The Annihilation of a Nation
Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim
The bombardment of Gaza is relentless, indiscriminate and all encompassing, and whilst weak Western governments refuse to condemn Israel and cut all military aid the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) continues to slaughter Palestinian civilians and obliterate what remains of Gaza.
Nobody and nowhere is off limits to Israel, even designated humanitarian zones, camps and informal settlements where displaced Palestinians shelter (75% of the population has been displaced), are targeted.
At least 44,502 Palestinians have been killed since 8 October 2023 (70% are women and children), tens of thousands more lie buried under the rubble; over 100,000 are injured in Gaza and a further 5,500 in the West Bank; 152 journalists and media workers have been killed; 333 humanitarian aid workers killed – most were staff members of UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), a compassionate thorn in Israels side for years.
Every school in Gaza has been destroyed, the healthcare system has been decimated, with the United Nations relate, more than “500 attacks on health care” facilities recorded in Gaza. The Red Cross warn that, “Gaza is now at risk of a complete medical shutdown,” and the UN report that, “all 2.1 million residents [are] in urgent need of food and livelihood assistance.” If it is not officially the case now, widespread famine is, the UN make clear, imminent.
Placed against the legal definition of genocide it is clear that this brutal onslaught by Israel on defenceless Palestinians constitutes genocide; genocide that is being facilitated by the US and other western allies of Israel.
Whether genocide is being committed, in this case by the rogue state Israel, is not a matter of opinion, it is a question of law. International law administered by the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not something that a State can choose to accept or agree with. When States disregard the ruling or findings of such global institutions and publicly condemn them as the US and others have done over the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his chief henchman Yoav Gallant, the underlying global order is weakened.
Threatening the ICC with sanctions “as if it was a terrorist organisation,”, said the President of the court, Tomoko Akane, is shocking. US politicians (as well as Israel’s leaders) seem to believe they inhabit a sphere beyond the rest of the world, and can selectively abide by and acknowledge the rulings of the worlds highest courts.
The word genocide comes from the Greek genes, meaning tribe or race and the Latin suffix side, which means killing – so killing a race, or members of a race.
Genocide was recognised as a crime under international law in 1946. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) is part of international law, which means that even if a country has not ratified the convention (153 countries have, including Israel and the US), it is bound by its articles.
Article II lays out the definition: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. As such:
1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group;
So, if any of these have been committed by Israel against the Palestinians, then Israel is carrying out a genocide, in a addition, the US and Co., are complicit, because without the ongoing supply of US arms Israel could not continue its barbarism.
In relation to Palestinians, Israel is guilty on all counts.
It is Genocide
Amidst the numerous voices condemning Israel the UN Special Rapporteur On The Situation Of Human Rights In The Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese stands out as one of the clearest, strongest and most courageous. She is a fearless legal warrior on a mission to reveal the truth of what Israel has done and is still doing in Gaza and the West Bank.
In her report ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, she finds that, “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.” She makes clear that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians by: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The Special Rapporteur goes on to say that, such “genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.”
Inflammatory statements like those made by Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who on 9 October 2023 said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly….we will eliminate everything – they will regret it.” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, who heads the Israeli army’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories (COGAT) threatened Palestinians, “There will be no electricity and no water (in Gaza), there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israels Prime-Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has referred to Palestinians as “wild beasts, predators”. Such comments are not new, Israeli leaders have for decades used insulting language as they sought to dehumanise Palestinians.
Among other steps, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls on states to act, firstly to immediately “implement [of] an arms embargo on Israel” as it has “failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ on 26 January 2024.” As well as economic sanctions against Israel.
She is not alone in concluding genocide is being committed, notably, Amnesty International (AI) recently released a detailed report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’. In the damning text Amnesty states that, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”
AI Secretary General Agnès Callamard, points out that the report, “Demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”
Israel is committing genocide in defence of its colonial occupation and apartheid state. is unbelievable what the Israeli men of war have done and are doing, truly horrific. And they are not acting alone of course.
Its genocidal campaign is dependent on the unconditional military and political support provided by the US, the US is therefore complicit. Military hardware, provided by US companies that are making millions of US$ out of genocide, is annihilating Palestinians.
