Wealth and media backing notwithstanding, Israel’s facade has crumbled and lost its grip on legitimacy. Facing isolation, Israel’s existence as a recognised state teeters towards an inevitable demise.
Israel is as good as finished. It has lost all credibility as a responsible nation in-the-making. From the onset its creation has depended on abusing superpowers, injustice and crime. It has been those three forces that have kept it enduring and spreading until now, while skilfully dodging every attempt to hold it to account, often by playing the victim. Despite the numerous massacres perpetrated along the way, something very different has happened now that has shaken its very foundations; mortally so: Gaza.
When, around 550 BCE, the Lydian king, Croesus, famed for his wealth and power, consulted the oracle at Delphi on whether or not he should attack Persia, the answer he received seemed straightforward enough; namely, that by attacking Cyrus he would “destroy a great empire”. Little did he suspect that the empire referred to was not that of Cyrus the Great, but his very own. Israel has made the same mistake. Solon, one of the Seven Sages, has warned Croesus of the dangers of his arrogance. Israel’s supporters never did. There is an English saying that goes: Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves. This is exactly what Israel has done. Its arrogance has reached such proportions that it no longer felt that it had to pretend anymore or show any semblance of restraint. It opted for all out genocide and the civilised world will never accept or forgive that.
Genocide by any other name
The controversy around the labelling of a genocide has less to do with the vagueness of the term than the unwillingness of guilty parties subscribing to it. Definitions of genocide generally concur on three details: deliberation, large numbers and the victims belonging to a specific group or nation that the genocidaires intend to radically reduce or eliminate. There are different kinds of genocide, primarily depending on the numbers, the motivation and the means. In fact, every single one has its own unique stamp. The numbers, of course, are not just that. They are made up of individual people: men women and children whose lives are cast into apocalyptic terror and destruction in ways that vary according to the means. The motivation is more complex. Some genocides are triggered by a desire to ethnically cleanse or completely subdue, as Hitler’s Final Solution that was aimed at eliminating the Jews, or Stalin’s man-made Holodomor Famine, which targeted Ukrainians it wanted to bring to heel.
Others are a means to a different end, such as the annihilation of the people and culture of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US during the Second World War. In this case, destroying the groups in question was not the primary motive, which was sending a message of invincibility to the Japanese belligerents. For this reason, most Westerners and the US in particular, refuse to refer to this nuclear obliteration as a genocide. A similar “exoneration” can apply to situations where the mass killing is the result of abuse of power and recklessness, such as the Chinese Communist Party’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) pioneered by Chairman Mao Zedong, which, while intending to improve the agrarian and industrial economy, resulted in tens of millions of deaths through starvation: collateral damage to an experiment gone wrong. This last example, which was the deadliest of all, with as many as thirty million people having perished, proves that lack of deliberation does not necessarily mitigate the dire consequences.
Do we really need a court in the Hague to tell us the abhorrent crime in Gaza should stop?
Nevertheless, when we are talking about the murder of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people, arguing over semantics seems rather trivial. Do we really need a court in the Hague to tell us that what is happening in Gaza is an abhorrent crime that should stop immediately? Of course not. And yet, journalists, politicians, judges and academics tiptoe around the word ‘genocide’ as if it were the Holy Grail of condemnation, to the detriment of nightmare realities that transcend words or labels. Besides, thanks to modern-day technology that brings the daily slaughter of Palestinians to our screens, as well as the blatant ethnic cleansing, Gaza is as close to a textbook definition of genocide as you could possibly get.
Israel is a theocratic and apartheid state that was created through the theft of Palestinian lands, homes, livelihoods and lives. It has been allowed and supported to incrementally abuse the native population to the point where more and more Zionists are now claiming openly that the whole of Palestine should be theirs by divine right, despite the fact that most Israelis are postwar immigrants, their descendants and relatively new arrivals. So in a way what is happening in Gaza is no surprise, though the fact that Israel has so bullishly peeled off the mask is. What is utterly bewildering, however, is why the “West” is persisting in its aiding and abetting of these murderous crimes even though Israel no longer makes any attempts to hide them.
