Israel's Final Solution
As Gaza Starves, Netanyahu Pledges to Expand the "War"
“In a transaction of this kind, a mass crime with a mass criminal and a mass victim, all must suffer: the victim immediately in blood and spirit, the criminal by his rapid and irretrievable degradation to savagery, and the remainder of the species by the necessity of either subduing the savage or submitting to him” - Vincent Sheean, 1939 [Not Peace But A Sword, III.2]
“The starving longed for death, and thought the lucky ones were those who had met their end before they had word or sight of such horrors.” - Josephus [The Jewish War, VI.213]
On Tuesday, August 4th, reports began to appear in Israeli media that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to launch a more “aggressive” military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which will end with Israeli occupation of the territory. According to these same sources, this is being done with President Trump’s blessing. This announcement comes at a time when starvation in Gaza has reached the tipping point and there is the highest level of famine, while countries besides the United States increasingly criticize Israel’s actions and demand a resolution to this grim chapter in history. Netanyahu, however, instead of showing concern for international pressure or the impact this has on his US patrons, is solidifying power, including illegally firing the Attorney General who has been prosecuting him. With the notable exceptions of Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became the first Republican Representative to call Israel’s actions genocide, the ruling party in the United States is unfazed and is even doubling down, with the Trump Administration attempting [and then reversing] to tie state and local disaster relief funds to support for Israel, while a large number of Congressional Republicans just went to Israel and were photographed with Netanyahu, who has an outstanding international warrant for war crimes. It should be undeniable at this point that Israel’s objectives in Gaza are genocidal. It is not just the government: a new poll showed that roughly 80% of Israel Jews are at least largely unconcerned about famine in Gaza. All of this notwithstanding, our corrupt and fanatical governing class is determined that Americans be as culpable for this crime as possible. It is past time to take every possible action to end Israel’s genocide, feed Gaza, and remove the Likud government from power. However, despite increasing public criticisms from new quarters, it seems the policy of the “civilized world” will be to support or at least remain neutral towards Israel until there is greater mass death among the Palestinians of Gaza and those who remain are restricted to an even smaller concentration camp.
From the start of Israel’s war on Gaza we have been flooded with propaganda about 10/7 itself, Israel’s goals and actions, and the entire history of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Much of it was of surprisingly poor quality, as we have learned that Israel was never actually good at propaganda, the US and British media just cover for them to an incredible extent. They have, as with any propaganda campaign, also relied on public ignorance about the workings of human affairs. For example, many have claimed Israel has been going “easy” on Gaza and that no other power would show this degree of restraint following an attack, despite that Israel’s behavior has been among the most unrestrained of any state in modern history. Early in this I did the math, however crudely, and based on publicly available information about the number of missions flown in the first weeks after the attack, Israel was bombing at roughly the fastest sustainable rate it was capable of, when you figure that pilots need to sleep and planes need to be reloaded and maintained and that sort of thing. It is said that in the first 13 months of this conflict Israel dropped more munitions on Gaza than were used in entire Second World War. Though they have murdered as many Gazan journalists as possible and have prohibited foreign journalists from entering, a surreptitious video was recently taken of Gaza City from the air, and the scale of destruction is unprecedented:
Much of the public for some reason believes that genocide is something one can just decide to do, not something which takes an enormous amount of work and planning. As genocide scholar Mark Kersten recently explained, genocide is a process, not an event,
“Genocide is not perpetrated instantaneously. It does not ‘just happen’. Rather, those who seek to commit genocide must prepare their population to either support violence or to turn a blind eye to it…
In part because human beings have an innate aversion to harming others and participating in atrocities, genocide also takes on insidious forms, what some call “slow violence”…This lack of instant violence – often accompanied by continued births and parts of the population surviving – is often used to deny genocidal violence.