The report from AI and those produced by the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese are unequivocal: Israel is carrying out a genocidal campaign in Gaza, and as Agnès Callamard said, “It must stop now”, and those responsible, the Israeli politicians and military chiefs, must face justice.
My Hunger Strike for Gaza: A 31 Day Experience
Leslie Angeline.
When Northern Gaza was placed under a complete siege, the Biden Administration issued a warning that if conditions didn’t improve within 30 days, he would stop weapons shipments to Israel. At the time of the announcement, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians faced imminent starvation because the Israeli military was blocking trucks of humanitarian aid from entering Northern Gaza. As children and their parents either starved to death or suffocated under the rubble of their homes that were deliberately bombed – Biden told them to wait thirty days. When the thirty days were up, Israel correctly called Biden’s bluff. They knew he wasn’t going to stop sending weapons, and they were right.
I began this hunger strike to demand that my government end the siege on Gaza. It’s clear to the entire world that Israel acts with full backing from the United States and both governments are responsible for the death and human suffering happening in Palestine.
The people of Gaza were starving before Biden’s 30 day warning. They faced famine even before October 7th. People who defend this genocide will often note that there was peace on October 6th, 2023. But on October 6th, there was an Israeli imposed blockade that only allowed in the minimal calorie intake per Palestinian every single day – with no intention of making sure it reached each of the two million people that resided in Gaza. On top of that deprivation, Israel waged sporadic wars on the people of Gaza every few years. Nearly a month has gone by since Israel called Biden’s bluff – the arms are still flowing into Tel Aviv with American flags stamped into the bomb casings and the people of Gaza are still starving to death. When the very few aid trucks do arrive to feed the starving population, Israel kills them while they stand in line for food.
I want to tell you what 30 days with no food does to a person, and my experience is made easier by the fact that I have a roof over my head, access to clean water, and a certainty that I won’t have to flee my home at any moment depending on the whim of the IOF evacuation orders. The women my age in Gaza are not given the same luxuries. I’m an Elder, a mother and a long time Peace and Social Justice activist. I’ve lived in California for over forty years, mostly in Sonoma County, but also in San Francisco and presently in Marin County.
In the first days of my hunger strike, I felt really tired and the hunger pangs were intense. Now they occur only several times a day. My body aches and as of today I’ve lost seventeen pounds. I’m constantly cold and my resistance and immunity are low. I learned yesterday from a dear friend and sister Palestinian Activist — something I didn’t know about hunger strikes— that after days of starvation, beginning to eat food again could kill you. Your body isn’t used to processing even a little bit of food. My friend Hazami, who ended her hunger strike this week, ended up in the hospital. So, I wonder what would happen to a person who hasn’t had enough food for months and months? What happens to them when they have no hospital to go to? What happens when the remaining hospital they do find gets bombed? Or when their doctors get executed? I know I will be able to eat again, but what if I was a child and I had no idea when food might be coming? How scared would I be? Hunger isn’t just hunger in Gaza, it’s grief and suffering compounded a hundred times. It’s a form of torture.
I feel I’ve been living in a traumatized state for over a year. I cry everyday, multiple times a day, my heart is beyond broken, it’s shattered. I wake up each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government this couldn’t continue. Our government is sending billions upon billions of our tax dollars to slaughter innocent children, mothers and fathers, entire families with bombs and artillery funded by our country.
I understand that “my trauma” is nothing compared to what the people of Gaza must be suffering. I can’t even imagine the horrors they’re being forced to live through or die from.
I’d gone to Washington DC on Oct 3rd wanting to work for diplomacy in the war in Ukraine. When Oct 7th happened, I decided to stay until we had a ceasefire in Gaza. I was there for seven long months, going to Capitol Hill, the White House and the State Department everyday trying and failing to get a Ceasefire. I came home broken. Last summer I joined the Handala in Lisbon, part of the Freedom Flotilla that is trying to break the Siege of Gaza. There are ships with 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid stuck in Istanbul, because the Turkish government has succumbed to Israeli and US pressure not to allow the ships to sail! The US government is not allowing much needed humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, but then spends millions on building a port that was never going to work. Our government’s hypocrisy is soul crushing.
