From Apartheid to Genocide: Israel in Gaza

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Blood on all our hands
We cannot hope to wash them clean
History is mystery
Do you know what it means?
Motorhead, “Brotherhood of Man“

In an earlier post, I wrote:

Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next full year, from now until the beginning of November 2024.

That “extraordinary event” is here. Israel’s open, unapologetic attacks on the medical system of both Gaza and the West Bank are a conclusive indication that we’ve reached a macabre turning point in this “war.”

An ethnic cleansing is a mass expulsion of a population to achieve ethnic homogenization. A genocide is the destruction of a population to achieve either wholesale annihilation or a combination of annihilation and the subjugation of an easily tractable minority. For awhile, given Israel’s outlandish proposals to settle the Gazan population in Sinai or elsewhere, it was plausible to argue that Israel was “merely” after ethnic cleansing in Gaza–Netanyahu’s version of the Trail of Tears facilitated by an Israeli version of the bombing of Guernica, just on a larger, more technologically advanced scale than those now-quaint atrocities. It’s no longer plausible to believe that. What we’re witnessing now in Gaza is a genocide in the making. The numbers are not there yet. But barring an abrupt and dramatic change in the course of events, they will be. 

The American mass media and political class have done a proficient job of concealing or minimizing the nature of Israel’s actions, but there’s no evading it any longer. Israel’s leaders make no secret of their intentions. This document compiles page after page of official Israeli declarations asserting an explicit, unapologetic intention to exterminate the population of Gaza. These are not one-off statements by random people. This is the voice of Israel’s ruling class, speaking in unison as to its desire to wipe Gaza and its people from the planet: combatant and non-combatant; infants, children and adults; able and infirm; guilty and innocent. The statements make no attempt to discriminate one target from another. They make no pretense that the operation aims to attack or “dismantle” or “degrade” Hamas. There is no concern for the rescue of the hostages. There is, undeniably, claim after claim asserting the imperative to destroy the population of Gaza. 

But such sentiments are not limited to Israel’s political class. This document (17 page PDF) compiles some 145 instances of Israelis both from Israeli political life as well as those prominent in its non-political cultural life, all giving voice to unmistakably genocidal sentiments–to widespread approbation in Israeli culture at large, and to very little disapprobation there. It simply is not possible for me to download the dozens upon dozens of TikTok videos I’ve seen or saved of Israelis gleefully and openly celebrating the actual or prospective torture or mass death of Palestinians, comparing them not only to vermin but to barbecued meat fit for mealtime consumption (not an unprecedented rhetorical trope in recent Israeli culture). Nor can I upload every video valorizing the idea of a divinely sanctified return to Gaza, to “cleanse” it, and re-settle it in the name of God. But unless TikTok is banned, all of that is there (or on Instagram) for anyone to see: follow shaunking or blackvancouver, each of whom has posted several damning examples every day for the last five weeks. Yitzhak Rabin once joked that he wished Gaza would simply fall into the sea. As Freud famously pointed out, sometimes jokes are diagnostic. That one was.

It is no longer possible to pretend, if it ever was, that Hamas or Islamic Jihad are uniquely genocidal or Nazi-like in moral outlook. The erstwhile victims of the Holocaust are now becoming the willing, manic, eager, explicit protégés of the ideology of the Third Reich. That may strike some ears as “offensive,” but it’s decidedly not “anti-Semitic.” It’s a cold, hard, brutal fact. Anyone tempted to play the anti-Semitism card for my saying so is advised first to immerse him- or herself thoroughly in the relevant facts (as I have, every day, for hours a day, for the last five weeks), and only then to make judgments. No one unwilling or unable to face the facts has the moral standing to judge those of us who have. 

The facts on the ground now provide ample evidence of Israel’s systematic attempts to put its genocidal intentions into practice. Israel has not only killed massively and indiscriminately in Gaza, but has systematically attacked or disabled every piece of civilian infrastructure necessary for life, including water plants and medical centers.

