Gaza No Longer Officially Facing Famine—But 1.6 Million Palestinians Still in ‘Man-Made Hunger Crisis’
“To end this catastrophe, supplies must be let in at scale and humanitarians allowed to do their job,” said the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
Displaced Palestinians receive food distributed by a charity organization at the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on December 6, 2025.
(Photo by Moiz Salhi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Jessica Corbett
Dec 19, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
While the global initiative that tracks hunger crises concluded Friday that the Gaza Strip is no longer facing “famine,” the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report echoed warnings from United Nations leaders and humanitarian groups that “the situation remains critical” for Palestinians who have endured over two years of an Israeli assault and blockade.
Famine was declared in August, sparking a worldwide outrage over what one research group called “genocidal starvation.” The new IPC report—released after an October ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel—says that “following a significant reduction in conflict, a proposed peace plan, and improved access for both humanitarian and commercial food deliveries, food security conditions have improved in the Gaza Strip.”
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However, the report also notes that between mid-October and the end of November, “around 1.6 million people (77% of the population analyzed) faced high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above),” including “more than half a million people in emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 100,000 people in catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).”
Those conditions—over three-quarters of Gaza’s population at risk of famine—are expected to continue through April. In other words, as Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), put it, “Gaza remains in a man-made hunger crisis.”
The latest IPC report “underscores how fragile the gains have been since the ceasefire began in October,” he said on social media. “To end this catastrophe, supplies must be let in at scale and humanitarians allowed to do their job. UNRWA has food parcels for 1.1 million people and flour for the entire population waiting to enter the Gaza Strip.”
As the Associated Press reported Friday, while Israeli government agencies rejected the IPC findings, humanitarian leaders and Palestinians have highlighted all that the people of Gaza continue to endure because of Israel’s war on the strip:
“This is not a debate about truck numbers or calories on paper. It’s about whether people can actually access food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare safely and consistently. Right now, they cannot,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
People must be able to rebuild their homes, grow food, and recover, and the conditions for that are still being denied, she said.
Even with more products in the markets, Palestinians say they can’t afford it. “There is food and meat, but no one has money,” said Hany al-Shamali, who was displaced from Gaza City. “How can we live?”
Earlier this week, the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which brings together heads of UN entities and over 200 nongovernmental organizations, urged the international community to “take immediate and concrete actions to press the Israeli authorities to lift all impediments,” including a new registration process for NGOs, that continue to undermine lifesaving operations, “or risk the collapse of the humanitarian response, particularly in the Gaza Strip.”
The team emphasized that “humanitarian access is not optional, conditional, or political. It is a legal obligation under international humanitarian law, particularly in Gaza, where Israel has failed to ensure that the population is adequately supplied. Israeli authorities must allow and facilitate rapid, unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief. They must immediately reverse policies that obstruct humanitarian operations and ensure that humanitarian organizations are able to operate without compromising humanitarian principles. Lifesaving assistance must be allowed to reach Palestinians without further delay.”
Israel has killed at least 70,669 Palestinians in the strip and wounded 171,165 others since launching its retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry said Thursday. Experts have warned that the true death toll is likely far higher.
Winter storms are exacerbating already dire conditions in Gaza, including by damaging and destroying shelters of displaced people. Oxfam’s humanitarian director, Marta Valdes García, said Friday that “with 1.6 million people found to be facing acute food insecurity... we are incredibly concerned that winter is already bringing flooding and more misery to thousands of hungry people with little or no money, who are now exposed in terrible living conditions.”
Multiple infants have died of hypothermia in recent days, including a 14-day-old named Mohammed, whose family is living in a tent after being displaced from their home in the east of Khan Younis. His mother, Eman Abu al-Khair, told Al Jazeera that “I can still hear his tiny cries in my ears... I sleep and drift off, unable to believe that his crying and waking me at night will never happen again.”
“His body was cold as ice. His hands and feet were frozen, his face stiff and yellowish, and he was barely breathing... I woke my husband immediately so we could take him to the hospital, but he couldn’t find any means of transportation to get us there,” the 34-year-old recalled. “As soon as daylight broke, we rushed with an animal-drawn cart towards the hospital... But unfortunately, we arrived too late. His condition was already critical.”
Another 29-day-old baby, Saeed Eseid Abdeen, was declared dead at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza on Thursday, according to Drop Site News and Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
“Children are losing their lives because they lack the most basic items for survival,” Bilal Abu Saada, nursing team supervisor at Nasser Hospital, said in a statement from MSF. “Babies are arriving to the hospital cold, with near-death vital signs: Even our best efforts are not enough. They say the war has ended, but people are still having to fight for their lives.”
