Israel has shattered its precedent of sadism, paving the way for wider imperial corruption and the end of the West’s neoliberal mirage, writes Yoav Litvin.

( The New Arab ) – On Saturday, October 7 2023, a significant shift occurred in the Palestinian-Israeli narrative.

A normalised, gradual genocide over 76 years of Zionist colonialism, peppered by savage episodes of “mowing the lawn”, obscured by liberal Zionist propaganda and backed by imperial Washington, became an unapologetic, even gleeful mass murder of Palestinians, grotesquely captured on video for the world to witness.

Throughout its history, the Zionist movement has exploited fear-mongering and the lure of land and resource theft to subjugate and entice its populace into compliance.

In the aftermath of October 7, Israeli propagandists escalated their gaslighting of Palestinians and their allies, silenced opposing viewpoints in the media, concocted atrocity propaganda to justify Israel’s brutality and rallied support for extensive military action utilising Judaic motifs of revenge and trauma.

For nearly eight months, Israel’s settler colonial, white supremacist genocide has systematically shattered international taboos with its military accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide.

Israel has sought to obliterate Palestinian society by bombing hospitals, aid trucks, churches, mosques, schools, universities, UN facilities and tent encampments, while targeting women, children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, journalists, healthcare workers and academics, among others. 

Yet, in the process, Israel has done more than devastate the besieged Gaza Strip. It has intensified an inevitable unravelling of its internal apartheid fabric, with significant implications for global neoliberal dominance.

As Israeli actions continue with impunity – backed by financial, diplomatic, and military support from Western countries, led by the United States, and complicity of many countries in the Global South – they threaten to trigger a cascade of global acts of fascistic aggression.

“All Eyes on Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v 3, IbisPaint, PS Express, 2024

The ethical fabric of human society 

An orderly society shares a common ethical fabric, upheld by taboos at its extremes. Taboos shape human communities by regulating behaviour, defining identity, maintaining social control, preserving cultural practices, protecting communities, and influencing norms.

Ethical boundaries define the societal mainstream and are typically codified by laws and enforcement practices. For example, the United States Constitution defines rights and restrictions, with evolving interpretations empowering or disempowering individuals within society.

Taboos can be broken in various ways: (i) Violation: Deliberate acts against the taboo, like incest or forbidden rituals; (ii) Ignorance: Unintentional breaking due to lack of awareness; (iii) Rebellion: Acts of defiance against societal norms; (iv) Cultural change: Evolution of societal values can modify or eliminate taboos, and; (v) Contextual exceptions: Taboos may be relaxed in specific contexts, such as religious ceremonies.

Breaking taboos can lead to social progress and dismantling oppressive norms but also cause social tensions and conflicts. Societies constantly face conflicts between forces aiming to stretch or shrink ethical boundaries to serve specific agendas — ideological, social, political, or economic. Taboos are deeply embedded in the human psyche, making their erosion a process that requires both resistance and persistence.

Trial balloons

Breaking taboos and redefining behavioural boundaries often start with experimentation – trial balloons. Successful experiments, where society is conditioned to accept change while maintaining structural integrity, set precedents that shatter taboos. If these experiments face little resistance and set precedents, ethical and moral boundaries may stretch, shifting society in a regressive or progressive direction. 

Importantly, trial balloons are effective within a broader context of a society primed for a particular change. In addition, an experiment must receive sufficient support so as to withstand a variety of challenges to its integrity, whether from within the society or external to it.  

For example, bombing of hospitals has been deemed a war crime. To justify targeting hospitals in the Gaza Strip, Israel initially claimed, with no proof, that there were Hamas command centres underneath Gaza’s hospitals.

On October 17, a massive explosion hit Al Ahli Hospital, causing hundreds of casualties. Israeli officials suggested a failed rocket launch by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) caused the explosion, while Palestinian authorities, reports from the ground and several independent investigations (e.g. see here) attributed it to an Israeli airstrike.

Regardless, the event was used by Israeli leaders as a trial balloon to assess public and imperial reaction to such a grave violation of a societal taboo.

Since it deemed opposition to it, most significantly the US, inconsequential, and despite the negative reaction of the West to a Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Ukraine in 2022, the Israeli military has targeted many more hospitals throughout the strip.

The Ahli Hospital incident was one of many trial balloons the Israelis carried out in Gaza, including the targeting of schools, UN facilities, universities and aid delivery convoys.