If people like Julian Assange were allowed to do their job, rather than being incarcerated, perhaps we would have more clues as to why the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and even some of the higher echelons of the EU are unconditionally backing Israel. The US, in particular, is not only approving billions of dollars and generous amounts of weaponry to Israel during this systematic slaughter, but is vetoing one ceasefire resolution after another to allow Israel to do its dirty work. This, as UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated, after the third US ceasefire veto on February 20, in words reminiscent of Nazi policy, until “a final solution” is reached.
As of March 2024, over 30,000 have been killed indiscriminately. Many more children are being killed daily in Gaza than in Auschwitz-Birkenau. “BUT DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS?” Really? Is that all you can say? Not to mention the serious questions regarding the October 7 attack and Israel’s alleged involvement in it.
So why are so many leaders of the western world risking their reputation and their very souls to back this Zionist onslaught? One reason could be a certain sense of camaraderie. The American colonists had done the same to the native populations of the Americas, as the European colonisers had done, in different degrees, to their victims in other continents. Besides, the American colonists were European to start with, anyway. Still, this affinity in crime and this same exploiting mentality seems hardly sufficient as a reason.
A second possibility could lie with the Israel lobbies. The lobbyists and donors are very powerful, particularly in the US, and there are elections on the way, but even this does not seem sufficient to justify such complicity. It is almost as though these Zionist supporters are living in an alternate reality that we poor mortals cannot comprehend. No doubt, in some ways, that is exactly what they want us to believe and expect that we should trust them because they see the bigger picture. But no, as Aaron Bushnell put it, we will not bow to what the ruling class has decided should be normal. And just in case anyone should think there is anything antisemitic in any of this, it is worth noting that there are countless more Christian Zionists than there are Jewish ones and more than twice as many Christians believe that “Israel was given to the Jewish people by God”. Many Jews, in fact, abhor Zionism, particularly the ultra-Orthodox, for having hijacked their religion and for the evil it perpetuates.
There are further credible reasons behind this unconditional support that are even more disturbing. The first is that we are dealing with pure, unadulterated racism. One only needs to compare the sense of outrage Putin’s attack on Ukraine caused in the West, to the disregard with which the Gazans are treated by much of the political establishment. The second is that these leaders are fuelled by callous greed and the prospect of juicy dividends coming their way after Israel overpowers Gaza and makes it a profitable oil-producing hub: a similar motivation to the attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, or Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi's Libya in 2011.
The third, and most sinister of all, is that Mossad has infiltrated these seats of power and keeps these leaders in check through bribes, existential threats and blackmail. The Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell story, with its ties to Mossad and blackmail, could be a case in point. True, even this is reminiscent of Hitler: the conspiracy of international Jewry; however, the link does not make it any less feasible.
Needless to say, some or all of these factors could be at play together. Still, whatever is going on behind the scenes, the enthusiastic collusion is nothing less than abhorrent and plainly evident for everyone to see. The ruling establishments in the West are now seen as having lost their moral compass. People like Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Ursula von der Leyen, to mention but a few, have made sure of that. There are few grey areas now. One is either on the dark side, or on the side of justice. The dull mush that divided the two camps is slowly dwindling, as ignorance loses its excusing power to a truth that is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Israel is exposed. It will fall, or the world will succumb to the new normal where justice is nothing more than a tool in the toolbox of evil. Thanks to people like Aaron Bushnell and the myriads who have been protesting around the world against the genocide in Gaza, I doubt the latter will be the case; certainly not in the long run. I was brought up on a staple of westerns, “cowboys and Indians”, where the “Indians” were always the bad guys. Today, few in their right mind would blame the native Americans for their resistance. Humanity has finally seen through the propaganda. What is happening in Gaza, however, is happening now, before our very eyes and is impossible to gloss over.
