.”
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated.
Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Rappatour for the Palestinian territories, writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
“In August,” Albanes writes in her most recent report, “entry permits for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.”
“In recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted, impairing distribution,” the report notes. “At least 34 deaths from malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.”
These measures, sh noters, “indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.”
The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S. has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. And Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank
Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets, electricity and public health infrastructure.
Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks, checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.
“The gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7 percent,nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs have been lost,” the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians — “10 times the previous 14 years’ annual average of 69 fatalities,” have been killed and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children who have been killed, “nearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the torso.”
Albanese’s report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the assault in Gaza and the West Bank to “defend itself,” “eradicate Hamas” or “bring the hostages home,” charging that these claims are “camouflage,” a way of “invisibilizing the crime.” Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari from the ICJ points out, “may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.”
Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters on Oct. 7 “provided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a ‘Greater Israel.’”
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.
Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nation’s conscience.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of those the emperor Nero singled out for torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel.
We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.
But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?
Who were Nero’s guests?
We are Nero’s guests.
History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.
“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”
The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
President Joe Biden talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 25, 2024.(Susan Walsh, File / AP Photo)
Past the 20-foot-high aluminum doors of the Justice Department’s Robert F. Kennedy Building, and down a long limestone hallway lined with art deco accents, Room B-206 has long served as the epicenter of the Biden administration’s prosecutorial war against former president Donald Trump. Behind the heavy wooden door is the office of special counsel Jack Smith, a highly secure redoubt where attorneys spent years building criminal cases against Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as for his alleged improper handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
But now, instead of heading to trial, the prosecutors are scrambling to empty file cabinets and stuff their contents into cardboard storage boxes. As a result of Trump’s election win, the prosecution is officially halted by the Justice Department’s policy prohibiting the filing of criminal cases against a sitting president. But while President-elect Trump will likely never face the consequences of his alleged criminal actions, President Biden may one day face trial for his, albeit in a far different courtroom in The Hague.
Three thousand eight hundred miles to the east from Washington sits the International Criminal Court (ICC), a complex of six modern towers in the Netherlands not far from Peace Palace and Europol in The Hague. In the largest building, Court Tower, are three courtrooms that carry out the institution’s mandate: to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, thereby providing justice to victims.
According to Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, the Contracting Parties, including the United States and Israel, must prevent and punish acts of genocide. Under Article III, those punishable acts include “Complicity in genocide,” such as by knowingly providing the deadly weapons used to carry it out. In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a case involving Bosnia and Serbia, established that the obligation to refrain from providing weapons or other assistance begins the moment a state becomes aware of the existence of a serious risk that genocide may be committed.
For the Biden administration, that moment came in January, when the ICJ found that there was a “plausible” risk of genocide being committed in Gaza against the Palestinian people by Israel. Shortly after, in February, the Dutch Appeals Court halted the transfer of F-35 munition parts to Israel on account of the serious risk of International Humanitarian Law violations. Further notice came in May with the applications for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others by the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Kharim Khan. Among the charges against Netanyahu related to Gaza were crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentional attacks against a civilian population, and “other inhumane acts.” It was the first potential ICC arrest warrant issued for the leader of a Western-style democracy. Nevertheless, European countries including France and Germany issued statements affirming their support for the legitimacy of the ICC.
Despite the clear indication that American weapons were being used to carry out an alleged Israeli genocide, the bombs continued to flow and the wholesale massacres never stopped. According to a report last week by the UN Human Rights Office, close to 70 percent of the fatalities in Gaza have been children and women, “indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law,” said the report. Nizam Mamode, a retired surgeon with Britain’s National Health Service who recently returned from working at a hospital in Gaza, testified last week to members of Parliament that he treated children “day after day after day” who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones following bomb attacks.
In July, an analysis published by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the actual number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, including those decomposing beneath the rubble of bombed-out hospitals, schools, and densely packed refugee camps, is likely more than 186,000. And if the deaths continue at the same rate, said Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, the estimated deaths by the end of the year would total 335,500.