How Israel scapegoats to obscure criminality

 The calculated dehumanisation and scapegoating of the Palestinian people echo a historical pattern of white supremacist colonial atrocities masking subsequent land grabs and gangster-like corruption of society from its highest echelons.

In fact, current Israeli genocidal aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have served to conceal failures preceding October 7, and have extended to targeting any perceived and manufactured threats to the colony.

This signals an impending escalation of conflict between Israeli military/Zionist militias and opposition to apartheid and genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and within Israel itself.

Of particular concern are Arab citizens of Israel, constituting over 20% of Israel’s population, primarily identifying as Palestinian but also encompassing Druze, Circassians, other Muslims, Christian Arabs, and Armenians, all of whom are already subjected to an array of discriminatory laws. Such an escalation may very well unravel the existing apartheid structure of Israeli society, leading to civil chaos and its ultimate collapse.

Further, the genocidal imperial laboratory in Gaza could serve as a template for future aggressive episodes in the Global South and against dissent in the imperial core, potentially marking the beginning of the end for the neoliberal mirage of “the West” in which, under the guise of “promoting democracy” and “humanitarian interventions,” the United States and its allies in the global north have aimed to extend their capitalist dominance whilst disrespecting and attacking international legal bodies.

In this scenario, naked fascism constructed of US-imposed taboos and lack thereof would prevail, propelling a colonial race to plunder global resources while scapegoating BIPOC communities. Israeli actions thus serve as a trial balloon for continued US imperial corruption and exploitation on the road to climate change-induced international turmoil.

Resistance to erosion of taboos on the one hand, and the promotion of accountability for criminal actions toward decolonisation on the other, may serve to blunt this dangerous downward spiral toward lawlessness and violence.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.

The prime minister or Taoiseach of Ireland, Simon Harris, proclaimed, “Ireland’s decision is about keeping hope alive. It is about believing that a two-state solution is the only way for Israel and Palestine to live side by side in peace and security.”

The Irish government called for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

In his speech to parliament or the Dáil, Harris said,

“Last week, I expressed that recognition sends a message to those in Palestine who advocate and work for a future of peace and democracy. We fully respect your aspirations to be living freely in your own country, in control of your own affairs under your own leadership.

“In lockstep with our European colleagues, we aimed to be bearers of hope. We wanted to reaffirm our belief that peace is possible, justice is achievable, and that recognition of both states, Palestine and Israel, is the only cornerstone upon which that peace must be built. You cannot have a two-state solution without two states.

“We have long recognized the State of Israel and its right to exist in peace and security within internationally agreed borders.

“Today, we equally recognize the State of Palestine and its right to exist within internationally agreed borders. So, I want to conclude today by reiterating my statement from last week to the people of Palestine in the West Bank, in Gaza, in refugee camps, in exile, and those who joined us in the Dáil today and around the world.

“Here in Ireland, we see you, we recognize you, we respect you, and today Ireland formally recognizes the state of Palestine. Thank you.”

The center-right Irish government usually defers to the United States in foreign policy and it had repeatedly refused to impose sanctions on Israel for its long term occupation of the Palestinians. It is clear that the Israeli total war on Gaza for the past nearly 9 months, and the way in which the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly thumbed its nose at international legal institutions, was what changed Irish minds.

Harris went so far as to broach sanctions on Israel in reaction to Sunday evening’s bombing of a refugee tent camp in what had been declared a safe zone, which set fires that devoured some 45 persons, according to the BBC:

“Overnight we have seen Israel attack a displaced person centre, a place where parents were told to flee with their children, and they bombed it.

“In relation to sanctions, I don’t think anything can be off the table when it comes to Israel, particularly with what we’re seeing currently happening in Rafah now, when we’re seeing the international community being ignored, when we’re seeing international courts being ignored.”

PM Harris also condemned rising violence by Israeli squatters on Palestinian land against the indigenous population in the occupied West Bank, saying, “In today’s West Bank we see an extreme form of Zionism fuel settler violence and appropriation of land, illegal actions that largely go unchecked.”

The idea of sanctioning Israel had been earlier pushed by the opposition left wing party, Sinn Fein. Member of Parliament Matt Carthy, speaking a few days ago, had said, ““The state that we will now officially recognise has long endured oppression, occupation and apartheid. Today the people of Gaza face a relentless genocide . . . Israel must be held to account and meaningfully sanctioned for the ongoing gross violations of international law in Gaza and across Palestine.”