Big Tech and the Architecture of the Israeli Genocide Against Palestinians
Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
History is filled with examples of corporations fueling war machines and global colonization. IBM supplied technology used in Nazi death camps; shipping and trading companies played central roles in the transatlantic trafficking of Africans; and multinational firms helped bankroll South Africa’s apartheid regime. The companies that once profited from South Africa’s pass laws, today empower Israel’s biometric checkpoints. Silicon Valley giants are repeating that history by providing the digital tools and propaganda that enable and whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The collaboration between Israel and Silicon Valley goes far beyond hardware and algorithms, encompassing narrative control. According to Drop Site News, Google signed a six-month, $45 million contract with the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promote government disinformation and downplay the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Signed in late June, the agreement made Google a “key entity” in Netanyahu’s PR strategy.
The PR campaign was launched in response to international outrage after Israel violated the ceasefire on March 2 and blocked food, medicine, and fuel from entering Gaza. The Google contract was part of Israel’s digital disinformation effort claiming “there is no hunger” in Gaza. In other words, while Palestinian babies were starving to death, Google was fattening its checkbook, serving as Netanyahu’s pernicious digital PR machine to obscure the crime.
In 2021, Microsoft (MS) signed a $133 million contract that made the Israeli military its second-largest defense customer after the United States, describing the Israeli army as a “top priority” client. The deal includes more than 600 separate Azure subscriptions linked to military units such as Mamram, its central tech hub, and Unit 8200, its elite cyber-intelligence wing.
According to the Associated Press, MS’s support team fielded 130 direct requests from the military in the first ten months of the Gaza genocide. Its data centers outside Tel Aviv store more than 13.6 petabytes of data, or 350 times the size of the Library of Congress. At least nine MS employees, including some ex-unit 8200 Israeli officers, coordinated MS AI genocide with the Israeli army.
MS centers supplied raw data for Israel’s AI kill lists. Since 2021, these facilities were used to deploy “Gospel” and “Lavender,” algorithms that ranked Palestinians by the likelihood of being militants. Lavender, for example, assigns scores from 0 to 100 based on criteria as family history, friends or intercepted phone calls and messages.
Known as “AI hallucination,” these systems often generate information that appears convincing but is, in fact, fabricated. “Hallucinating” AI models can extrapolate from incomplete or misleading inputs, such as intercepted phone data, mistranslated language, ambiguous signals, or distorted realities, and combine them with unscientific assumptions about family history to produce what appear to be credible “kill” targets.
AI doesn’t make war cleaner. It is a resourceful utility to murder, efficiently. Inside the tech companies, workers who did not sign to murder, protested. In response, MS fired the staff who organized a vigil for Palestinian refugees. One, Hossam Nasr, leading the campaign: No Azure for Apartheid, said, “cloud and AI are the bombs and bullets of the 21st century.” The digital targeting has taken war to a new barbaric level fusing U.S. corporate power and Israeli malevolent occupation.
Google is also deeply enmeshed in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint venture with Amazon to supply Israel’s government and military with cloud computing, artificial intelligence services, and data centers. This is not an abstract “infrastructure;” cloud storage and AI have become the backbone of modern warfare, powering surveillance systems, analyzing targeting data, and sustaining Israel’s military operations from the “River to the Sea.”
Like MS, when workers raised alarms and protested against the Nimbus contract, instead of engaging the employees, Google summoned the police and fired 28 of its staff. A company engineer described Google’s contract to build a “sovereign cloud” exclusively for the Israeli government whereby they can use it with no regards to international law.
Instead of investigating ways to make sure, AI products are not used to murder and starve children, AI companies formalized the ethical violations. OpenAI, for instance, changed its policies to allow military use of its models. Google removed language that barred using AI to weapons or surveillance. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a Zionist by all means, urged Silicon Valley to build the “drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield.”
Over a year ago, Col. Racheli Dembinsky, head of the army’s computing unit, stood before a giant screen displaying the logos of Israeli genocide partners: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services. She hailed the “very significant operational effectiveness” of this partnership in the Gaza genocide.
The challenge is whether the world will hold accountable not only the state dropping the bombs but also the companies engineering the algorithms to deliver murder and the PR machines that conceal it. Israel is not the only party guilty of genocide; but the corporations reaping blood profit from synthesizing and enabling its war crimes.