In spite of those grim statistics, the Biden administration last month decided to play politics with the lives of the desperate and starving survivors in Gaza, most of whom had been forced to flee from multiple Israeli evacuation orders. To help the Harris campaign with pro-Palestinian voters, Biden pretended to turn tough and issued a highly publicized letter giving Netanyahu a 30-day deadline to increase the flow of food and other aid to Gaza or face a potential cutoff in military support. But it was simply a scam, since the deadline would fall after the election was over. When the time limit expired last week, there was no longer a need for Biden to pretend that the United States would take action. Instead, his administration continued to deceive the American public by falsely claiming that it found no evidence that Israel was obstructing shipments of food and other aid into Gaza.
The announcement was greeted with disbelief and anger by aid groups, including Save the Children, Oxfam, Refugees International, and Mercy Corps. “Israel’s actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter,” said a joint statement. “Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago. The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that ‘the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.’” According to an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Israel is unleashing an apocalypse in Northern Gaza.”
Further evidence of the Biden administration’s deliberate cover-up of the ongoing genocide came days after the administration’s announcement when a UN special committee released a report that said, “The policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period [the past year] are consistent with the characteristics of genocide” and “Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza.” The report went on to say that there were also serious concerns that Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war”—a fact made clear by numerous reports of humanitarian aid convoys being looted right next to the Israeli troops, who stand by and do nothing to stop it. Israel’s decision to stop cooperating with UNRWA, the critical relief agency providing welfare services to Palestinians, is another clear war crime. “Since the beginning of the war,” the report concluded, “Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life—food, water, and fuel.” The very definition of genocide.
Also last week, Human Rights Watch issued a report charging that Israel is using its frequent evacuation orders to cause the “deliberate and massive forced displacement” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, actions that appear to “meet the definition of ethnic cleansing” as well as crimes against humanity. The report, entitled “Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,” went on to say that the group has collected clear evidence pointing to “the war crime of forcible transfer [of the civilian population].” They described these actions as “a grave breach of the Geneva conventions and a crime under the Rome statute of the international criminal court.”
That same evidence of genocide, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement was clearly available to the Biden administration, yet it lied to the American public to hide its own criminal culpability in the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
There is no statute of limitations when it comes to support for genocide, nor does it make a difference whether an individual is in or out of office. What matters is evidence of the crime, and there is more than enough for the ICC’s chief prosecutor to issue an application for an arrest warrant for Biden, just as it did for Netanyahu. After all, it’s the United States that builds the bombs, pays for them, ships them to Israel, provides intelligence on targets in Gaza, and supplies the planes that carry them. All Israel does is drop them, with US approval, on the tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
By June, the Biden administration had sent Israel at least 14,000 massively deadly 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs, made in Oklahoma and dropped on hospitals, apartment blocks, and crowded refugee camps. In addition, it sent 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions. Added to that is the approval of additional ground attack aircraft to Israel’s existing American-made F-15s, F-16s and F-35s and Apache helicopters. And in January, following a visit to Washington by Eyal Zamir, Israel’s Defense Ministry director-general, defense sources told the Times of Israel that Israel plans to procure a new squadron of 25 F35i stealth fighter jets, a squadron of 25 F-151A fighter jets, and a new squadron of 12 Apache helicopters.
In the end, it’s the American taxpayers who are financing the genocide. According to Bruce Fein, an expert in international law, “The United States has clearly become a co-belligerent with Israel in its war against Hamas-Gaza Palestinians by systematically supplying the IDF with weapons and intelligence without conditions.”
If the ICC were to seek an arrest warrant for Biden before he leaves office or shortly thereafter, it would also serve as a warning to his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, who appears to have even less regard for the Palestinians. And his return to the White House will allow Netanyahu to not only speed up the genocide, but also to achieve his ultimate goal: the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, illegal actions under international law.