To kill en masse and without discrimination, and to destroy the physical infrastructure necessary for life would be compatible with ethnic cleansing if there was some guarantee of exit from the locus of danger. But there is no such exit. Both Erez and Rafah crossings, into Israel and Egypt respectively, remain closed. The “border” with Israel is closed. (“Border” in scare quotes because it is not in fact an internationally recognized border.) The only other “border” is the Mediterranean Sea. What we’re left with, then, is a closed 5 x 25 mile strip denuded of the necessities of life, under ground invasion and bombardment. It’s possible that Rafah Crossing will, in extremis, be opened, in which case the would-be genocide will become a mere ethnic cleansing. But until and unless that happens (and it may not), what we have is mass killing without exit, driven by genocidal intentions. That’s not just ethnic cleansing. That’s a genocide in its early stages.

What’s not been given proper attention is the possibility that the population of Gaza might, even if given the opportunity to leave, adamantly stay put. The Gazans are not, after all, herd animals who react deterministically to danger or pain, obey their would-be shepherds, and acquiescently put themselves at those shepherds’ mercy. Most of them have been made refugees before, and might not want to repeat the experience. They might, like so many “normal” people elsewhere, want to die at home with dignity, rather than live or die elsewhere in misery, whatever Israel does to them or anyone else does for them. Socrates, not exactly a Hamas-nik, made much the same decision. Israel has famously said that it wants to make Gaza a place where “no human can live.” It’s an open question whether the government of Israel really knows how to make such judgments, which require a knowledge of human nature that Israel seems pretty much to have lost. 

The mass media has been pointlessly fixated on whether or not Shifa Hospital was or was not a “Hamas command and control center.” The evidence so far adduced in support of that claim consists of a contemptibly pitiful set of moving-goal-post-assertions that would ordinarily be the subject of a comedy routine. Unfortunately, mass torture and mass death don’t make for tasteful comedy.

If comedy is at issue, I can’t resist mentioning that Christ Hospital in Jersey City, where both of my parents worked for 40 years, had a tunnel system underneath it. I thought it merely facilitated movement from one part of the hospital complex to the next, but perhaps I was mistaken. Maybe Hamas put the tunnels there. Indeed, I worked as a janitor in the “tunnel systems” of both Overlook Hospital (Summit, New Jersey) and Hunterdon Medical Center (Flemington, New Jersey). The “tunnels,” also known as “basements,” were where linen was laundered/stored, and where garbage and hazardous waste were kept for hauling. Shady dealings often took place there: spare equipment was kept (or hidden) from people unauthorized to use it; pot was smoked; blow jobs were had. Perhaps that, too, was really a Hamas operation. Alas, no one thought to blow it up. 

Another ominously secret tunnel, accessible only to a chosen few, was filled with corpses. The top secret code word for this “command nodule” was the “morgue.” Indeed, unknown to most of the rest of the hospital, the Department of Environmental Services had a command and control center in one basement, housing strange men in suits and ties who would sit behind computers, pretending to look busy. It had never occurred to me that these tunnels might be Hamas facilities. But what would I know? I just worked there.  

Frankly, it doesn’t matter at this point if we find the equivalent of a Palestinian Pentagon under Shifa. Even if we do, the fact remains that Israel has attacked just about every major medical center in Gaza (along with schools, elder facilities, and other uncontroversially non-military targets), and dozens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It offers no pretense to anyone that all of these targets (or any specific proportion of them) are military facilities, and a fortiori has made no effort whatsoever to prove that they are, or even to offer a promissory note of doing so. It has destroyed them in the full awareness that they are plain old medical facilities or schools or residences or shelters. In the case of the hospitals, it has killed and tortured to death some of the patients by aerial bombardment or the destruction of power supplies, detaining others, expelling others from the hospital grounds, destroying the hospitals themselves, and “discharging” patients (including those recently amputated without anesthesia) into a pointless exodus into southern Gaza, where it has launched a military offensive to kill anyone who enters the area. In other words, Israel forced people out of north Gaza to the illusory “safety” of south Gaza in order to kill them en masse in both places.