It is an impressive achievement for Netanyahu to have brought the whole spectrum of Irish politics, from the center right to the left, together.

The deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, Micheál Martin, said, according to Euronews, “Today’s decision by the Government represents our conviction that a political way forward is the only way to break the cycle of dispossession, subjugation, dehumanisation, terrorism and death that has marred the lives of Israelis and Palestinians for decades.”

Martin also excoriated Israel for the Rafah tent strike, calling it “barbaric,” according to the BBC:

“I condemn the violence . . . The rockets that were struck at Tel Aviv and the heinous attack on the Rafah tent refugee camp where innocent children and civilians were killed. What we witnessed last night is barbaric. Gaza is a very small enclave, densely populated conurbation.”

“One cannot bomb an area like that without shocking consequences in terms of innocent children and civilians.”

Martin predicted that more member states of the 27-state European Union will join in recognizing Palestine. Prior to Tuesday, Sweden, Cyprus, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria had recognized Palestine; for the eastern Europeans, that step was taken when they were Socialist states. Slovenia and Belgium are already weighing this decision. Countries get enormous pressure, and threats, from Israel and the United States to keep the Palestinians stateless and helpless and to de facto perpetuate the Apartheid situation imposed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In a formal statement posted to “X,” Martin said,

“Today’s Government decision authorises the establishment of full diplomatic relations with the State of Palestine. Subject to the formal request from the Palestinian authorities, the Government will upgrade the status of the Palestinian Mission in Ireland to that of an Embassy, and authorise the appointment of an Ambassador from the State of Palestine to Ireland.

“Our decision today also authorises the upgrading of the current Representative Office of Ireland in Ramallah to an Embassy.

“Recognition of Palestine is not the end of a process; it is the beginning. We are deeply committed to the pursuit of peace and support for Palestinian state-building. Ireland has reaffirmed this commitment over many decades, through intensive diplomacy and our long-standing development cooperation programme.

“It is vital that the Palestinian Authority is given the full backing of the international community in its reform and service delivery efforts and we will redouble our energies to this end.

“In recent days, I have held substantive discussions on the path ahead with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa and engaged with European and Arab partners on the Arab Peace Vision as a meaningful way forward in achieving peace.

“Ireland will continue to work closely with the Palestinian Authority, and our EU and international partners, in creating a political path that can stop this horrific conflict and humanitarian disaster, ensure the release of all hostages, and realise the vision of a sovereign, independent Palestinian State existing alongside the State of Israel in peace and security.”

The South African case has now been joined by Ireland, Egypt, Colombia, Libya, and Nicaragua, and Turkey says it too will join shortly. Egypt and Turkey have had strong trade and security relations with Israel and their decision to support Pretoria’s suit is a slap in the face of the Israeli government and a signal that Israel is losing what few friends it had in the region.

The Israeli government, given impunity from UNSC sanctions by the Biden administration, thumbed its nose at the injunctions and went on with its slaughterhouse policies. Adilah Hassim, one of several South African attorneys pressing Pretoria’s case, pointed to five pieces of evidence that the Rafah campaign is genocidal. At one point in her detailing of Israel’s atrocities she broke down. She said,

(1) First, Israel has continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza, including women and children, at an alarming rate.

(2) Second, as a result of Israel’s onslaught, Palestinians in Gaza are facing what the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations has described as the “worst humanitarian crisis” he has seen for more than 50 years.

(3) Third, Israel’s systematic targeting and bombardment of hospitals and medical facilities, and its throttling of humanitarian aid, has pushed Gaza’s medical system to collapse;

(4) Fourth, Israel’s direct attack and siege of Gaza’s biggest hospitals have led to the uncovering of mass graves evidencing Israeli massacres of Palestinians seeking shelter and medical treatment;

(5) Finally, most recently, Israel has intensified its attacks in the north while pressing on with its Rafah offensive leaving displaced Palestinians nowhere safe to go.

Video: Lawyer Adila Hassim Outlines ‘Genocidal Conduct’ in Gaza at South Africa’s ICJ Hearing Against Israel

Earlier in the trial, Vaughan Lowe, Chichele Professor of Public International Law in the University of Oxford and himself a barrister, explained that “Israel’s action is directed against the Palestinian people throughout Gaza and the West Bank. South Africa’s request was initially focused on Rafah, because of the imminent prospect of death and suffering on a massive scale resulting from Israel’s attack. Since that request was made, it has become increasingly clear that Israel’s actions in Rafah are part of the endgame in which Gaza is utterly destroyed as an area capable of human habitation.”

