Despair is the currency of massacre / by Lital Khaikin

_{^{All Out for Gaza demonstration in Montréal, Tuesday, October 17, 2023. Photo by Lital Khaikin.}}

How deflecting from the Palestinian humanitarian crisis to the ‘Israel-Hamas’ war enables continued apartheid

_{Reposted from Canadian Dimension}

“More than 20,000 Palestinians have perished in the new war,” reads a newspaper photo caption citing December’s death toll since the beginning of the Israeli siege. A young girl reading in a café remarks to her father, “Why? They call it a war, but it was an attack. Israel completely demolished Gaza.”

When Israel predictably bombs Palestinians every year, the episodic tragedy beckons many back to the writing of academic and literary critic Edward Said. Beyond documenting the cyclical nature of Israeli apartheid since the Nakba, Said’s essays anchor the politicization of emotion within the history of crisis in Palestine. What Said saw unravelling from the neglect—internationally and by Palestine’s own elected officials—of Palestine’s humanitarian crisis and the continuity of Israeli apartheid in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, has never been more urgent. The inability to address the racist and classist policies of repressive states is only adding fodder to reactive extremism and eroding ideological diversity in anti-imperialist resistance.

The Palestinian humanitarian crisis has long since been reduced to a story of periodic suffering and a media sandbox topic for the perfection of algorithms. Canadian policy-makers pay marginal attention to the daily reality of the IDF’s detention and murder of Palestinian civilians at Israeli checkpoints, inhumane medical and living conditions, targeting and murder of journalists, bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, and restricted mobility in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, now reduced to rubble.

In response to the massacre of around 1,200 Israelis by Hamas militants at a music festival, Israel launched the opening salvo of its assault on Gaza in October. In the months since, the siege has been rebranded as the “Israel-Hamas war.” A status update from the Times of Israel in December assures the world that the war is “almost half done,” while months of continued fighting are still expected. With December’s campaign against Hamas through a siege on northern Gaza, Israel is pursuing “full operational control” to continue expanding its illegal settlements. The Times founding editor David Horovitz has transparently described this as “a situation that is supposed to enable the beginning of a return and rebuilding of communities in sovereign Israel.”

For a nation pushed day after day against Israel’s wall of execution, this past year is on record as the deadliest since 2005, when the United Nations started systematically documenting Palestinian casualties. In the week of October 13 alone, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported the killing of at least 1,900 Palestinians and the injury of 7,699 people in Gaza.

Following the bombing of al-Alhi Hospital, Ramallah-based human rights organization al-Haq denounced the continued carpet-bombing of Gaza. Human Rights Watch called out the IDF’s use of white phosphorous munitions in Israeli airstrikes targeting Gaza and Lebanon in October. In light of this, Israel has still not signed and is not bound by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons which prohibits the use of the chemical weapons in areas with dense civilian populations.

Predictably, the United States rushed to provide a $14.3 billion (USD) military aid package to the IDF, one of the world’s most technologically advanced and well-funded militaries. And despite Justin Trudeau decrying Israel’s “killing of women, of children, of babies” in Gaza, Canadian military exports to Israel are nearly as high as during the First Intifada. Last year alone, Canada exported over $21 million (CAD) worth of military goods including bombs, torpedoes and missiles, aircraft, and electronic equipment.

In the initial weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza, protests in downtown Montréal shut down the streets from the US embassy to the steps of the Israeli embassy. On Friday, October 13, the groups Palestinian Youth Movement, Al Raya Dawson, SPHR Concordia, Academics for Palestine, and Montreal4Palestine organized emergency protests as Israel issued an evacuation order to civilians in Gaza.

Essential services have long been a weapon in the IDF’s arsenal, and, true to form, Israel cut off water and electricity to Gaza in October. While IDF Colonel Elad Goren proclaimed that there was enough water to satisfy humanitarian needs when Israel reopened pipes and about half the usual supply of water in October, Gaza had depended on Israel supplying roughly 49 million litres of water per day on average prior to the siege. Contrary to the IDF’s claims on fulfilling humanitarian needs, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) continued to report a shortage of food and water through November, and an outbreak of waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid.