Big Tech does more than make war “efficient.” It creates the digital fog that enables mainstream media to wash massacres into sanitized narratives. Algorithms are weaponized not just on the battlefield, but across social media. In a clear example of this insidious subversion of the truth, META hired an ex-Israeli embassy staff as “Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief,” Jordana Cutler, who spoke proudly before the Jewish National Fund of her role to silence pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activities across META’s platforms.
META, owner of the major social media outlets: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads … etc., is one of Netanyahu’s new weapons, suppressing images of Israeli atrocities while amplifying Zionist disinformation. In doing so, Big Tech firms are playing a dual role in the architecture of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians: facilitating its execution on the ground, and whitewashing it in the media.
The American Evangelical Pastors Supporting Genocide in Gaza
December 19, 2025
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
This month, over a 1000 American pastors, mostly white, mostly men, and mostly evangelical, flew to Israel for a summit. It wasn’t to address the suffering of Palestinian children or to assist Palestinian families. It wasn’t to demand an end to the genocide. It wasn’t even to pray for a just peace for all peoples. It was a training program for Israeli propaganda.
Mike Huckabee, the Trump regime’s ambassador to the genocidal state and rabid Christian Zionist, joined the group. He said: “It’s an extraordinary time for pastors to go to their pulpits and push back on the bigotry being pushed toward Israel.”
Notice that Huckabee didn’t say bigotry against Jews. He said bigotry against Israel. Against a state. A state that is actively committing genocide with the full support of the United States.
This is significant because Christian Zionists are notoriously antisemitic. They do not support Israel because they love Jews, whom they believe are destined for hell if they continue to refuse their evangelical message of salvation. They do it because it fits neatly into their narrow, misinformed and heavily biased interpretation of the ramblings of a man who lived in a cave on a Greek island years after Christ walked the earth.
American evangelicals see Jews as essential only insofar as their role in the fulfillment of an eschatological opera. But they don’t see Palestinian Christians at all. They are rendered invisible because to acknowledge them would mean admitting the deep racism at the heart of their theology.
Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with an arrest warrant on him for war crimes, also addressed the crowd saying: “I’m counting on you. I know you’ll do what has to be done.” He also told them he wanted them to recruit 10,000 more pastors.
There is something deeply perverse about a group of Christian men being flown into a nation that is committing the very worst crime against humanity, only to “learn” from the very criminals perpetrating it. And doing this all while ignoring the mass suffering occurring just a few kilometres away. Not one of those pastors visited a Palestinian church or even mentioned Israel’s bombing of churches in Gaza.
That this happened during Advent is also staggering. This is a time when Christians around the world meditate on the story of a refugee child hunted by a vicious, genocidal king. But instead of attending to the suffering of children being slaughtered by a contemporary genocidal government, they basked in its comfort and vowed to defend it.
To be sure, this is the heart of American Christianity. And it is a cold, deadened one. A theology of death. A gospel of calculated cruelty. And nothing will awaken these dead bones from the whitewashed sepulchers they have chosen to repose in.
Social Democracy During World War III
December 19, 2025
I’m not writing this to try and convince a Zionist to not be a Zionist, or to get a fence sitter off the white picket.
Instead, I want to explain to those of you who are not pushing for a totally anti-Zionist social justice movement how the rest of us view the world now. How that understanding shapes our lives. After October 7, the western governments who backed Israel began a process which has since becomes essentially World War 3: The west, struggling to maintain their domination and the white supremacy contained within, versus the entire rest of the world.
Put another way: WWIII is being waged by the white supremacist ruling classes of the West against the Global South across the planet.
There are two types of people now:
1) Those who see and understand that this is WWIII and that the dismantling of Zionism– the ideology of white European supremacy that has unleashed all of the ghosts of Fascist European white supremacy—is the only worthy goal, as the ability to rein in climate change, the ability to push back at racially violent anti-immigrant campaigns, to prevent massacres of fishers in the Caribbean and the Pacific, to uphold free airwaves and stop the further suppression of information is to defeat the ideology at the root of all these issues. Or?
2) There are other people (many in fact), who will state their opposition to Israel’s worst excesses, yet continue to call it a democracy, to see the problem as one of “dealing with Hamas” and who still parrot to others the need for a 2 State solution, Palestinian resistance being disarmed, and who protect all of the war criminals in the entire west that are part and parcel of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Those who talk about the problem as one of a bad Prime Minister and not of a state that has been genocidal in conception since 1897.