“Netanyahu has stalled until Trump’s election, and it paid off. Now there’s nothing standing in his way,” Palestinian political scientist Nour Odeh told Le Monde. He added: “He can wage his war as he sees fit, especially as he has just sacked his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who had opposed him. As for Trump, he’s not interested in the Palestinian Authority, the state of which is getting worse all the time, nor in a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas, because they’ve already fallen out. He’s going to do whatever Israel wants. And international law won’t hold him back any more than American law will.”
Among those overjoyed by Trump’s triumph is far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Trump’s victory brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel,” he told supporters at a conference of his Religious Zionist Party. During Trump’s first term, he said, “we were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the settlements” in the West Bank. “Now,” he said, “the time has come to make it a reality.”
And on November 12, Trump sent the same signal back to Smotrich and Netanyahu by naming as his new ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian. Shortly afterward, Huckabee said in an Israeli radio interview that “of course” annexation of the West Bank is possible in the next administration, but the policy hasn’t been set. And in 2017, he claimed, “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.” He went even further in a statement during his 2008 presidential campaign. “Basically, there really is no such thing as—I need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upset—there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he said. “There’s not.”
Although neither the United States nor Israel recognizes the jurisdiction of the ICC, most other countries of the world, including in Europe, do. So, should Biden join Netanyahu on the ICC’s wanted list, he would remain safe as long as he never leaves the country. But if he were to give a speech or attend a ceremony outside the country, an Interpol Red Notice would likely be waiting for him, followed by a quick trip to the ICC’s Court Tower in The Hague. According to The Architectural Review, those awaiting trial at the ICC are confined in a “dark gray holding cell complete with steel table and chair bolted to the floor, a slab for a bed, seatless stainless-steel prison toilet and sink.” And there is plenty of room for both Netanyahu and Biden.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of the United States Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol March 3, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Ultimately, this is the story of how the Israel lobby undermined America, wrecked the Middle East, and set a series of international crimes against humanity in motion.
It’s official now. America’s closest ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the one accorded more than 50 standing ovations in Congress just months ago, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes. America must take note: the U.S. Government is complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes and has fully partnered in Netanyahu’s violent rampage across the Middle East.
For 30 years the Israel Lobby has induced the U.S. to fight wars on Israel’s behalf designed to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian State. Netanyahu, who first came to power in 1996, and has been prime minister for 17 years since then, has been the main cheerleader for U.S.-backed wars in the Middle East. The result has been a disaster for the U.S. and a bloody catastrophe not only for the Palestinian people but for the entire Middle East.
These have not been wars to defend Israel, but rather wars to topple governments that oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel viciously opposes the two-state solution called for by international law, the Arab Peace Initiative, the G20, the BRICS, the OIC, and the UN General Assembly. Israel’s intransigence, and its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people, has given rise to several militant resistance movements since the beginning of the occupation. These movements are backed by several countries in the region.
The obvious solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is to implement the two-state solution and to demilitarize the militant groups as part of the implementation process.
Israel’s approach, especially under Netanyahu, is to overthrow foreign governments that oppose Israel’s domination, and recreate the map of a “New Middle East” without a Palestinian State. Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
What is shocking is that Washington has turned the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu for his disastrous wars. The history of the Israel lobby’s complete takeover of Washington can be found in the remarkable new book by Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).
Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
Netanyahu repeatedly told the American people that they would be the beneficiaries of his policies. In fact, Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
If Trump wants to make America great again, the first thing he should do is to make America sovereign again, by ending Washington’s subservience to the Israel Lobby.
The Israel Lobby not only controls the votes in Congress but places hardline backers of Israel into key national security posts. These have included Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State for Clinton), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff of Vice President Cheney), Victoria Nuland (Deputy National Security Advisor of Cheney, NATO Ambassador of Bush Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Obama, Under-Secretary of State for Biden), Paul Wolfowitz (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Sr., Deputy Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Douglas Feith (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Abram Shulsky (Director of the Office of Special Plans, Department of Defense for Bush Jr.), Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Bush Jr.), Richard Perle (Chairman of the Defense National Policy Board for Bush Jr.), Amos Hochstein (Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State for Biden), and Antony Blinken (Secretary of State for Biden).
Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
In 1995, Netanyahu described his plan of action in his book Fighting Terrorism. To control terrorists (Netanyahu’s characterization of militant groups fighting Israel’s illegal rule over the Palestinians), it’s not enough to fight the terrorists. Instead, it’s necessary to fight the “terrorist regimes” that support such groups. And the U.S. must be the one to lead:
The cessation of terrorism must therefore be a clear-cut demand, backed up by sanctions and with no prizes attached. As with all international efforts, the vigorous application of sanctions to terrorist states must be led by the United States, whose leaders must choose the correct sequence, timing, and circumstances for these actions.
As Netanyahu told the American people in 2001 (reprinted as the 2001 foreword to Fighting Terrorism):
The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet it… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust. The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.
All of this was music to the ears of the neocons in Washington, who similarly subscribed to U.S.-led regime change operations (through wars, covert subversion, U.S.-led color revolutions, violent coups, etc.) as the main way to deal with perceived U.S. adversaries.
After 9/11, the Bush Jr. neocons (led by Cheney and Rumsfeld) and the Bush Jr. insiders of the Israel Lobby (led by Wolfowitz and Feith), teamed up to remake the Middle East through a series of U.S.-led wars on Netanyahu’s targets in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria) and Islamic East Africa (Libya, Somalia, and Sudan). The role of the Israel Lobby in stoking these wars of choice is described in detail in Pappe’s new book.
The neocon-Israel Lobby war plan was shown to General Wesley Clark on a visit to the Pentagon soon after 9/11. An officer pulled a paper from his desk and told Clark: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
In 2002, Netanyahu pitched the war with Iraq to the American people and Congress by promising them that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region[…] People sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
A remarkable new insider account of Netanyahu’s role in spearheading the Iraq War also comes from retired Marine Command Chief Master Sargent Dennis Fritz, in his book Deadly Betrayal (2024). When Fritz was called to deploy to Iraq in early 2002, he asked senior military officials why the U.S. was deploying to Iraq, but he got no clear answer. Rather than lead soldiers into a battle he could not explain or justify, he left the service.
The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century.
In 2005, Fritz was invited back to the Pentagon, now as a civilian, to assist Under-Secretary Douglas Feith in the declassification of documents about the war, so that Feith could use them to write a book about the war. Fritz discovered in the process that the Iraq War had been spurred by Netanyahu in close coordination with Wolfowitz and Feith. He learned that the purported U.S. war aim, to counter Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, was a cynical public relations gimmick led by an Israel Lobby insider, Abram Shulsky, to garner U.S. public support for the war.
Iraq was to be the first of the seven wars in five years, but as Fritz explains, that follow-up wars were delayed by the anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgency. Nonetheless, the U.S. eventually went to war or backed wars against Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. In other words, the U.S. carried out Netanyahu’s plans—except for Iran. To this day, indeed to this hour, Netanyahu works to stoke a U.S. war on Iran, one that could open World War III, either by Iran making the breakthrough to nuclear weapons, or by Iran’s ally, Russia, joining such a war on Iran’s side.
The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century. All of the countries attacked by the U.S. or its proxies—Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria—now lie in ruins. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza continues apace, and yet again the U.S. has opposed the unanimous will of the world (other than Israel) this week by vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution that was backed by the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council.
The real issue facing the Trump Administration is not defending Israel from its neighbors, who call repeatedly, almost daily, for peace based on the two-state solution. The real issue is defending the U.S. from the Israel Lobby.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Zarah Sultana, thank you for highlighting what PM Starmer said about Gaza in October and what he says now. Suppose a responsible public official is not totally indifferent to how Israel has been busy ethnically cleansing Gazans by killing innocent civilian population, mainly children and women, and is systematically destroying the infrastructure of Gaza, then how can anyone say that Israel has a right to do this?
But there are some in the ruling elites of the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, etc. etc. who openly support the destruction of a captive population. They do not name it ethnic cleansing, genocide or large-scale slaughter of Palestinians. Instead, they justify what Israel does by repeating the mouldy mantra that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ and thus the crimes against humanity by Israel are brushed aside.
