The big men are all deaf; they don't want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street in cleated boots (Sylvia Plath, 11 September 1950)
We warned you: the wholesale destruction of Gaza was not an exception, it was a blueprint to crush anyone who opposes the plutocratic imperialism embodied by US/Israel and their global allies. Act now: defend int[ernational] law from lawlessness, before the rupture becomes irreversible.
A bloodstained backpack left after the Israeli-US missile strike on Minab elementary girls’ school, Iran, February 28, 2026. BDS.
On February 28, Mark Carney issued a statement on what he delicately termed the “Iran-related hostilities throughout the Middle East.” He did not call them the “Israel-initiated hostilities” or the “US-initiated hostilities,” despite the fact that the hostilities originated in a so-called “preemptive strike” on Iran by Israel and the US earlier that day.
“Canada,” the PM’s statement proclaimed, “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security” (my emphasis). This was a clear endorsement not only of the (purported) political objectives of the US military action, but of the action itself.
Preemptive massacres
So what, exactly, is Canada supporting? Equally to the point, what is it opposing?
During the first round of strikes, Israeli and US missiles assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with his daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law. Khamenei’s wife died from her injuries on March 2. The IDF boasted of taking out 40 top Iranian commanders “in the first minute” of the attack, including armed forces chief of staff Maj.-Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi.
So successful were these targeted assassinations that on March 3 Donald Trump told reporters that “Most of the people we had in mind [to succeed Khameini] are dead … And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”
Military and political leaders were not the only casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the first day of the war left 555 dead across Iran. Bombings have continued every day since, with the capital Tehran being especially hard hit. By March 5 the death toll had reached 1,230—more than the number of people killed in the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023, which appalled the world and precipitated Israel’s Gaza “war.”
Thousands of kilometers away off the coast of Sri Lanka “an American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.” I quote US secretary of war—he’s no longer called secretary of defense—Pete Hegseth. Eighty-seven bodies were recovered.
The war has meantime spread to Lebanon, where Israel is carpet-bombing and has ordered more than half-a-million people to evacuate Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Most horrifically, a missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran killed at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12.
Israel disowns the Minab massacre, stating that it has not “found any connection to our operations.” The Pentagon is “investigating,” but Pete Hegseth has assured the world that “we of course never target civilian targets” and US secretary of state Marco Rubio protests “The United States would not deliberately target a school.”
Neither Carney nor foreign minister Anita Anand have yet uttered a word of regret about the Minab slaughter. In fact, they haven’t mentioned it at all. But while remaining silent on what—at the least—is a tragic instance of collateral damage, they rushed to condemn the “strikes carried out by Iran on civilian infrastructure across the Middle East.”
According to Anand, it is Iran’s retaliatory strikes, not the the Israeli-US aggression that Canada supports, that “represent an unacceptable escalation and a blatant attempt to further destabilize the region.” The first European leader to publicly react to the war, EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, also denounced Iran’s “reckless and indiscriminate strikes” as “a blatant violation of … sovereignty and a clear breach of international law,” without mentioning, still less condemning, the Israeli-US actions that provoked them.
This is self-evidently absurd. Asked by NBC News why Iran was attacking US bases in neighboring Gulf states, the Iranian foreign minister gave the only appropriate response: “Um, because you’re bombing us from those bases? What do you want me to say?”
Value-based realism?
Carney’s backing for the Israeli-US strikes on Iran came as a nasty shock to many in Canada and abroad in light of his widely-acclaimed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos little more than a month earlier.
Carney began his Davos speech by acknowledging “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics—where the large, main power—is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” But, he argued,
the other countries, particularly intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.
Invoking former Czech president Václav Havel’s parable of the Prague greengrocer who places a sign in his window every morning reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it but “to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along,” Carney urged: “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Middle powers like Canada should adopt “value-based realism” in foreign policy. He presented this approach as
both principled and pragmatic—principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
Carney’s value-based realism seems to have crumbled in the face of its first test.
Odious as the ayatollahs’ regime may be when judged from the standpoint of human rights as proclaimed—though not always honored—by the West, the Israeli-US attack has unquestionably violated Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is manifestly not consistent with the UN Charter or international law.
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states categorically that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” However evil a regime may be, force may only be used in pursuit of regime change if the UN Security Council has authorized it.
While Article 51 permits the use of force in self defence, this has been understood to mean “in response to an actual or truly imminent armed attack.” Preemptive defensive action is admissible only when the risk of attack is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” (the so-called Caroline Test).
This was not the case here. Notwithstanding White House press secretary’s Karoline Leavitt’s assertion that “The president had a feeling … based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States,” administration officials told congressional staff in private briefings on March 1 that “U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S.” Do Trump’s feelings now override international law?
A war of choice
Whether the US action was undertaken to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, as Carney says, must also be seriously doubted. It is more likely a pretext for war, just like George W. Bush’s false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction during the lead-up to the 2003 Gulf War. The difference in this case is that the US has not even gone through the motions of seeking UN support for the attack.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities when it bombed them back in June 2025. This may just be typical Trumpian bluster, but on March 3 Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said his inspectors had not uncovered any evidence of “a systematic and structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.”
Before the attack, negotiations on the nuclear issue were well underway between Iran and the US, and seemed headed for a favorable outcome. The Omani foreign minister, who was mediating the talks, told CBS News “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan on February 27 that he was confident “a peace deal is within our reach.”
Iran, he explained, was prepared to agree to a deal in which it “will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb”; its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium would be “down blended to the lowest level possible … and converted into fuel”; and there would be “full and comprehensive verification by the IAEA.”
Asked whether he feared that “Israel is planning to take a first strike, even though the U.S. and Iran are agreeing to talk,” Albusaidi replied “I hope that is not the case.”
This fear likely explains why the Omani minister went public in the first place. As Triti Parsi points out, he wanted to make clear to the world that although “what has actually been achieved in the negotiations is quite unprecedented … everything indicates that Trump won’t take yes for an answer. That he will start a war of choice very soon.”
Marco Rubio later let the cat out of the bag when he told the press that the “imminent armed attack” that led the US to launch its so-called “preemptive defensive strike” was in fact Israel’sstrike on Iran. The logic is straight out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:
The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action [against Iran], we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.
Stung by the suggestion that he could possibly be Bibi Netanyahu’s puppet, Donald Trump subsequently denied that the US was “pushed into war” by Israel (“I think they [Iran] were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand”). But this only confirms that this indeed was a war of choice.
The fault line in our foreign policy
Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack has copped a lot of flak in Canada and beyond. Lloyd Axworthy—no “radical left lunatic,” but a well-respected former foreign minister in Jean Chrétien’s government—called out the glaring hypocrisy:
Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.
We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans—whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat—doing the bombing.
Axworthy is only echoing Carney’s own admission in Davos “that international law [was] applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
“The double standard is obvious,” Axworthy goes on: “when Russia uses force without lawful grounds [as in the invasion of Ukraine], it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.”
More importantly, in the context of this article, Axworthy questions whether supporting the US in this illegal war is remotely in Canada’s national interest—precisely because of the new world disorder (or as Sandra Kendzior dubs it, the “no world order”) described by Carney, within which “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu … ”
“We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together,” Carney continued. This means, among other things, “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals” (my emphasis).
Not only, then, is Canada’s support for the Israeli-US war on Iran unprincipled. It is also, on Carney’s own premises, unpragmatic. “For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security,” Axworthy concludes, “that is not realism; it is recklessness.”
If Canada condones the US attack on Iran, then what will we say if Trump decides to make good on his repeated threats to absorb Greenland (“I think we’re going to have it”) and make Canada “a cherished and beautiful 51st state”? Who will be there for us?
Putting the signs back up
Mark Carney is far from stupid, and though he may be a novice in politics his experience of moving in the top circles of international governance is unrivalled among Canadians. He knows that—as he later admitted to a Toronto Star reporter—”the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada” and that the attack is “prima facie inconsistent with international law.”
He must also be well aware that his endorsement of the US action will dismay many of his supporters—not just among the progressive left, but more centrist Canadian opinion—not least because what allowed him to overturn the enormous lead Pierre Poiliévre had in opinion polls and win the federal election was his perceived willingness to stand up to American bullying. His slogan “Elbows Up!” was a stroke of genius, summoning up the shades of Gordie Howe and Terry Fox to come to the aid of the nation in its hour of need.
The first Canadian opinion poll since the Israeli-US strike on Iran, from Angus Reid, does not bode well for Carney: 35% supported the attack, 48% opposed it, and 17% were unsure. Most worrying for the Liberal government was the finding that just 17% of past Liberal voters—in other words, those who elected Carney—supported his position.
Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack also manifestly does nothing for our standing with the middle powers with whom he sought to cooperate in “building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored … something bigger, better, stronger, more just …” So what gives?
Carney didn’t have to endorse Trump’s attack on Iran. So the inevitable question arises: why did he?
For Spain read spine
Carney is not the only one to find himself impaled on the horns of this dilemma. The US-Israel attack on Iran led to uncertainty as to how to respond across western capitals.
Though Norway’s PM Gahr Støre complained that “The attacks this morning and the spreading of the conflict to Iran’s neighbouring countries is not in line with international law,” Spain was the only EU member to condemn the US-Israeli attack outright.
Prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused the US permission to use jointly-operated bases for launching strikes on Iran, leading Trump to threaten “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.” Sanchez was unbowed, stating thathis country “will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world—and that is also contrary to our values and interests—simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”
On March 4 Karoline Leavitt assured reporters “I think [Spain] heard the president’s message yesterday loud and clear. It is my understanding over the past several hours they’ve agreed to cooperate with the US military.”
Whether this is a sign of American insecurity or just another regular White House Lie™ I can’t say, but José Manuel Albares soon set the record straight:
The Spanish government’s position on the war in the Middle East, the bombings in Iran, and the use of our bases has not changed one iota. Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal … She may be the White House press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m telling her that our position hasn’t changed at all.
Take note Mr Carney. This might be what “value-based realism” looks like. As Václav Havel knew better than most, when the going gets tough living in truth takes cojones.
The devil or the deep blue sea?
Other EU leaders were more circumspect. In the immediate aftermath most denounced the Iranian regime and several welcomed the death of Khamenei. Needless to say, there was widespread condemnation of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. But it is noteworthy that while nobody followed Sánchez in rejecting the Israeli-US action, nobody followed Carney in voicing support for it either. For that he had to wait for Australia and New Zealand.
Even Germany, whose Middle Eastern policy seems to comprise atoning for its part in the Holocaust by facilitating genocide in Palestine, prefers not to jump too visibly on Trump’s bandwagon. Pressed on the legality of the Israeli-US operation, Chancellor Friedrich Merz diplomatically evaded the question: “Categorizing the events under international law will have relatively little effect. This is not the moment to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their objectives.” He again dodged the issue when questioned after meeting with Trump on March 4.
Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement on March 1 condemning “the indiscriminate and disproportionate missile attacks launched by Iran against countries in the region” in which they promised “to work together with the US and allies in the region … potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source.” Again, they stopped short of expressing support for the Israeli-US attack itself, on which the statement was silent.
The next day France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot began to distance France from Israel and the US. Asked by a journalist whether “France today believes this war is justified, because you haven’t condemned it,” he responded: “we weren’t informed and didn’t take part in the military operations launched by the United States and Israel … only by facing the Security Council could such operations have had the legitimacy of international law.”
Addressing the nation on the Middle Eastern situation on French TV on March 3, President Emmanuel Macron flatly stated that the Israeli-US attacks were “outside of international law” and France “cannot approve of them.” Italy’s foreign minister Guido Crosetto likewise told his parliament on March 5 that the US-Israeli attack was “in violation of the international law” and confirmed that Italy had no prior knowledge of it.
Caught between not wanting to provoke the wrath—and economic or other retaliation—from “Daddy” (as NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte called Trump), and being dragged into an illegal war that could easily spiral out of control, the Europeans are squirming.
And that “special relationship”?
Perhaps the most entertaining contortions have come from UK prime minister Keir Starmer. Keir cannot have been happy with Trump and Netanyahu putting him on the spot less than a week after his hammering in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Green Party, whose leader Zack Polanski is a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Walking a tightrope between appeasing Trump and fending off his domestic critics to both the right and the left, Starmer predictably ended up satisfying neither. Speaking in the House of Commons on March 2, he made clear that “The United Kingdom was not involved in the initial US and Israeli strikes on Iran” and “That decision was deliberate.”
Indeed, Starmer denied US requests to use British military bases for its initial attack on Iran. Furious, Trump complained that “we are not happy with the UK” and “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” “He should be giving us, without question or hesitation, things like bases,” he told the New York Post on March 5.
However, Starmer continued, “it is now clear that Iran’s outrageous response has become a threat to our partners, to our interests, and to our allies.” For this reason, he was now prepared to modify Britain’s stance to allow the US to use British bases “to destroy the [Iranian] missiles at source, in their storage depots or at their launchers.”
“To be clear,” he emphasized, “the use of British bases is strictly limited to agreed defensive purposes. The UK has not joined US offensive operations.”
A lawyer by trade—once upon a time a civil rights lawyer, as well as the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions—Starmer was certainly, as Trump suggested, “worried about the legality.” He told MPs that government would publish its legal advice (it did), explaining
We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis, and a viable thought-through plan. That is the principle that I applied to the decisions that I made over the weekend.
Unlike Macron, nowhere in his speech—or, as far as I am aware, anywhere else—did Starmer comment on the legality of the Israeli-US attack on Iran itself.
On March 5 German foreign minister Johann Wadephul told reporters in Berlin that “Germany is not participating in this war. And that will remain the case,” and on March 6 Macron was reported as assuring a social media user that “France is not part of this war. We are not in the fight and we are not going to get involved in this war.”
By contrast, Britain’s deputy PM David Lammy caused consternation when he told BBC Breakfast viewers the same morning that “there was a “legal basis” for the Royal Air Force to participate in strikes on Iranian missile sites” (as distinct from the UK merely allowing the US to use British bases to launch them). Mark Carney, too, has refused to“categorically rule out participation. We will stand by our allies when it makes sense.”
Britain and France have meantime moved ships, planes, and troops into the Middle East, ostensibly for the purposes of aiding the US in its “defensive” strikes on missile facilities or protecting their citizens and allies. It is not hard to see how things might go south.
Why?
Whatever else this circus might be, it is certainly not middle powers banding together to fight power with value-based realism. The abandonment of principles (while paying lip-service to international law) is undeniable.
But as Lloyd Axworthy observed in relation to Canada, this is hardly good pragmatics either. What do Canada, Australia, the UK, or the EU countries have to gain from getting drawn into an Israeli-US war which if previous experience (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) is anything to go by will only create further chaos in the Middle East and floods of new refugees?
So we must ask, once again, why are they doing this? No doubt there are a multiplicity of reasons, including fear of US tariffs and sanctions, strength of Zionist lobby groups, and (for some) the prospect of money to be made out of armaments, oil, or postwar reconstruction of bombsites into rivieras.
We also cannot ignore the deep racism underlying Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump’s framing of these wars as “a battle of civilization against barbarism.” If there is one thing that unites the US, Canada, Australia, and the Europeans, it is whiteness. Europeans found it easier to stand up to Trump when he took a fancy to Greenland.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Marco Rubio laid out an unashamedly imperialist agenda for “a new Western century”:
We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir … And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.
But if we ask how any of this was possible—how the western world got to where it is now—I believe the answer lies under the rubble in Gaza.
For more than two years, during much of which Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, was in the White House, the West participated in, endorsed, or at best turned a blind eye to overt war crimes in Gaza. While the UN, ICJ, ICC, and every major human rights organization on the planet warned of genocide, the Western democracies supplied Israel with arms, gave it diplomatic protection at the UN, and punished dissenters at home, while from the BBC to the New York Times an obliging media became a mouthpiece for Israeli hasbara. The US and other governments recklessly shredded international law and sabotaged its key institutions—the UN and its agencies, ICJ, and ICC—in the process.
This is a deeply corrupting process for everyone involved. If you don’t believe me, read Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless.”
Asked in February 2025 why he thought the Democratic Party was powerless to resist Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, the writer Ta-Nahisi Coates replied: “I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” His point applies more generally.
Note. A lightly edited version of this was article published in Canadian Dimension on January 22, 2026.
Donald J. Trump via Truth Social
I’ll speak today about the rupture in the world order, the end of the pleasant fiction and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, opening his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026
Before dawn on January 3, the US launched “a large-scale strike against Venezuela” during which its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped and flown out of the country. They were subsequently arraigned in a New York court on drug and weapons charges. Though there were no American deaths, at least 100 people were killed in the assault, including Venezuelan civilians and 32 Cubans.
Four days later, in Minneapolis, MN, a masked ICE agent, Jonathan E. Ross, fatally shot a 37-year-old American woman, Renée Nicole Good, three times in the face at point-blank range. Video analysis by the New York Times of “bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired.” Contrary to the claims put out by the Department of Homeland Security within two hours, this was a brutal murder—not self-defense.
What has any of this to do with Gaza? The short answer is: everything. For it was above all in Gaza that the New World Order of which these are symptoms was forged.
The Donroe Doctrine
Later on January 3, Trump told journalists that “We’re going to run the country [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
With a nod to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which he has modestly renamed the “Donroe Doctrine”), Trump warned that “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force,” vice-president J. D. Vance posted on X, “but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that. The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.“
By “steal our stuff” he meant Venezuela’s nationalization of foreign oil companies in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.
When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 aiming to depose president Gamal Abdel Nasser following his nationalization of the Suez Canal, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower pressured them to accept a United Nations ceasefire and voted for UN resolutions publicly condemning the invasion and approving the creation of a UN peacekeeping force. That was under the old post–WW2 “rules-based” order.
Today, according to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller,;
We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.
Move fast and break things
As Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Trump made his determination not to have American hands tied by involvement in multilateral organizations, treaties, or agreements very clear from the get-go. On his first day in office, he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement.
Two weeks later he pulled the US out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, prohibited any future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and ordered a review of US funding and involvement in the UN, including what he called the “anti-American” UNESCO (from which he would withdraw the US in July 2025).
Following that review, which was led by secretary of state Marco Rubio, on January 7 this year Trump withdrew from a further “35 non-United Nations organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and “advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities.”
One of these was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which all other countries in the world belong. This frees up the US from any future international obligations regarding action on carbon emissions and global warming. Trump has long made it clear to the world that he proposes to “Drill, baby, drill!”
More recently (and very ominously), in the words of former UK prime minister Gordon Brown Trump has made “the momentous decision to constitute an alternative” to the United Nations, a so-called “‘board of peace’, with a remit for interventions far beyond Gaza, and with membership offered to about 60 favoured states, including Russia.”
That the UN opened the road for this when it cravenly endorsed Trump’s “Gaza Peace Plan” on November 17 is indicative of just how moribund the old order has become.
Triumph of the will
The invasion of Venezuela is not a one-off. Despite running on an anti-war platform, the use of force (or threat thereof) has been a defining feature of Trump’s presidency.
Notwithstanding his petulant lobbying for a “Noble Peace Prize” (like Obama) and his specious claim to have “ended eight wars,” in 2025 Trump bombed Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and the US has killed at least 112 people in strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Asked whether “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” J. D. Vance responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
On December 16 Trump declared “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela … Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” As of January 13, the US Navy had seized five tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump responded “We’re gonna keep it.”
Trump has now extended the blockade to Cuba, warning “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY [from Venezuela] GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He has also threatened to take military action in his quarrels with Mexico and Colombia. Nothing like showing them who’s boss.