Much like Malcolm X’s historical understanding of the liberal, those who seek to return to an October 6, 2023 status quo? Who continue to use rhetoric that presupposes that the current state of Israel is some sort of democratic (or even simply civilized) place? Again, I’m not here trying to convince anyone of the crimes of Zionism now. Yet it must be said: liberal half measures towards Zionism uphold not only Zionism, but the genocide, capitalism, the destruction of the climate and the oceans, the everywhere racism & the scapegoating of victims.
We have hit a point of total saturation of society with Zionist war crimes. There are only people who try to choose to be unaware, not that “bad things happen in war,” but that Israel is one of the most powerful armies in history & is using this army against civilians, in order to deliberately target children, life support services such as hospitals, water treatment plants, community places such as mosques and schools, and so on and on. The starvation is not only fact, global collective revulsion towards Israel guarantees that people know this is happening.
The only people left who are unaware of this have chosen that ignorance, and deliberately curated their consumption of information to only the stories that Zionist newsrooms have either approved or reluctantly accepted. Those same people are denying that countries like Canada are in total flagrant disregard of international law.
These points simply are chosen thought patterns, so trying to pierce them is almost pointless.
In the attempt to stay mentally healthy, without accepting genocide, I am constantly trying to find ways to stay positive. I know I am not alone at all.
I have been a member of various social media groups and threads about the preservation of sanity, mental health and human as well as humane outlooks on the self and the world. Even as it is easily rendered nuts to give the self blame for the ongoing atrocities, the feeling of “I must do more to end this” is the preserve of literal millions around the world now.
In an attempt to have an optimistic, positive vision for the future, but without lying to myself about possibilities? In an attempt to reconcile the absolute need to completely banish Zionist “needs and demands” and feelings, without resorting to hating on all Jewish people for crimes falsely carried out in their names?
Personally, I started to study the post April 1945 Germany. I was reminded immediately of the Holocaust education I received in a social studies class in Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver, Canada), in what seems likely to have been 1990 or ’91.
I walked into my classroom, and the entire inside of the room was filled with black and white photos of the victims of the Holocaust. There were photos of the bulldozers that had to be used– after the ‘liberation’ of the camps– to push dead, emaciated white (mostly Jewish) bodies into giant pits.
The statistic of “300 calories a day” meant very little to my 15 year old mind. But to see a person who had no cheeks, not a single bit of fat, who had a face but no expression, who eyes were open but their souls were closed? That meant everything.
In that classroom you couldn’t escape the Holocaust reality; Everywhere I turned were those photos, and the accompanying stories. It was drilled into our heads, and more importantly, our hearts, what this meant. What to listen and look for, to guard against it.
How the Nazi Holocaust was not exclusively Jewish, and in fact didn’t even start with the Jews (though the antisemitism certainly was obvious before the NSDAP’s Beer Hall putsch) but communists, anarchists, liberals who acted on their conscience, social democrats and the disabled were interred long before the wholesale round up of every Jew.
And so recently, I went deeper. Modern Germany has very deep, ongoing and serious problems of racism in general and white supremacy in particular; Based on governmental actions as well as far-right groups on the ground in the country, it would seem Germany accepted that their white supremacy needed to expand to international perspectives, and make sure “never again” applied to Europe.
But how did the post-Holocaust 1946 country deal with their Holocaust 1944 reality?
In the immediate days following liberation, Allied troops would go to towns and villages that were a stone’s toss from the chambers and the ovens. Then they would march civilians out to the death camps, take them through the area and force them to see and deal with it right up front. You could find scores and dozens of German civilians sobbing, throwing up, silently walking through an area while Allied soldiers were cleaning up the dead.
To try and undo the decade plus of the most vitriolic hate campaigns led by a government that controlled information, Germans had billboards everywhere across the country. Pictures of the camps, with variations of the theme:
“YOU DID THIS!” screaming from the evidence of the crime of all crimes.
For the first while of real time after VE day and ultimately the surrender of Japan, whether it was radio, or television, or newsprint or billboards or elementary schools or churches and so on– the entire society was enrolled in an involuntary, deep and all-encompassing anti-Nazi campaign. These campaigns focused on what happened during the Nazi Holocaust, and how it happened, bit by bit, through both ‘legal’ means and through breaking down the human nature to see ourselves in all other human beings.