Let us not forget that, apart from the rulers of the countries just mentioned, vast numbers of the people of these countries are against the genocidal war in Gaza, and they strongly oppose what Israel has been doing. They show their solidarity with the victims of the Israeli war on the people of Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories.
In his recent response, Prime Minister Starmer expressed his knowledge of the concept of genocide, which he is unwilling to apply to Gaza. But the lives of millions of Palestinians are not a question of some definition, which he, President Biden and Antony Blinken will not use. But what stops them from using other words like mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing and killing fields of Gaza, for instance?
Lastly, I wonder if Prime Minister Starmer will be generous enough to admit that over 45 thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been mercilessly slaughtered by Israel’s army and air force and what steps he has taken to stop the ongoing carnage and destruction. Has he done anything to stop the killings and destruction or not?
As residents of the north are forced to flee, the Knesset has passed a law allowing Arab citizens of Israel to be deported to the besieged enclave
Mourners react next to the body of a Palestinian killed in an Israeli strike, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip on 13 November 2024 (Reuters)
The Israeli Knesset recently passed a law allowing the state to deport the families of Palestinian attackers from within Israel or occupied East Jerusalem.
Under the legislation, family members accused of having advance knowledge of such an attack, or who express “support or identification with the act of terrorism”, could be deported to Gaza or elsewhere, depending on the circumstances.
This new law appears to fit with Israel’s overarching goals in Gaza and Palestine more generally. The situation in Gaza, particularly in the north, provides a clearer picture of these plans.
After more than 55,000 Palestinians from Jabalia reportedly fled south, Israeli army general Itzik Cohen told reporters that “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.
Cohen added that humanitarian aid would only be made available in the south, as there were “no more civilians left” in the north. (An Israeli army spokesperson subsequently said his words had been taken out of context and did not reflect the military’s “objectives and values”.)
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The mass expulsion of residents from Jabalia has been accompanied by Israel’s widespread destruction of buildings and infrastructure throughout northern Gaza, and the killing of at least 2,000 people. Across the besieged territory, the damage is so severe that aid agencies have warned it could take centuries to rebuild.
A detailed operations map, which covers the northern areas of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, suggests that Israel is effectively – but quietly – implementing the Generals’ Plan, a genocidal strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza that has faced widespread international condemnation.
Genocide and permanent occupation
Israel’s recent creation of the Netzarim Corridor sliced Gaza in half, and as the army has zoned in on the north, most Palestinians have been pushed south of the corridor. The ultimate aim appears to be the annexation of the entirety of northern Gaza, creating space for Israel to expand its settlements and deepen its control over vital trade projects in the Mediterranean.
In addition, the recent appointment of Israel Katz as defence minister raises the possibility of reviving a project he has long promoted: the creation of an artificial island that Israel would use to control and monitor aid to Gaza.
Amid the challenges of implementing a mass displacement from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai – a notion Cairo has refused to entertain – it appears Israel is settling instead on a project to ethnically cleanse and annex the northern part of the enclave, barring displaced people from returning north of the Netzarim Corridor.
The new law enabling the deportation of families of Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of occupied East Jerusalem is further evidence of Tel Aviv’s resolve to maintain its annexation and occupation of northern Gaza.
Israel’s actions point to a broader, emerging strategy that aims not only to reoccupy Gaza and sever it geographically, but also to reshape Palestine as a whole
By specifying Gaza as a potential destination for those being deported, the legislation suggests that the territory will remain under Israeli control. International law prohibits deportation or the revocation of citizenship without the prior agreement of the state to which the deportee is being sent – although Israel is a habitual violator of international law.
The Generals’ Plan was not the initiative of a rogue Israeli official, but rather appears to reflect a broad consensus and the coordination of high-ranking government circles.
Amid international legal constraints, the Israeli government cannot officially declare policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, permanent occupation and annexation – but on the ground, this is what has been happening. At its core, the Generals’ Plan is no different than former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration last year that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no fuel” after the 7 October Hamas attack.