With this dependency on Israeli infrastructure and vendors, Palestinians have long lacked sufficient access to clean drinking water. Some communities in northern Gaza, like areas of Beit Lahiya, have historically lacked access to safe drinking water for the majority of their citizens. Electricity blackouts are simply routine.

Médecins sans frontières (MSF) called for an end to the “egregious level of collective punishment currently being meted out to the people of Gaza” and for restoring “unconditional humanity,” emphasizing that medical workers and emergency responders cannot work safely in Gaza. The MSF reported that surgeons at al-Shifa hospital had been operating without painkillers. Medical and emergency supplies could not pass through the Rafah crossing in and out of Egypt, although it was eventually opened. Impeding the free movement of medical staff and supplies in conflict zones is in violation of the Geneva Fourth Convention and has been condemned by the UN Third Committee.

In the wake of the bombing of al-Alhi Hospital (Al-Maamadani) on October 17, Palestinian organizers called supporters to strike. In December, calls for a strike in Montréal continued. Several actions have taken place since, including sit-ins, vigils, the national march on Ottawa, and independent strikes like a Gazette columnist putting her collaboration with Postmedia on hold to protest Canadian media coverage of Palestine.

Palestinian trade unions—including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (Gaza), the General Union of Palestinian Teachers, and the General Union of Palestinian Women—have called on unions globally to refuse manufacturing and transporting weapons to Israel, and to lobby their governments to end military trade with Israel. Members of the CSU/SCP (the Canadian Staff Union, working at CUPE) passed a resolution to respond to the call from Palestinian trade unions, and to protect workers from being punished or silenced for opposing the Israeli occupation.

World Beyond War has called for an end to Canadian companies profiting from Israeli apartheid through the export of weapons, weapon components and military technologies. Labour Against the Arms Trade and Labour 4 Palestine have taken actions like blockading the facilities of Toronto-based INKAS, a company specializing in security technologies and armoured vehicles that sells supplies to Israel.

Many community groups and arts organizations across Montréal have shown continued solidarity through an open letter initiated by CERAS (South Asia Forum), with supporters including South Asian Diaspora Action Collective (SADAC), Québec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG), Climate Justice Montréal, and the Québec Writers’ Federation.

But ask solidarity groups for a comment on the current siege, and you’ll receive a statement that could very well have been unchanged for years, worn out by being ineffectually trotted out to the media. Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) shared a link to a statement decrying the distortion of Judaism in the service of Israeli apartheid: “It is time to draw a distinction between Zionism—the cult of right-wing Jewish supremacy—and Judaism, the Jewish religion of transcendence and tolerance.” Following the censure over the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in November, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) published the statement: “It cannot be inherently violent to call for your own dignity to be respected, and to label the Palestinian quest for freedom as inherently antisemitic or actively violent is Islamophobic and a form of anti-Palestinian racism.”

Year after year, the Palestinian humanitarian crisis continues to be mired in a war of rhetoric and the tired conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and the defence of Palestinian human rights with “terrorism.” Year after year, human rights groups like Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemn Israel’s permanent state of apartheid that continues without censure or penalty as the international community watches the Zionist state play bingo with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’s checklist of war crimes.

**_{All out for Gaza demonstration in Montreal, Friday October 13, 2023 | Photo by Lital Khaikin.}**

Why is there silence around the extrajudicial killings and political assassinations carried out by the Israeli right-wing fundamentalist Zionist government as it pursues the eradication of Hamas and rounds up Palestinian “military-aged” men—including Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab) correspondent Diaa Al-Kahlout—for detention, interrogation and torture at Beersheba prison? Does the targeting of Gaza’s Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, or the assassination of the West Bank’s Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouiri in Beirut, not deserve the same scrutiny by the UN as the extrajudicial assassination of Iranian military general Qassem Souleimani?