It is now impossible to care for the wounded or count the dead in Gaza. The availability of fuel, food, water, and electricity is sporadic at best. Nor is there any way to tell what atrocities are now being committed under cover of darkness and isolation. But there is no need to enumerate every last atrocity. We have more than enough evidence at this point to know that a momentous, historic crime is taking place, and that those who favor its continuation are complicit in it. 

Setting aside the United States and Israel, most of the world is waking up to the moral catastrophe of Gaza. Even within the United States, the Biden Administration and Congress have greatly underestimated the American peoples’ revulsion for Israel’s war, and for any further support for or involvement in it. Desperate attempts at suppression and censorship are under way, but they’re an exercise in futility. Tens of thousands of Americans (to say nothing of others elsewhere) are spontaneously taking to the streets to end the madness. The Center for Constitutional Rights has now sued members of the Biden Administration for complicity in genocide. I hope both parties succeed. The “war” must be brought to an end, and every member of the Biden Administration implementing its Israel policy should be put behind bars (to say nothing of those in the Israeli government). 

I’ve written several posts here advocating the idea of a ceasefire for a hostage exchange (and have written my elected officials to the same end). I repeat that proposal for the nth time, and am pinning this post to the top of the blog for the indefinite future so that no one can mistake where I stand. 

There is, I acknowledge, such a thing as rational ignorance of a given topic. Some people may simply be bewildered by events and epistemically incapable of judging them. So set such people aside. As for the rest, given the United States’s blanket support of Israel, Americans have only two options at this point: advocacy of a ceasefire, or complicity in genocide. “Never Again” is now, not as metaphor, hyperbole, or trope, but as an immediate moral imperative in the face of catastrophic moral horror. Write and/or call your elected officials at first opportunity. Do not ask. Demand a ceasefire and the refusal of a wider regional war on Israel’s behalf. We will not regret trying. We will only regret not trying hard enough. 

(Substantive revisions after original posting, Sunday, November 20, 2023, 1:45 pm ET.)  

Postscript, December 16, 2023: Here is the text of the Center for Constitutional Rights’ court filing against the Biden Administration (89 page PDF). Here is Palestine Legal’s letter informing members of Congress of their legal liability for complicity in genocide. I’ve recently resolved to send my Senators, Cory Booker and Robert Menendez, weekly reminders of their legal liability for the genocide in Gaza, and to send CCR/Palestine Legal a donation for every paycheck I receive until their case reaches a final verdict. I encourage others to do the same or something similar. 

Postscript, January 27, 2024: For a useful summary of the case for charging Israel with genocide, see Seth Ackerman, “Why Israel’s War Is Genocide, and Why Biden Is Culpable,” Jacobin, January 2024.  

I write here only for myself, not for other members of the blog. Thanks to Norman Finkelstein, Hilary Persky, Suleman Khawaja, and Mustafa Akyol for helpful discussion, and to Rita Jabri Markwell for useful information. Thanks again to Hilary, as well as to Monica Vilhauer and Ali Jabbar for valuable moral support. None of the preceding necessarily agrees with anything I say here, or is responsible for anything I say here. 

19 thoughts on “From Apartheid to Genocide: Israel in Gaza”

    • In a further irony, your comment has been stuck in my spam folder for over a week. Because by WordPress’s algorithms, the phrase “Nazi Israelis” is by definition spam to be dismissed and deleted without consideration.

      I was just at a rally for Palestine this afternoon at Princeton University. There were almost as many hostile infiltrators at the rally as demonstrators. Pro-Israeli demonstrators ended up drowning out the pro-Palestinian ones; the pro-Palestinian ones were prohibited from using a microphone, presumably because nothing could be more “intimidating” to American Jews than having to hear Palestinians speak at an audible volume. I’m on campus about a dozen times a week, every week. For all that one hears about the terrible, “intimidating” climate for Jews on American college campuses, as far as Princeton is concerned, it looks to me like the intimidation works the other way round.