Professor Lowe is clearly flabbergasted that partisans of the far, far right Netanyahu government continue to attempt to gaslight us all and to assert that nothing out of the ordinary is happening in Gaza. To the contrary, he said, we have the “evidence of continued bombings, attacks on people in so-called ‘safe areas’ to which they have been directed by Israel, attacks on aid convoys, and of mass graves and the horrors of which the corpses speak.”

Lowe deals summarily with the smarmy claim that the Israeli government is only exercising its right to self defense: “First, the right of self-defence does not give a State a licence to use unlimited violence. No right of self-defence can ever extend to a right to inflict massive, indiscriminate violence and starvation collectively on an entire people. Second, nothing — not self-defence or anything else — can ever justify genocide. The prohibition on genocide is absolute, a peremptory norm of international law. Third, the Court ruled in 2004 that there is no right of self-defence by an occupying State against the territory that it occupies.” (Emphasis added.)

If I owned a fleet of small aircraft I’d arrange for these words to be sky-written over every major city in the world. What Lowe is saying is that in some instances, two legal principles might come into conflict with one another. Where, for instance, does free speech stop and libel begin? But there are some laws that trump others. Genocide is the ultimate in this regard. It trumps every other law. There is no legal principle you can invoke to justify genocide, not even the right to self-defense, which is enshrined in the UN Charter and is generally sacrosanct.

Remember this the next time you hear a glib US government spokesman dance around the Gaza genocide by saying that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas.

As Max du Plessis explained Israel’s command that Palestinians who had taken refuge in Rafah must now leave is genocidal in effect: “Not only is there nowhere for the 1.5 million displaced people and others in Rafah to safely flee — so much of Gaza having been reduced to rubble — but that if Rafah is similarly destroyed there will be little left of Gaza or prospects for the survival of Palestinian life in the territory.” In particular, he said, the last functioning hospitals are in Rafah, and if they are destroyed as all the others have been, health care in the Strip will be dead.

At the same time, du Plessis pointed out, virtually all aid has now been blocked by the Israeli government, which seized the Rafah border checkpoint from Egypt and closed it. Gaza cannot feed itself in the best of circumstances, but it is now a basket case needing hundreds of trucks of food and medical aid a day to survive. Hunger and disease are spreading, since most of the trucks are now barred.

Du Plessis said, “Deliberately herding 1.5 million Palestinians into Rafah and then carrying out a full-scale bombardment while sealing off entry and exit for life-saving aid to an already devastated population, while exposing them to famine and human suffering, leaves only one inference, regrettably, and that is of genocidal intent.”

Prominent attorney and senior counsel (SILK) Tembeka Ngcukaitobi pointed to the extensive statements made publicly by Israeli officials that prove their genocidal intent:

The Israeli Minister of Defence: Yoav Gallant said that Israel is “taking apart neighbourhood after neighbourhood” and “will reach every location” in Gaza.

Finance Minister and Cabinet heavyweight Bezalel Smotrich : “[T]here are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation.” He goes on to say: “We are negotiating with the ones that should not have existed for a long time.”

Ngcukaitobi cited reams of quotations showing genocidal intent from government officials — quotes that somehow I never see quoted by CNN anchors in the United States.

On January 26, the court had found that Israel was violating specific provisions of the Genocide Convention, to which Tel Aviv is signatory, regarding targeting a group of people because of their ethnicity:

(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and

(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

All of these genocidal actions have continued and intensified ever since.

( Human Rights Watch ) – This week, United States President Joe Biden announced that his administration has “held up” at least one shipment of 3,500 bombs and artillery shells to Israel, saying the US wouldn’t transfer certain weapons to Israel if it proceeded with an assault on the city of Rafah’s densely populated areas.

This partial pause on weapon transfers doesn’t go far enough in response to Israel’s international law violations and US rules on arms transfers. Nonetheless, Biden’s decision represents a shift from the unconditional support the US has offered Israel, particularly since Biden acknowledged that “civilians have been killed as a consequence of those bombs and other ways [Israel] goes after population centers.”

Biden should resist congressional opposition to the pause and go further. Immediately stopping all transfers of arms and military support would be consistent with the US’s international and domestic legal obligations.