It is perhaps instructive to imagine the amount of work that would goes into two people killing one person and then disposing of the body, but on an industrial scale. By any method one would use, and whether or not one leaves corpses lying around, to instruct one large body of men towards the extermination of as many of a population of 2 million as possible is an enormous undertaking which takes years, particularly when you want the amount of plausible deniability- or in this case implausible deniability, I suppose- that allowed Israel to go through the first 20 or so months of this with the word “genocide” remaining taboo in most “respectable” circles in the powerful “Western” countries. Further, the human instinct for survival is great, as seen by the willingness of Gazans to brave indiscriminate gunfire to grab bags of flour. Starvation is a slow and miserable process, particularly as any society starts with quite a lot of stored food and will ultimately kill their livestock, eat the seeds they intended to plant, hunt for insects, peel the bark off of trees, and boil their leather belts for food; hunger will drive humans to such lengths for survival that during the siege of Jerusalem a woman killed, cooked, and ate her own baby, and was so driven to madness by hunger that she saved half of him to present to partisans who would inevitably be attracted to the smell of meat and come to take it [Josephus, The Jewish War, VI.201-2131.]
The human capacity for hope of survival also makes genocide a difficult process. The situation is akin to the halal rule of dhabiba, where it is prohibited for animals to see other animals slaughtered or to see the blade before their throat is slit, because it will induce stress and fear. This is the reason those captured generally follow the instructions of the killer until the last minute, or why a man can be made to dig his own grave at gunpoint. If a man has no hope of survival he will go into panic mode and with a large population this brings about a great risk of stampedes or any number hopeless attacks, and the IDF is massively outnumbered in the Strip. The belief that there is some hope of survival is why the Gazans keep following instructions to go from one area to the next- despite that the IDF keeps killing them at “safe zones”- instead of trying to break out as one unstoppable mass. In most genocides, the perpetrators do everything they can to keep the victims as docile as possible while the slaughter is carried out.
The point is that what we are seeing is what genocide looks like as it is happening. Even the Nazis, with all the resources and time they put into it2, did not come close to fully exterminating the Jews they had held in camps for many years. However, unlike the Holocaust, no one can claim they didn’t know how bad this was, and the craven propagandists denying it know that they are lying and that their lies are not working. This is genocide live-streamed and minutely detailed with modern technology. Modern technology also has an unprecedented number of people on record with their views, and we can see who justified this for almost two years before turning against it, as well as those who actively denied a genocide even when the social cost for acknowledging it had disappeared- that is to say, we can separate the cowards and the dupes from those who are simply evil, and there are many in the latter category.
I was myself slow to call this a genocide, despite that I opposed and spoke against Israel’s lies, crimes, and brutality- and the policy of supporting Israel- from the beginning. My issue was that I felt that arguing about the definition of genocide was a distraction from the obvious reality that Israel was killing far too many civilians and committing war crimes. However, it has reached the point where Israel’s exterminationist objectives should be undeniable, though of course that isn’t stopping many from denying them. Caitlin Johnstone recently argued that Israel’s genocidal intentions have been clear this entire time because they wouldn’t have acted with this level of brutality if they were expecting to continue to live next to the survivors,
“Call it the Inigo Montoya problem — if you kill someone’s father right in front of him, it’s a safe bet that he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you. If you intend to act in monstrous ways that fill young children with thoughts of revenge, then you need to get rid of the children, and you need to get rid of the women who will give birth to them. Otherwise you’re just creating a problem for your own children and grandchildren down the road.”
Machiavelli teaches that “men forget the death their father more quickly than the loss of their patrimony,” but Israel has also destroyed everything that the average Gazan would possibly inherit, on top of the fact that many of them are already refugees from when Israel stole their family homes in decades past [The Prince, XVII.] If Israel’s goals from the beginning had been to overthrow Hamas and replace them with the Palestinian Authority or some other collaborationist government they would have behaved entirely differently. Instead, they have destroyed everything and chased the public all over the territory into supposed “safe zones” while letting Hamas return to any place they have left. Given the existential threat Israel claims it faces there would be no excuse for not using the personnel necessary to accomplish the goal of pacifying Gaza and putting it under different governance. Johnstone is correct: they have conducted this entire war like people who don’t expect to have the Palestinians of Gaza as neighbors in the future. A new report on Israeli television shows that Israel could have ended the war and got the hostages back at the beginning of March, but Netanyahu instead intentionally broke the cease fire because he wanted to. The genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always the plan and the Likud government has never cared about the hostages.