      That said, I haven’t changed my views on “cancellation” or “cancel culture.” The rally I attended this afternoon was on divestment from Israel, which I support. The University divested from apartheid South Africa and from Sudan (over Darfur) decades ago. Divestment was in those cases a perfectly benign form of cancellation. If we really lived in a “culture” of cancellation, we wouldn’t be facing a situation where the divestment-from-Israel campaign was reflexively regarded as anti-Semitic rather than as the protest against genocide that it is. So as far as I’m concerned, we don’t live in any “cancel culture.” We live in a culture of hypocrisy, deceit, and moral confusion, where a morally neutral tactic becomes a “culture,” and misuses of the tactic are taken to define the tactic itself.

      It’s hard to have any respect for a country that trumpets its commitment to free speech, cries such a river over “cancel culture,” but operates as ours does on Israel and Palestine. In any case, I’ve lost whatever remnant of respect I ever had. When the United States is on the receiving end of the next 9/11-like terrorist attack, which is a near-certainty now, the attack will no doubt have “Gaza” engraved all over it. Don’t expect a denunciation from me. Not that I condone it. But we’re long past the point where I could be expected to care, much less raise my voice above the din of the mob clamoring for genocide. Fuck them, and the “republic for which they stand.”

      But expect an attack. We all have “foreknowledge” of it at this point. Only a fool could say he didn’t.

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      • I guess one must care though, tempting though it is to feel, serves you right. The wrong people always get it in the neck. Someone said to me the other day, if Israel got nuked, I wouldn’t care. But the challenge is to keep caring, I think.

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        • I suppose I should clarify by saying that one should never stop caring about the loss or suffering of innocents, though of course, no one cares, or can be expected to care, about every last victim on the planet who is victimized by something, either. There are too many victims, and life is too short to fixate on all of them.

          What I mean is that I have lost my last remnant of identification with or loyalty to the United States as a country, despite the fact that I was born here, have mostly lived here, still live here, and may always live here. My point is: that I live here and who governs the place are now two entirely contingent and unrelated facts. If the United States is attacked, I will feel for the innocents killed, but apart from the completely practical issue of being affected by any attack–I live in a target-rich environment–it no longer matters to me that the United States is attacked as opposed to some other place.

          I guess I’ve turned into the nightmare that’s always ascribed to “illegal immigrants”: that they will come here simply to better themselves economically, but lack any sense of loyalty to the place. I was born here, and unapologetically confess to that attitude. What happens to “the American Project” is no longer of any concern to me except the narrowly self-interested one of how it affects my relatively immediate personal life-prospects.

          In a letter written two months before his death, Machiavelli famously wrote a friend: “I love my fatherland more than my soul.” No political cause is worth that trade, much less the cause of the American Empire. I love my soul far more than any country, including the United States. I’m not willing to stain my soul–my personal sense of moral integrity–by complicity in the crimes of this country. I’ve already compromised too much by the willing support I’ve given. It was a mistake. Never again. At this point, it’s their country, not mine. They’re on their own.

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            • My attitude toward love of my country is about the same as that of the heavy metal band Rammstein toward Germany:

              Deutschland: meine Liebe
              Kann ich dir nicht geben

              Germany: my love I cannot give you

              Considering that both Germany and Israel got their conceptions of Lebensraum from us, all I can say is that I second Rammstein’s sentiment when it comes to the United States.

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              • I love Australia the way you love your home I guess. It doesn’t have to be glorious and I don’t identify with the nation or the government or the flag, but I love the land and feel an affection for the people, boring, narrow minded and parochial as we are. I like our laziness and our willingness to help each other out, generally speaking.

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                • I can’t say that I have a great affection for Americans generally. A good 40% of Americans support the further prosecution of what I regard as a war of genocide. Some of them want the war to be more murderous than it is.

                  https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/12/08/americans-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/

                  A Senate resolution to withdraw US troops from Syria was defeated last Thursday, 84-13. The presence of US troops in Syria has no legislative authority whatsoever; arguably it’s against the law (against the War Powers Act). But the measure was defeated anyway, by a long shot. Though more Americans are protesting our support for Israel than ever before, that leaves an enormous number of Americans who are content to drift their way into a catastrophic war on Israel’s behalf–or are eager for one.

                  https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/51

                  Here is an article by the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times, who happens to live in my childhood hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. What is her response to the genocide taking place in Gaza, where today’s news is of execution-style murders of people taking shelter in a school? She writes an article about the Israeli singer David Broza and writes touchingly of the concert of his she recently saw in Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc in the West Bank.

                  https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/looking-forward/573445/david-broza-will-it-be-ok-israel-hamas-war/

                  “Things will be OK,” he’s singing. Of course they’ll be OK for people like him. I have friends who live in villages adjacent to Gush Etzion. They’re wondering where their next meal will come from, and whether they’ll live to eat it. But their “neighbors” are singing along to David Broza. What a bunch of assholes.