Asked in a lengthy interview for the New York Times in January 2026 whether there was any limit on his powers, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me … I don’t need international law.”
A global protection racket
In a sharp reversal of the free trade consensus that has governed the world economy since World War II, Trump has imposed tariffs ranging from 10–41 percent on imports from all US trading partners, and certain goods (e.g. steel, aluminum, critical minerals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber) face higher levies. As I write, the legality of Trump’s use of tariffs is being litigated before the US Supreme Court.
On February 1, 2025 he imposed 25 percent tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, supposedly because neither country was doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl (and in Mexico’s case immigrants) across the US border. On March 24 he imposed 25% tariffs on all goods from countries that import Venezuelan oil—a tactic he extended on January 12, 2026 to “any country doing business with” Iran.
On July 30, 2025, Trump put tariffs on various goods from Brazil “due to Brazil’s actions regarding the prosecution of former President Bolsonaro, the regulation of online platforms, and other issues.” In August he imposed a whopping 50 percent tariff on India, which included a 25 percent punishment for continuing to buy Russian oil. In October he made a $20 billion line of credit to Argentina contingent upon his rightwing ally Javier Milei’s party winning the upcoming parliamentary elections.
On January 17 he threatened a 10 percent tariff, rising to 25 percent, on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland, which would “be due and payable until … a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”—despite having signed recent trade agreements with the UK and EU. Following pushback from European powers he backed down, announcing that talkswith NATO chief Mark Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal.”
When French president Emmanuel Macron declined to join his Board of Peace, Trump threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and champagne.
It is clear is that irrespective of prior agreements or treaties, Trump will not hesitate to use economic means to achieve political ends. He’s running a global protection racket.
Strongarming the courts
Not only has Trump flouted international law. He has gone out of his way to discredit international legal institutions, including the world’s two highest courts.
Accusing South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice” (ICJ) the Trump administration instituted a series of measures intended to discredit South Africa’s moral authority to bring the case, pressurize South Africa to drop it, and discourage other countries from joining it.
In February 2025, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for indicting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes. ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan was the first victim. The US sanctioned four more judges on June 5, adding two more judges (one of them was Canadian justice Kimberly Prost) and two assistant prosecutors on August 20. Rubio sanctioned two more judges in December, and the administration is now leaning onthe court to amend its guiding documents to exempt US citizens from its jurisdiction.
Such sanctions include an asset freeze, a prohibition on Americans doing business with sanctioned individuals, and a ban on their entering the United States. Unable to access the world banking system, victims—who also include UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—cannot even use credit cards or book a flight or a hotel online.
“The purpose is clear,” Prost told the Irish Times:
Effectively, they are interfering directly with the independence of a judge. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the International Criminal Court’s independence as an institution.
Securing the home front
Trump has moved just as fast on the domestic front, in ways that test the legal limits of his executive power. His actions have resulted in at least 583 challenges in the courts. While lower courts have overturned many of his orders, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court—which previously gave him immunity for “actions relating to the core powers of his office”—has so far generally proved more compliant.
The administration took an axe to the federal government and its programs, with the loss of 317,000 jobs by the end of 2025. Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was created by executive order on Trump’s first day outside the normal machinery of government, was responsible for much of the early carnage. The now-defunct DOGE has been widely criticized as “illegal and unconstitutional.”
From removing over 8,000 government web pages related to DEI initiatives, “gender identity, public health research, environmental policy, and various social programs,” to excluding transgender soldiers from the military and athletes from women’s sports, waging a “war on science” and whitewashing how history is presented in the nation’s museums, Trump has used his executive powers to advance MAGA’s culture wars.
He also found time on his first day to unconditionally pardon almost all 1,600 rioters convicted in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and commute the sentences imposed on Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia members for seditious conspiracy. While this was within his powers as president, it shows scant respect for the courts. House Democrats are now asking how many of the rioters have joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which increasingly looks like Trump’s Gestapo.
The same contempt for the rule of law is shown by the fact that nearly a month after Congress set a deadline of December 19 for the release of all files relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump’s Department of Justice has made public only 12,285 out of over 2 million relevant documents, and many of these have been heavily redacted.
I am your retribution
Not content with stacking the governing bodies of public institutions from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center—to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with loyalists, Trump has good on his promise to his MAGA supporters that “I am your justice … I am your retribution.”
The president has purged the US military, the justice department, immigration judges, and at least 17 inspectors general (the independent watchdogs who oversee federal government departments). The list of those whose security clearances been revoked in retaliation for past actions deemed hostile to Trump is growing very long indeed.
Trump has sanctioned big law firms (e.g., WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, Covington & Burling) because they represented clients of which he disapproved. Rather than face being shut out of business with federal agencies, excluded from federal buildings (including courtrooms), and losing security clearances, several firms have caved to Trump’s demands and promised millions in pro bono work to causes he supports.
Silencing speech
The administration has dismantled Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia and defunded PBS and NPR on grounds that the former has “a “leftist bias” and fails to project “pro-American” values and the latter do not offer “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
Trump removed Associated Press from the White House press pool and stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional power to decide which journalists have access to the president. In October, reporters from all but one news organization—including even the regime-friendly Fox News—turned in their Pentagon access badges rather than agree to new rules from secretary of defence (now styled “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth restricting what they were allowed to report.
CBS canceledThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert criticized Trump. The next month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel commented on the assassination of rightwing darling Charlie Kirk, leading Trump to muse: “They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” This is hardly a climate conducive to free speech.
From executive orders and memos, to investigations, the withholding of funds for research and financial aid, and efforts to detain, deport, or deny visas to international students and academics, the federal administration has weaponized every imaginable lever to bring the higher education sector to its knees.
The report instances 90+ Title VI investigations, $3.7 billion in cuts from federal research dollars from previously awarded grants, and NIH and NSF funding cuts with an estimated annual cost of $10-15 billion in decreased US economic output.
The federal government has proposed suspending 38 universities including Harvard and Yale from a research partnership program because they engage in DEI hiring, fined UCLA $1.2 billion, and required that it not enroll “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.” Since January 2025 the State Department has revoked over 8,000 student visas, targeting in particular those who have taken part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Faced with these pressures many schools, including New York’s Columbia University, have traded academic freedom for federal dollars and accepted unprecedented political oversight of their hiring practices and the content of their research and teaching.
Others have resisted—up to a point. Though Harvard is suing the administration, it has suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
The cruelty is the point
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act allocated a mindblowing $75 billion over four years (in addition to $10 billion already appropriated for 2025) to ICE to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. The law provided $45 billion to increase ICE detention capacity and $46.6 billion for the construction of border barriers and surveillance systems.
Advertising “You do not need an undergraduate degree,” a generous pay and benefits package, and a $50,000 signing bonus, ICE recruited 12,000 additional agents during 2025, expanding its workforce by 120 percent. Mobilizing “Uncle Sam” imagery, the ads are crafted to attract MAGA supporters, if not outright white nationalists.
DHS boasts that in 2025 “nearly 3 million illegal aliens … left the U.S. … including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations.” The conditions in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and other ICE detention centers are grim. A record 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025. The cruelty is the point—to strike fear.
An unknown number of those deported have not been given due process and in some cases have been sent to third countries with which they have no connection. In what is perhaps the most notorious case of denial of legal rights, the administration defied court orders and summarily deported 238 Venezuelan men to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, which is notorious for torture and “life-threatening prison conditions.”
ICE has conducted large-scale raids across the US aiming at 3,000 arrests per day. Though DHS claims its targets are “criminal illegal aliens across the country, including gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers,” ICE’s goons have rounded up people from factories, farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, churches, schools, and even immigration courts. In Minnesota Trump’s Gestapo are going from house to house, breaking down doors and arresting people. Seventy-five percent of those held by ICE in December had no criminal convictions. This is a reign of terror.
Trump has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, in the latter case to support ICE. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to dispatch troops to end the protests in Minnesota. “If I feel it’s important to invoke the Insurrection Act,” he told the New York Times, “I have the right to do pretty much what I want to do.” L’état, c’est moi.
Signs in the window
What has any of this to do with Gaza?
Invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the Czech greengrocer who places a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it, but to signal his conformity—and thereby helps reproduce the system that oppresses him—Mark Carney’s 2026 Davos speech showed rare honesty from a western political leader.
“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order,” he begins. But
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful … So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
Then came Gaza. When the gaps became chasms.
When George H. W. Bush went to war with Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he sought and got authorization from the UN Security Council. When his son, George W. Bush, wanted to fight Saddam again in 2003, he and UK PM Tony Blair—the same Blair that is now on Trump’s “Board of Peace”—used fake intelligence to get support for going to war from the US Congress and UK parliament. The UN was unpersuaded by their claims, but they went through the motions of playing by the rules before going ahead with a “coalition of the willing” anyway. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2024, western powers, including the US, EU, UK, and Canada, responded with ever-escalating rounds of sanctions.
But with Gaza, it is different. As I have documented in more than 25 articles over the last two years, not only have western governments, with the support of mainstream political parties and mass media across the political spectrum, armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for the genocide. They have thrown international law out of the window and perhaps fatally undermined the institutions that support it—the UN and its agencies, the ICJ, and the ICC. And they have sacrificed human rights and civil liberties at home, persecuting Israel’s critics under the specious banner of “combatting antisemitism.”
This was not Donald Trump’s doing. The responsibility lies squarely with Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Kamala Harris; with Rishi Sunak, David Cameron, Keir Starmer, David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper; with Justin Trudeau, Mélanie Joly, Anita Anand, and—it must be said—Mark Carney; with Emmanuel Macron, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. They dealt the final blows to the old order. Trump is just picking up where they left off.
Gaza’s revenge
Asked by Democracy Now on December 26, 2025, to comment on “what’s happening in Gaza,” the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy replied:
What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it? And everybody’s sort of ambiguous—I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think, there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended. So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Trump’s triumph might be seen as Gaza’s revenge. Revenge for the West’s complicity in the worst crimes of the century. Revenge for its repeated trampling on international law. Revenge, above all, on the American Democrats who demanded everyone’s vote despite Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel and Kamala Harris’s refusal to break with his legacy—and told protestors against genocide to shut up because “I’m speaking!”
She is not speaking any more. Donald Trump is Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The imperial chickens are coming home to roost.
Girl in Gaza on her way to get food. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons.
After reneging on its January ceasefire agreement with Hamas, Israel imposed a total blockade on aid into Gaza on March 2 and cut off remaining electricity supplies a week later. It resumed its military assault on March 18. Since then, Gaza’s health authorities have recorded a further 8,196 fatalities and 30,094 injuries. The death toll from IDF actions since the present “war” began on October 7, 2023 has now passed 60,000.
United Nations data show that throughout July the IDF has been killing one person every 12 minutes. “An average of 119 Palestinians are being killed daily so far in July—the highest rate since January 2024. More than 401 Palestinians a day are being wounded, the highest figure since December 2023.”
To put this in perspective, this means that in the last month Israel has killed, on average, more people in Gaza every week than the 736 Israeli civilians who died during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel (many of them casualties of Israeli “friendly fire”)—the event that triggered, and has repeatedly been used to justify, Israel’s present “war.”
For Pity’s Sake, Stop This Now!
Aid agencies have been warning of imminent famine for months, threatening the lives of Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants—or whatever portion of them have survived nearly two years of IDF bombardment—who have no means of escape from the besieged enclave. Deaths from hunger are now rising exponentially, beginning with the most vulnerable.
The children die first. In conditions of starvation, their growing bodies’ nutritional needs are higher than those of adults, and so their reserves are depleted faster. Their immune systems, not yet fully developed, become weaker, more susceptible to disease and infection. A bout of diarrhoea is lethal. Their wounds don’t heal. The babies cannot be breastfed as their mothers have not eaten. They die at double the rate of adults.
On July 29, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC—the world’s official famine watchdog—for the first time issued a famine alert, as distinct from a warning, for Gaza, stating that:
The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Conflict and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels.
Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
Immediate action must be taken to end the hostilities and allow for unimpeded, large-scale, life-saving humanitarian response. This is the only path to stopping further deaths and catastrophic human suffering.
Recent days have seen a tsunami of horrific headlines, illustrated by graphic photos of starving children. In the UK, the Guardian’s July 23 lead story blared: “‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’: skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza.” The article was illustrated with a mother-and-dying-child image that seems destined to become as iconic as Nick Ut’s famous Vietnam War photo “Napalm Girl.”
The front page of the Daily Express—a right-wing populist tabloid—carried the same photo, captioning the image “For Pity’s Sake, Stop This Now.” The accompanying article was headlined “The suffering of little Muhammad clinging on to life in Gaza hell shames us all.” The paper’s head of news Callum Hoare posted on X:
The brutal suffering in Gaza must end. The shocking image shows Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, one, who weighs the same as [a] three-month old baby due to the humanitarian crisis following the continued blocking of basic aid to civilians by Israel.
Spain’s El País showed a child’s outstretched hand holding a crust of bread under the headline, “Hunger in Gaza sparks global outcry to stop the war.” India’s Economic Timespaired a front-page editorial calling Israel’s actions “genocidal” with a photo of empty cooking pots outside a damaged building. The Washington Post led with “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza” and a photo of a another Palestinian woman holding another emaciated infant.
Is “balance” finally giving way to truth?
Western newsrooms are no longer taken in by IDF propaganda videos purportedly showing “senior Hamas terrorists boasting about their meals in underground terror tunnels” while gorging on fresh fruit—a tall order, since Israel has been blockading the Strip since March 2. Nor are they uncritically accepting Israeli official statements as statements of fact, as most of them have shamefully done for the last two years.
BBC News—which has repeatedly, and justifiably, been accused of systematically downplayingPalestinian sufferings and whitewashing Israeli war crimes—issued a joint statement on July 24 with AFP, AP, and Reuters, which backhandedly conceded that the IDF indeed is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. It began:
We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families. For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering.
Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.
The statement neglected to mention that in the interests of keeping the genocidal truth under wraps, Israel has banned international media from Gaza and so far killed 232 local journalists in the course of its current “war”—more than the number of journalists killed in the US Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined.
Even the New York Times, which has been steadfast in its support for Israel throughout its “war” on Gaza, carried a long and damning essay by the renowned Israeli Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov headlined “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It when I See It.” To be fair, the paper carried an op-ed by Bret Stephens a few days later arguing “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” in the interests not of truth but of “balance.”
Despite Israel’s increasingly implausible attempts to deny that there is famine in Gaza—or to shift the blame to Hamas (which a recent USAID investigation found is not “stealing aid,” a conclusion that was repeated later by IDF senior officers interviewed by the New York Times) or the UN (ignoring Israel’s own ban on UNRWA in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and refusal of visas to UN agency personnel)—the dam has broken.
When “aid distribution centres” become killing fields
In late May, under international pressure, Israel permitted the US-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to distribute meagre and inappropriate aid packages through four centres set up to replace the 400-plus distribution points previously run by UNRWA and other international aid agencies. The GHF is a private body, staffed largely by US contractors, with no prior experience of supplying humanitarian aid in war zones.
Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that allowing this “minimal” aid was only done to keep US politicians onside. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir denounced the change in policy as “a grave mistake,” while Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu argued that “letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory.”
On July 8, following the death of five Israeli soldiers in a Hamas ambush—a drop in the ocean compared with the daily Palestinian civilian casualties—Ben Gvir demanded “a total siege, a military crushing, encouraging immigration and settlements” and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Netanyahu to “immediately halt” aid for Gaza. They could hardly have made it clearer that Israeli combatants’ deaths will be paid for many times over by Palestinian civilian lives, whatever the Geneva Conventions might say.
Outside of the so-called “humanitarian zones,” to which over 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants have been compulsorily evacuated and now live in squalid tents—which the IDF still regularly hits, claiming to target “Hamas militants” but killing and maiming many more civilians with every strike—82.6 percent of the Gaza Strip is now within the Israeli-militarized zone or under displacement orders. Three of the GHF centres are located in the ruins of Rafah in the south, the other in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been massacred when lining up for food at GHF centres or trying to reach them. As of July 15, per the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 875 people had been killed trying to access food for their families, 674 of them in the vicinity of GHF sites. That number has now passed 1,000.
Interviewed for the BBC World Service on July 25, retired US special forces officer Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, a former Green Beret, explained why he had quit his job with GHF:
I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians… Without question I witnessed war crimes by the [IDF], using artillery rounds, mortar rounds, and tank rounds against unarmed civilians… I have never witnessed such a level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population—an unarmed, starving population.
Lies, damned lies, and hasbara
Charging that “Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” on June 30 more than 240 international charities and NGOs, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Amnesty International, issued a joint statement calling for “immediate action to end the deadly Israeli distribution scheme (including the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) in Gaza, revert to the existing UN-led coordination mechanisms, and lift the Israeli government’s blockade on aid and commercial supplies.”
Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, former Republican governor of Arkansas, knows better. On July 24 he posted on X two photographs, which we are to assume were shot in Gaza though no date or location is given, with the comment:
Here are photos of UN trucks & enough food to feed all of Gaza but it sits rotting! UN is a tool of Hamas! US based GHF is actually delivering food FOR FREE and SAFELY. UN food is either looted by Hamas or rots in the sun! Photos from yesterday.
Huckabee, whose “evangelical Christian beliefs,” per the official US embassy website, “include support for Israeli control over their ancient and indigenous homeland,” clearly believes his responsibilities including shilling for hasbara (Israeli public diplomacy aimed at explaining and promoting Israel’s policies and image internationally). It would be nice to see him apply the same argument about ancestral homelands to the Indigenous inhabitants of the United States, but let that pass. Israel’s rights are judged by different standards.
Huckabee also believes that “There is no such thing as a Palestinian” and “no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.” This is of course music to Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and Netanyahu’s ears.
UN spokesperson Farhan Haq has cited “a number of interdependent factors” that have stopped UN aid being delivered even when it has reached Gaza, including “bureaucratic, logistical, administrative, and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities”—something former British Foreign Secretary and one-time Prime Minister David Cameron complained about back in March 2024—and “shooting incidents that have killed and injured people gathering to offload aid supplies along convoy routes.”
One recent shooting incident is related by Cindy McCain, the widow of US Senator John McCain and head of the World Food Program:
Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies… As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire. We are deeply concerned and saddened by this tragic incident resulting in the loss of countless lives.
Today’s violent incident comes despite assurances from Israeli authorities that humanitarian operational conditions would improve; including that armed forces will not be present nor engage at any stage along humanitarian convoy routes. There should never, ever, be armed groups near or on our aid convoys, as reiterated on many occasions to all parties to the conflict.
Without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza strip.
The politicians react
If key sections of the Western media are now changing their tune on Gaza, disgust with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is even more pronounced among the wider public.
A survey carried out by Pew Research Center published on June 3 found that in 20 of 24 countries surveyed, half of adults or more have a negative view of Israel. Among Western or Western-aligned nations, Israel was viewed “very” or “somewhat unfavourably” by 79 percent of respondents in Japan, 78 percent in the Netherlands, 75 percent in Spain and Sweden, 74 percent in Australia, 72 percent in Greece, 66 percent in Italy, 64 percent in Germany, 63 percent in France, 62 percent in Poland, 61 percent in the UK, 60 percent in Canada and South Korea, and even—remarkably, in view of bipartisan support for Israel among both Republican and Democrat party leaderships—53 percent in the US.
This was before the recent blanket press coverage of the growing famine and almost daily massacres of Palestinians seeking food at the GHF distribution centres.