Anti-Nazification took place across the entire western world, even if only Germans were supposed to be collectively responsible if not outright guilty. While it’s been several decades right now since Fascism reappeared in Austria due to the primacy put on German-just-German roles in the Nazi Holocaust, every single western white country adopted some variant of Holocaust education.
What we remember learning is that there is no such thing as a violation of the basic humanity of any human being that does not immediately threaten and begin to spread to everyone else.
We were all taught that.
Contemporary attacks on migrants in the US and Canada, the demonization of addicts, the scapegoating of “leftists” (whatever that is supposed to mean), the full scale assaults on gay rights, trans rights and the rights of people to control their bodies regardless of the opinions of cis men, all of these attacks on human dignity are much worse in the face of Zionism.
That knowledge is now crashing up against what we didn’t know– and that’s the length that the white supremacist (western) world will go to in order to ensure that Israel is never held to account, that no court ever gets to find justice, that law never applies to Zionists, that extermination is okay so long as it is of Muslims and Arabs, that international laws against the deliberate creation of displacement are never upheld…
We also see our leaders shred their own institutions of constitutional law, and destroying the guarantee of human rights that– whether accurate or not– the West has used as their base advertisement for decades.
In the UK, Canada, the United States, Germany (!), France and multiple other white supremacist countries, laws of suppression exist to make certain that Israel can’t be interrupted. That the (illegal) flow of weapons, money, and Orwellian nightmare level intelligence sharing must continue.
Free Speech, association, the right to be seen and heard while confronting political forces, student inquiry into actual academic reality, all of these things and a lot more all must be destroyed to protect the ability of one small, apartheid based and extraordinarily racist, violent state to outright exterminate others who have no recourse to the law.
This is how global Zionism has locked onto the West and decimated the few things that were bragging rights of the richest white countries. All of those ideals about “market place of ideas,” etc? Gone, in the pursuit of extermination.
Zionism is a project of western imperialism and the two cannot be divided.
Again, my point here is not to try and change the people who refuse to see this as WWIII, with the people of the entire world now vying against a rabidly racist faction of western imperialism’s ruling classes, with an ever dwindling minority among the population still supportive.
When people are not talking about ending the fight by dismantling Zionism, the rest of us see that as accepting totalitarian controls on media, including social media through to CNN, in the name of stopping people from seeing the Zionist Holocaust.
If the vision for the defeat of the genocide does not involve treating Israel much like Germany 1946, then it will contain no justice, no real peace, no end to the genocide, no restoration of even limited civil liberties, no free exchange of ideas on the internet or elsewhere, etc.
When the discussion of this fight ending does not involve a mass, involuntary de-radicalization campaign that will disabuse white Israeli notions of racial superiority, we hear nothing at all.
Without deradicalization, all we hear is an attempt to actually continue the genocide.
When we don’t hear talk about how each and every state must be forced to start arresting and extraditing all soldiers of the IDF? We hear people who want child rapists to walk free and sit next to us on the bus.
When we don’t hear one-person, one-vote as the solution to the crime of all crimes, we hear a continuation of the struggle. Apartheid is the problem, not its answer.
When we hear people speak of two states, we don’t even blink. It’s so very not serious, and it is insulting in the extreme.
The one-person, one-state vision will need enforcement from an outside force to exist for a long time.
We know how far down the genocidal mania path the entire society of Israel has gone.
We know what defending Zionism has done to international law.
We know what defending Zionism internationally has done to constitutional protections in country after country.
We know what arming this state illegally has done to the atmosphere and attempts to rein in climate change.
We know what the rhetoric of Zionism has done to the entire western political discourse.
We recognize that attacks on migrants, Somalis, indigenous and non indigenous inner city people struggling with addictions and housing, and on and on, are a partial result of mainstreaming discourse around collective guilt on all Arabs.
We know that white supremacists will only keep growing so long as the racist, violent ethno-state is allowed to exist.
We know Fascists will keep saying “we need a state like that, too.”
So for those of you who are still unsure as to why someone who is proposing a two state solution, who has half measures and deliberately vague policy towards Israel won’t be given credit for having at least a minimal program on Palestine?
Who say they are against war, but who remain studiously silent on the attacks against Lebanon, Venezuela, Yemen and others?
During a World War, there are no half measures. This war is one disguised by so much rhetoric, but it ultimately is all or nothing, no less than 85 years ago. And we need to articulate it as such, so we at least have a 5% chance of victory.