                  One can’t generalize about Americans as such, but these vignettes capture what many Americans are like. They’re genuinely despicable people–ignorant, narcissistic, full of inappropriate cheer and “positivity,” and gleefully out of touch with reality. They’re the willful beneficiaries of centuries of imperialism and racial supremacy, and full of false pride about their supposedly liberal attitudes about it. I hate having to share space with them, but don’t seem to have much of a choice about it right now.

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                • Oh dear. Maybe you should move. But not to Australia, I’m pretty sure we’re not much better! Really, I despair of people in general, and yet my friends and acquaintances are genuinely good people.

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                • I would move if I had a good place to go. My wife was one of the few people I know to put threats of leaving into practice, but she had citizenship in Canada. There is also the question of who exactly would take me.

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  3. Their propaganda is incredibly cartoonish. The acting is so staged that people were making all kinds of memes about it.

    The videos of the mass graves are very sad to see though

    Ever since my last comments I’ve noticed two arguments surfacing

    First one: Hamas broke a ceasefire agreement on October 7th. Wasn’t this the armistice that was broken in 2007 that you talked about?

    Second one: Israel backing out and leaving Gaza in 2005. Pretending everything was fine afterwards

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    • The Armistice I’ve referred to is the 1950 armistice following the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1949. It has never been given a final peace settlement.

      On ceasefires, the issue is far too complicated for a blog comment. Consider how much time has passed since 1950, how many different conflicts there have been, and how many different claims and counter-claims of “broken ceasefires” have arisen. If someone said to you, “Smith has violated his contract with Jones,” the most obvious thing to do would be to take a look at the contract, then consider the facts, then decide whether the contract was violated. The same procedure should be followed here. Hillary Clinton mentions, off-hand, that some “ceasefire” was violated. Some obvious questions:

      What ceasefire?
      Where is the text?
      Who were the parties?
      What were the exact conditions of the ceasefire agreement?

      For instance, you’d want to know whether the ceasefire applied to Israeli activity in Golan, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Hamas likely thinks “yes.” Israel likely thinks “no.” But if Hamas thought “yes,” and Israel attacked Palestinians in the West Bank, Hamas would regard the ceasefire as broken, and Israel would not.

      Most likely, Clinton meant the ceasefire agreement following the hostilities of May 2023:

      https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-strikes-gaza-palestinians-fire-rockets-truce-bid-lingers-2023-05-13/

      Israel attacked Jenin in early July. Hamas attacked Israel in early October. Which act violated the ceasefire? Israel might say that Jenin wasn’t covered by the agreement. Hamas would likely say it was. Personally, I don’t know. Thirty seconds into the video embedded in the preceding Reuters story, the newscaster tells us that the May 2023 ceasefire was violated almost immediately after it was issued. I can’t tell from watching the video which side did the violating, or if both violated it at once, or Israel violated it more egregiously (or what). Ceasefires always have this what-the-fuck quality to them. They’re more diminutions of violence than outright cessations.

      Right now, despite claims in the American press that the ceasefire is “holding,” the Israelis are shooting at Gazans trying to head north, and wantonly attacking West Bankers as well.

      https://www.972mag.com/hebron-area-settler-violence-expulsions/

      What conclusion do we draw? The conclusion is that we need to look at the text in its fine-grained detail, something I have not done for any ceasefire agreement. Is it compatible with these acts of violence? I find it comical that people are such sticklers for detail when it comes to lesser matters, but somehow think ceasefire agreements can be interpreted by taking one half-assed claim by Hillary Clinton and running with it. You should see the intensity of the conflicts that arise in medical billing when an insurance company disagrees with a hospital about an insurance payout: the tooth-gnashing, hair-splitting quarrels about a dollar here and a cent there. Meanwhile, where lives are at stake, the consensus view is that we should take Hillary Clinton on faith. Priorities.