Wrong-footed by events, and under immense pressure from their respective publics, Western politicians have been falling over themselves to take back the narrative.
On July 21, Canada joined 24 other Western nations and the EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management in a statement that firmly rapped Israel over the knuckles for its most recent transgressions in Gaza:
The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food. It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid. The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.
On July 25 the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany issued another statement reminding Israel that “withholding essential humanitarian assistance” is “unacceptable” and describing the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” They added that they “stand ready to take further action to support an immediate ceasefire and a political process that leads to lasting security and peace for Israelis, Palestinians and the entire region,” without saying what that action might comprise.
No doubt Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron would rather we forgot that they had signed a joint statement with Canada’s Mark Carney calling on the Israeli government “to stop its military operations in Gaza and immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza,” and threatening “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response,” two months ago, on May 19. Needless to say no actions of any consequence were taken.
The time for covering asses is at hand
Aware, perhaps, of their potential liability under the Geneva Conventions for not doing everything within their power to prevent genocide—or at least war crimes and crimes against humanity—in Gaza, individual Western politicians have meantime been lining up to put their immense sympathy for the Palestinian people on record.
Keir Starmer proclaims “The suffering and starvation unfolding in Gaza is unspeakable and indefensible. While the situation has been grave for some time, it has reached new depths and continues to worsen. We are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Starmer’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy says he is he is “appalled, sickened” by the “grotesque” targeting of starving Palestinians. “These are not words that are usually used by a foreign secretary who is attempting to be diplomatic,” he adds, “but when you see innocent children holding out their hand for food, and you see them shot and killed in the way that we have seen in the last few days, of course Britain must call it out.”
Australia’s PM Antony Albanese laments that “The situation in Gaza has gone beyond the world’s worst fears… Gaza is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel’s denial of aid and the killing of civilians, including children, seeking access to water and food cannot be defended or ignored.”
EU foreign policy supremo Kaja Kallas (who stated on July 15 that “the EU will not move forward with sanctions against Israel”) protests that “The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible.” “The images from Gaza are unbearable,” posts Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, “Israel must deliver on its pledges.”
Canadian government representatives have been more reticent in their condemnations—a good deal more reticent than when they denounce instances of alleged “antisemitism.”
But noting on July 24 that “denial of humanitarian aid is a violation of international law,” Mark Carney stated that “Canada condemns the Israeli government’s failure to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand echoed her boss, posting on X the same day:
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens by the day. Women and children are starving, without adequate access to food and water, the most basic of needs. It is inexcusable and must end… the Israeli government must allow the uninhibited flow of humanitarian aid to reach Palestinians civilians, who are in urgent need.
New Democrat Party MP (and candidate for NDP leader) Heather McPherson asks, not altogether unreasonably:
For nearly 21 months @NDP has urged action from Canada: recognize Palestinian statehood, impose sanctions, suspend CIFTA, implement arms embargo. In a caucus of 169 MPs only a handful of Liberals have spoken out for Palestine. Why the Liberal silence? Cowardice? Racism?
It’s only words
Several things need to be said about this belated outpouring of sympathy for innocent Palestinians on the part of politicians who have been arming, diplomatically supporting, and repressing domestic criticism of Israel’s genocide for the last two years.
First, however tough their language, they never use the word genocide—or the terms war crimes and crimes against humanity. The reason is pretty clear. To do so would not only acknowledge these governments’ past complicity in the worst crimes known to the law, but legally require them to act immediately to end that complicity in the future.
The preferred term is always “humanitarian catastrophe,” which naturalizes the event—equating it with other things that cause famine, like crop failures, floods or drought—and shifts the focus away from the human actors and actions that have caused it.
Second, there is a systematic attempt to suggest that it is only now that the situation has become catastrophic. The implication is that it was legitimate to support Israel’s assault on Gaza previously. As one puzzled comment on X put it:
I have been wondering why the Zionists’ stepped up use of hunger as a mass murder weapon has suddenly triggered a Western outcry, but two years of pre-announced, and equally vile, mass murder via bombs and bullets did not generate the same outcry.
Third—and most importantly—none of these statements, however strongly worded, have been followed by any action that would put real pressure on Israel to change its behaviour. And knowing this, Israel continues to largely ignore Western protests.
Even Emmanuel Macron’s historic promise to recognize a Palestinian state—a largely symbolic gesture, albeit a significant one—has been attacked by Donald Trump, and Britain and Canada, who at one time looked prepared to join him, are now reportedly getting cold feet for fear of angering the US.
It is not as if the international community doesn’t have plenty of weapons at its disposal to force compliance on rogue states.
Apartheid South Africa was kicked out of the UN and subjected to stringent economic, sporting, and cultural sanctions and boycotts that eventually brought the system to its knees. The first Gulf War against Iraq was fought under UN auspices, and the second by a US-led “coalition of the willing.”
The most obvious contemporary example of such international action—which contrasts sharply with the West’s pusillanimous avoidance of any meaningful action to stop Israel’s carnage in Gaza—was the coordinated response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has been met with wave after wave of sanctions.
For whatever reasons—be they geopolitical, economic, or racist—not to take comparable action against Israel is a choice. Our choice.
Our genocide
Faced with widespread Western condemnation, Netanyahu has now agreed to allow air drops of aid into Gaza and daily 10-hour “humanitarian pauses” in three areas of the Strip to enable UN convoys and other aid organizations to safely distribute food and medicine. As in his earlier pivot in May, he explained that given the international reaction, Israel “needs to continue to allow the entry of a minimum amount of humanitarian aid.”
I see this as a purely tactical retreat, like Netanyahu’s earlier acceptance under US pressure of two ceasefire deals which he subsequently broke. He went on to reassure Israelis that “We will continue to fight, we will continue to act until we achieve all of our war goals—until complete victory.” His fundamental objectives have not changed.
On July 28, the day after Netanyahu’s announcement, Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem announced the publication of a report titled Our Genocide on social media. They did not pull their punches or mince their words:
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
It sounds inconceivable. But it’s the truth.
Israel is taking deliberate, coordinated action to destroy the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Explicit statements by Israeli officials, combined with a consistent policy of destructive attacks and other practices of annihilation, prove beyond a doubt that Israel’s target is the entire population of Gaza.
Entire cities razed to the ground; medical, educational, religious and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed; 2 million Palestinians forcibly displaced with the aim of expelling them from Gaza; and, of course, mass starvation and killing—all this amounts to an explicit attempt to destroy the population of Gaza and impose living conditions so catastrophic that Palestinian society cannot continue to exist there.
That is the exact definition of genocide.
They continued:
The international community has not only failed in its duty to stop the atrocities, but the leaders of the Western world, particularly the United States and Europe, also share responsibility by providing support that enables Israel’s acts of destruction. It is the duty of the international community to stop the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza…
US President Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden. Photo by Daniel Torok.
A non-political civil service, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, USAID, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Scholarships, federal funding for scientific and medical research—the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Ivy League universities, “big law”—the great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one. Those with the biggest reputations have all too often capitulated, starting with the Fourth Estate.
Anticipatory obedience
Obeying in advance began well before Trump’s inauguration on January 15. Last October Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder and ex-CEO of Amazon, sniffed the way the wind was blowing and intervened to cancel the editorial board’s proposed endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
The owner’s interference in the editorial independence of the storied paper whose journalists ended Richard Nixon’s presidency provoked the resignation of Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan and the loss of over 250,000 subscribers. Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts and columnist Michele Norris, the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), followed Kagan out the door.
The Los Angeles Times also backed out of endorsing any candidate on the orders of billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, which led Editorials Editor Mariel Garza to quit, together with editorial board members Karin Klein and Robert Greene. When Soon-Shiong’s 31-year-old daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, claimed that the family declined to endorse Harris “to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children” in Gaza, her father hastened to deny any such suggestion.
Early in January, the Washington Post refused to publish a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that depicted Bezos, Soon-Shiong, and tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Meta) and Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAI) offering “bags of money to a larger-than-life Trump statue standing on a decorated pedestal with its head just out of view.” Telneis resigned from the Post, where she had worked since 2008, in protest at this blatant act of political censorship.
Zuckerberg and Bezos have had their disagreements with Trump in the past. But along with other billionaires, both were a prominent presence at his inauguration. So was Elon Musk. Well before their current bromance bloomed, Musk had tried to ingratiate himself with Trump by reinstating his account on X (formerly Twitter). His Latin comment “Vox populi, vox dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God) reads ominously in retrospect.
Meta hastened to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after his banning from Facebook following the January 6, 2020 assault on the Capitol, and obligingly replaced independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram with X-style user-generated “community notes.” Independent fact-checkers were “too politically biased,” explained Zuckerberg, and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression.”
On February 26 Bezos instructedWashington Post editorial staff that from now on only opinions supportive of “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be accepted for the opinion pages of the paper, and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned. Bezos says he asked Shipley whether he wanted to stay on, suggesting “if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’” Ain’t free expression great?
Billionaires have much to gain from cozying up to Trump—like a $4.5 trillion tax cut and a bonfire of environmental and other regulations—and even more to lose if they don’t. For those less willing to kiss the ring, the administration has other means of persuasion.
Muzzling the media
Speaking at the Conservative Policy Action Conference (CPAC) on February 23, 2024, MAGA cheerleader Kash Patel urged:
We [must] collectively join forces to take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no it’s not Washington, DC, it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!
A year later, MAGA’s war against the media is raging on all fronts.
Among other “intimidation tactics” (as the New York Times rightly describes them) designed to control the news, the Trump administration has removedAssociated Press reporters from the White House press pool; stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its historic role in deciding which journalists have access to the president; and attempted to dismantleVoice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which Trump accuses of a “leftist bias” and failing to project “pro-American” values.
The New York Times may complain about Trump vilifying its star correspondents, but it is not above self-censorship when it matters. Per CNN, on April 5, “1,400 “Hands Off!” mass-action protests were held at state capitols, federal buildings, congressional offices, Social Security’s headquarters, parks and city halls throughout the entire country,” and involved “millions of people.” One of the largest marches stretched for 20 city blocks on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The Times reported it on page 18 of its Sunday print edition.
The DOGE Subcommittee of Congress, headed by Trump’s ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, has threatened the public broadcast networks NPR and PBS, whose CEOs it summoned on March 26 “to explain why the demonstrably biased news coverage they produce for an increasingly narrow and elitist audience should continue to be funded by the broad taxpaying public.”
Trump has meanwhile extorted $15 million from ABC News in an out-of-court settlement of a defamation case over its reporting of the E. Jean Carroll trials, and his campaign is suing the Daily Beast for defamation in “a transparent attempt to intimidate The Beast and silence the independent press.” Other intimidatory litigation is ongoing against CBS News, the Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Board.
“Hands Off!” protesters rally against the second administration of President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, April 5, 2025. Photo by G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons.
Mugging the lawyers
Trump has used executive orders to go after several top law firms who have taken cases and represented clients he doesn’t like. An order against the law firm Jenner & Block, for example, punished it for pro bono representation of transgender people and immigrants. The sanctions imposed on this and other practices include removing their lawyers’ security clearances, barring federal agencies from doing business with them, and excluding them from federal government buildings—including the courts.
An executive memorandum of March 22, aimed at immigration lawyers in particular, directs “the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States,” rendering pursuit of any lawsuit against any government agency a risky proposition.
While Jenner & Block and two other firms are challenging these orders in court, four other “big law” outfits—Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, Milbank, and Willkie Farr—have not only caved to Trump’s demands, but agreed to commit millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to causes that Trump supports in order to avoid being sanctioned. Best keep on the right side of the boss, even if the boss is clearly on the wrong side of the law.
Defending “all firms and lawyers who fight against this president’s lawless executive actions,” senior partners of the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters wrote:
We sympathize. We take seriously our obligations to our clients, our associates, our staff and their families. But at this crucial moment, clients need to find their courage, too. And partners at big firms—who often earn millions a year—must be willing to take financial risks when the fate of our nation, the future of our profession and the rule of law itself are at stake.
You can support a lawyer’s right to represent unpopular clients and causes against powerful forces—essentially the oath we all took when becoming members of the bar. Or you can sit back, check your bank balance and watch your freedoms, along with the legal system and the tripartite system of government we should not take for granted, swirl down the drain.
Playing the terrorism card
Citing a provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that empowers the government to deport people if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe their presence in the country “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident and recent graduate student at Columbia University, in front of his eight-months pregnant wife—who is an American citizen—and have since detained him first in New Jersey, then in Louisiana. The only thing preventing him from being deported is a court challenge.
Khalil’s offense is the leading role he played in last year’s protests at Columbia University against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. However, as his lawyers emphasize:
Mr. Khalil has never been accused, charged or convicted of any crime. He was ripped from his home, detained and threatened with deportation in retaliation for his political beliefs. His case represents a clear attempt by the Trump administration to silence dissent, intimidate our universities and attack our freedom.
Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk, who is in the US on an F-1 visa, was snatched off the street by masked and anonymous ICE agents, transferred to a detention facility 1,500 miles away with no access to a lawyer, and threatened with deportation for no other “crime” than that she coauthored an op-ed for the school’s student newspaper whose contents Secretary of State Marco Rubio doesn’t like.
According to his own testimony, Rubio has since retrospectively revoked the visas of hundreds other foreign student “lunatics” on grounds that their social media posts show them to be a threat to national security, leaving them liable to deportation without due process, “potentially to countries other than a student’s homeland” (my emphasis).
This is exactly what happened to 238 Venezuelan migrants, who have been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned without trial in the notoriously brutal Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca. They were alleged members of the “terrorist” criminal gang Tren de Aragua, but this has never been established in court. In this case Trump has perverted the 1798 Enemies Alien Act to define Tren de Aragua as “invaders” of the United States. The sole “evidence” connecting the gay makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero with the gang was his crown tattoos—which are traditional in his Venezuelan hometown.
The message is: keep your head down, your nose clean, and your mouth shut and you’ll be OK. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel as FBI director has set many alarm bells ringing. Patel’s resumé is long on “counter-terrorism,” and boasts of “working with our nation’s tier one special forces units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations in almost every theater of war worldwide.” Now he’s bringing it all back home. Specious associations of “terrorism” are being used to launch a real reign of terror.
The Trump Kennedy Center
On February 7, Trump posted a surprise announcement on Truth Social regarding the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose annual awards ceremony he had ostentatiously shunned during his first term in the White House:
At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!
Trump went on to fire two dozen members of the traditionally bipartisan board and replaced them with MAGA loyalists, including the wives of Vice President J.D. Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (and her mother Cheri Summerall), mega-donor Patricia Duggan, Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartilomo, and the spouses of several business allies.
Trump then had the trustees elect him chairman in place of billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein; ousted the center’s long-serving director Deborah Sutter and other senior staff members; and installed Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, as interim president. Grenell told CPAC that his vision for the center was “to make art great again,” with “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”
Trump promised his supporters that “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP.” Instead, he wants the center to stageCamelot, Hello Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera. The fact that only Phantom is currently playing in North America—these respectively premiered in 1960, 1963, 1964, 1981, and 1986—seems not to have deterred him.
Meantime, in one of those richly symbolic details where the devil likes to lurk, records of the 2023 production of 1776, in which a multiracial cast of female, trans, and non-binary performers donned breeches, buckle shoes, and wigs to impersonate America’s all-white Founding Fathers, have been disappeared from the center’s website.
A dozen center staff, including Ellen Palmer, vice president of corporate engagement, and Leslie Miller, the senior vice president of development, quit over the MAGA takeover. Actor Issa Rae, TV producer (of Scandal and Bridgerton fame) Shonda Rhimes, opera singer Renée Fleming, and musicians Rhiannon Giddens and Ben Folds and other artists cut ties with the center or canceled upcoming performances.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, which had been scheduled to run for several weeks in 2026—and would likely have been the highest-grossing event of the season—was pulled by its producer. Miranda explained: “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Donations are drying up, ticket sales have plummeted, and revenues have tanked. No matter. The Great American Cultural Revolution must go on.
Inside the museums diversity goes up on trial
Back in 2021, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that its “strategic priority” was to “focus on diversity, equity, access and inclusion throughout our work to diversify the stories we tell, the ways in which we tell them, and our staff.”
Metrics for measuring the plan’s success included increasing gender, racial, and ethnic diversity in acquisitions, as well as “progress toward special exhibitions and installations of the permanent collection … that tell non-Euro-centric art stories … [and] include a significant percentage of non-white artists and women artists.”
Over the next three years the museum “hired its first curator of African American art, recruited trustees of color to the board and began mounting more shows by women and artists of color.” That process of liberal enlightenment has now come to an abrupt halt.
In response to Trump’s executive order of January 20 banning “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)” in all agencies and entities of the federal government, the NGA announced that it had “closed its office of belonging and inclusion and removed related language from our website.”
The NGA is not an agency or entity of the federal government, and the US is not the Soviet Union or North Korea. The president cannot (yet) simply decree what the NGA and other museums are permitted to exhibit. But the NGA receives 80 percent of its operating budget from the federal government and was hardly in a position to argue.
Fears of losing federal funding likely also explain why the National Endowment for the Arts has eliminated Challenge America grants designed to “extend the reach of the arts to underserved groups/communities,” instead prioritizing “projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250).” Discretion is the better part of valour.
Whitewashing the past
Perhaps the most ominous piece of MAGA cultural regulation to date is Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Trump begins:
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.
Remembering, perhaps, the widespread interrogation of exactly whose histories were being commemorated in public spaces that followed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the order directs the secretary of the interior to:
take action … to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.
Trump reserves his fiercest fire for the Smithsonian Institution—whose 21 museums, 21 libraries, and 14 education and research centres in Washington, DC make it one of the largest and most influential knowledge complexes on the planet. He is appalled that:
the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”
The clear implication is that if white people dominate American society, the reasons must lie in the biological superiority of the white “race,” not in a history built on the twin pillars of genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of millions of Africans. The undisguised fascist roots of Trump’s worldview are on display here for all to see.
The order goes on to direct J.D. Vance, in his capacity as a member of the board of regents, to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and “ensure that future appropriations … prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that … promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
The Smithsonian has yet to formally respond. But again, though it is not part of any branch of US government, two-thirds of the institution’s $1.25 billion annual budget comes from federal allocations. Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), faces a difficult choice.
NMAAHC was another target of Trump’s executive order. The poet Kevin Young, Bunch’s successor as NMAAHC director, was put on indefinite leave on March 10. He resigned “to focus on his writing” on April 4.
The war on science and education
The administration started softening up America’s universities early in Trump’s second term, with cuts to federal research funding causing hiring freezes, lab closures, layoffs, cuts in graduate admissions, and the withdrawal of job offers. MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania were among the schools affected.
At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which now falls under the jurisdiction of vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr., grant review panels were suspended, blocking millions of dollars in funding for medical research.
On March 27, Kennedy announced 10,000 job losses, including leaders of divisions regulating food and drugs, studying chronic diseases and the risks of environmental disasters, and targeting HIV prevention. Among those fired were eleven principal investigators, who lead research teams. One senior NIH scientist predicted the result would be “chaos,” with cutting-edge neurological research particularly at risk.
It speaks volumes that the hundreds of “words federal agencies are now discouraged from using” (per a New York Timescompilation of government documents) include not only Black, disabilities, equality, gender, historically, indigenous community, transgender, and women, but also clean energy, climate crisis, and climate science.
During the night of April 3, state humanities councils and recipients of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) began receiving emails telling them their funding was ending immediately because the agency would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.”