Israel’s actions point to a broader, emerging strategy that aims not only to reoccupy Gaza and sever it geographically, but also to reshape Palestine as a whole. In this context, northern Gaza would be annexed, while the south would become an enclave for displaced Palestinians – whether from the north, or those deported from within Israel or East Jerusalem.
Effectively, the southern Gaza Strip would serve as a barren point of exile for an increasingly dense population, devoid of livable conditions.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Ameer Makhoul is a leading Palestinian activist and writer in the 48 Palestinians community. He is the former director of Ittijah, a Palestinian NGO in Israel. He was detained by Israel for ten years.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Thursday that Israeli forces killed 78 Palestinians and injured 214 in the previous 48-hour period as Israeli strikes continued across the Gaza Strip.
One strike on Thursday targeted a school-turned-shelter in the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. At least 12 Palestinians were killed and 30 were wounded in the attack on the Shati Elementary Boys School, which is affiliated with the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA.
Palestinians react after a school sheltering displaced people was hit by an Israeli strike in Shati camp in Gaza City November 7, 2024 (REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa)
Reutersreported that dozens of Palestinian families were pushed out of Beit Lahia, one of the cities where the ethnic cleansing campaign has been focused. Israeli forces have been destroying homes in Beit Lahia to ensure Palestinians don’t return.
“After they displaced most or all of the people in Jabalia, now they are bombing everywhere, killing people on the roads and inside their houses to force everyone out,” a displaced Palestinian man told Reuters.
In southern Gaza, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported three children were killed by an Israeli strike in Rafah.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that the latest violence brought its death toll since October 2023 to 43,469 and the number of wounded to 102,561. The ministry only counts bodies brought to hospitals and morgues. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza have estimated the US-backed Israeli bombing campaign and siege has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, including over 60,000 who have starved to death.
Defeating the Arab democracy movement left autocratic states hollowed out and often reliant on US and Israeli support to survive. Palestinians cannot expect help anytime soon
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (R) meets with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alamein in northern Egypt on 20 August 2024 (AFP)
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As Israel continues its genocidal war in Gaza, and expands it to Lebanon, most Arab countries appear to be mere observers or enablers of the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on an unprecedented scale.
Even with the threat of a large-scale regional war looming, which could have extremely destabilising effects on the entire region, the ability and desire of Arab states to restrain Israeli imperial hubris appears to be non-existent.
There is good reason to argue that the main enabler of the current crisis engulfing the Middle East is none other than the United States, which has effectively funded the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon, with aid topping $17.9bn since 7 October 2023. It has also provided diplomatic cover to Israel and given its far-right government the green light to expand the war into Lebanon.
This, however, misses an important aspect of the dynamic. Namely, Israel’s colonial hubris regards having the ability to reshape the Middle East through mass violence being fed by the autocratic nature of the Arab states and the failure of the democratic movement in the region.
More than a decade after the mass revolts that swept the region, the result is weak states, with contested legitimacy, only able to exercise power over their own citizens through mass violence – not dissimilar to the way that Israel is treating the Palestinians.
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In many ways, the logic of regime survival at any cost has eroded the ability of these states to influence events in the region – and, in some cases, the social foundation of the national state itself.
Flow of US aid
A notable example of this is Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the only one to have a border with the Gaza Strip, making it, theoretically, one of the Arab states with the most potential to influence the conflict and restrain Israeli aggression.
Egypt is also a close ally of the US, receiving a whopping $183.5bn in aid since the end of the Second World War, positioning it as a possible interlocutor with Israel’s patron.
This strategic positioning, however, was overridden by the Sisi government’s obsession with survival, which placed it in a dependent relationship with Israel, even as Israel threatens the very stability that Sisi covets.
Indeed, Israel played a not insignificant role in the consolidation of the Sisi government after the 2013 coup, offering political support, security cooperation and deeper economic ties to the direct benefit of the Egyptian elites.
War on Gaza: Arab despots’ failure to stand up to Israel could fuel an explosion
For example, during the summer of 2013, after the coup that overthrew the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) was lobbying on behalf of the fledgling military autocracy to ensure the continued flow of American aid.