Ceasefires in the Gaza Genocide: A Historical Perspective
Photograph Source: Hla.bashbash – CC BY-SA 4.0
Since October 10, 2025, the official beginning of a mangled ceasefire in Gaza, there has been both a fading interest on the part of mainstream media in covering the disaster and, simultaneously, much commentary on the effectiveness of ceasefires as contexts for humanitarian aid and for the development of a robust, sustainable peace. Perhaps the most succinct analyses of the Gaza situation is offered by Palestinian poet, Dr. Rafaat Alareer. Alareer, since a casualty of the genocide, suggests that for Israelis addressing Palestinians, the real meaning of ceasefire is “we fire, you cease.”
But even Alareer does not emphasize how Israeli violence is spreading from Gaza to the West Bank, to its own prisons, and to the region, with bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen.
To understand any specific ceasefire, especially this one in Gaza, which has optimistically been called “fragile” from the moment of its inception, we must first understand the particular violence it is trying to pause.
In the case of Israeli violence against Palestinians, the short answer is that ceasefires have minimal effect because they are often brief and, when violated, the violation occurs, predictably, by the more powerful party continuing to injure the less powerful. Even before the current genocide in Gaza, Israelis were the ones to re-ignite violence 79% of the time. The frequency of ceasefire violations, the speed with which they occur within days of being announced, and the one-sidedness of their violation, necessarily raises the question of whether they were ever, for Israelis, a real option or merely performative. For example, during the current ceasefire which nominally began about two months ago, close to 400 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza alone. One might call this situation, at best, ceasefire-lite.
The longer answer requires us to understand the roots of Israel’s war against the Palestinians, its fierce, unrelenting commitment to Jewish exclusivity or, at the very least, Jewish supremacy over its Palestinian population, land, and water resources. The ideology that drives the Israeli position is now commonly called Zionism.
But Zionism was not, at its inception, monolithic. There were many strands, including a labor Zionism that focused on class relations and allowed for Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity, and a cultural Zionism that sought a homeland – that is, the acceptance of Jewish immigrants into a multi-ethnic host society irrespective of its governing structure – and the current prevailing nationalist Zionism that finds its expression in a highly militarized state.
Whatever Biblical claims they may make for propaganda purposes,[1] Israeli leaders, almost exclusively of white, European ancestry, generally recognize the European context of their political project. Their preoccupation with their unsafe standing in Christian societies is embedded in the gene code of their political consciousness, and can be dated back at least to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, under King Edward the 1st. This king and date might be the earliest to put forth the idea that the solution to Europe’s “Jewish problem” (the “problem” being the presence of Jews in Christendom) was to remove the Jews. It is easy, then, to understand why at least some Jews in some places would begin a conversation of “if we cannot stay here, where should we go?” This striving for a safer, more permanent place soon became the North Star of their political thinking.
And then there were the interests of empires. While there was a time 
in the 19th century when England favored the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, largely against expansive Russian interests, that time was gone by the era in which a Zionism began to take root. At that point, the British made a series of commitments whose cumulative effect can only be described as disingenuous. In 1915-1916 the McMahon-Hussein (Husayn) correspondence saw England promising to advance national autonomy for Arab countries in return for Arab attacks opening a second front against the Ottoman Empire in WWI. The boundaries of such countries were left deliberately vague. In 1916 the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Treaty promised Palestine to England as part of a successful Allied war effort that intended to dismember the Ottoman Empire and divide its borderlands among European powers. In 1917, the British Balfour Declaration promised part of that same land to the Zionist movement as a Jewish home in Palestine. Even a contemporary British foreign minister, Jack Straw, describes these duplicitous agreements as “an interesting history for us, but not an entirely honorable one.”[2]
British machinations soon converged with the demands for a Jewish state articulated by Theodore Herzl, the leader of the early Zionist movement. Because European Zionists were seen as a fundamentally modern extension of Europe,[3] the British acquiesced to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not in Uganda or in Argentina, as the early Zionist movement was also open to accepting.
What both sides agreed on was that Palestine, since the Sykes-Picot agreement, was for the British to dispose of and for the Zionists to covet. As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has written about the Balfour Declaration “There was never anything like it: an empire promising a land that it had not yet conquered to a people not living there, without asking the inhabitants. This “original sin” created a discursive terra nullius in Palestine, “a land without people for a people without land,” which erased the Palestinians who were stripped of the permission to exist as the inhabitants of the place where they actually lived. Their rights as individuals, as religious and ethnic communities, as potential citizens of an emerging state were simply to be disregarded. The language of the Balfour Declaration, which fleetingly acknowledges the rights of the others (non-Jewish people) living in Palestine, provided no mechanism for accountability on their behalf.