Since November, Human Rights Watch has called for the suspension of arms transfers to Israel and Palestinian armed groups given the real risk that weapons would be used to commit grave abuses. Providing weapons that knowingly and significantly would contribute to unlawful attacks can make those providing them complicit in war crimes. Other human rights organizations and dozens of United Nations human rights experts have echoed with their own calls to stop transfers to Israel.

Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) considered Nicaragua’s legal challenge to bar Germany’s military assistance to Israel, among other things. The ICJ declined that request based on Germany’s assertion that it was not exporting any “war weapons” for use by Israeli forces. However, the court allowed the case to move forward and left the door open for a different outcome if Germany begins providing more “war weapons,” language that two legal scholars have characterized as “might hang like a sword of Damocles over States providing military support to Israel.” 

Several of the US’s Western allies have already revised their policies of supplying weapons to Israel. In March, Canada announced it would cease future arms exports to Israel. Italy and Spain also stopped new licenses.

Legal action has also effected changes in state policies. In the Netherlands, a lawsuit forced the government to pause sales of F-35 fighter jet parts. In Germany, civil society groups filed a similar suit seeking to stop weapon sales.

Mounting public and legal pressure is making it harder for governments such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Denmark to continue selling arms to Israel. Biden’s shift in tone will add to the pressure. In the face of continuing atrocities, “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, and Israel’s obstruction of aid for Gaza, these countries need to stop sending weapons now.

Human Rights Watch

Hordes of settlers continue to wreck havoc in Palestinian occupied territory .. another attack on Al-Mughair village near Ramallah that left a 35 year old man dead and so many houses and cars burnt. #ApartheidIsrael pic.twitter.com/pBcXuOMzqi

— Amal Jadou (@AmalJadou7) April 12, 2024

Palestinian civilians, especially in villages in area C have been abandoned by the world, and so, for that matter, have all the Palestinian populations facing the violence of armed Israeli settlers. The expansion of the Israeli settlements, considered illegal under International Law, and built on stolen Palestinian land, goes on at its fastest rate ever. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the diversion of the world’s attention by its barbaric assault on the Gaza strip to strengthen its grip on the West Bank.

According to a recent UN report which covers the period from November 1 2022 to October 31 2023, illegal Israeli settlements expanded at unprecedented rate since records began in 2017. Approximately, 24,300 units were advanced in existing Israeli settlements including 9670 in East Jerusalem. The same report also highlighted that about 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank including 465,000 mainly live in area C in the West bank and 230,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Displacement or small scale ethnic cleansing were also carried out against Palestinian herding communities. This uprooted about 1105 Palestinians from 28 herding communities from their land between January 2022 and September 2023. Further 878 people including 435 children from 15 herding communities were displaced between 7th and 23rd of October 2023.

The figure of 700,000 settlers is particularly alarming. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in 2002, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank was 380,000 settlers. This massive increase reflects how different Israeli governments worked tirelessly to almost double the number of settlers in the West Bank in 21 years. Such a doubling was also pursued by Israel after it signed the Oslo Accord with the PLO in1993, promising to withdraw from the Palestinian territories by 1997.

It is ironic that the Oslo Accords which were supposed to lead to peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, were followed by the creation of ever more Israeli settlements after dividing the West Bank into areas A, B and C, killing any hope for just peace. To illustrate, area A is about 18 percent of the West Bank and encompasses the main urban areas. Most matters there are under the authority of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B is about 21 percent of the West Bank. It is under joint control between Israel and the PA , which affects health, education and the economy. 60 percent of the West Bank is area C. It is mainly rural, and is where the Palestinians have their main agricultural land, so that it is crucial for their food security. Israel is in full control in this area.

The Israeli refusal to withdraw as agreed enabled Israel to deny the Palestinians permits to build new homes in most of the West Bank while construction in the illegal Israeli settlements was accelerated. These discriminatory policies forced desperate Palestinians to build without Israeli permission. Many of those who dared to do so had their homes demolished by Israel. Between 2009 and 2022, 9,128 Palestinian homes were demolished, causing the displacement of 13,171 Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government offers the Israeli settlers a wide range of financial incentives and subsidies, including but not exclusive of grants and preferential loans to buy property, reduced land prices, reduced taxes for individual and businesses and crucially, indemnity to compensate for any loss of income resulting from EU custom duties. This institutional racism is another manifestation of an apartheid state and settler colonialism.