The new acting director of the agency, Michael McDonald, who was appointed after his predecessor Sally Lowe was forced to resign “at the direction of president Trump,” told senior NEH staff that upward of 85 percent of the agency’s current grants would be canceled. In the future, NEH would focus on “patriotic programming.” The New York Times had previously reported that DOGE wanted to cut 80 percent of NEH’s 180 staff.
Though the NEH is not about to find a cure for cancer—that prospect just grew a lot more distant thanks to the cuts at the NIH—we should be in no doubt of the magnitude of the stakes here. According to its website:
NEH is the only federal agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities. Since its founding in 1965, NEH has awarded over $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, colleges, universities, K–12 teaching, libraries, public television and radio stations, research institutions, independent scholars, and to its humanities council affiliates in each of the nation’s 56 states and jurisdictions. Panels of independent, external reviewers examine and select top-rated proposals to receive grants.
Who needs experts? On this as on everything else, the self-professed stable genius in the White House knows best.
The antisemitism canard
Alongside these cuts, Trump’s administration has attacked academic freedom under cover of combatting “antisemitism”—which in Trump’s America, like in Biden’s America, has been redefined to encompass virtually any criticism of Israel’s “plausibly genocidal” actions in Gaza, even when the critics are Jewish.
On March 7, Trump’s so-called Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The statement went on:
The decisive action by the DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA to cancel Columbia’s grants and contracts serves as a notice to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses.
On March 10, the Department of Education—a body Trump is committed to abolishing, but which in the meantime has its uses—put sixty elite institutions on notice that they were under investigation for “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”
In fact, under President Minouche Shafik, who resigned under Republican pressure in August 2024, and her successor Katrina Armstrong, Columbia bent over backwards to protect Jewish students.
Among other measures, the university restricted access to campus to those carrying Columbia ID; tightened up event policies; revamped procedures “to report allegations of hate speech, harassment, and other forms of disruptive behavior, including antisemitic behavior”; “enhanced reporting channels … supplementing internal resources through a team of outside investigators”; established an antisemitism task force; banned student societies, including Jewish Voice for Peace; twice invited NYPD armed riot police onto campus to break up protests, leading to scores of arrests; disciplined student protestors; removed three deans for allegedly antisemitic text messages; and forced law professor Katherine Franke into early retirement for her claim that “students who “come right out of their military service” have “been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus”—a reference to a case in which ex-IDF Columbia students sprayed protestors with an unknown substance, sending several of them to hospital.
It is difficult to see what more the university could reasonably have done to protect its Jewish community—many of whose members were (and are) active in the protests. But facts (and Jews) are not what matter here. It’s all about messaging.
As New York Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espaillat wrote in a joint statement:
Revoking federal grants to Columbia University isn’t about combating anti-Semitism; it’s about the Trump administration’s war on education and science … Today’s announcement does nothing to keep Jewish students safe and sends a chilling message that universities must align with the MAGA agenda or face financial ruin.
The administration has since threatened to axe billions of dollars in federal funding from Princeton, Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities over their alleged tolerance of antisemitism, and has suspended $175 million in research grants to the University of Pennsylvania over a transgender swimmer who last represented the school in 2022.
Bending the knee
Faced with the threat of further cuts in funding, Columbia caved to Trump’s blackmail, agreeingamong other measures to ban face masks, hire 36 “special officers” to arrest individuals, and install a “senior vice-provost” to take over running the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies, with a mandate to “review all aspects of leadership and curriculum.”
Scores of schools, including UCLA, the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A & M, the United States Naval Academy, the University of Virginia, and the entire University of North Carolina and University of Texas systems hastened to close DEI offices, dismantle DEI programs, and purge DEI statements from their websites.
Harvard—the richest university in the world, with an endowment of $53.2 billion—suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer. NYU cancelled a talk on challenges in humanitarian crises by Dr Joanne Liu, a former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, over the content of some of her slides. They dared to mention casualties in Gaza and cuts at USAID.
Yale fired the Iranian legal scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, a prominent critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, for her alleged connections with a Palestinian charity the US government has designated as a fundraiser for terrorism. Johns Hopkins instructed faculty, staff, and students not to obstruct ICE officers if they try to arrest any member of the university community on campus, nor tip off anyone that ICE was hunting them, “or engage in any behavior in an effort to enable them to leave the premises or hide.”
A few brave holdouts like Brown, Tufts, the Rutgers University Senate, and one lonely University of Michigan dean at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design have stood up against the Trump administration’s pressure, but many more institutions have not.
Even Barack Obama—who like former Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Joe Biden has kept disgracefully quiet about Trump’s assault on liberal America—was moved to comment:
If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?
If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.
The chickens come home to roost
With a handful of exceptions—the most notable being Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, and other members of “the Squad”—the Democrats have mounted no significant opposition to Trump’s blitzkrieg.
Rather than boycotting—or even showing up and turning their backs on—Trump’s address to both houses of Congress on March 3, Hakeem Jeffreys called upon his colleagues to maintain a “strong, determined and dignified” presence. Under the leadership of Chuck Schumer, enough Senate Democrats voted with the Republicans to confirm almost all Trump’s appointments and pass a funding bill House Democrats characterized as “an assault on critical programs for vulnerable Americans.”
Kamala Harris made herself notorious for shutting up hecklers who dared protest her policy on Gaza during the election campaign with her catchphrase “I’m speaking”—a stance that may well have cost her the election. A YouGov poll released on January 20 showed that “29 percent of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited ‘ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ as their reason for withholding their vote.” This may have been enough to tip the balance in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which would have put Harris in the White House had the vote gone the other way. Now, the only speaking Harris is doing is to real estate conventions in Australia (where she is listed as giving “no interviews” to the media).
The high point of the Democrats’ “resistance” is Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech, which beat the previous record for bloviating set by the arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act in 1957. In all of that time Booker did not once mention the genocide in Gaza—or the repression of protests in the US.
Two days later Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ attempt to block $8.8 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including more than 35,000 2000-pound bombs whose sale the Biden administration had suspended. His two motions were defeated by majorities of 83-15 and 82-15. Only 14 Democrats (out of 45) strayed from the party line.
And here, in a nutshell, is the problem. The Democrats cannot credibly lead resistance to Trump’s trampling on democratic norms and the rule of law in America because that is exactly what the Biden–Harris administration—along with most other Western governments—had been doing in relation to Gaza for the last 18 months.
In the words of the activist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to an audience of students at the University of Michigan on February 21:
We are in a moment right now where people are asking themselves, ‘Why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy?’” However you take the state of democracy in America to be … I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, if you can’t fight for something that is so blatantly and obviously unjust, if you can’t oppose the 2,000 [pound] bombs dropped on schools and on hospitals, what does everything else mean?
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’re watching a not-so-slow-motion coup in real time
Canadian Dimension, Derek Sayer / March 10, 2025 / 11 min read
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in 2019. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
“This is going to be great television, I will say that,” said Donald Trump at the end of the February 28 “Oval Office showdown” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
When Vice President JD Vance complained that Zelensky was “trying to fight it out in the American media” rather than “litigating” their disagreements behind closed doors, Trump cut in:
But you see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on. I think it’s very important. That’s why I kept this going so long.
The president made by reality TV knew exactly what he was doing. The “Oval Office showdown” was one in a procession of choreographed spectacles—Trump signing a tsunami of executive orders surrounded by his adoring disciples, Elon Musk brandishing a symbolic chainsaw at CPAC—designed to shock and awe the world into submission.
The MAGA revolution
As anybody not living on a desert island without internet access cannot fail to have noticed, Donald Trump has begun his second term in the White House with a flourish.
A Republican budget promising $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich and enhanced funds for the military and immigration enforcement, to be financed by $880 billion in cuts to public expenditure, threatening the social security and medicare and medicaid on which poorer Americans rely, was only to be expected from the party of Jesus.
But the speed and comprehensiveness of the rest of Trump’s MAGA revolution has left many reeling, not just in the US (or Canada) but across the globe. It is astonishing just how much has been done—and undone—in just six weeks.
Frozen all foreign aid while dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cancelling “about 90 percent of the agency’s work and tens of billions of dollars in spending” and devastating humanitarian aid projects across the world.
Voted against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; stopped offensive cyber-operations against Russia; and directed the State and Treasury departments to draw up a plan to give Russia relief from sanctions.
Trashed EU and NATO states (see speeches by Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth), and threatened not to defend NATO allies “if they don’t pay”
Suspended military support for Ukraine and paused the flow of intelligence to Kyiv.
Floated a plan to expel Gaza’s two-million-strong Palestinian population and transform the strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East” under US control.
Sanctioned International Criminal Court officials and family members for the court’s indictment of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Rescinded the Biden administrations temporary pause on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, and used emergency powers to bypass Congress and “expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.”
Imposed 20 percent tariffs on Chinese goods and 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, and promised unspecified tariffs on the EU (which Trump says “was formed to screw the United States”).
Immigration and the border
Trump has:
Declared a national emergency and halted asylum at the US–Mexico border; suspended the refugee resettlement program; revoked deportation protections for Venezuelans; detained the first of a promised 30,000 migrants in Guantánamo; threatened to prosecute officials who impede ICE operations and remove federal funding from “sanctuary cities”; and pushed the IRS to provide the addresses of 700,000 undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security.
Reportedly considered revoking the temporary legal status of 240,000 Ukrainian refugees in the US.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Trump has:
Terminated programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in “virtually all aspects of the Federal Government … from airline safety to the military,” and halted new civil rights cases or investigations by the Justice Department.
Required all government-issued documents, including passports, to reflect sex assigned at birth; ordered transgender women inmates to be transferred to male prisons; barredtransgender soldiers from the US military; restricted all gender-affirming treatments for minors under 19; ordered federal employees to remove “any gender identifying pronouns” from their email signatures; and moved to exclude transgender athletes from women’s sports.
Taken down thousands of government web pages with content related to diversity and “gender ideology,” including information about vaccines, scientific and medical research, hate crimes, and veterans’ care (among the images caught in this cull by AI was the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima).
Science, arts, media
Trump has:
Canceled scheduled biomedical scientific meetings, including grant review panels, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—thereby blocking millions of dollars in funding for research on cancer, addiction, and other health threats—and imposed a moratorium on all public communications from federal health officials.
Halted funding to Fulbright Scholarships and other US international exchange and study abroad programs, leaving thousands of students stranded abroad in limbo.
Created “chaos” across American university campuses with cuts to “billions of dollars in research” that amount to “a complete, utter, destruction of the United States research infrastructure” and have led to hiring freezes or layoffs at MIT, Stanford, Brown, Johns Hopkins and numerous other schools.
Stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) of its 70-year-old role in deciding which journalists have access to the president in the Oval Office and on Air Force One and taken control of the White House press pool.
Appointed himself chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, firing board members who don’t “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
“Antisemitism”
Under the pretext of combatting antisemitism, Trump has:
Ordered US colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that “could be considered antisemitic or supportive of terrorism,” threatening that “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
Cancelled “approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” and warned that “additional cancelations are expected to follow.”
Given notice “to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this Administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses.”
Changed the Student Loan Forgiveness Program (affecting approximately two million people) to allow disqualification of federal and non-profit employees, teachers, police, and pastors, among others, who engage in “improper activities,” including providing legal support, advocacy, or education work on behalf of undocumented immigrants, or “whose work had been tied to foreign terrorist groups.”
On previous experience at Columbia and elsewhere, virtually any criticism of Israel—including from Jewish organizations and individuals—is regarded as “antisemitic” and virtually any support for Palestine considered to be “support for terrorism.”
Environmental policy
Trump has:
Declared a “national energy emergency”; halted federal approvals for new offshore windfarms; opened up wilderness areas of Alaska to mining and drilling; ordered a 60-day pause on approvals for renewable energy developments on public lands; revoked Biden’s prohibitions on offshore oil drilling; and instructed federal agencies to end subsidies for electric vehicles.
Designated English as “the official language of the United States.”
Renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America (and bannedAssociated Press from presidential press conferences and news events until it adopts the name change).
Granted a “full, complete and unconditional” pardon to almost all the 1,600 rioters charged in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, some of whom injured police officers, and commuted the sentences—in one case, of 22 years—imposed on 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias for seditious conspiracy.
You’re fired!
Since the US is not—yet—a dictatorship, some of this is being challenged in the courts. Whether or not the administration will abide by their judgments remains to be seen.
Ominously, a recent executive order from Trump instructs government agencies to request judges to require anyone suing the government to post a bond in advance to cover government legal costs should the suit not succeed. While judges are not bound to grant such requests, the clear intent is to discourage court challenges by putting them beyond the pocket of most potential plaintiffs.
Emboldened by the US Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024 ruling that “presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly,” Trump is clearly testing the limits of his power.
Trump’s newly-created so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a shadowy entity that operates entirely outside the previous framework of US governance, with no mandate from Congress, no requirement that its billionaire head, Elon Musk, be confirmed by the Senate, and no security clearances for the handful of young tech bros it employs, has taken a chainsaw to federal departments—and the men and women who staff them. Its depredations have reportedly already caused pushback from cabinet heads of government departments, including secretary of state Marco Rubio.
Freezing all federal government hiring “except for members of the military” or “positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.”
Offering all federal employees “inducements” to resign or face being fired, beginning with the “Fork in the Road” offer to two million federal employees to receive nine months pay if they quit now—which was accepted, it is claimed, by about 75,000 workers.
Ending remote work for federal workers and requiring “employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis” (the assumption being this will push many of them into quitting their jobs).
Terminating at least 20,630 federal employees during the probationary period of their contracts—including not only newly hired but newly promoted workers.
Demanding that all federal agencies provide a detailed list of divisions to be consolidated or cut by March 13 and submit plans for relocating Washington DC offices to areas of the country where the cost of living is lower by April 14.
Putting all federal staff in DEI programs on paid administrative leave and closing all DEI program-related offices; cutting thousands of jobs at USAID, with the goal of reducing its workforce from over 10,000 to 290 employees; and closing six out of 10 regional Social Security Administration offices, eliminating 7,000 jobs.
No less worrying than this often arbitrary slashing is Trump’s targeted purge—the term, with its Stalinist echoes, is the appropriate one—of individuals, and their replacement by MAGA loyalists.
Among the people Trump has so far removed from office are:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr., only the second African American to hold the chairman’s job; Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; General James Slife, vice chief of the Air Force; the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force; and the commandant of the US Coast Guard, Admiral Linda L. Fagan, the first female officer to lead any branch of the US military.
More than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the criminal investigations into Donald Trump for the special counsel Jack Smith; another dozen prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office in Washington hired to investigate the January 6 riot; and at least nine high-ranking FBI officialswho were involved in Trump investigations.
Fifteen immigration judges, eight supervisory assistant chief immigration judges, and five senior managers at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the branch of the Department of Justice’s branch that runs US immigration courts.
At least 17 inspectors general—the independent watchdogs who oversee federal government agencies—at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs and elsewhere; as well as USAID inspector general Paul Martin, who was fired the day after he warned that agency cuts risked the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Trump has also revoked security clearances for political opponents, including former President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan; 51 senior former intelligence officials who (allegedly) “engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign”; a raft of lawyers with whom Trump has crossed swords, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco; and Trump’s one time National Security Advisor John Bolton.
While some of these targeted actions against individuals send out ideological messages, and others are clearly about Trump settling personal scores, their cumulative effect is to sideline or neutralize potential sources of opposition to the implementation of the MAGA agenda in the government apparatus—including, crucially, the judiciary, the military, and the police.
A not-so-slow-motion coup?
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are watching a not-so-slow-motion coup in real time, involving the simultaneous unraveling of American democracy and the destruction of the post-war “rules-based order,” and its replacement by—at best—a Viktor Orban-style “illiberal democracy.”
The characteristics of the latter have been ably summarized by one political scientist as follows:
Consolidation of power in the executive
Charismatic leader
Erosion of the independence of the judiciary
Weakening status of the parliament
Recourse to direct democracy (plebiscites/referenda)
Populist rhetoric/propaganda
Discrimination of minorities
Monitoring and moulding of civil society
Media and internet censorship
Curbs on academia and educational curricula
Targeted repression of opponents
Restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly
Disregard for rule of law and human rights
Misuse of state resources (cronyism)
Emasculation of the electoral process
Forging of external enemies
Almost every one of these has accelerated in the United States since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. What used to be called the free world has ample reason to worry—and little time to act. Maintaining Hakeem Jeffries’ “dignified presence” will not be enough to save us.
But it does make for great TV—which we mostly watch, these days, on the two-way Orwellian telescreens we carry in our pockets that monitor and monetize our every move as we sleepwalk on into the darkness, mesmerized by a spectacle that lies somewhere between Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd.
Aftermath of an Israeli bombing raid on the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Photo courtesy the Palestinian News & Information Agency-WAFA/Wikimedia Commons.
In my most recent article for Canadian Dimension, I wrote about the stark discrepancies between US policy on supplying arms to Ukraine and Israel.
Though both states are nominally US allies, the Biden-Harris administration’s “unwavering support” for Ukraine has not stopped it from limiting or conditioning supplies of “offensive” as distinct from “defensive” weapons—long-distance ballistic missiles that are capable of reaching deep into Russia, for instance—in the interests of preventing escalation of the conflict and keeping European allies onside.
The US’s “ironclad commitment” to Israel, by contrast, has meant that the supply of offensive weaponry—like 500-pound and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of demolishing whole apartment blocks and incinerating their occupants—has continued to flow unimpeded, notwithstanding widespread international condemnation (including by several European states) of Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possible genocide in Gaza, or the Netanyahu government’s frequent breaches of what the US has itself described as “red lines.”
Until now. But a recent report by Axios suggests things may—may—be about to change.
Axios claims to have seen a letter sent on October 14 by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin to Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and Minister of Defence Yoav Galant, which was first reported on Israel’s Channel 12.
If the Axios report is accurate, for the first time the US administration is explicitly threatening to suspend military aid to Israel unless some very specific conditions are met.
These conditions, says Axios, amount to “the most wide-ranging and comprehensive list of US demands from Israel since the beginning of the war.”
Noting that IDF evacuation orders have forced 1.7 million Palestinians into Mawasi, a narrow strip of land on the Gaza coast where they are prey to dangerous diseases, at the same time as recent Israeli policies have made it harder to supply international aid into Gaza and limited its movement within the Strip, Blinken and Austin wrote that:
The amount of assistance entering Gaza in September was the lowest of any month during the past year … to reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory as consistent with its assurances to us, Israel must, starting now and within 30 days act on the following concrete measures …
Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM-20 and relevant US law (weapons supply).
These “concrete measures” included demands that Israel must:
allow “the permanent transfer of 350 aid trucks daily to the Gaza Strip through all four current border crossings as well as the opening of a fifth border crossing”;
enable “humanitarian pauses [in the fighting] throughout Gaza to allow the distribution of aid for at least the next four months”;
permit “the Palestinians who are concentrated along the coast in Mawasi to move east inland and away from the coastal area before winter”;
“end the isolation of northern Gaza Strip and officially announce it has no policy of forced evacuation of Palestinians from northern Gaza Strip to the southern Gaza Strip”; and
“allow the Red Cross to visit Palestinian detainees in detention facilities in Israel as soon as possible, in light of reports of abuse of detainees.”
In addition, Blinken and Austin expressed the US administration’s “concern” about a bill currently before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that would “sever ties between the Israeli government and UNRWA and to change the status-quo towards the organization in Jerusalem.”