I was desperate for this genocide and ethnic cleaning of Palestine to end, so I took a stand and put my body on the line. Today, Thursday Dec. 19th, is the beginning of the 31st day of my hunger strike/fast for Gaza. Even now my Representative in Congress, Jared Huffman, refuses to sign onto Representative Casar’s letter for an arms embargo against Israel. I asked for a meeting with him on the 25th day of my hunger strike/fast and was told he was unavailable to meet with me. Since it’s clear Rep. Huffman doesn’t care about Palestinians or his constituent’s lives and he seems to be indifferent to our collective suffering, I’m ending my hunger strike/fast for Gaza with my dear friends and colleagues at the press conference at a press conference today and saving my energy to sue the ******.
How Holocaust Survivors Become Holocaust Revivors
Image by Levi Meir Clancy.
I realize that I’ve said this before but there really is no more room left for interpretation. Israel is engaged in a concerted effort to annihilate the Palestinian people, an American financed and facilitated genocide playing out in real time across a million flickering screens. The bombs never stop and there is no place left to hide that they won’t hit twice. The violence is so relentless that it’s impossible to keep track of it without becoming frighteningly desensitized to the endless horror in the process. Every day is another massacre. Every day is another mangled mosaic of screaming children and obliterated limbs. It’s just hospital after hospital, refugee camp after refugee camp, bomb after bomb after bomb after goddamn bomb.
The official death toll currently hovers somewhere near the middle of the forty-thousands but even the conservative body counters know that number is bullshit. A group of 99 American healthcare workers who have volunteered on the ground in Gaza recently sent our current president an open letter based on the extensive data that they have painstakingly collected estimating the death count to be at least 118,908. That is 5.4% of Gaza’s entire population. And as grotesque as those numbers alone may be, the doctors who came up with them the hard way still readily admit that they are likely dismally below the total count lost in the ruins.
The worst part of this is that the Israeli military machine barely even tries to hide it anymore. In fact, there is a plot being bandied about quite openly among the nation’s elites known as the General’s Plan, a depraved outline for the deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip which earned its cruelly beige sounding title from the fact that it was drawn up by a coterie of respected IDF generals. The CliffsNotes to this final solution include the complete evacuation of all Palestinian civilians from Northern Gaza to below a strip of Israeli controlled territory known as the Netzarim Corridor. Any and all civilians who refuse to comply with this death march are to be treated as enemy combatants and summarily murdered either by bullet or by starvation.
While some Israeli power brokers still scoff at the very suggestion that such a blatantly heinous campaign is even being considered, many more don’t even try to deny that it is already in progress and the IDF’s actions on the ground over the last two months seem to be following the blueprint for this conspiracy to the last detail.
At the beginning of October Israel ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still living in Northern Gaza to head south. Most of these people were already refugees several times over and thus totally lacked the means and ability to comply. Regardless, not long after the order the IDF began a thorough and focused arial assault on the Northern cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia. The results have been as well-documented as they are horrifying.
The IDF openly admits and even celebrates the fact that they have expelled 55,000 Palestinians from the Jabalia Refugee Camp and that they have zero intention of giving it back. Meanwhile, the well-respected Israeli paper, Haaretz, has reported from the ground in Beit Lahia that not only is this once thriving metropolis a virtual ghost town with only a few thousand shellshocked civilians remaining but that nearly every residence in that zip code has been either obliterated or rendered unlivable by nightly showers of indiscriminate artillery fire.
The brass on the ground made little attempt to conceal their actions nor their intentions with one IDF spokesman, a Brigadier General named Itzik Cohen, telling reporters “There is no intention of allowing the residents of the Northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes” and the IDF commander in charge of Beit Lahia, Colonel Yaniv Baret, openly admitting that the city they were crushing carried zero evidence of militant infrastructure, no tunnels, no arms caches, no weapons manufacturing sites.