From that debased starting point, campaigns of expulsion, expropriation and resistance became all but inevitable since subordination or, preferably, expulsion of the Palestinians, were the only two outcomes Zionists would countenance. The aspirations of Labor Zionism and cultural Zionism were disregarded. Warnings from such Jewish thought leaders as the theologian Martin Buber, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein were ignored. Buber famously argued that if the more aggressive variants of Zionism prevailed, excessive nationalism would lead only to “a tiny state of Jews, completely militarized and unsustainable.”[4] Arendt warned that a Jewish homeland should never be sacrificed to the “pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state built on Arab suppression.”[5] Nevertheless, Labor Zionism and Cultural Zionism became the roads not taken.
Einstein was more generally skeptical about all nationalisms. While Zionists ignored his doubts, another well-known part of his thinking seemed to anticipate their behavior: his definition that insanity can be understood as doing the same thing over and over, hoping for better results.
Unfortunately, the most aggressive variant of Zionism, the nationalist version that blended the “monopoly over legitimate violence” (which is the essence of a state apparatus) with a largely fictive vision of Jewish peoplehood[6] prevailed. Quickly thereafter, the pattern of repeated wars, followed by repeated massacres became a reality.
Each period of Israeli history ended in warfare between the Zionist state and its Palestinian inhabitants. First, the pre-state period led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 producing the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in which some 750,000 Palestinians (about ¾ of the population) were expelled and most of the rest were internally displaced within the new state. Second, the early state period (1948-1967) ended in a regional war which left historic Palestine entirely occupied by Israel, under varying political conditions from inferior rights (compared to Jewish Israelis) to military rule with, de facto, no rights at all. Third, the years between the full occupation of multiple but divided Palestinian communities and militant pushback from Palestinians (the Intifadas of 1987and 2000) again ended in sustained bloodshed. And finally, fourth, the time since then has been marked by recurring massacres, uprisings, repressions, and a failed, deceptive peace process down to the present.
What is new in the current situation and particularly ominous, is that, formerly, even the most exclusivist version of Zionism did not rely on genocide as a tool: generations of Zionists have tried to buy land from Palestinians, to expel them through bureaucratic means, to use violent Apartheid and ethnic cleansing strategies, or to engage in what Palestinian political scientist Saleh Abdel Jawad calls “sociocide” – to make life so legally, financially, psychologically, and physically difficult that Palestinians themselves would choose to leave. In previous writing, I have argued that, while Zionism before 2023 has certainly produced many dead Palestinians, it did not intrinsically require their death. Their departure might have sufficed.
As this much-wished-for departure failed to materialize, over the course of this century, Israeli efforts to rid themselves of (or entirely subdue) Palestinians have narrowed to a series of brutal, recurring military massacres they call “mowing the lawn.” This program has proven to be both increasingly lethal and simultaneously Einsteinian in its repetitive cruelty that never yields the desired results, only impotent ceasefires, always leaving an oil slick of mutual enmity and the seeds for the next massacre in its wake.
Thus, a Palestinian born in Gaza in 2003 has already experienced at least 12 of these “lawn mowing” massacres, witnessed many more random cross-border shootings, knows of similar depredations in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons, and, even extra-judicial assassinations with military forays into other countries.
Consider the following history of “mowing the lawn”:
Operation Rainbow, May, 2004
Casualties: Israeli: 13, Palestinian 59.
Alleged Purpose: Razing Rafah, home demolitions, to suppress resistance in Gaza
Operation Day of Penitence, Sept-Oct., 2004
Casualties: Israeli 8, Palestinian 107
Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket and mortar fire from Gaza
Operation Summer Rain, June – November, 2006
Casualties: Israeli 11, Palestinian 402
Alleged purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza
Operation Autumn Clouds, October-November, 2006
Casualties: Israeli 1 , Palestinian 50
Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza
Operation Hot Winter 2008
Casualties: Israeli: 3, Palestinian 107
Alleged Purpose: to suppress rocket fire from Gaza
Operation Cast Lead 2008/09
Casualties: Israeli: 13 (3 from friendly fire), Palestinian: 1,166-1440
Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza
Operation Returning Echo 2012
Casualties: Israeli: 0, Palestinian 23
Alleged Purpose: destruction of weapons caches, weapons manufacturing, and rocket launching sites in Gaza
Operation Pillar of Defense 2012
Casualties: Israeli: 6, Palestinian: 105
Alleged purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza, enforce limits on Palestinian fishing more stringent than those protected by international standards, erode Hamas’ popularity in Gaza
Operation Protective Edge 2014
Casualties: Israeli: 73, Palestinian: 2,125-2,310
Alleged Purpose: Continuation of Operation Brother’s Keeper to avenge the killing of 3 Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.