Noting that this law, if passed, “would be devastating for the humanitarian effort in the Gaza Strip at a critical time and would prevent education and welfare services for tens of thousands of Palestinians in Jerusalem” and could also “constitute a violation of US laws,” Blinken and Austin demanded that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exercise his powers and influence over Knesset members so the bill doesn’t pass.”
Finally, Blinken and Austin wrote, “the US wants to establish a new mechanism with Israel to discuss incidents of mass Palestinian civilian casualties during IDF operations.”
On reading this report my response was mixed. This could be a game-changer, not only for Gaza but for the rapidly escalating conflict that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East (if not eventually the world). Without US arms and diplomatic support at the United Nations for its defiance not only of UN Security Council resolutions but also the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, Israel becomes far more vulnerable not only militarily but to international pressure.
A change in US policy on arms at this point would also make domestic political sense. The presidential election is less than a month away, and the race is too close to call in the critical swing states.
While Kamala Harris has doubled down on Biden’s “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s defence, a threat to condition the supply of offensive weapons of the sort that has been the administration’s policy in Ukraine could win back some of the Palestinian American, Arab American, Muslim American, and young American votes the Democrats have lost over Gaza—because these groups have much to lose otherwise from a Trump victory.
If, that is, it is not too late. Remember Hubert Humphrey’s loss, in uncannily similar circumstances—cleaving too close to an unpopular president despite US involvement in a divisive war (Vietnam)—to Richard Nixon in 1968?
On the other hand, Biden has ignored his own red lines before, and Blinken has recently been exposed as flagrantly disregarding State Department advice back in April that Israel’s actions in Gaza were not in conformity with the very same legal requirements he is now invoking. The Blinken-Austin letter sets a 30-day deadline for Israel to act on its demands, which takes us to November 12—a week after the US election.
Should Harris, buoyed by the apparent prospect of a U-turn on Biden’s policy on arms to Israel, win on November 5, what is there to prevent her administration, having done its due diligence, from certifying that Israel’s assurances that it is acting in accord with relevant US laws are “credible and reliable,” as Blinken did—outrageously—before?
It is a time, on the contrary, for heightened vigilance.
Update
The full text of the Blinken-Austin letter has now been posted on X by the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid and its authenticity confirmed by the White House, whose spokesman Matthew Miller describes it as “a private diplomatic communication” whose “timing was not influenced by next month’s presidential election.” Sure.
The contents of the letter are as described by Axios, though there are some additional demands made of Israel that are not mentioned in the Axios report.
A young woman carries her infant while walking on Rashid Street, west of Gaza City, on January 11, 2024. Photo by Omar Al-Qattaa/UNICEF/Flickr.
“There is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side … Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.”
On Friday, November 3, 2023, as the Palestinian death toll from Israeli military action in Gaza climbed to 9,257—among them 2,405 women and 3,826 children[1]—US Secretary of State Antony Blinken lamented that, “It’s shocking that so many people appear to have forgotten the brutality of the Hamas October 7 attack.” Unless one wished to be denounced as an antisemite and an apologist for terrorism, in the weeks following the attack it became obligatory to preface any statement on the war in Gaza, and in particular any criticism of Operation Swords of Iron (as Israel’s action is officially known), with a condemnation of Hamas’s brutality. Across the Western world a “McCarthyite backlash against pro-Palestine speech” cost people literary awards, art exhibitions, government positions, seats on scientific research advisory boards, places in sports teams, film roles, publications, and jobs ranging from Air Canada pilot to MSNBC news show hostto University of Ottawa medical resident to editor at Artforum and eLife. Wall Street law firms rescinded job offers to students who had spoken out in support of Palestine, while doctors were investigated for “potential professional misconduct” by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush abruptly quit her job at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario after a pro-Israel organization complained about her social media posts. Laurie Anderson was forced to give up a visiting professorship at Folkwang University of Arts in Essen, Germany, because of her support for a 2021 Palestinian artists’ “Letter against Apartheid.” Exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose exhibition at the Lisson Gallery was “effectively cancelled” for a tweet critical of Israeli influence in US politics, aptly described this backlash as “a massacre of thoughts.”
In Canada, the Ontario NDP expelled Hamilton MPP Sarah Jama from caucus for pro-Palestinian statements that had “broken the trust of her colleagues.” British Home Secretary Suella Braverman characterized protests in London and other UK cities, in which hundreds of thousands of people rallied against the scale and ferocity of Israel’s response, as “hate marches … chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map,” while the US Senate unanimously condemned “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” after demonstrations on university campuses across America. Not to be outdone, the House of Representatives censured its only Palestinian-American member, Rashida Tlaib, for “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.” Columbia University—for 40 years the home of world-renowned Palestinian scholar Edward Said—suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace societies. Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, who would later be hounded into resigning over her allegedly inadequate response to antisemitism on campus, responded to a letter from 34 student organizations that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in Gaza with a statement that began by condemning “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and totally ignored Israeli reprisals. She continued: “Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region.” What decent person, it was implied, would not want first and foremost to repudiate the authors of such barbaric atrocities—even if they supported the Palestinian cause?
The Times of Israelreported the UN General Assembly’s ceasefire resolution of October 27 under the subheading “Jerusalem denounces General Assembly’s approval of ‘despicable’ Jordanian initiative that makes no mention of Hamas,” while US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield complained “It is outrageous that this resolution fails to name the perpetrators of the October 7th terrorist attacks: Hamas.” It was on these grounds that the US and UK abstained in the vote on the Security Council resolution of November 15 calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting. The October 27 resolution aimed to halt future fatalities, yet what concerned Israel and the US more was its failure to censure Hamas for its past actions. By drawing our attention relentlessly back to October 7, the focus was taken away from the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza—and from Israel’s ongoing part in it. When Justin Trudeau later urged Israel to stop “this killing of women, of children, of babies,” Benjamin Netanyahu angrily responded: “it is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust … the forces of civilization must back Israel in defeating Hamas barbarism.” By this time, Gaza’s death toll had passed 11,100, including 4,609 children—nearly four times as many children alone as the total number of Israelis killed in the October 7 attack—but it was October 7 that continued to dominate discussion and circumscribe the terms of acceptable debate.
These ritualized denunciations of Hamas’s actions on October 7 have functioned as what Gérard Genette calls paratexts. Like an abstract for an article, a trailer for a film, or a publisher’s blurb for a book, a paratext provides:
a threshold, or—a word Borges used apropos of a preface—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of stepping inside or turning back. A paratext is “an edge,” or as Philippe Lejeune put it, “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”
By positioning October 7 as Israel’s Ground Zero, Hamas’s assault becomes the self-evident point of origin of the current conflict in Gaza and the obligatory reference point for all critical analysis and moral judgment regarding subsequent events. Whether the issue was Israel’s cutting off of water, food, electricity, fuel, and medical supplies to the Gaza strip, its relentless bombardment of residential areas and civilian facilities including schools, hospitals, mosques, bakeries, aid agencies, and physical infrastructure, or its acquiescence in settler violence against Palestinian villagers in the West Bank—all of which constitute prima facie war crimes and/or crimes against humanity—the Israeli government and its Western supporters repeatedly reminded us of the brutality of Hamas’s actions on October 7.
Beside such an atrocity, it was intimated, all else paled into insignificance: including Palestinian civilians’ human rights and the internationally recognized rules of war. Mark Thompson, CEO and editor-in-chief at CNN, said the quiet bit out loud in a set of guidelines to CNN staff issued in late October, which were later obtained by the Guardian newspaper:
A note at the top of the two-page memo pointed to an instruction “from Mark” to pay attention to a particular paragraph under “coverage guidance.” The paragraph said that, while CNN would report the human consequences of the Israeli assault and the historical context of the story, “we must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians.”
Even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found on January 26, 2024 that there was a “plausible” risk of a genocide occurring in Gaza and imposed several “provisional measures” on Israel “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts,” the events of October 7 continued to frame official and mainstream media western narratives. Responding to the judgment in a statement that made no mention of most of the ICJ’s measures, the Canadian government reiterated that “Nothing can justify Hamas’ brutal attacks on October 7, including the appalling loss of life, and the heinous acts of violence perpetrated in those attacks, including sexual violence.” The following day was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Joe Biden—whose White House had previously dismissed South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”—seized the opportunity to divert the world’s attention away from the ICJ’s findings:
This year, the charge to remember the Holocaust, the evil of the Nazis, and the scourge of antisemitism is more pressing than ever. On October 7 Hamas terrorists unleashed pure, unadulterated evil on the people of Israel, slaughtering approximately 1,200 innocent people and taking hundreds more hostage—including survivors of the Shoah. It was the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. … We cannot remember all that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust experienced and then stand silently by when Jews are attacked and targeted again today. Without equivocation or exception, we must also forcefully push back against attempts to ignore, deny, distort, and revise history. This includes Holocaust denialism and efforts to minimize the horrors that Hamas perpetrated on October 7, especially its appalling and unforgiveable use of rape and sexual violence to terrorize victims.
By then, the number of Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza had reached 26,083, with thousands more missing under the rubble, 64,487 people injured, and 1.7 million permanently displaced. Biden did not once mention them. At the time of writing, Israel has killed at least 11,500 Palestinian children in Gaza—as compared with the 36 children killed in Israel on October 7. “A child killed every 15 minutes, one out of every 100 children in Gaza,” writes Israeli journalist Gideon Levy; “No explanation, no justification or excuse could ever cover up this horror … Horror of this scope has no explanation other than the existence of an army and government lacking any boundaries set by law or morality.”
Yet no matter what Israel does, any criticism of Operation Swords of Iron is forestalled by this eternal return of the ever-same. There is no way out of the vestibule. October 7 has acquired the status of a myth, in Roland Barthes’ sense of the term:
a self-sufficient sign that abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is a world without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.
From occupation to blockade
Myths, wrote the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, are “machines for the suppression of time.” Their defining characteristic is not that they are false—Hamas (or others who followed them through the fence on October 7) did commit war crimes against Israeli civilians, possibly including some horrific crimes of sexual violence.[2] The important point about myths, for present purposes, is that they are ahistorical. They detach actions from any context, transforming them into free-floating signifiers. It is this abstraction that allowed Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan to demand that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres resign “because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism.” But Guterres was right. Hamas’s attacks did not erupt out of nowhere. Nor did Israel’s response. They are the latest chapters in a conflict that has been going on now for over a century. Hamas’s rampage through southern Israel may have been, as Pakistan’s Ambassador to the UN Munir Akram put it, “the proximate cause” of the war, but the “real cause” lies deeper. Akram is in no doubt that “The Israeli occupation is the original sin, not what happened on 7 October.” While Israel’s defenders would cavil at the word sin, I would demur at the word original. Origins are in the eye of the beholder.
In seeking to go back beyond what is immediately visible, then, how far back should we go? The storming of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by 832 Jewish settlers two days before Hamas’s assault undoubtedly inflamed Palestinian passions. But Hamas officials have said that the planning for October 7, which they codenamed “al-Aqsa Flood,” began after Israeli police raids on al-Aqsa in May 2021. Both recent intrusions will have revived memories of Ariel Sharon’s uninvited visit to the same mosque with a heavily armed entourage on September 27, 2000, which sparked the Second Intifada of 2000-2005, in which there were 138 suicide attacks and 1,038 Israelis and 3,189 Palestinians lost their lives. Sharon, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2001-2006, is loathed among Palestinians, not least because of his role in facilitating the Christian Phalange militia’s massacre of between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Shi’ite Muslims in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the Beirut suburbs during the First Israel–Lebanon War of 1982. An official Israeli investigation concluded that “the Minister of Defense [Sharon] made a grave mistake when he ignored the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population in the refugee camps” and found him “personally responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge,” causing him to resign his post. This wasn’t Sharon’s first brush with atrocity: he commanded the forces responsible for the Qibya massacre in the West Bank of October 14, 1953, in which more than 69 villagers, two thirds of them women and children, lost their lives in a reprisal for a fedayeen raid from the West Bank that killed three Israelis.
It would be surprising if the latest desecration of Islam’s third most holy site played no part in stoking the vengefulness with which Hamas fighters carried out their killings on October 7 or the jubilation with which news of the breach of Israel’s supposedly impregnable defenses was greeted by many Palestinians in Gaza and across the world. Other recent Israeli provocations that might have been simmering in Palestinian minds that Saturday morning include the shooting of Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, in which, a UN inquiry “concluded on reasonable grounds … Israeli forces used lethal force without justification under international human rights law”; the weekly Great March of Return demonstrations of 2018-19, when Israeli snipers—some of whom later boasted to the newspaper Haaretz of taking sadistic delight in crippling Palestinian protestors by shooting them in the knees—fired at peaceful demonstrators within Gaza across the perimeter fence, killing 266 people and injuring 30,000 more in the course of a single year; and Israel’s Operation Protective Edge of July-August 2014, which led an appalled veteran Danish Middle East correspondent to tweet an iPhone photograph to the world with the sardonic caption “Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard.” Sderot was the scene of fierce fighting on October 7, which left at least 50 Israelis dead.
Operation Protective Edge was the third of four Israeli assaults that marked the peaks in a running conflict that killed 6,540 Palestinians (5,360 of them in Gaza) as compared with 309 Israelis between January 2008 and October 6, 2023—a fatality ratio of 21:1. The other operations were Operation Cast Lead in December 2008; Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012; and Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. Calling these “wars” is contentious insofar as they were not fought between sovereign states. The Israeli military uses the derisive metaphor “mowing the grass,” which rather confirms the Palestinian view of these “operations” as periodic collective punishments meted out by an occupying power. The political status of Gaza is a peculiar one. Israel dismantled its settlements and withdrew its troops from Gaza (which it had occupied since 1967) in September 2005, and Hamas has governed within the strip since 2006, when it won Palestinian elections with 44 percent of the vote. Fatah took 41.43 percent. Hamas followed its victory with a coup d’état in June 2007 in which it drove out its Fatah rivals (who continued to nominally govern in the West Bank). There have been no more elections in Gaza. Since only a small minority of the strip’s present inhabitants, over half of whom are children, were eligible to vote on the last occasion on which they had any choice in their government, the charge that “the Palestinians elected Hamas” (or, as Israeli President Isaac Herzog has complained, have failed to remove it) and that therefore “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible [for October 7]” is at best a gross oversimplification.
Israel has imposed a land, air, and sea blockade on Gaza since 2007, transforming the strip into what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison camp.” Masha Gessen offers a different (if more inflammatory) comparison:
For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.
For this reason, to Israel’s chagrin, the UN still classes Gaza as an occupied territory (which places legal obligations on the occupying power to safeguard the lives and human rights of its population). Gessen’s essay led the Heinrich Böll Foundation to withdraw its sponsorship of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought that she had been awarded, leading to the cancelation of the award ceremony. As Samantha Hill observed, “The irony is almost too thick to cut. Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975.”
Hamas’s takeover and Israel’s blockade of Gaza were the culmination of a longer process of polarization among both Palestinians and Israelis following the breakdown of the Oslo “peace process.” Should we be looking back, then, to the failure of the 2020 Camp David “peace summit” and the Second Intifada? To the sabotaging of the 1993-5 Oslo Accords by opponents on both sides—including Benjamin Netanyahu—after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing religious extremist, Yigal Amir, in November 1995? To the First Intifada of 1987-93 and the Muslim Brotherhood’s foundation of Hamas in 1987? These were the decades during which the secular nationalism espoused by Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which accepted Israel’s right to exist in peace in 1993, lost ground to Hamas’s militant Islamism. For years, Netanyahu cynically sought to take advantage of this split in the Palestinian resistance, bolstering Hamas’s control in Gaza in order to undermine the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority and with it any chance of a two-state solution. On October 7, that strategy spectacularly backfired. This has not stopped Netanyahu boasting that “I’m proud that I prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state,” and describing the Oslo accords as “a fateful mistake.”
Or is the “real cause” of the current crisis, as Munir Akram argued, to be found in the occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank following their capture by Israel in the Six Day War? Fifty-six years have now passed since the UN Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 242, which mandated the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Does Gilad Erdan seriously expect us to ignore the impact on Palestinian minds of the subsequent history of (illegal) Israeli settlements and dispossession of Palestinians—a process that has only accelerated during the present century—or the imposition, within the occupied territories, of what many respected Israeli and international human rights organizations, including B’tselem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, have described as an apartheid regime? In 1995 there were around 110,000 settlers in the West Bank. Today, more than 700,000 settlers live in 150 settlements and 128 outposts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The UN has repeatedly condemned this as a process of creeping annexation and ethnic cleansing.
In October 2022, a UN commission of inquiry called out “the coercive environment intended to force Palestinians to leave their homes and alter the demographic composition of certain areas,” instancing “the demolition of homes and destruction of property, the excessive use of force by security forces, mass incarceration, settler violence, restrictions of movement, and limitations on access to livelihoods, basic necessities, services and humanitarian assistance.” According to another recent UN report, Israel has detained around one million Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1967, including tens of thousands of children, in many instances in “administrative detention” without trial:
Confinement in filthy and crowded cells, sleep and food deprivation, medical negligence, severe and prolonged beatings and other forms of ill-treatment, have been extensively documented and torture remains an available method to intimidate and obtain confessions or information.
From Nakba to occupation
But perhaps to find the “real cause” of October 7 we need to go back still further, to the events that laid the foundations of the Israeli state. Palestine had been an Arab land and an integral part of the Islamic world, containing some of its holiest places, since the Muslim conquest in 635-7 CE. The conquest did not significantly affect the demographics of the region: a Muslim elite replaced the Byzantine elite with little change in the ethnic makeup of the population as a whole. For centuries before that, Palestine had been part of the Byzantine and Roman empires: its name derives from Syria Palaestina, the Roman province established after the defeat of the Bar Kochba Jewish revolt of 132-136 CE, events that furthered the diaspora that began with the Babylonian conquest of Judea in 597 BCE. While there indeed was a Jewish presence in Palestine over the next two millennia—as there was throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe—Jews were never more than a small minority of Palestine’s population. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, Ottoman records show in 1878 Palestine had 462,465 inhabitants, of whom only 15,011 (three percent) were Jewish.
The stage for Palestine’s makeover into Israel was set by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between Britain, France, and Russia on parceling up the Ottoman Empire in the event of Turkey’s defeat in the First World War, and the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which Britain promisedZionists its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Britain gained control over Palestine in 1918, which it officially administered under a League of Nations mandate from September 29, 1923. Despite some modest Zionist immigration from Europe beginning in the 1880s, at the end of the First World War Palestine’s population was still 90 percent Arab. Initially encouraged by Britain, 376,845 Jewish settlers, many fleeing from Nazi persecution, arrived in Palestine between 1920 and 1945. The peak years of immigration were 1925 (33,801), 1933 (30,327), 1934 (42,359), 1935 (61,854), and 1936 (29,727). Hostility to the speed and scale of the Jewish influx led to the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-9.
David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine who would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister, understood the sources of Palestinian disquiet all too well. Benny Morris quotes him addressing a meeting of the Mapai Party in 1936:
The Arabs’ fear of our power is intensifying. They see exactly the opposite of what we see. It doesn’t matter whether or not their view is correct … They see immigration on a giant scale … they see the Jews fortify themselves economically … They see the best lands passing into our hands. They see England identify with Zionism … [Arabs are] fighting dispossession … The fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people. There is a fundamental conflict. We and they both want the same thing: We both want Palestine … By our very presence and progress here, [we] have matured the [Arab] movement.
Since the parties seemed irreconcilable, the Peel Commission of 1937 recommended partition as the only solution. The Second World War put a temporary hold on any further resolution of the problem.