The red herring and the two-state solution
The two-state solution was never a real option. The Arabs did not want it because for much of the native population, over half, in fact, it would have meant losing everything; while the Zionists, though initially agreeing to the 56% or so of the land offered, really wanted a good deal more than this generous percentage the United Nations had identified for them. Of course, the UN had no right to carve up the country in the first place. Palestine had been occupied by the Ottomans since 1516 and the people were finally liberated when Turkey lost the First World War. Arabs in the Middle East had fought with the British against the occupiers. They were promised independence and T. E Lawrence fired them on, also believing the lie. Instead, from the beginning, plans were afoot to abuse the territory by handing much of it over to the diaspora.
The British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, approved the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, despite the fact that only a very small minority Jewish people lived there at the time. When Palestine formally became a British mandate in July 1922, plans to rectify this inconvenience were set in motion with aggressive policies encouraging Jewish immigration. Indeed, a Jewish state would have been impossible without a significant number of Jewish people to make it viable. Between 1922 and 1026 as many as 75,000 Jews had already moved to Palestine from different parts of the world, but this was a tiny fraction compared to the influx following World War II. All the pieces were now in place. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the UN adopted Resolution 181 which formalised the partition plan for Palestine. The Palestinians were outraged and they revolted.
The situation began to deteriorate, but by May 1948 the British felt the ground had been sufficiently prepared for a Jewish state to emerge and they announced a complete withdrawal by 15 May. Sure enough, the day before the deadline, the Zionists sprang into action taking the allocated area by force and grabbing many more through bloody conquest, in the process, leaving just 23% of the territory, which are made up of the West Bank and Gaza. The illegal settlements in the former area and the ethnic cleansing in the latter prove that even that was not enough.
Apart from the injustice of a two-state solution, which would moreover at least involve the highly unlikely return to the 1967 borders, before, that is, Israel helped itself to more Palestinian land, the prospect has inherent flaws. Most notable amongst them is the fact that a theocracy will always oppress otherness and freedom of thought. Even if every Muslim and Christian were expelled from Israel, citizens would have to remain Jewish and only have Jewish families. In many ways it would be no different Afghanistan under the Taliban, where people are no longer citizens but followers or forced adherents.
Palestinians would have to be fairly compensated for every single loss…
The alternative is obvious: a single secular state where people can live in peace with their religious beliefs equally respected. This is not as impossible as it seems. I remember visiting South Africa during apartheid in the early 80s as my father was Chargé d'affaires for Italy in Pretoria at the time. The thought of a unified state with equal rights for whites, and black who had been abused for so long, seemed impossible to even contemplate... and yet here it is and its creation did not involve the catastrophic scenarios that were often projected. Of course the Palestinians would have to be fairly compensated for every single loss, and every misappropriation of homes or land by Israelis returned to the rightful owner, just as valuable artwork stolen by Nazi’s was returned, whenever possible, after the defeat of Hitler. Equally important, every crime committed, especially the crime of genocide and ethnic cleansing, should be punished according to a just legal system or international law. Apart from the historical abuses and crimes committed against Palestinians before and since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and the current genocide, the brutality and pervasiveness of these crimes and must also be taken into account. As Philippe Lazzarini the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East stated to the UN General Assembly on March 4:
"[I]n a period of just 5 months, more children, more journalists, more medical personnel and more UN staff have been killed than anywhere in the world during a conflict."
So peace and justice for Palestine is not beyond the realms of possibility. Israel may fall and, in its place, a peaceful eclectic society emerges. The main threat, all said and done, is not the law-breakers in Israel, but the power that fuels them; especially the US. The demise of the American ruling elite, however, may finally be on the cards, as the mask that fooled so many for so long has finally become transparent to most. Of course, the machine is still propped up by big bucks and the media, as well as more sinister players behind the scenes, but at least they are now only fooling those who really want to be fooled. In other words, there is a hope that the terrorist state of Israel and the iniquitous institutions that uphold it will come crumbling down. What is certain, is that Israel’s legitimate right to exist is well and truly finished. What is left is a pariah state whose days are numbered.
- I dedicate this article to Aaron Bushnell (1999-2024)