But Bibi’s own former Defense Minister, Moshe Yaalon, probably summed it up in the most chillingly certain terms. “The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse…” before adding “There’s no Beit Lahia, there’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating in Jabalia, they’re basically cleansing the territory of Arabs”
And we sadly have every reason to believe that this campaign will not end at the Netzarim Corridor either. Documents drafted by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry leaked early in this siege describe another plot to remove all 2.3 million Arabs from the Gaza Strip and place them in a massive camp in the deserts of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula with a “sanitized” buffer zone of several kilometers separating them from their former territory.
Cryptically, this document suggests evacuating the population of Northern Gaza as the first step to its final solution. Egypt for their part has balked at the suggestion, but this is a nation lorded over by a military dictatorship totally dependent on American firepower and President Elect Donald Trump appears to be even more slavishly beholden to the Zionist lobby than Genocide Joe.
The sheer enormity of this brazen campaign by an American client state to erase an entire population may be grotesquely overwhelming but we can’t pretend that it began on October 8th. Much like their Yankee doodle masters back on Turtle Island, Israel is a nation founded on theft and annihilation.
Much of the territory now declared to be Israel was seized by force between the years of 1947 and 1949 under another Generals Plan now known as the Nakba. After a vicious campaign of mass slaughter that killed some 15,000 civilians in cold blood, another 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.9 million were made homeless, with 350 villages and cities leveled and 78% of historic Palestine unilaterally declared to be a Jewish homeland. And it is actually those last two words which have historically made this 80-year genocide so hard for many westerners to grasp.
The Nakba, though rooted in a campaign of Zionist terrorism that both predated and colluded with the Third Reich, began only two short years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Some 7 million European Jews were systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany. How in any god’s name could those same people just turn around and commit the same horrors against another totally unrelated population of stateless people?
Or, in other words, how could a nation of holocaust survivors become a nation of holocaust revivors? And this is where I take a sad sad song and make it death metal because as horrific as that scenario might be, it is not the least bit unusual. It actually happens a lot and Israel’s real founding fathers back in Washington actually have a long history of exploiting such horrors in the name of globalist brinksmanship. Two more recent campaigns come to mind.
Most educated westerners are well schooled in the details of the now legendary Cambodian Genocide committed during the short reign of the Khmer Rouge between the years of 1975 and 1979. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians were killed in a frenzied campaign of mass executions, starvation, disease, and overwork. That’s a whopping 25% of the nation’s population. However, few westerners seem to be privy to the fact that the bloodbath didn’t actually begin with Pol Pot or that his rise was only made possible by another campaign of mass extermination.
Beginning in 1969, the American military machine expanded its already genocidal campaign in Indochina to include Cambodia. This began with that nation’s secret saturation bombing enacted illegally without congressional approval by Dick Nixon and his sociopathic National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. By 1973, 532,000 tons of American ordinances had been dropped on the rural population of Cambodia, more than three times that dropped on Imperial Japan during the Second World War.
Meanwhile, the CIA took the violence to the nation’s more metropolitan regions by overthrowing the popular and neutral Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Phnom Penh in 1970 and then replacing him with a military dictatorship run by the brutishly fascist General Lon Nol, who enthusiastically approved of an American-led ground invasion of his country a month later. The gruesome result of this brutal campaign was the complete and systematic decimation of Cambodian society outside of a handful of cities that were largely occupied by the nation’s elites.
Over 600,000 people were killed. Another two million out of a population of just seven million were rendered refugees with many taking shelter in caves just to avoid the bombs that seemed to obliterate any two stones standing atop each other. Rice production dropped by over 80% and malnutrition became the norm. It was also during this heinous campaign that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge grew exponentially, from a rag-tag militia of fewer than 5,000 in 1970 to the massive army of 70,000 who took Phnom Penh in 1975.
The majority of these soldiers weren’t even communists. They were just starving peasants desperate for revenge and that is precisely what the Cambodian Genocide amounted to; a feverish rampage launched by the victims of mass slaughter against anyone who they perceived to be complicit in their suffering.
