The Genocide in Gaza has not stopped. It has been rebranded. And that is
enough of a linguistic subterfuge to get the world to ignore it.͏ ͏ ͏
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Rebranding Genocide
The Genocide in Gaza has not stopped. It has been rebranded. And that is enough
of a linguistic subterfuge to get the world to ignore it.
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| Chris Hedges |
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| Dec 15 |
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See No Evil Hear No Evil Speak No Evil — by Mr. Fish
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself. Then it was a war, even though,
by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties
were civilians. The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli
air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no
tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no
sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United
States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since
Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it is a “ceasefire.” Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the
first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held
in Israeli prisons — 1700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well as
around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20
remaining Israeli captives.
Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement —
brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into
the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning
Palestinians. Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international
agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by
three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ)
and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and
international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the
most militarily advanced countries say it is.
The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End
the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people,
was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and
Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their
backs on the genocide.
The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman
Finkelstein writes, “was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a
declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and
void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the
Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel
withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. Hamas — along with
other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say
they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is
created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not
disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”
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Hamas (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) | Benhamin Netanyahu at the U.S.
Capitol Building (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with
armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force,
although no country seems anxious to commit their troops. Trump promises a Gaza
Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating
outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter
Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. This will be achieved through the
“voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own
land offered digital tokens in exchange. Trump declares that the U.S. “will
take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys
— though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most
laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial
masters.
But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to
do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to
survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so
many times in the past, be betrayed.
Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10
and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least
383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government
Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of
six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day
before the “ceasefire.” Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed
Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three
others were also apparently killed in the strike.
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A boy stands near the wreckage of a car targeted by an Israeli airstrike, as
others inspect the car on Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, on Dec. 13, 2025. Four
Palestinians were killed. (Photo by Abood Abusalama via Getty Images)
The genocide is not over. Yes, the pace has slowed. But the intent remains
unchanged. It is slow motion killing. The daily numbers of dead and wounded —
with increasing numbers falling sick and dying from the cold and rain — are not
in the hundreds but the dozens.
December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead
of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure
widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under five
were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. Israel has
opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians
leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as
stipulated in the agreement. Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is
steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand
its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantly
shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown
up — even if they are children.
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded
concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s
residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of
all structures are damaged, according to UN estimates. The Strip, only 25 miles
long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of
rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos,
industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an
estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. There is almost no clean water, electricity
or sewage treatment. Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies,
including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel,
so nothing can be rebuilt.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire
population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities
captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to
Palestinian citizens of Israel. Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they
are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and
suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in
July. The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language
Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and
incitement against Palestinians.
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and
news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the
sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political
party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn
by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
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Source: @infinite_jaz
They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death
penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death
of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or
hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state
or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights
group Adalah explains. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli
jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through
its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws
enacted since October 7.
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of
whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and
if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps.
Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing.
Wholesale surveillance. Executions. Torture, including the beatings,
electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food
and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits
and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous
wild dogs.
We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous
academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only
individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide
by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as
temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human
species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch
with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.
If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but
slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most
of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we
deserve.
Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide.
Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the
Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against
their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.
This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.
Chris Hedges
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