CBC News Video: “West Bank engulfed by wave of settler violence”

For economic reasons, these racist policies are designed to encourage more Israelis to live on stolen Palestinian land in breach of the international law. This strategy is aimed at easing the demand on housing inside Israel and speeding up its colonization of the West Bank ahead of its declared plan to annex area C to Israel. These policies, combined with the settlers violence will force more Palestinians out of area C towards the already crowded and smaller areas of A and B. This is already causing property price inflation and decreasing affordability. Additionally, these areas are already subjected to frequent Israeli raids, sieges and extrajudicial executions. This is besides other socioeconomic problems such as unemployment and poverty caused mainly by the Israeli occupation.

While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.

The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

Israel’s government was so furious at Joe Biden for abstaining rather than vetoing the resolution that it has canceled a planned trip to Washington. But this intransigence in the face of international law and international institutions could end up hurting Israel severely. Since the state is already under scrutiny for committing genocide by the International Court of Justice, its truculence and defiance of the UNSC can only harm its case.

In a further blow to Israeli policy, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 of the UN Human Rights Council, issued a report Monday entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide.

Albanese, an attorney with degrees from Pisa and SOAS in London, has worked for a decade with the UN on human rights law. She is also at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University as an Affiliate Scholar.

Her report begins, “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza.” She points out that the Israeli military has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, included over 13,000 children, and has wounded 71,000. She says that not only has 80% of the population been made refugees but 70% of the areas where people lived have been destroyed. So they have no place to return to. Corpses have decayed “in homes, in the street or under the rubble.”

The report concludes that Israel’s policies in Gaza give “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

The Special Rapporteur finds that Israeli authorities are misusing and distorting the international law governing the prosecution of war (jus in bello), disregarding their function in protecting innocent civilian noncombatants, “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In other words, Israeli officials’ invocation of international humanitarian law is nothing more than a “camouflage.”

The Special Rapporteur argues that genocidal projects are inherent in settler-colonial states. She cites the mass killings of the Native Americans in the US, the First Nations in Australia, and the Herrero in Namibia. Since the settler-colonial state covets the land and the resources of the native people, it has a motive for provoking the disintegration of the native people’s social institutions and very identity.

AJ+ Video: “How Israeli TV Sells Gaza’s Destruction”

The report alleges, “Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be ‘re-colonized’ and its population as invaders to be expelled. These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the ‘exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people’ on the land of ‘Greater Israel’, as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.”

One of the problems for the Israeli government’s attempts to defend itself against charges of genocide is how openly and volubly Netanyahu and his cronies have proclaimed their intentions and the racist bases for them.

Turning to the charges of genocide, the report notes that in just the first few months of the current Israeli campaign against Gaza, the Israeli army deployed

a) over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on countless buildings

b) that these targets were chosen using Artificial Intelligence

c) that the Israeli military dropped 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs in “densely populated areas” and even on the “safe zones” declared by that very Israeli military.

d) The Israelis killed an average of 250 people a day in this period, including 100 children a day, destroying entire neighborhoods and necessary infrastructure.

Albanese points out that by early December, the Israeli government was alleging that it had killed “7,000 terrorists” in Gaza. But at that point only 5,000 adult males had been killed, so it is clear that the Israeli authorities considered all of them terrorists.

In a compelling bit of reasoning, she points out that “This is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.” That is, the Israeli government’s triumphalist statistics are themselves genocidal.

She estimates moreover, that 10 children are dying of acute malnutrition daily that that over 500,000 Palestinians could die from malnutrition and poor health conditions in 2024.

So that’s the first element of genocide, “Killing members of the group.”

The report then goes down the other criteria for genocide. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group?” Check. This includes depriving them of needed medicines and inflicting psychological harm.

Then there is “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Check.

Here she mentions the destruction of 77% of healthcare facilities, 68% of telcoms, almost 50% of roads, and 60% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, all the universities, 60% of schools, etc.

What about “Genocidal intent”? Check.

The Israeli officials have made this one a no-brainer. Albanese writes,

50. In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced.150 High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent, including as follows: (a) President Isaac Herzog stated that “an entire nation out there…is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”;151 (b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek”152 and “monsters”.153 The Amalek reference is to a biblical passage in which God commands Saul “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”.154 (c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals”,155 and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints…”

Finally, the Israeli military has subverted basic principles of international humanitarian law, which makes a key distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In essence, Israel’s government has treated all Palestinians in Gaza as combatants. Moreover, the Israeli military has declared all civilian institutions to be Hamas “power centers,” obliterating the distinction between hospitals and military garrisons. While such “objects” can be legitimate targets if they are used by the enemy for military purposes, they are only targets while they are so being used. Israel’s army is treating them as legitimate targets if they ever were or potentially might be used by Hamas. It is thus ignoring the distinction between military and civilian objects.