As if triggering a holocaust weren’t bad enough, America then actively milked the carnage that their actions made inevitable as well. The Pentagon very quietly shifted their support over to the Khmer Rouge the moment they took power in a successful effort to destabilize Vietnam, leading to that newly liberated colony’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and a summary Chinese Invasion.
This may have officially ended the reign of the Khmer Rouge, but it didn’t end America’s support for the remnants of that regime who largely enjoyed the full support of Doctor Frankenstein throughout the late 70s and 1980s, or as Jimmy Carter’s own private Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski once so eloquently confessed, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot… Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”
America played similarly heinous games during the nineties in a little African country called Rwanda. Once again, many westerners know the basics of the 1994 chapter of the Rwandan Genocide quite well. They know that during a 100-day campaign of terror, militias composing of the nation’s Hutu majority slaughtered around one million ethnic Tutsis. What most of them don’t know however is that this massacre was actually much larger and far more complex.
The tragedy actually began in 1990 when an army of American and British trained Tutsi refugees invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, led by the former Director of Ugandan Intelligence, Paul Kagame, who was conveniently trained in psychological warfare at Fort Leavenworth. For 42 long months, the RPF launched a brutal campaign of ethnic terror against Rwanda’s Hutu population. Villages were raided, refugee camps were torched, tens of thousands were carted away by the truckload to be slaughtered in soccer stadiums or tortured to death in Akagara National Park which had been transformed into a colossal open-air crematorium.
The goal for Kagame was to return the Tutsis to the privileged status that they had once enjoyed under Belgian colonial rule. America, for their part just wanted to edge out the French for influence over the mineral rich region. We got our wish when Kagame had a private jet carrying Rwanda’s Hutu President, Juvenal Habyarimana, along the Hutu President of neighboring Burundi and much of the Rwandan Army High Command, shot out of the sky with a missile. It was only then that Rwanda descended into chaos and ungoverned Hutu militias began to slaughter any Tutsi they could sink their machetes into.
Then President Bill Clinton actually ordered the removal of UN forces after the Habyarimana assassination specifically so Kagame’s RPF could exploit the mayhem to take power, which they did but only after killing several hundred thousand more Hutu civilians during the resulting melee.
And Paul Kagame still runs Rwanda today like an African Pinochet, opening his markets to foreign plunder while he continues to pursue the final solution to the Hutu question deep inside the Congo where his men and their own proxies are responsible for the deaths of millions.
This is what we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip as we speak, and it is a horror story as old as colonialism itself. Genocide has long been a common tool for imperial aggression. Race itself is merely a colonialist construct initiated to facilitate this cruel strategy. Pitting one tribe of impoverished people against another is how the Europeans tamed the “New World” and enslaved much of the old one. And when one genocide leads to another and another and another, the self-anointed powers at be simply exploit the blowback to bankroll their next final solution. And so, it goes… But it doesn’t have to.
This madness only stops when we all stop and recognize that we are all getting played here and that the people playing us don’t give a flying fuck about any color but green with no tribe is exempt from this capital supremacy. It’s a hard lesson to learn but it will only get harder if we double down on ethnic carnage and refuse to fucking learn it. For all of the slaughter and apartheid that European Jews have achieved in Israel, they are still outnumbered and surrounded by the victims America supplied them with in the wake of a Holocaust that many of our own corporate elites directly profited from.
What do you think is going to happen when Uncle Sam goes the way of Hitler and retires to his Further Bunker after going broke bankrolling his 89th genocide? The cycle starts all over again with the survivors who became the revivors becoming the victims again, only this time those victims will still have their guards’ fresh blood beneath their fingernails.
We must all learn that the enemy of every tribe is power. Whether they self-identify as Nazis or Zionists or Democrats or Republicans, those who rule through a monopoly on the use of violence are the real problem and the final solution is a stateless society with no tribe powerful enough to dominate another.
Don’t get me wrong, this will be nothing short of a massive tectonic shift that won’t happen overnight, but I can’t think of a better way to get it started than by having the sons and daughters of Auschwitz turn their guns against the towers of Tel Aviv.
Enough is enough. Let every Reichstag burn brightly for its sins and let every shade of humanity rejoice in the glow of indiscriminate justice.