Despite belated British attempts to curtail further immigration, by 1944 Jews made up 30.39 percent of Palestine’s population. These numbers were swelled by some 70,000 Holocaust survivors in 1945-7, who arrived as illegal immigrants running the gauntlet of a British naval blockade. By 1948, over 50,000 Jewish refugees were detained in internment camps in Cyprus. Under attack from Palestinian nationalists on one side and Zionist militias on the other, in 1947 Britain announced its intention to leave Palestine and turned the future of the territory over to the UN. On November 29, the UN adopted a proposal to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem being placed under international control. Palestinian leaders rejected the proposal, which would have handed over 56 percent of the land to the Jewish minority, including the fertile central coastal strip. At the time the great majority of the land was still owned by Arabs. The Zionist leadership accepted the UN plan, on grounds that Ben-Gurion had set out in a letter to his son apropos the Peel Commission report:
But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have, though of course much less than we merit and desire. The question is: would we obtain more without partition? … What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish. A unified Eretz Israel [Land of Israel] would be no source of satisfaction for me—if it were Arab.
A civil war ensued in which Jewish and Palestinian militias both committed atrocities. Zionist militias Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi played a major part in the fighting, as Irgun (commanded by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin) and Lehi (otherwise known as the Stern Gang, led by future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir) had done in earlier attacks on the British like the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people on July 22, 1946. In one of the most notorious incidents, the Deir Yasin massacre of April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi forces slaughtered over 100 villagers, including women and children. Like almost everything else in this history, both the details of what happened and the numbers of casualties are hotly disputed. Historian Benny Morris quotes reports written by the head of the Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) in Jerusalem, Yitzhak Levy, on April 12 and 13: “The conquest of the village was carried out with great brutality, whole families [including] women, old people and children were killed and there are piles and piles of dead. Some of the prisoners taken away … including women and children were murdered barbarically by their captors.” Palestinians retaliated four days later with the Hadassar medical convoy massacre, an ambush that left 78 Jewish medical staff and others dead.
Writing to the New York Times on December 4, 1948, and instancing among other atrocities the “shocking example” of Deir Yassin, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and other prominent members of the American Jewish community warned that:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ [Herut], a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine … Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority … During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
Herut’s leader was Irgun commander and future founder of Likud, Menachem Begin. There is a straight line of descent here from Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, which was established in 1925 on an unquestioned belief in “the only and single idea of establishing a Jewish state” with “a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.” I should perhaps add that were Arendt and Einstein to write their letter today, the Times likely wouldn’t publish it because it falls foul of the influential but much-contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of antisemitism, which forbids “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
On the day the British mandate ended, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel” and the Palestinian Civil War turned into the Israeli War of Independence. Despite its promise of “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” the declaration made clear that Israel was to be a Jewish ethnostate. Troops from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq poured into Palestine, to be joined by smaller units from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The Jewish militias merged into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). In ten months of fighting Israel gained control not only of all the land allocated to it in the UN plan but around 60 percent of the area earmarked for the Arab state, as well as of West Jerusalem. Transjordan occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, annexing the latter the following year. Egypt occupied the Gaza strip. Ilan Pappé records that “In a matter of seven months, 531 [Palestinian] villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape, and the imprisonment of males over the age of ten in labor camps for periods of over a year.
Palestinian refugees in the Jaramana Refugee Camp, Damascus, Syria, 1948. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from the land that became Israel during 1947-8. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba: the Arabic word for catastrophe. In what is perhaps the bitterest pill for the exiles to swallow, Jews from anywhere in the world can “return” to a land they may never have set foot in with an automatic right to Israeli citizenship, while Palestinians have repeatedly been denied any right of return to the land they had been driven out of and their ancestors had inhabited and cultivated since time out of mind. Israel’s continuing refusal to allow the refugees to return has been a major stumbling-block to any peace agreement ever since. Their place was quickly taken by newly-minted Israelis. The UN has estimated that “between 15 May 1948 and the end of 1951 more than 684,000 Jewish immigrants settled in Israel … Of the 370 Jewish settlements established between 1948 and the beginning of 1953, 350 were established on land abandoned by the Palestinians. In 1954 more than one-third of Israel’s Jewish population, plus 250,000 new Jewish immigrants, settled in whole cities that had been completely deserted by the Palestinians as a result of the military operations of 1948.” Around two-thirds of Gaza’s population are Nakba refugees or their descendants. The memory of what was taken from them in 1947-8 has been passed down from generation to generation.
From a Palestinian point of view, the state of Israel is an artificial and entirely modern creation, which is as much the product of European settler colonialism as Australia, Canada, or the United States. Whatever may have been the case in antiquity, when the Hebrews were among several peoples (including the ancestors of the Palestinians) living in the Levant, Jews did not form a major component of Palestine’s population at any point between the second century CE and the 1920s. Israel’s ideological roots lie in the Zionism developed by Theodor Herzl and other European Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, and its demographic foundations were laid during the British mandate and built upon later. During the 1930s Britain, the US, and other Western states strictly limited the numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution they would accept, resulting in such tragedies as the turning back to Europe of the MS St. Louis, with 937 refugees on board, in June 1939. But after the Second World War, salving its conscience for the Holocaust with Arab land and Arab blood, the West allowed Israel to drive Palestinians out of their homeland to make way for Jewish settlers; and the West—somewhat grotesquely now including Germany, which has sought to atone for its Nazi crimes by declaring that “Israel’s security is German ‘reason of state [Staatsräson]’”—has continued to protect the Zionist state economically, diplomatically, and militarily ever since. Jewish ascendancy in Israel was established by violence and continues to be maintained by violence. Operation Swords of Iron, which killed more civilians in the first month of combat than died in two years of the Russia–Ukraine War, is but the most recent chapter in Israel’s long history of ethnic cleansing.
Capping this process and forever enshrining Jewish ethnic privilege in the constitutional law of the land, “The Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which was passed by the Knesset in July 2018 on a vote of 62 to 55, defines Israel as “the historical homeland of the Jewish people” in which “the right to exercise national self-determination … is unique to the Jewish people.” The same law stripped Arabic of its status as an official language, proclaimed a “complete and united Jerusalem” as the national capital, and committed to “the development of Jewish settlement as a national value” which the state “will act to encourage and promote.” Unlike other settler colonies like Canada, which have evolved over time into multicultural democracies in which populations of diverse ethnic origins and religious faiths enjoy at least formally equal status and rights, Israel has continued to define its identity in restrictive ethno-religious terms, and this has bedeviled all attempts at any solution of the Palestinian question. In a controversial essay in the New York Review in 2003, the late historian Tony Judt got to the heart of the matter:
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European enclave in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are permanently excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
The Israeli narrative—righteous victims?
Let me now put the clocks back and tell the story from an Israeli perspective—more briefly in this case, because this version is more familiar to most Western readers. Israel differs fundamentally from other settler colonies, its supporters argue, in that unlike the Muslim invaders, who came later, Jews did live there in antiquity. There is plentiful evidence, both Biblical and archaeological, for the existence of Jewish kingdoms in present-day Israel, including in the occupied territories of Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), during the first millennium BCE. Notwithstanding the long Jewish exile after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt in 136 CE, Zionist settlers were indeed returning to their ancestral homeland, whose memory was enshrined in the religious texts and observances that defined and held together the Jewish people over the next two millennia. Palestinians, by contrast, never formed a distinct people with a comparable bond to the land but were simply Arabs who shared a common language, culture, history, and religion with their brothers and sisters from Morocco to Yemen and happened to live in Palestine rather than in any other Ottoman province.[3] These arguments have been comprehensively challenged by Ilan Pappé, Shlomo Sand, and other Israeli historians, but their merits are not what matters here. What matters is that they have become an integral part of the Israeli national narrative, shaping perceptions of the country’s history both at home and abroad.
Equally absent from the foregoing account, for Israel’s defenders, is any acknowledgment that the Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim allies have refused every offer of a peaceful settlement since they turned down the UN partition plan in 1947, while continuing to wage intermittent wars with the aim of wiping the state of Israel from the face of the earth. After being invaded by several Arab armies on the very day of its birth, Israel signed armistices, but not permanent peace treaties, with its defeated enemies in 1949. The war inflamed antisemitic sentiment across the Muslim world and led to a mass exodus of Jews from Arab states of no lesser magnitude or misery than the Palestinian Nakba. Driven out of their centuries-old diasporic communities, some of which dated back millennia to the Babylonian captivity, by fear and violence as much as they were drawn by Zionist dreams of a new national homeland, around 650,000 of these displaced Middle Eastern and North African Jews (Mizrahi) ended up in Israel. Another 200,000 made their way to Europe (mostly settling in France) and the United States.
In addition to facing repeated incursions and border clashes, Israel fought three more full-scale wars with its neighbours over the next quarter-century: the Suez War of October 1956; the Six Day War of June 1967; and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, which began with a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria launched on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It took until 1979 before Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel—a breaking of ranks that resulted in its suspension from the Arab League until 1989. Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1984. Four decades had to pass before the Abraham Accords of 2020-23 normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, followed by Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco. But so long as the Palestinian problem has not been resolved, such agreements remain precarious—Saudi Arabia, for example, suspended normalization talks with Israel on October 14, 2023 (which was likely a key objective of the Hamas attack). Most Muslim countries still refuse to recognize Israel’s existence 75 years after it was admitted to the UN, and some, like Syria and Iran—which funds Hamas and the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah—remain actively committed to Israel’s destruction. Founded in 1982, Hezbollah, with whom Israel fought the Second Lebanon War in July 2006, represents an ongoing threat on Israel’s northern border at least as serious as Hamas’s in the south. No other state in the world, no matter how odious its regime, has been the object of such a sustained diplomatic boycott. What adds piquancy to this is that according to its supporters, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The claim is not without justification—so long as we forget about the democratic rights of the three million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, not to mention the 2.2 million who are blockaded in Gaza.[4]
After the Six Day War of 1967, a further wave of 280,000-325,000 Palestinian refugees fled from the newly occupied territories to surrounding Arab states. Refugee camps provided fertile recruiting grounds for the Palestinian resistance, whose different factions proved to be major headaches not only for Israel but also for their hosts. Following months of fighting triggered by the Dawson Field hijackings of September 1970, in which Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militants diverted four passenger airliners to a desert airstrip in Jordan and blew up the (emptied) planes in front of the world’s assembled media, the Jordanian military expelled the Palestinian fedayeen to Lebanon, where they established what was in effect a state within a state that served as a base from which to continue their attacks on Israel. Some Palestinian terrorist operations made international headlines, like Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport massacre of May 30, 1972, when Japanese Red Army gunmen acting on behalf of the PFLP killed 26 people and injured 80 others, or Black September’s hostage-taking and murder of 11 Israeli athletes later that year at the Munich Olympics. Palestinians’ cross-border raids and involvement in the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90 precipitated Israel’s invasions of 1978 and 1982 and occupation of the security zone in south Lebanon from 1985-2000.
Over the years there were many Palestinian attacks inside Israel. Among the worst were the Kiryat Shmona massacre of April 11, 1974, when PFLP–General Command militants killed 18 residents of an apartment block, half of them children; the Ma’alot massacre the following month, when Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine guerrillas took over an elementary school and held 115 students and teachers hostage, ending up in 31 deaths, including those of 22 children; and the Coastal Road massacre of March 11, 1978, in which 38 people, 13 of them children, died in a shootout after Fatah militants commandeered a bus near Tel Aviv. All of these were carried out by infiltrations from Lebanon, which declined after the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut in the fall of 1982 during the First Lebanon War. After a relatively peaceful interlude—the First Intifada employed mostly non-lethal forms of protest—Hamas’s first suicide bombing, at Mehola Junction in the West Bank on April 16, 1993, prefigured dozens of terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada whose targets included buses and bus stations, cafés and restaurants, bars and clubs, shopping malls, discotheques, crowded markets, and busy city streets. The number of suicide bombings dropped off after Hamas took over the Gaza strip in 2006, but Israel’s withdrawal did not bring about peace. Hamas and other Palestinian militias have since launched thousands of rockets against Israeli towns and cities from Gaza. Thanks to Israel’s “iron dome” defenses the rockets have caused relatively few fatalities, but they have inflicted a constant psychological barrage. From the beginning of the Second Intifada at the end of September 2000 through the end of September 2017, Palestinians killed 813 Israeli civilians, including 135 minors.[5]
Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement left no room for doubt that the group’s objective is to destroy the state of Israel and replace it with an Islamic republic, though it has considerably softened—or at least clarified—its original position since.[6] “The Islamic Resistance Movement … strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” the 1988 covenant proclaims. Insisting that “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad [holy war],” the text rules out any trade-off of land for peace or two-state solution like that proposed in the Oslo Accords. “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land,” it thunders, “Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem.” The document is full of well-worn antisemitic slurs:
With their money, [our enemies] took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there … They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
“The Zionist plan is limitless,” Hamas warns. “After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
Reading such calumnies, it is easy—too easy, perhaps, for the historical contexts were quite different—to see October 7 as simply the latest manifestation of an age-old generic antisemitism that is found in both the Muslim and Christian worlds (though Islam was on balance more tolerant of its Jewish minorities) and long preceded the establishment of the State of Israel. While Jew-hate has varied in its forms and intensity from time to time and place to place, the history of the diaspora has been marked by religious persecution (sometimes resulting in mass expulsions, like those from England in 1290 and the Iberian peninsula in 1492-6), ghettoization (enforced by restrictions on Jewish landowning, residence, marriage, and occupations), and stigmatization (like blood libels and Shylock stereotypes), punctuated by outbreaks of popular violence in which Jewish property was vandalized and Jewish men, women, and children brutally slaughtered, often with the connivance of the authorities. The precursors of October 7 stretch from the massacres of Jews across Europe and the Levant that accompanied the Crusades and the Black Death to the rash of pogroms in Odessa, Kyiv, Warsaw, and elsewhere in the Tsarist Empire at the turn of the twentieth century that contributed to the rise of Zionism. European antisemitism was to find its apotheosis in the Holocaust, a genocide that is without modern parallel in either its scale or its systematicity. When Hitler came to power in 1933 there were approximately 9.5 million Jews living in Europe. The Nazis murdered six million of them. It has not been forgotten in Israel that Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921-37 and an ardent Palestinian nationalist, propagandized on behalf of the Axis powers during his Second World War exile in Berlin.
In seeking to understand Israel’s response to October 7, we can no more ignore this context than we can ignore the influence of the Nakba or the occupation on Palestinian perceptions. Dov Waxman writes that “for many Jews the specific nature of Hamas’ attack—the mass slaughter and the way in which Hamas gunmen went systematically from house to house murdering families, and, in some cases, brutally butchering people—evokes deep, traumatic memories of the Holocaust.” It is surely possible to acknowledge the reality of intergenerational Jewish trauma independently of whether, as Atalia Omer, Raz Segal, and Norman Finkelstein maintain, Israel “weaponizes the Holocaust.” The global Jewish population (of 15.7 million) has still not recovered to its pre-Holocaust level (c. 16.5 million in 1939). Israel (excluding the occupied territories) has a population of around 9.73 million people, of whom 7.14 million (73.5 percent) are Jews. This compares with a global Arab population of approximately 464.68 million, and a global Muslim population of around two billion. Most Arab and Muslim states have shown nothing but hostility toward Israel for the last 75 years, while Hamas, Hezbollah, and other radical Islamist groups have made clear their desire to eradicate what they call “the Zionist entity” from Levantine maps and memories. Is it any wonder that the Jewish state should see itself as perpetually under existential threat—or that it should feel compelled to adopt a posture of aggressive self-defense and military deterrence? A self-defense that may in its eyes call for pre-emptive strikes (as in the 1956 Suez and 1967 Six Day Wars) and disproportionate reprisals (the apparent basis of current IDF strategic thinking), in order to ensure that “never again” becomes a reality, rather than just a well-meaning sentiment? No more going gentle into anyone’s gas chambers. When senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad promises that “the October 7 attack[s] against Israel were just the beginning” and vows to launch “a second, a third, a fourth” attack until the country is “annihilated,” best listen.
David Ben-Gurion anticipated the hostility the infant Jewish state would face. He was also far more forthright than many of Israel’s present-day defenders in admitting that the “Jewish national homeland” was built on the dispossession and depopulation of Palestinians, rather than seeking to justify the Zionist conquest with reference to Biblical prophecies, descent from the ancient Hebrews, or the Holocaust. In his memoir The Jewish Paradox, founder of the World Jewish Congress and longtime president of the World Zionist Organization Nahum Goldmann related a conversation he had with Ben-Gurion in 1953. “Why should the Arabs make peace?” he says Ben-Gurion asked him:
If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out …
“But how can you sleep with that prospect in mind,” I [Goldmann] broke in, “and be Prime Minister of Israel too?”
Who says I sleep? he answered simply.
Photos of Israelis who were kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7 attack. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Historical contextualization versus traumatic recall
“Palestinian terrorist groups and their sympathizers” are not the only ones to have claimed the land “from the river to the sea,” which under the sign of October 7 is now unambiguously interpreted as a call for genocide of Jews. The 1977 Likud Party Platform declared that “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable … Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” This exactly mirrors Hamas’s insistence in its 1988 covenant that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day … it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” As Ben-Gurion said, they both want Palestine. I have not rehearsed these competing narratives, however, in order to adjudicate between their respective claims. My purpose has instead been to show why we cannot begin to understand the war in Gaza without an awareness of how both Palestinian and Israeli actions have shaped and been shaped by those narratives. I do not believe we can make sense of Hamas’s assault on October 7 without reference to the Nakba, the occupation, or Israel’s blockading of Gaza since 2007—any more than we can make sense of Israel’s response without reference to the diaspora, the pogroms, and the Holocaust, as well as the more recent history of Arab/Israeli conflicts since 1948.
Unfortunately, the feature of the current fighting that has most appalled outsiders—and that, crucially, allowed October 7 to be weaponized as an emotionally compelling, all-embracing, all-excusing paratext in the first place—is depressingly familiar to historians. Colonial settings tend to create a mutual contempt between the colonizer and the colonized that frequently finds its outlet in extreme violence toward the other—on both sides. Plentiful historical precedents for Hamas’s October 7 attack, as well as for Netanyahu’s “mighty vengeance,” can be found in the brutality of the Haitian Revolution, the 1831 Jamaica Slave Rebellion, the Indian “Mutiny,” the massacres at Wounded Knee and Jallianwala Bagh, the Mau Mau Uprising, or the Algerian War. As Israeli human rights activist Michael Sfard sorrowfully recognized apropos the current bloodshed, “The incomprehensible cruelty that we’ve been exposed to—which proves the degree to which the occupation and the siege corrupt the occupied as well as the occupier—has penetrated our soul. And like nuclear fuel, it has spiraled us on our way to a moral hell.”
To contextualize is not to absolve. “To make sense” does not mean to justify, excuse, condone, or legitimate either side’s actions, but to attempt to grasp the historical circumstances in which they took place. Things precisely don’t mean something by themselves. Contrary to Gilad Erdan, to understand human actions, including (and perhaps especially) those we find most repugnant and alien to our own sensibilities, requires us to situate them not only in relation to antecedent events but also in relation to the cultural frameworks that confer meanings on those events: not for us, but for the actors involved. In this case, as former B’tselem Director Hagai El-Ad reminds us, “Deir Yassin and Gush Etzion, Sabra and Shatila, Be’eri and Gaza. Atrocities [are] etched into the historical memory of both peoples.” Gush Etzion was a massacre of Jews by Palestinians on May 13, 1948. Be’eri is one of the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7, where at least 130 people were killed. Only a fool—or an unprincipled political apologist—would deny that such historical memories profoundly influence how people act and react.