Operation Guardian of the Walls, 2021
Casualties: Israeli: 12, Palestinian: 253
Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza
Operation Breaking Dawn, 2022
Casualties: Israeli: 0, Palestinian: 49
Alleged Purpose: Arrests and assassination of Islamic Jihad leaders
Operation Shield and Arrow, May, 2023
Casualties: Israeli 1, Palestinian 33.
Alleged Purpose: To suppress Islamic Jihad rockets from Gaza.
Given the failure of these efforts to achieve Zionist desires, the logical endpoint is the turn toward genocide: not an aberration, but a culmination.[7] Why else would the Israeli leadership use language that names Palestinians as Amalek, destroy an overwhelming number of civilian targets like schools, hospitals, and refugee tent camps, damage almost 90% of the housing stock of Gaza, impose a regimen of starvation on more than 2 million people, and announce their encouragement of re-colonization by illegal Israeli settlers? Moreover, an experienced army–though not necessarily a civilian leadership committed to performative toughness–knows better than to set unattainable military objectives, like the total destruction of Hamas, unless it is actually giving itself carte blanche to commit genocide. Israeli lawyers have done their best to promote a new military doctrine of “the lesser evil”, that allows their forces to violate the Geneva conventions at will, in the name of the country’s best interests. But even with this piece of cynical enabling, the goal of total destruction is over-reaching. If only one emaciated teenager crawls out of the rubble in Gaza waving a Hamas flag, the vaunted IDF has not succeeded in pounding the Gaza strip into submission by its own metric.
In the face of this appalling preferential option for genocide, the many killings that preceded it, the intentionally ineffective ceasefires meant to distract from it, what should people of good will be demanding?
First, we need an expanded understanding of who needs protecting: certainly the beleaguered, victimized people of Gaza, but not only them. The potential for genocide is rapidly expanding into the West Bank (although the presence of extensive illegal Jewish settlements makes carpet bombing more difficult there) and is already engulfing the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. All of these Palestinians deserve human rights equal to those of their Israeli oppressors. So do others in the region: the Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Yemenis who also suffer from Israeli state violence and bombings.
Second, we need to consider the possibility that Israel does not want peace and will not self-correct and that only pressure from the outside–pressures that we can create in what remains of our freedoms to speak out, our democratic processes–will move the needle toward a decent and sustainable peace. Again, our understanding of which institutions have been complicit in the genocide and should become targets of pressuring include everything from American media, old and new, to both of our most prominent political parties, to most of our universities and churches, to almost all European countries, to global institutions such as the United Nations. “Genocide is not the Lesser Evil,” “Equal Rights for Equal People”[8] are possible slogans.
And finally, we need to remember that when we do speak out, we will be faced with invocations of Holocaust memory to silence criticism of Israel. Without compromising our compassion for the victims of that horrible episode of human history, we have a duty to insist that no people, no country, no alliance, no matter their history of suffering, can ever earn the right to commit genocide. There simply is no such right, there can never be a right to genocide.
Notes.
[1]Prominent Israeli “New Historian” Ilan Pappe is credited with recognizing the contradiction at the heart of Zionism: that largely secular Ashkenazi Jews used a Biblical claim to justify the nature of their political project. He summarizes this contradiction succinctly as: “Most Zionists do not believe in the existence of God, but they believe that He promised them Palestine.”
[2] Eve Spangler, 2019. Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation and Human Rights in the Conflict, 2nd edition. (Boston: Brill/Sense) p. 138
[3] Spangler, 2019, op. cit., p.108
[4]Spangler, 2019, op. cit. p.225.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Shlomo Sand, 2020. The Invention of the Jewish People. New York: Verso Books.
[7] Anne Irfan, 2025. A Short History of the Gaza Strip. New York: Norton & Co. I am indebted to Irfan’s succinct and elegant formulation of the current moment.
[8] I am indebted to Palestine-facing political activist Stephen Low for the suggestion of “Equal Rights for Equal People.”
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