Some friends of mine associated with Jewish Voice for Peace of North Jersey (along with Peace Action and Pax Christi) have taken out a paid ad in the Star-Ledger this morning (Newark, New Jersey), condemning Israel’s violation of the ceasefire agreement signed January 17th (see below, under the fold). You might not, by reading legacy (“mainstream”) media, have grasped the blatantly obvious fact that Israel had violated the ceasefire, but if you hadn’t, here’s a primer by Jonah Valdez at The Intercept.

You might recall that I predicted this outcome back on January 22, two days after the “ceasefire” theoretically went into effect. I called the ceasefire a “fraud.” I was hardly the first to do so, or the only one, or anywhere near the most authoritative. Chris Hedges called the ceasefire a “charade.” Paul Pillar said “it wouldn’t last.” Jonathan Cook called it a “lie.” Anyone who’s studied the Oslo Accords (or lived under the regime they produced, or both, as I have) knows how Israel and the US operate, how little respect for human life or the virtues of fidelity they have, and to put it simply, how completely full of shit they both are. None of this was a tough call.

The Israeli government has now called on the people of Gaza, as a condition of survival, to do what the Israelis themselves have been unable to do after almost a year and a half of heavily subsidized, industrialized warfare: overthrow Hamas. Starving, dying people are supposed to overthrow the only source of self-defense they have–or else the people making the demand, who are currently killing them in droves, will, well…really kill them even harder. Dahlia Scheindlin calls it a “deeply dishonest” claim, but in that respect, it’s of a piece with all the rest. But whatever you do, don’t call the Israelis “liars,” and don’t call their actions a “genocide.” You might get Donald Trump mad.

To belabor the painfully obvious: Israel violated the ceasefire in a gigantic way the other day with its Ramadan Massacre, attacking 100 separate locations, and timing the attack to coincide exactly with the opening of the Ramadan fast, when people can be expected to gather in groups. Predictably, people were killed in groups: more than 400 people were killed in one night, including 170 children.

To belabor the slightly less obvious: Israel didn’t just violate the ceasefire then. It violated the ceasefire right from the start, and continued to do so throughout the “ceasefire” period; the Ramadan Massacre was just the largest escalation in a sequence of Israeli violations, not the first or only one. Even Wikipedia has figured this out: click the previous link, and scroll down to “Violations and Deviations by Israel,” which lists more than two dozen shooting violations by Israel before the Ramadan Massacre, along with “Hindrance of aid,” “Refusal to engage in second phase negotiations,” “Delay of release of Palestinians,” and “Refusal to withdraw from Philadelphi Corridor.” As I say, Wikipedia has figured this out, but legacy media has not. And neither has the average American. Ignorance is an addiction.

It’s a contestable question whether a ceasefire agreement can literally re-set a cycle of violence back to zero. But assume for a moment that it does. If so, then whoever violates a ceasefire becomes the initiator of force in a given conflict. If so, then no matter what you think about October 7, it can’t any longer be said (as is widely believed in “the West”) that “Hamas started this war,” so that every subsequent casualty can be blamed on Hamas, and so that the people of Gaza deserve anything Israel can do to them. If we accept that logic at all, it has to be reversed at this point: as of either the first Israeli violation of the ceasefire, or (at least) the most recent one, Israel started this war, and the people of Israel deserve anything that Hamas and its allies can do to them.

That’s not me speaking in my voice. I wouldn’t wish Israel’s actions back on Israel, or any actions like Israel’s back on anyone. It’s me holding a mirror up to the “civilized” people of “the West,” showing them the maxim of their own action, and telling them what happens if you universalize it. The decades-long occupation, blockade, and attempted destruction of Gaza turns out, as a matter of principle, to be a murderous rampage against the humanity in all of us. Hannah Arendt described the Nazi death camps as an attempt to “kill the juridical person in man” (Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, p. 145). That’s where we are. Gaza is our death camp. We are its commandants. Death-camp-commandant-from-afar is the role our rulers have devised for us, in perpetuity. The question is how long we’re content to do their will.

Thanks to Meera Jaffrey, Jon Moscow, and Steve Shalom for putting the ad together.