      Notice one largely unnoticed implication of Clinton’s claim: if there was a “ceasefire” between Hamas and Israel on October 7, there was an underlying state of war between the two parties. If so, October 7 can hardly be thought to be the initiation of hostilities between Israel and Gaza even if it did involve the breach of a ceasefire. Yet people insist on saying that “the war” began on October 7. If “the war” includes the Syrian-Iraqi theater (if we regard that as the same war, which it arguably is), didn’t the war begin as early as 2020?

      Suppose X initiates force against Y, and eventually they agree on a ceasefire. If Y then breaks the ceasefire, it doesn’t change the fact that X initiated force. If X’s force initiation exceeds Y’s ceasefire violation in scope, duration, and intensity, then justice arguably lies with Y despite the ceasefire violation. None of these obvious issues seems to enter the heads of Western commentators. They just seize on the random claim that some “ceasefire” existed somewhere, Hamas violated it, and that settles everything. It doesn’t “settle” anything.

      It’s typical of pro-Israeli propaganda that they formulate some sound-bite-like mantra, repeat it over and over, act as though anyone puzzled by it is simply ignorant, and then start making random accusations from there. That’s what Clinton’s “ceasefire” claim amounts to. She makes the claim, but no one seems capable of asking about the specifics. Once you descend to specifics, you realize how full of shit she is.

      I have not specifically studied ceasefires in great detail, so I offer this graphic with a grain of salt. “Visualizing Palestine” is a partisan outfit, but the claim they make here certainly has some plausibility to it: both sides have violated ceasefires, but Israel has violated far more.

      https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/gaza-ceasefire-violations

      I’ve never sat down to count, but someone should. Note that this graphic only covers the years 2013-2014, but that by itself shows you how complicated the issue is.

      If violence by itself were sufficient to break a ceasefire, Israel has already violated this one. But again, I haven’t read the agreement.

      The implications of Israel’s evacuation in 2005 has been studied to death (literally), and anyone who claims that the evacuation left Gaza free is either too ignorant to talk to, or just outright lying. Israel pulled out its settlements and pulled out its military bases within Gaza. But it then was able to besiege Gaza and control every aspect of Gaza’s life from a perimeter around it–by land, sea, and sky. It blockaded Gaza, it controlled exit and entry (mostly denying both), it controlled power, it controlled the airwaves, it controlled the currency, etc. It claims even to control the rainwater: all Gaza rainwater is, by Israeli fiat, Israeli (I’m not making that up: there is actually a similar law in the US, as it happens; I’m no longer sure which country is more fucked up than the other).

      For primer discussions, try these three sources.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip

      https://www.unicef.org/mena/documents/gaza-strip-humanitarian-impact-15-years-blockade-june-2022

      https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/gaza-israel-occupied-international-law/#:~:text=What%20does%20international%20law%20say%3F,-By%20Celeste%20Kmiotek&text=On%20October%2015%2C%20US%20President,there%E2%80%94or%20is%20it%20not%3F

      The most obvious explanation for Israel’s ability to impose blackouts and shortages on Gaza during the last five weeks is that it controlled all of those variables in the first place, deliberately so.

      Once we add the number of military operations Israeli has initiated against Gaza, the withdrawal of settlements and troops becomes irrelevant. Two events should suffice to convey the point. In 2010, the Mavi Marmara ship tried to approach Gaza from the Mediterranean, and was attacked by Israel in international waters, killing nine people aboard. In 2018, Gazans approaching the perimeter fence from the Gaza side were gunned down in cold blood by Israel. Both acts illustrate Israel’s control over Gaza–the first outside of Gaza and outside of Israel, the other outside of Israel and in Gaza. Both make obvious that Israel has been able to control Gaza without having to be inside it.

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