He continued, “It is not a war between soldiers and soldiers. It is a war between a well equipped army on the one hand and women and children on the other.”

Lula is not the first world leader to compare Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Hitler over his actions in Gaza — Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan made the same comparison.

Since Hitler murdered six million Jews, the comparison is hurtful. It could also be rejected on grounds of scale. Hitler not only killed all those European Jews, he also killed 6 million Poles. And consider Ukraine: “of the 41.7 million people living in Ukrainian Soviet Republic before the war, only 27.4 million were alive in Ukraine in 1945. Official data says that at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 – 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed at the front. The data varies between 8 to 14 million killed, however, only 6 million have been identified.”

The Times and the Sunday Times Video: “Brazil’s Lula likens Gaza war to Holocaust”

While Netanyahu’s policies are not like those of Nazi Germany in almost any respect if we consider absolute numbers and consider the scale of killing, Lula is not completely in error if we consider more qualitative aspects of history and look to European fascism as a whole and not just the German National Socialists (who were peculiar in many ways).

FIRST: KEEPING PEOPLE STATELESS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY

For instance, the Fascists stripped citizenship from millions of people and made them stateless, without the rights that come from a direct relationship to a state of their own. Chief Justice Earl Warren defined citizenship as “the right to have rights.”

Hitler took citizenship from German Jews but also from the Roma and from persons of African heritage.

Netanyahu keeps 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories stateless and without citizenship. So his policies in this narrow regard are similar to those of the National Socialists in the 1930s. In essence, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are living under something like the Nuremberg Laws. Their establishments and homes are attacked by militant Israeli squatters with impunity in a sort of rolling Kristallnacht.

Note that by Israeli law, Israeli squatters in the occupied Palestinian territories have all the citizenship rights of other Israelis. So the lack of rights on the West Bank is not territorial. It is by ethnicity.

Netanyahu has boasted about derailing the Oslo Peace Accords and presents himself as the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state from being established. He reiterated his opposition to any international diplomatic track that leads to a Palestinian state just this weekend.

SECOND: DEPRIVATION OF BASIC INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Another feature of Fascism, underlined by Robert Paxton, is the elimination of individual rights. Israel’s regime over the occupied, stateless Palestinians fully demonstrates this feature. Palestinians can be arrested under “administrative detention” without charge or trial or habeas corpus and held for months or years. We have seen a treatment of detained Palestinians in Gaza that constitutes war crimes. It is alleged that forms of torture are practiced.

THIRD: TOTAL WAR

Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has demonstrated a reckless disregard for the lives of innocent noncombatants, who make up nearly all of the nearly 30,000 people so far killed, and who have been deprived of domiciles and sufficient food and potable water by the Israeli military.

Total war was adopted as a military strategy by fascist states, according to historian Alan Kramer. One academic summarized his argument: “Kramer indicated a very interesting question regarding the specificity of the kind of war implemented by fascist regimes during the thirties and the forties, characterized by its genocidal nature and opened, according to him, with the colonial war launched by Italy in Abyssinia [Ethiopia] in 1935. Kramer underlined that the specificity of this particular way of waging war typical of fascism would define itself by the final elimination of the «distinction between combatants and non-combatants», pointing how in the six years of this conflict between 350.000 and 760.000 Ethiopians were killed, victims of an asymmetric war based on the overwhelming use of air force, chemical weapons and politics of collective terror against any sign of real or imagined resistance.”

The fascist way of war eliminates the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and wreaks mass death on the latter to achieve military aims. There doesn’t seem much doubt that Netanyahu is waging total war on Gaza and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and a whole plethora of Israeli officials have repeatedly insisted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. This, even though half of Gaza’s population consists children.

Total war easily leads to genocide, of course, which is why the International Court of Justice has found it at least plausible that Netanyahu is waging a genocide in Gaza, attempting to destroy a people in part or in whole because of who they are.

So, no, Netanyahu is not a Hitler. But, yes, his policies bear a strong resemblance to those of inter-war Fascism.