In Canadian media, Palestine cannot be said to exist as an autonomous political entity with an internal complexity of class struggle, labour rights, women’s rights, electoral politics, and its own renditions of political corruption. Hamas is only part of this story. Despite the exaggerations of Palestinian support for the extremist right-wing Islamist party and the discomfort it provokes, there are deeper roots to the past decades’ gradual shift in popular support toward Hamas.

A recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) reported that support for Hamas has risen in the West Bank; its leadership is more appealing than the prospect of governance under the Palestinian Authority, even without President Mahmoud Abbas at the helm. While Gaza burns, the West Bank has only flickered through the headlines as Israel killed more civilians between January and October than in any year since 2005. The majority of respondents want the current Palestinian president to resign.

That the name of Abbas has not even been uttered for almost a decade at Canadian solidarity protests is an echo of the disillusionment with political leadership in Palestine. Nor is it an accident that protest organizers in Montréal did not once invoke the UAE or Saudi Arabia when roll-calling representation from the Arab states at demonstrations this fall. The Gulf states are understood to be aiding and abetting US imperialism and the genocide in Yemen, and participating in the resource race for key trade corridors in the Horn of Africa.

The discontent of younger generations born after the Oslo Accords was apparent in a statement by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) in 2020 that called for the mobilization of young Palestinian voters and international youth movements against the incompetence of the Palestinian government under Abbas: “to affirm that the leadership of the Palestinian Authority does not represent our people and is outside the ranks of our national struggle.”

Abbas is keenly aware of the lack of support from the people he is supposed to be representing and defending: he derailed the anticipated May 2021 elections when he sensed an erosion of voter support in the wake of Sheikh Jarrah and Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza. Israel’s bombing of Gaza that month took out four residential high-rises and damaged thousands of civilian buildings, with growing incidents in Israeli settler violence reported the following year.

Arafat was similarly derided for being holed up in Ramallah as his government lost the faith and respect of Palestinians in the years leading up to the majority election of Hamas to the Palestinian parliament in 2006. In 2001, Edward Said wrote: “It is a self-sacrificing spirit of human and moral solidarity with his people that Arafat’s leadership so fatally lacks. I am afraid that this terrible absence has now almost completely marginalized him and his ill-fated and ineffective Authority.”

“It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings and cause,” he wrote the following year, days before Israeli forces razed the villages of ‘Abasan and Khuza’a. “There is thus no strong moral centre in the Arab world today.”

In the absence of international accountability for Israeli genocide and daily conditions of apartheid, it is no wonder Palestine has increasingly rallied behind the leadership of Hamas. After all, only one form of self-defence is justified: that of the oppressor defending their right to oppress. This much has been made clear in the Israeli and US refusal of Abbas’ negotiations for a ceasefire without “the destruction of Hamas,” as Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan described it.

Back in October, an open letter by the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Students stated: “The unfathomable crime of silence and complicity perpetuated by the entire world— including Arab and Muslim regimes under the oppressive power of American impositions—are openly supportive of genocide or mute witness to the crimes of settlers.” That silence has been decades long. Is it not a deeply Jewish question to ask how much longer a people are supposed to remain complacent in their own destruction?

The open letter ends with the observation: “[…] Now that our resistance has used guerrilla war tactics, we have now become the oppressors?!” This refers to the criminalization of Palestinian resistance to the apartheid conditions imposed on people in Gaza and the West Bank since the Nakba, and to the sustained dependency on the Israeli state for essential services, the right of movement, and even the fundamental right to exist. That the Birzeit letter refers to “guerilla war tactics” speaks volumes about frustrated and fruitless efforts to hold Israel accountable for decades of illegal settlements and police-state brutality, and the absurdity of the occupying state playing the victim.***

The unstable growth of support for Hamas is a negation, not an affirmation: the Islamist party’s religious fundamentalist core contributes to bolstering the Israeli state agenda of eradicating the last remnants of Palestinian autonomy and further incentivizing regime-change in the Middle East and North Africa.