The close relationship between President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Zionist lobbying groups continued, with reports emerging in February 2017 that Sisi met representatives of the most influential pro-Israel groups, including Aipac, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and the Zionist Organization of America (Zoa) five times in 20 months.
The relationship between Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been described as the closest between any leaders from the two nations since the peace treaty of 1979.
This apparent closeness was anchored in close security cooperation between the countries, with reports emerging in 2018 that, in the preceding two years, Israel had conducted over 100 air strikes against militants in Sinai, with Cairo’s approval.
This security cooperation was extended to include direct repression of peaceful dissent in Egypt, with the sale of Israeli spyware to Sisi’s government, which was used to hack into the phone of Ahmed Tantawy, a prominent member of the secular opposition.
The depth of the alliance extended to the energy sector, with a $15bn deal signed in 2018 between the two countries to import Israeli gas for re-export in liquid form.
An investigation by human rights campaigner Hossam Bahgat revealed that the Egyptian private company responsible for the deal was managed by Egypt’s General Intelligence Services (GIS), allowing the country’s security elites to profit from the deal directly.
Egypt’s debt crisis
These deep structural dependencies placed Sisi’s government in an extremely vulnerable position, unable to restrain Israel, even when the idea of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza was floated by Netanyahu, with its highly destabilising effects on the government and the country.
Indeed, beyond rhetorical condemnation, Egypt has done little to impact the dynamic on the ground. The most notable example of a critical public stance was the Egyptian declaration in May that it would join the International Court of Justice case against Israel.
At the time of writing, there is no evidence of it doing so. But there is evidence of deepening economic ties, with Egypt in September signing another deal with Israel, to increase its imports of natural gas by 20 percent.
More than a decade after the coup, with the Sisi government facing a grinding debt crisis and following a logic of power consolidation at any cost, it finds itself at the mercy of Israel and its colonial hubris, unable to exert influence on one of its closest allies.
Syria in shambles
The enabling of Israel’s colonial ambitions is not limited to Israel’s Arab allies, but also extends to Syria, where the logic of government survival above all else is at its most extreme.
More than a decade after the start of the Syrian uprising, the Assad government has survived, albeit at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, high levels of foreign interference and the loss of large swathes of territory. The Syrian economy is decimated, the state’s monopoly on violence is now completely eroded, and the social foundations of the state have been eviscerated.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel
The Syrian government has reduced the country to a narco state, blackmailing the Gulf states into reintegrating it into the Arab fold in exchange for stopping the flow of illicit drugs.
In essence, Assad decided to sacrifice the Syrian state on the altar of his survival, leaving behind a state in shambles – unable to assert control within its own borders, let alone restrain Israeli aggression that could spiral to engulf Syria as well, whose territory it already occupies.
The horrors that we are witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon are as much the result of an Israeli colonist mania, and western support for it, as it is also a direct result of the nature of the Arab political landscape that emerged from the failed Arab spring.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel. Any pretences of this have now completely disappeared, with a new raison d’etre emerging, namely the domination of their own citizens at any cost.
This is not to argue that these states were not repressive before, but there is not now even a pretence of confronting a dangerous external enemy, now that said enemy is internal.
The dissident has now come to replace colonists and the occupier as the number one enemy of the Arab states, with the mass slaughter of the Palestinians, Lebanese and whoever dares to challenge the Israeli vision of the new Middle East standing as a testament to a new Arab autocratic political order.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Maged Mandour is a political analyst who is a regular contributor to the Arab Digest, Middle East Eye, and Open Democracy. He is the author of an upcoming book entitled Egypt Under Sisi, to be published by IB Tauris. The book will examine the social and political developments in Egypt since the 2013 coup.
Footage shows a Palestinian man being used by the Israel Defense Forces as a human shield.
(Photo: Al Jazeera)
“The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began,” one human rights expert said. “The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer.”
The Israel Defense Forces routinely use detained Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, according to testimony from four Palestinians and one IDF soldier shared withThe Washington Post.