Passing moral judgment on those actions is a separate matter, which should not cloud and cannot substitute for historical analysis. My personal position on the Gaza War, for whatever it is worth, is that while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa. Both share the same indifference to human lives and human rights and the same cruelty in collectively punishing a dehumanized other. I would also strongly suggest that proportionality of response should itself be seen as a moral issue. By proportionality, to be clear, I mean in proportionality of numbers of victims and extent of damage on each side. This is not the same as the legal definition used in relevant humanitarian law, which weighs civilian harm against military objectives (thus clearly prioritizing the latter). I would like someday to see Yahya Sinwar and Benjamin Netanyahu sharing the dock in the Hague, and the recent ICJ decision gives me some hope that I might. But these are not the reasons why I have written this article. My concern is with what the translation of October 7 into a paratext as the Ur-atrocity, the singular point of origin, suppresses—and enables. It suppresses understanding. And it thereby enables—justifies, excuses, condones, and legitimates—further atrocities.
In a recent discussion of Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech in the wake of October 7, British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman argued that “There is a crucial distinction between two relations to the past, one governed by factual excavation, collation and analysis, the other manifesting as a kind of psychological recoil. We can shorthand the former mode as historical contextualization and the latter as traumatic recall. But these two forms of responses have gotten dangerously mixed up in the past weeks”:
I can’t deny that as the descendant of [a] family of pogrom and Holocaust survivors the close-range killings of families were emotionally triggering. But the trauma I too experience can’t replace the responsibility of historical analysis. Israeli society seems stuck in Oct 7th, as if in an endless present. Trauma has disassociated at least some of the events of this day from the history of the seventy-five years of catastrophe that Israel brought on Palestinians, the decades long siege of Gaza, the denial of any political horizon to another people. But after October 7th came October 8th and on—and all the while much of Israeli society is either cheering or is oblivious to the annihilation of Gaza.
The severing of the events of October 7 from the preceding 75 years of catastrophe has already done untold damage and threatens to do more. I am not only referring to the McCarthyite witch hunts that are poisoning democratic political cultures across the western world. Far worse is the effect on the course of the conflict itself. So long as we remain mired in the endless present of October 7, Israel’s continuing pulverization of Gaza remains immune from any intellectual analysis or moral criticism because these are disallowed a priori. Instead, the transmutation of October 7 into a free-floating sign, divorced from any meaningful context that might explain it, allows it to be reinscribed in other, time-honored colonialist discourses—those familiar discourses of “civilization” versus “barbarism,” replete with their racist tropes of the irredeemably primitive, lustful native—that usurp the place that responsible historical analysis should have occupied.
Addressing the Knesset on October 16, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that the Gaza War was “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” “Many people around the world now understand who stands against Israel,” he went on. “They understand that Hamas is ISIS. They understand that Hamas is the new version of Nazism.” As a matter of historical fact, Hamas has fundamentally different objectives to ISIS and very little in common with Nazism other than the antisemitism discussed earlier. One might, on the other hand, brave IHRA censure as an antisemite and point to some uneasy parallels between the calculated, rationalized brutality of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza and the specifically modernfeatures of the Holocaust to which Adorno and Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Zygmunt Baumanamong others have drawn attention. But so what? Stripped of any meaning other than as a self-explanatory signifier of elemental savagery, October 7 becomes a metonym for the Palestinian (or Arab, or Muslim) people and a vehicle for their further dehumanization. If they are less than fully human, why should they have any human rights? Announcing on October 9 that “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explained “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Evidently, he has no sense of irony.
Late in November international pressure led Israel to accept a week-long “humanitarian pause,” in which some hostages were exchanged and some food, water, fuel, and medical supplies were allowed into Gaza. Fighting resumed on December 1. While that portion of the world that was not forever stuck in the October 7 vestibule equivocated over whether Israel’s actions yet met the legal thresholds for war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu went on TV to assure the Israeli people that “The day before yesterday I directed the IDF, together with the War Cabinet, to resume fighting, with increasing force … The IDF and the security forces are doing this with determination, strength and while upholding international law.” South Africa launched its genocide case at the ICJ on December 29. Faced with the ICJ’s unwelcome judgment, Israeli leaders circled the wagons and determined to carry on regardless. Netanyahu fumed “the very claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is not just false, it is outrageous, and the court’s willingness to discuss it at all is a mark of disgrace that will not be erased for generations.” He added that Israel would continue the war until it had achieved “absolute victory.” “The ICJ in The Hague went above and beyond, when it granted South Africa’s antisemitic request to discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza, and now refuses to reject the petition outright,” agreed Yoav Gallant. “Hague Schmague,” tweeted national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Once again invoking the specter of October 7, opposition leader Yair Lapid thundered “136 hostages in Hamas tunnels are witness to their voices being silenced in the court in The Hague,” adding: “we do not need lectures or behavior guidelines in order to act like democracies that act according to international law.” Sure. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Let me give the last word to Theodor Adorno—a German Jew, displaced to America, writing in the wake of the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions. He was horribly prescient:
Legalities.—What the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language has no word for it, since even mass murder would have sounded, in face of its planned, systematic totality, like something from the good old days of the serial killer. And yet a term needed to be found if the victims—in any case too many for their names to be recalled—were to be spared the curse of having no thoughts turned unto them. So in English the concept of genocide was coined. But by being codified, as set down in the International Declaration of Human Rights, the unspeakable was made, for the sake of protest, commensurable. By its elevation to a concept, its possibility is virtually recognized: an institution to be forbidden, rejected, discussed. One day negotiations may take place in the forum of the United Nations on whether some new atrocity comes under the heading of genocide, whether nations have a right to intervene that they do not want to exercise in any case, and whether in view of the unforeseen difficulty of applying it in practice the whole concept of genocide should be removed from the statutes. Soon afterwards there are inside-page headlines in journalese: East Turkestan genocide programme nears completion.
References
1. Throughout this article Palestinian casualty figures are those supplied by the Gazan Health Ministry unless otherwise indicated.↩
2. If true, the allegations regarding Hamas’s use of sexual violence on October 7 are deeply disturbing. See relevant articles in themedialine.org, Haaretz, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. However, there has been considerable doubt cast on the evidential basis for these claims in pro-Palestinian sources. See articles in Mondoweiss (here, here, and here), The Intercept, and Electronic Intifada (here and here).↩
3. My own view is that while both these contentions can find some empirical support, they are anachronistic. We cannot simply identify modern Israelis with ancient Hebrews while simultaneously dismissing the elements that bind Palestinians into a community and distinguish them from other Arabs. Like every other modern nation, the adversaries confronting each other today in Israel/Palestine are “imagined communities” in Benedict Anderson’s sense, and how each imagines itself has been shaped in large part by the modern struggles between them. This is an important issue, but one that it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss any more fully.↩
4. The Economist Group’s Democracy Index 2022 ranks Israel as the only democracy (albeit a “flawed democracy”) in the region. But the description absolutely cannot be applied to the occupied territories, whose inhabitants lack any democratic rights. Moreover, the majority of Arab citizens who remained within Israel after the Nakba (who formed around 1/5 of the population) were subject to military rule until 1966.↩
5. By way of comparison, from 29 September 2000 to 6 October 2023, Israeli forces killed 10,554 Palestinians.↩
6. Hamas adopted a new covenant in 2017, which is far less publicized among supporters of Israel. Among other important shifts from the 1988 position are (1) clarification that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity”; and (2) acceptance of “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of June 4, 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” The antisemitic slurs of the 1988 covenant, quoted below in my text, are absent from the 2017 document.↩
Damage in Gaza caused by Israeli airstrikes, October 2023. Photo courtesy Islamic Relief Canada.
After four months of war, some Western leaders seem finally to be waking up to the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has unleashed upon Gaza, in which our governments and civil societies—our corporations, our news organizations, our social media, our educational and cultural institutions—are unarguably complicit.
The West has supplied the bombs, tanks, drones, and Hellfire missiles with which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has killed at least 28,473 Palestinians, injured another 68,146, displaced 90 percent of the population, and rendered much of the Gaza Strip uninhabitable. Over 12,300 of the dead are children or young teenagers. These are the known casualties, as of February 13; thousands more people are missing, presumed buried under the rubble. According to Israel’s social security agency Bituah Leumi, by comparison, Hamas’s October 7 attack killed “695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139 deaths”—not 1,400, as was stated as recently as February 15 by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—an unknown but likely substantial number of whom died from IDF friendly fire.
Comparisons may be odious, but I am not the only one making them. Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden, and other defenders of Israel’s actions in Gaza have constantly reiterated that October 7 was “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” coopting the memory of the most horrific crime of the twentieth century to justify what threatens to be the worst genocide so far of the twenty-first.
But however horrific Hamas’s crimes were on October 7, they are dwarfed by Israel’s retribution, which matches them in its callous brutality but is infinitely greater in its scale. It seems the IDF has taken Netanyahu’s injunction to “remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible” literally: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys,” says the relevant passage from the first book of Samuel.
For every Israeli killed on October 7, the IDF have now killed 27 Gazans. For every Israeli civiliankilled on October 7, the IDF have now killed 40 Gazans. For every Israeli child killed on October 7, the IDF has now killed 342 Gazan children.
You might have seen one of them, 12-year-old Sidra Hassouna, hanging dead from a wall in Gaza, ribbons of flesh all that was left of her legs after Israel struck Rafah in a “complex overnight operation” to free two hostages, while a worldwide audience of 123.7 million people were glued to the 2024 US Super Bowl, making it “the highest number of people watching the same broadcast in the history of television.”
Western representatives at the UN have repeatedly prevented the Security Council from ordering a ceasefire that might have halted this carnage. Western media have boosted the Israeli narrative through brazenly one-sided reporting (e.g. at CBC, BBC, CNN), while our universities, museums, film studios, art galleries, professional associations, and a host of private employers have compliantly suppressed all pro-Palestinian speech on grounds of “antisemitism.”
The ICJ ruling that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza vindicated Israel’s critics, but has so far done little to alter the situation on the ground. Canada’s evasiveresponse, in which Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly reiterated Israel’s “right to defend itself” in the face of “Hamas’s brutal attacks of October 7,” was typical of official Western reaction. Immediately after the court delivered its verdict, the US, UK, Canada, and 13 other “Western democracies” diverted attention from the ruling by suspending funding to UNRWA, the principal relief agency in Gaza upon which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives depend, on the basis of Israel’s unevidenced allegation that a dozen UNRWA staff (out of 13,000) had participated in Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Such is the power of the spectre of October 7, which up till now has been a black hole into which everything—reason, morality, proportionality, context, or any other perspectives on the conflict—get sucked and disappear.
Palestinians inspect the ruins of Aklouk Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on October 8, 2023. Photo courtesy the Palestinian News & Information Agency-WAFA/Wikimedia Commons.
Is the tide turning?
When the Spanish and Belgian prime ministers denounced “innocent killings of civilians” back in November, Netanyahu rebuked them because they “did not place total responsibility on Hamas for the crimes against humanity it perpetrated: massacring Israeli citizens and using Palestinians as human shields.” As Israel seems poised for a final solution (“absolute victory”) by assaulting Rafah, where an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians the IDF has driven from their homes are holed up in conditions of unimaginable squalor, famine, and disease, that argument seems finally to be losing its stranglehold over rational or moral debate.
Maintaining that “The expanded Israeli military operation in the Rafah area poses a grave and imminent threat that the international community must urgently confront,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote Ursula van der Leyden on February 13 demanding that “the European Commission urgently review whether Israel is complying with its obligations to respect human rights in Gaza.” Along with Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, and Portugal, Ireland and Spain have been among a handful of European countries who have refused to join the boycott of UNRWA and publicly criticized Israel for its military response to October 7.
More recent converts to the chorus of belated concern include the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Mélanie Joly, who is rapidly developing into Canada’s very own Susan Collins. These all speak for states who have up till now backed “Operation Swords of Iron,” as Israel’s Gaza offensive is officially codenamed, to the hilt.
On February 14, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon went further, issuing a joint statement calling for a ceasefire. As the Times of Israelnoted, the statement “did not mention removing the terror group [Hamas] from power, as a trilateral statement in December had, but rather focused on civilians in Rafah.”
Though the leaders reiterated that they “unequivocally condemn Hamas for its terror attacks on Israel on October 7” and demanded that “Hamas must lay down its arms and release all hostages immediately,” the statement’s main focus was no longer on Hamas but Israel. The settler colony troika adopted a markedly different tone toward the ICJ’s measures than Mélanie Joly’s earlier statement of January 26:
There is growing international consensus. Israel must listen to its friends and it must listen to the international community. The protection of civilians is paramount and a requirement under international humanitarian law. Palestinian civilians cannot be made to pay the price of defeating Hamas.
An immediate humanitarian ceasefire is urgently needed. Hostages must be released. The need for humanitarian assistance in Gaza has never been greater. Rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian relief must be provided to civilians. The International Court of Justice has been clear: Israel must ensure the delivery of basic services and essential humanitarian assistance and must protect civilians. The Court’s decisions on provisional measures are binding.
Perhaps more significantly—time alone will tell—a visibly exasperated Joe Biden, whose public backing for Israel has up till now been (in his words) “unwavering,” told White House Reporters on February 8: “I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the [Israeli] response in the Gaza Strip has been over the top.” The White House meantime leaked that in private, Joe calls “that guy” Netanyahu an “asshole.”
Speaking in Tel Aviv a day earlier, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had warned: “the daily toll that [Israel’s] military operations continue to take on innocent civilians remains too high …”
Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way on October 7. The hostages have been dehumanized every day since. But that cannot be a license to dehumanize others. The overwhelming majority of people in Gaza had nothing to do with the attacks of October 7, and the families in Gaza whose survival depends on deliveries of aid from Israel are just like our families. They’re mothers and fathers, sons and daughters—want to earn a decent living, send their kids to school, have a normal life. That’s who they are; that’s what they want. And we cannot, we must not lose sight of that. We cannot, we must not lose sight of our common humanity.
An Israeli artillery unit in action near the Gaza Strip. Photo courtesy IDF Spokesperson’s Unit/Wikimedia Commons.
Colonialist legacies
It’s nice to see Western politicians admit that Palestinians are people rather than (as Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called them) “human animals.” It would be nicer still if the words were matched by deeds—the suspension of arms shipments to Israel, the immediate restoration of UNRWA funding, and Western support for a binding UN Security Council resolution on a ceasefire and implementation of resolution 242 (1967) mandating Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 borders would be a start. Despite Biden’s and Blinken’s words, the US used its veto to block a Security Council ceasefire resolution for a third time on February 20.
But one has to ask: what took you all so long? Where have you been these last four months (these 57 years of illegal Israeli occupation)? Whether or not the ICJ in the end classifies them as genocidal, what has blinded you to the palpable war crimes playing out live from Gaza on our screens in real time, that have horrified the rest of the world and brought hundreds of thousands of protestors out on Western streets week after week, only to be maligned by you as antisemites?
These questions might especially be asked of otherwise (relatively) progressive Western politicians, who are on the center-left of their countries’ political spectrum yet have stood foursquare behind the most right-wing government in Israel’s history while it methodically obliterated Gaza and canceled its people: Joe Biden and other Democrat leaders (Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer) in the US, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in the UK, Justin Trudeau in Canada.
Could an embarrassing part of the answer be that “the West,” or what is more accurately conceived as the Global North, is made up largely of imperialist states that not so long ago possessed colonies spread across the Global South, and their former settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and above all the United States)? That Israelis are in some obscure way felt to be, in a phrase once beloved of British supporters of Ian Smith’s rogue UDI regime in what was then Rhodesia, “our kith and kin,” in a way that Palestinians (Arabs, Muslims) are not? Why else would we be prepared to believe the most ludicrous of Israeli atrocity stories while for so long ignoring the mountain of evidence of war crimes committed against Palestinians now and previously by the IDF?
We need seriously to consider the disturbing proposition that it is not contemporary economic interests or geopolitical alliances, nor even the undoubted power of pro-Zionist lobby groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPIC) or Canada’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), that are the decisive factors in Western support for Israel, but the deeper, affectual bonds of a shared legacy of colonialism. That what most closely and insidiously binds the West to Israel, at the end of the day, is a deeply embedded culture of white supremacy in which “the natives” are indeed regarded (in Benjamin Netanyahu’s words) as children of darkness, capable of any vileness, while we are the progressive children of light, pure as the driven snow.
On February 25, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old serviceman of the United States Air Force, died after setting himself on fire outside the front gate of the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC.
As the whole world by now surely knows, shortly before 1 pm on Sunday, February 25, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old United States Air Force cyber-defense operations specialist serving with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron in San Antonio, Texas, walked to the gates of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC.
As he approached the embassy, he livestreamed a statement on the social media site Twitch via his cell phone:
My name is Aaron Bushnell. I’m an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
The young airman positioned his phone on the ground to video what was going to happen next, poured flammable liquid over his head, lit himself on fire, and stood to attention for as long as he could. He was wearing his air force uniform. Bushnell’s last words, which he screamed several times before collapsing, were “Free Palestine!”
After Secret Service officers extinguished the flames—this being America, one of them kept a gun pointed at the burning airman throughout his ordeal, shouting “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!”—Bushnell was taken by ambulance to a local hospital. He was pronounced dead at 10:06 pm.
A non-violent act of despair
An earlier protest against US support for Israeli action in Gaza by a so far unidentified woman carrying a Palestinian flag who set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta on December 1 attracted little press attention. Bushnell did his utmost to ensure that his death would not similarly go unnoticed, and social media did the rest.
Prior to setting out, he emailed a link to the Twitch livestream to several reporters and left-wing news sites giving notice that “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.” It would, he warned, be “very disturbing.” He asked that “you make sure that the footage is preserved and reported on.” It later emerged that the previous week Bushnell had made a will in which he left his savings to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and arranged for a neighbour to take care of his cat. Whether or not one agrees with them, these were considered and purposeful actions.
Initial media reports downplayed Bushnell’s political motivation—the New York Times headline “Man Dies After Setting Himself on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington, Police Say” was aptly described by Al Jazeera’s Belén Fernández as “a rather strong contender, perhaps, for the most diluted and decontextualised headline ever.” Many supporters of Israel tried to explain away the airman’s protest as the result of mental illness or, like Republican senator Tom Cotton, insinuated “extremist leanings” in his past. In the face of Bushnell’s footage going viral on social media, however, such attempts to bury the story or deflect from its message were soon superseded by more serious analyses of self-immolation as a form of political protest.
Recalling among others the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire at a Saigon intersection in 1963; Americans Alice Herz and Norman Morrison, who burned themselves to death protesting the Vietnam War; and Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose 2010 self-immolation launched the Arab Spring, several commentators situated Bushnell’s self-sacrifice in a long tradition of extreme protest. These are all what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim termed altruistic suicides, in which individuals sacrifice their lives out of loyalty to a group or cause.
Ironically, this is exactly the same kind of loyalty that our societies honour with Purple Hearts and Victoria Crosses—or what poet Wilfred Owen, protesting the senseless slaughter of the First World War, dubbed “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.” The difference is that the cause for which Bushnell martyred himself is not sanctioned by the state, and this immediately catapults it into a different realm of discourse.