Said predicted the erosion of secular resistance to Israeli imperialism in the years following the Oslo Accords—when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) renounced terrorism and Israel recognized its leadership. Said saw hardline religious fanaticism gaining power in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, emerging out of the corruption and ineptitude that shook faith in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.

“How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics, and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world,” he wrote, “as roundly and earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West?”

Despite acknowledging the reality of growing religious fundamentalism in the Palestinian liberation movement, he wrote on the conflation of criticizing US and Israeli imperialism with condoning terrorism: “Intellectually, morally, politically, such an attitude is disastrous since the equation between understanding and condoning is profoundly wrong and very far from being true.” Such conflation erases empathy and denies the “common sense of anguish” of people living in literal entrapment in the Palestinian territories.

As the Israeli siege continues through the Judeo-Christian holiday season, mainstream media has been turning its attention from the plight of ordinary Palestinians to the “Axis of Resistance,” a union of Sunni and Shiite militant groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (or Houthis). When the Houthis targeted Israeli-owned or -bound ships in the Red Sea with rockets and drones, this attack was described by journalist Rami Khouri as the “first serious coordinated battlefield action” by the Axis of Resistance beyond Gaza.

The most recent deflection from the Palestinian struggle for liberation toward the war against Hamas and the “Axis of Resistance” recalls the use of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as, in Said’s words, “stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination”. In the weeks preceding the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, Canada, Australia and other NATO allies, this association resulted in an “inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances.”

This fall in Montréal, lofty rhetoric of anti-terrorism spawned from the “Israel-Hamas” war followed the well-worn grooves from government statements and media language guidebooks to the streets. After a protest in October, drunken passersby on Sainte-Catherine street point and laugh at “les terrorists”: a group of laughing young women in hijabs walking with Palestinian flags.

Since October, weekend protests have become routine in downtown Montréal—another event to attend with friends on the weekend. Shoppers no longer linger as long beside the Palestinian flags, banners and keffiya patterning the blocks between the Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Victoria’s Secret storefronts.

Said was correct when he wrote back in 2001 that the US war against terrorism was stirring things up in “ways that might not be containable”. Where he was incorrect, however, was in his optimistic evaluation that “there is no way to continue indefinitely a thirty-five-year-old occupation.”

So it is that year after year, it takes the spectacle of massacre to bring attention to the indignity of life under Israeli occupation. While the written word itself is not enough to stop bombs, it is a conduit of memory, continuity and dignity in crisis. The written word preserves names when rubble is cleared, faces uncovered, and flags disintegrated. It exists to find sense in the senseless. It lends numbers to crimes, letters to politicians, and hope—as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “the twin of despair.” Darwish, who had criticized the extremist elements of Hamas, knew well what words, verses and songs meant in the face of inhumanity battling inhumanity.

There is no nation smaller than its poem
But weapons make words too big for the living
and the dead who inhabit the living
And letters make the sword on the dawn’s belt glitter
til the desert becomes parched for songs or drowns in them.

_{Lital Khaikin is an author and journalist based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). She has published articles in Toward Freedom, Warscapes, Briarpatch, and the Media Co-op, and has appeared in literary publications like 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Tripwire, and Black Sun Lit’s “Vestiges” journal. She also runs The Green Violin, a slow-burning samizdat-style literary press for the free distribution of literary paraphernalia.}

Let Them Eat Cement / by Chris Hedges

_{^{Image Made in Israel / by Mr. Fish via chrishedges.substack.com/}}

_{Reposted from the Chris Hedges Report}

Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.

Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.

The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.”

The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.

The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel.

Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners

“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”

Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.

The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.

Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest.

It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.

Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.

A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.

The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid trucks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.

Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza.

The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.

When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.

Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled.

Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.

Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.

“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.

Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.

“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.

Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem.

Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.

Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.

Israel makes no secret about its intentions.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.”

Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”

The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.

“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.

“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”

“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”

Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class? What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?

“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”

Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed.

_{Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for fifteen years for The New York Times. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is host of the Emmy Award–nominated RT America show On Contact. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University, is the author of numerous books, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has taught college credit courses through Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system since 2013.}

_{The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.}