Their stories, published on Sunday, build on other accounts from Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the international press, and Defense for Children International to reveal a pattern of Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians—including children—to enter buildings or tunnels ahead of them to check for militants or explosives, in clear violation of international law.
“This wasn’t something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places,” Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, told The Washington Post.
“My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands.”
The incidents recounted to the Post occurred between January and August. One man, 20-year-old Mohammed Saad, said he was detained by the IDF in June and interrogated for several days. Then, a new pattern began. Every day, he and two other Palestinian men were blindfolded and taken to a different location. They were made to wear IDF uniforms, given cameras, and told to enter buildings ahead of the Israeli soldiers to film and check for explosives. On the second day, an explosion went off after Saad had made his forced investigation.
“They tied my hands and threw me on the sand,” he recalled. “They took turns beating me. I still don’t know where the explosion came from.”
Another time, the captain of the unit he was detained by showed him an image of his family home destroyed by bombing.
“If you do not cooperate with us, we will kill all your family members like this,” the captain said.
On the 15th day of Saab’s ordeal, he was given civilian clothes and told to walk. As he did so, he felt a pain and realized he had been shot in the back.
The other three Palestinians interviewed by the Post were detained during the IDF’s raid on al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City in March. One was a surgeon at the hospital, while the other two were taken from their homes nearby. They were made to enter the hospital building ahead of IDF troops, remove any barriers, and take pictures of each room they entered.
“I was telling them that my hands are precious for my work; I am the only vascular surgeon here,” the surgeon, Omar al-Jadba recalled to the Post. “My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands.”
The IDF soldier, who spoke anonymously, said that two Palestinian detainees were placed with his unit to make sure that buildings were safe to enter. One of them was only a teenager. His commander said the two men were terrorists, but then later said they could be released after the mission was over.
“At this point we understood that if we could release them, then they were not terrorists,” the soldier, a reservist, told the Post. “The officer just lied to us.”
“Every one of their accusations is a confession.”
Another group of soldiers questioned the use of human shields, telling a higher-level commander that it was against international law.
“He told us that international law is not important and the only thing that simple soldiers need to think about is the ethical code of the IDF,” the soldier told the Post.
However, the IDF said in a statement that its orders prohibit the use of human shields.
Breaking the Silence, a group that records testimonies from Israeli soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the reservist’s account was in line with others they had received.
“The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began,” Carmel said. “The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer.”
The Post reporting came the same day as a major Associated Press investigation into Israeli raids on three hospitals in northern Gaza at the end of 2023. Israel has often justified its hospital raids with the claim that Hamas operates from the inside, turning all the patients and doctors into human shields. However, the AP concluded that “Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence at the three” hospitals it considered: the al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals.
“What do [former U.S. President Donald] Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu have in common?” asked journalist Mehdi Hasan in response to the Post‘s reporting. “Many things but especially… projection. Every one of their accusations is a confession.”
Other commenters responded to the clear violations of international law and questioned why the U.S. continues to provide weapons and funding to the IDF while it engages in war crimes.
The Austin for Palestine coalition shared a quote from the article, noting that what it described was “paid for by our tax dollars.”
Israeli Newspaper Haaretz Editorial, Oct 29, 2024,
For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip. Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.
But even based on the little that has been revealed to the public, two things can be said about the siege. First, the scale of the civilian casualties from the army’s daily bombings of towns and refugee camps in northern Gaza – children, women, elderly people and men who are innocent of any crime – is enormous.
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Moreover, medical and other aid facilities have largely collapsed, and other institutions are also collapsing. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people are now at risk of starvation or are already suffering terrible hunger.
Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose. Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.
Given this, it’s no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.
This suspicion fits with both the principles of the “generals’ plan” being pushed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland – a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing – and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.
Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government want to commit these crimes.
As soon as the war began, they began calling for “erasing Gaza” and for perpetrating a “second Nakba.” But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.
Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.
If this process doesn’t stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel
Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, earlier in October.Credit: Omar Al-Q
Peace and Justice Post 
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