In a lucid article in The New Yorker, Russian American journalist Masha Gessen argues that “Self-immolation is a nonviolent act of despair.” It was not Bushnell who was crazy, she suggests, but the situation in which he found himself—a situation that was made worse by the fact that he was a serving member of the US military. He confronted a stark double bind, from which he could see no honorable way out.
As a member of “a generation of Americans—adults under the age of thirty—who express more sympathy with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict,” faced with “a Presidential race between two elderly men who seem to differ little on what for Bushnell was the most pressing issue in the world today: the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza,” the young airman had every reason for hopelessness:
Maybe Bushnell watched or read about the proceedings of South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Perhaps he listened to the litany of atrocities that grew familiar as fast as it became outdated: the exact thousands of women and children killed, the precise majority of Gazans who are experiencing extreme hunger. That court ordered Israel to take immediate measures to protect Palestinian civilians. Israel has ignored the ruling, and the United States has vetoed resolutions calling for a ceasefire and argued, in another ICJ case, that the court should not order Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This was a government that Bushnell had sworn to protect with his life, subverting mechanisms created to enforce international law, including law—such as the Genocide Convention—that the United States had played a key role in drafting.
What was most radical in Émile Durkheim’s classic study of suicide was his insistence that whatever their individual circumstances, every suicide had its social conditions. In Aaron Bushnell’s case, the social conditions were the cognitive dissonance that arose from the west tearing up the “rules-based order” it had established after the Second World War in order to allow an ally to commit what the ICJ ruled was a plausible genocide.
Torch no. 1
Among the historical precedents for Bushnell’s protest mentioned by Gessen are several cases of self-immolation in the erstwhile Soviet bloc, of which the suicide of Jan Palach, a 20-year-old student of history and political economy at Charles University in Prague, is the best known. On January 16, 1969, Palach set himself on fire in front of the National Museum in Wenceslas Square, a Prague location that has an equivalent symbolic place in Czech political life as London’s Trafalgar Square or the National Mall in Washington DC. Palach, too, had ample reason for hopelessness.
Five months previously, the Soviet-led invasion of August 21-22 had brutally ended Czechoslovak communist reformers’ attempts to create “socialism with a human face.” Though many reformers still retained their positions in the party and state leadership—they would gradually be pushed out over the next eighteen months—the Prague Spring reforms were already being rolled back in a process euphemistically known as “normalization.” Compromised by their collaboration with the occupiers and increasingly alienated from the people, communist party secretary Alexander Dubček, prime minister Oldřich Černík, president Ludvík Svoboda, and the rest of the reformers were slowly becoming no more than shabby decorations on the facade of the normalization regime, signifiers of abject accommodation and submission.
Palach left a letter in his briefcase explaining why, in these circumstances, he thought his extreme action was necessary. It was intended to be a wake-up call:
Because our nations [i.e., Czechs and Slovaks] find themselves on the brink of hopelessness, we have decided to express our protest and awaken the people of this land by the following means. Our group is composed of volunteers who are determined to let themselves burn for our cause. I had the honor of drawing the first lot and so have gained the right to write the first letters and step up as the first torch.
Two days after Palach set himself ablaze, the New York Times ran an editorial titled “Human torch in Prague.” Its tone was very different from its coverage of Bushnell’s suicide (which did not merit an editorial). It concluded:
The attempted self-immolation in Prague of Jan Palach—who signed himself “Torch Number One,” in his farewell letter—is a sign of the desperation to which patriotic and democratically minded elements in Czechoslovakia have been driven.
Back then, when the fault lines between good and evil neatly coincided with the Iron Curtain, America’s self-proclaimed paper of record had no difficulty accepting the notion of self-immolation as a non-violent act of despair. Or in linking it with those supposedly quintessentially Western values of patriotism, freedom and democracy.
Truth will prevail
Jan Palach died of his injuries three days later. His death unleashed an immense outpouring of grief. Tens of thousands of ordinary people lined up for hours to pay their respects as his coffin lay in state at the Karolinum, the medieval seat of Charles University, on January 24.
University rector Oldřich Starý began the funeral ceremonies the next morning with these words:
In deep emotion, with pain and pride the academic community of Charles University bows before the dead Jan Palach, a student of the Philosophical Faculty. His heroic and tragic act is the expression of a pure heart, of the highest love for the homeland, truth, freedom and democracy.
After the speeches were over the coffin was placed on a hearse, behind which Palach’s mother Libuše, older brother Jiří, and sister-in-law Ilona led “an immense procession, which snaked like a river through the Fruit Market, Celetná Street, and the Old Town Square and stopped in front of the Philosophical Faculty building on the square that was spontaneously renamed Jan Palach Square in honor of the immolated young man on January 20, 1969.”
A young boy salutes during Jan Palach’s funeral, Prague, January 25, 1969. Photo by Milon Novotný/Wikimedia Commons.
Some 200,000 people filled Prague’s streets, honouring as well as mourning the nation’s latest martyr. Many drew a link between Jan Palach and Jan Hus, the Czech religious reformer who was burnt at the stake by the Council of Constance in 1415 because he refused to recant his heretical views, whose statue stands in the Old Town Square. The Hussite slogan “Pravda vítězí“—truth will prevail—was the official motto of Czechoslovakia and remains the motto of today’s Czech Republic.
No senior government or party figures attended Palach’s funeral, and the normalizers soon did their best to discredit his sacrifice. A scurrilous rumor was spread that his immolation started as a hoax organized by writer Pavel Kohout, Olympic medalist Emil Zátopek, chess grandmaster Luděk Pachman, and other prominent critics of the invasion that went tragically wrong. But the young man’s memory proved impossible to eradicate. His grave in Prague’s Olšany Cemetery became a site of pilgrimage.
Tired of the endless procession of visitors with their flowers and their candles, the authorities exhumed Palach’s remains one night in 1973, cremated his body, and returned the ashes to his family in the little country town of Všetaty. The square in front of the Philosophical Faculty officially remained Red Army Square throughout the years of normalization, but within weeks of the fall of communism in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 it was formally renamed Jan Palach Square.
I hear your cowardice
Much as Palach’s gesture was respected by his compatriots, nobody wanted to see it repeated. It was precisely an act of despair. The veteran poet Jaroslav Seifert, who would go on to become the first Czech winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, issued a plea to Czechoslovakia’s youth on behalf of the Writers’ Union:
Not even you, students who have resolved upon the most despairing act, can be allowed to have the feeling that there is no other path than the one you have chosen. I beg you, do not think in your despair that our cause can only be solved now and that it will be solved only here.
He was right, but youth is not always given to patience.
On February 25—the anniversary of the 1948 putsch that brought the communist party to power in Czechoslovakia—another young man, scarcely more than a boy really, an eighteen-year-old high school student from Šumperk in Northern Moravia named Jan Zajíc, elected to go up in flames on Wenceslas Square as “Torch no. 2.”
A few days before his death Zajíc had written a poem titled “The Last One,” which he dedicated to Jan Palach. Here it is, in full:
I hear your cowardice, it cries in the fields, it bawls in the cities, it whimpers at the crossroads, it stammers with fear of death and does not feel how death alerts and entices From the church towers tolls the death knell of the nation and the land In the name of life yours I burn Jan
Palach’s and Zajíc’s suicides are often represented as protests against the Soviet occupation, but this misses a crucial dimension of the young men’s actions. As both their words make abundantly clear, the “torches” were protesting not just the occupation, but above all their compatriots’ failure to resist—and therefore, their active complicity in—its normalization.
As Václav Havel would later argue in his celebrated essay “The Power of the Powerless,” by going through the motions of conformity to the system, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” They are “objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects as well. They are both the victims of the system and its instruments.”
Living in lies, dying in truth
Havel’s insight does not just apply to communist regimes. Rejecting complicity in a war he found morally unacceptable, and refusing to compromise on his convictions, Aaron Bushnell chose to engage in a gruesome, shocking act of protest that exposed our everyday normalizations for the lies that they are.
His supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is “self-defense,” the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world has described as a plausible genocide.
In case anyone is in need of a reminder, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted on March 1 that Israel’s assault has now killed at least 25,000 women and children alone in Gaza, as compared with 1,139 people, only 695 of whom were Israeli civilians and only 36 of whom were children, who died in Israel on October 7.
Bushnell’s message applies most obviously to those Western political leaders who have gaslit Israel’s slaughter—Biden, Sunak, Starmer, Scholz, Trudeau—by providing arms, diplomatic cover, and repression of critics at home. But it should not stop there.
Captioning the link to his Twitch livestream, Bushnell’s last Facebook post read:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
Medic carrying a wounded Palestinian child in Gaza. Photo courtesy Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.
On March 18, the world’s famine watchdog the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), whose “main goal … is to provide decision-makers with a rigorous, evidence- and consensus-based analysis of food insecurity and acute malnutrition situations,” reported that:
The entire population in the Gaza Strip (2.23 million) is facing high levels of acute food insecurity. Between mid-March and mid-July, in the most likely scenario and under the assumption of an escalation of the conflict including a ground offensive in Rafah, half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.11 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions (IPC Phase 5), the most severe level in the IPC Acute Food Insecurity scale …
It is vital to note that the projected Famine can be prevented or alleviated. All evidence points towards a major acceleration of death and malnutrition. The actions needed to prevent Famine require an immediate political decision for a ceasefire together with a significant and immediate increase in humanitarian and commercial access to the entire population of Gaza. All efforts must be made to ensure the provision of food, water, medicines, and protection of civilians, as well as to restore and provide health, water, and sanitation services, and energy (electricity, diesel, and other fuel).
The IPC’s warning and demand for a ceasefire were echoed by the World Health Organization, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Refugees International, the International Rescue Committee (whose president, former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, called it “a failure of humanity”), and other NGOs. UN Secretary General António Guterres described the report as an “appalling indictment,” adding, “This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system—anywhere, anytime.” He continued:
I call on the Israeli authorities to ensure complete and unfettered access for humanitarian goods throughout Gaza and for the international community to fully support our humanitarian efforts. We must act now to prevent the unthinkable, the unacceptable and the unjustifiable.
The Israeli response
During the month after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel must “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”—a 16-to-one decision in which the judge ad hoc appointed by Israel, Aharon Barak, concurred—aid deliveries to Gaza fell by a half. In February the number of aid trucks crossing into Gaza fell from an average of 170 per day in January to 98 per day. An average of 159 aid trucks per day crossed in the first 20 days of March, as compared with 500 a day before the war.
Responding to (since suspended) Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy’s outrageous claim that “there are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment into Gaza, and in fact the crossings have EXCESS capacity,” British Foreign Secretary David Cameron expressed his “enormous frustration” that UK aid has been routinely held up waiting for Israeli permissions:
For instance, I am aware of some UK-funded aid being stuck at the border just under three weeks waiting for approval. The main blockers remain arbitrary denials by the government of Israel and lengthy clearance procedures, including multiple screenings and narrow opening windows in daylight hours.
Trucks containing medical supplies have been turned back because they contain scissors, which could be used as weapons. Other items rejected as “dual use” include generators, tent poles, and pipes to restore water and sanitation infrastructure.
In David Miliband’s view, the key issues—on all of which Israel has been less than helpful—are the number of crossing points into Gaza, the number of trucks Israel allows through the crossings, what aid, above all food aid, the trucks are permitted to carry, and the transit of trucks inside Gaza, “so you’ve got a series of impediments, blockages, restrictions being put in place on lorries carrying the most basic humanitarian aid.”
Since the ICJ ruling, Israel has allowed protestors to repeatedly block the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, at one point, grotesquely in the circumstances, with a gigantic bouncy castle; refused to renew visas of scores of senior and experienced international aid workers; and variously impededWHO missions to supply medical essentials to Gaza’s “overwhelmed and overflowing and undersupplied” hospitals (which the IDF continues to assault, the latest being al-Shifa, the strip’s largest hospital before the present conflict began).
Israel has denied many requests from UNRWA and other agencies to send aid convoys to the devastated north, which has the worst food security situation, two of them in the last week. It has killed Gazan police convoy escorts and assassinated Brigadier General Fayeq al-Mabhouh, the police commander in charge of coordinating relief distribution with UNRWA. In several cases, beginning with the “Flour Massacre” of February 29 in which over 100 Palestinians were killed, IDF troops have fired on civilians lining up for food.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, is clear that “This is an artificially man-made situation that we can easily reverse if we want to. We know what needs to be done.” But Israel has declared war on UNRWA, which it has long sought to close down because it believes having a dedicated Palestinian refugee agency serves only to legitimate Palestinian grievances.
Israel’s claims that thirteen (out of 30,000) UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas’s October 7 attack and the agency is “perforated with Hamas”—which were presented, no doubt by pure coincidence, on the day the ICJ released its judgment on Israel’s “plausible genocide”—led 16 nations, including the US, UK, Germany, and Japan, to pause or strip funding from UNRWA. But Israel has so far failed to produce any convincing evidence to back up these allegations, and several states including Canada, Australia, and Sweden, as well as the EU commission, have since restored their funding.
On March 18, Philippe Lazzarini posted the following statement on X:
On the day new data is out on famine in #GAZA, the Israeli Authorities deny my entry to Gaza.
Famine is imminent in the northern Gaza Strip, expected to arrive between now and May. – Two million people= the entire population of Gaza is facing crisis levels of food insecurity or worse. – Half the population has completely exhausted food supplies and coping capacities. They are struggling with catastrophic hunger (IPC Phase 5) and starvation. – This is the highest number of people ever recorded as facing catastrophic hunger by the IPC system and double the number just three months ago. – Earlier, UNICEF warned that the # of children under two years old suffering from acute malnutrition has doubled in one month. – Children are now dying of dehydration & hunger.
@UNRWA has by far the largest presence among all humanitarian organisations in Gaza. My visit today was supposed to coordinate & improve the humanitarian response. This man-made starvation under our watch is a stain on our collective humanity. Too much time was wasted, all land crossings must open now. Famine can be averted with political will.
On March 24 Lazzarini had news of further devastating Israeli restrictions on UNRWA’s ability to provide aid to Gaza’s starving population:
Gaza: as of today, @UNRWA, the main lifeline for #Palestine Refugees, is denied from providing lifesaving assistance to northern Gaza. Despite the tragedy unfolding under our watch, the Israeli Authorities informed the UN that they will no longer approve any @UNRWA food convoys to the north. This is outrageous & makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man made famine. These restrictions must be lifted. UNRWA is the largest organisation with the highest reach to displaced communities in Gaza. By preventing UNRWA to fulfill its mandate in Gaza, the clock will tick faster towards famine & many more will die of hunger, dehydration + lack of shelter. This cannot happen, it would only stain our collective humanity.
Israel seems to have taken the IPC warning of impending famine in Gaza as an invitation to bring it on.
The US response
Under pressure from foreign allies, who were beginning to get cold feet about supporting what the world’s highest court had determined is a plausible genocide, and rattled by discontent within his own party and from voters who checked the “uncommitted” box in Michigan, Minnesota, and elsewhere in Democratic primaries, Joe Biden adopted a sharper tone—though not much more—toward Israel in February, which culminated in his proclamation in his March 7 State of the Union address that:
Israel must allow more aid into Gaza and ensure that humanitarian workers aren’t caught in the crossfire. Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.
Asked in an interview the same evening whether Israel’s threatened invasion of Rafah, where over a million desperate Palestinians had taken refuge, would constitute a “red line,” Biden answered: “It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical, so there’s no red line where I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.”
He added: “But there’s redlines that if he [Netanyahu] crosses them … They cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after … there’s other ways to deal with the trauma caused by Hamas.” Some saw in this a hint that the US might condition future supplies of (at least) offensive weapons on Israel reining in its assault and allowing aid into Gaza.
One who explicitly suggested doing so was Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate and highest-ranking Jewish politician in the US. Rising in the Senate on March 14 to speak, he said, “for so many mainstream Jewish Americans—a silent majority—whose nuanced views on the matter have never been well represented in this country’s discussions about the war in Gaza,” he called for Israel to make “some significant course corrections”:
We should not let the complexities of this conflict stop us from stating the plain truth: Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas, and Israel has a moral obligation to do better. The United States has an obligation to do better.
I believe the United States must provide robust humanitarian aid to Gaza, and pressure the Israelis to let more of it get through to the people who need it.
He went on to argue that Israelis’ rejection of “the idea of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty … a negotiated two-state solution” was “a grave mistake”; denounced far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and the settler violence they have supported in the occupied territories; and charged that Netanyahu has “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”:
He has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.
He concluded:
The United States’ bond with Israel is unbreakable, but if extremists continue to unduly influence Israeli policy, then the Administration should use the tools at its disposal to make sure our support for Israel is aligned with our broader goal of achieving long-term peace and stability in the region.
The final solution?
Will there be any “significant course corrections”?
Canada, to its credit—even if the details remain murky—has announced that it is cutting off future arms supplies to Israel. This has provoked fury in Tel Aviv, leading Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer to fume: “you saw the Canadians announced no more arms sales, it’s going to be a badge of shame for Canada and it’s going to last for a really long time … That in Israel’s darkest moment they abandon it. That’s what they just did and frankly I think it’s shameful.”
This Canadian thinks otherwise: for the first time in a long while, I feel proud of my country. And I remember when Canada provided a haven for US draft dodgers during the Vietnam War; when Brian Mulroney faced down Margaret Thatcher at the 1986 Commonwealth Conference over sanctions against apartheid South Africa; and when Jean Chrétien refused to follow the US-led “coalition of the willing” into the mire of the Second Iraq War unless the invasion was authorized by the UN. When we had an independent foreign policy.
And the US? The omnibus 1.2 trillion dollar spending bill passed on March 22 and signed into law by Joe Biden suggests any course correction is at best cosmetic.
While the bill’s main purpose is to keep the US government funded through September, it bans all funding of UNRWA till at least 2025. Last year US contributions totaled $422 million, about 30 percent of UNRWA’s budget. This is a slap in the face to Canada and other countries that have resumed their contributions, but was greeted by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz as a “historic ban” that “demonstrates what we knew all along: UNRWA is part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution.”
The bill also contains an odious provision cutting US aid to the Palestinian Authority if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively supports such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.” So much for US respect for the rule of law.
In a remarkable speech to the House of Representatives opposing the bill—you can watch it here—Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez for the first time declared Israel’s actions in Gaza to be a genocide. She was aware of the “gravity” of using this term (which she had hitherto avoided).
As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door. A famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government.
This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated following the killing of another 30,000, 70 percent of whom were women and children killed.
There is hardly a single hospital left. And this was all accomplished, much of this accomplished, with U.S. resources and weapons. If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks like good and decent people who do nothing. Or too little. Too late.
Interviewed on March 24 on CNN, she defended her use of the term genocide, telling Jake Tapper “I believe we have crossed the threshold of intent.”
AOC is right. The impending famine in Gaza is the result of deliberate, conscious, informed choices, and nobody in the Israeli or American governments can be in any doubt as to where they are leading. We are on the threshold of a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem. Ladies and gentlemen, this way for your ambient genocide.
Addendum
The Times of Israel (March 25) has just reported that “The US has deemed Israel to be in compliance with a new national security memorandum after it received a written assurance from Jerusalem that it is using American weapons in line with international law and is not blocking humanitarian assistance in Gaza.”
In the words of State Department spokesman Matthew Miller:
We’ve had ongoing assessments of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law. We have not found them to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance. We view those assurances through that ongoing work we have done.
Had the US not certified this, the flow of American weapons to Israel would have had to stop.
As I said, choices are being made. The US choice remains to facilitate Israel’s genocide.
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coasts of bohemia 