Now Netanyahu is admitting that occupation is the goal, but clearly the type of occupation which pushes the Gazans into a tiny concentration camp, not the kind of occupation where post-war security is provided by the winners. The security cabinet is convening Thursday and Netanyahu has shown his willingness to get rid of anyone who opposes him, with one senior official near the PM having already said “the die is cast.” It is expected to be a “months long” campaign against what are called Hamas’ “remaining strongholds” in this small territory where they have already been at war for nearly two years and have destroyed almost everything. Several of Israel’s most senior former security chiefs have called this a “futile war” and said that Netanyahu has no viable plan. Many think the Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir may resign instead of carrying out this action, which Netanyahu is already set on. It was noted in a recent Haaretz article that no other leader responsible for the failures of 10/7 is still standing and thus Netanyahu is out of scapegoats, so Zamir is the only one left to throw under the bus.
Meanwhile, Gaza is at the highest level of famine and Israel only needs to stall for time to cause mass death on a greater scale than we are already seeing. Famine expert Alex de Waal has said that,
“Israeli actions stand out because there is no other case in modern history in which you have such minutely, precisely engineered starvation within an hour’s drive, or even less than an hour’s drive, of a fully capable international humanitarian operation ready to roll.”
De Waal describes the food programs which Israel has recently put in place after a months-long total blockade as “like standing on the edge of a pond and throwing out bread to ducks.” Except unlike a duck feeder, Israel shoots aid seekers in large numbers and it is clearly an intentional policy. According to the UN, every child under 5 in Gaza is at risk of life-threatening malnourishment. The Zionist propagandists love to compare Gaza to other famine areas they pretend to care about, but in few instances is the hunger an intentional policy as opposed to the result of general poverty and instability. As Adam Tooze recently wrote,
“Death by starvation in Gaza is not the collateral, unintended consequence of an obscure, anonymous, amorphous crisis. It is the results of deliberate policy on the part of the Israeli government, bent on using the resources of a highly sophisticated state to render Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.”
This differentiates Gaza from most of the other most hungry places which are trapped in a “polycrisis” and are not having starvation imposed by a sophisticated power. Further, unlike all of the other most unfortunate places in the world where hunger is only impacting a portion of the population, according to the FAO and WFP, in Gaza 100% of the population is at risk of famine.
The starvation in Gaza is intentionally engineered for the purpose of exterminating the public. As depraved as the IDF may be, and as impervious to public opinion as Israel may seem, directly murdering 2 million people is still too much. It is a crime to be done by starvation. On top of all of this, a heatwave with temperatures as high as 104 degrees is imminently arriving in the region: for a population with severely limited access to nutrition, clean water, shelter, and medical care, and no access to cooling, this could be a mass casualty event comparable to a major natural disaster.
Most Israelis, however, seem satisfied or at least unconcerned with what is happening, when they aren’t actively denying it. A new poll shows nearly 80% of Israeli Jews are fine with the situation in Gaza. Israel may like to brag about being “the only democracy in the Middle East” but the thing about that is it makes Israel in general responsible for this, as opposed to something which can be laid solely at the feat of the Netanyahu government. Some radical Israeli settlers have even been filmed attacking what aid trucks are set to be let into Gaza:
The venerable newspaper Haaretz has been doing its best to wake the Israelis up to the enormity of their sin and the danger that it presents to the nation’s future and place in the world. In one particularly strong article titled “As Israel and Starves Thousands in Gaza, It Destroys Itself in the Process,” by Iris Leal, she argues that this is a “war of annihilation” and all of the decision makers who have been involved in it since 10/7 are implicated in “war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” The author further argues that as these leaders know they will not be able to travel to at least Europe, Canada, and Australia in the future they have likely stopped caring about their guilt, and questions if they should be allowed to rule people who are not in that situation. Another article, by Eytal Avriel, argues that Israel is reaching the breaking point where businesses will refuse to work with it leading to economic collapse. A third article by Daniel Blatman argues that Israel’s “victim identity” has distorted their sense of reality,
“For the past three generations Israel too has been constructing an identity of victimhood, ranging from acts perpetrated during the Holocaust to those of Hamas on October 7. It denies its own crimes and is therefore living in a permanently distorted reality. Any attempt to speak about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is seen as a threat not only to the image of the nation but to its very survival.”
There is something unique and hard to understand about Israel’s behavior throughout this, even for people who understand the psychology of genocide. The journalist Vincent Sheean was in Palestine for the 1929 riots, the first major outbreak of violence between Zionist colonists and Arabs, which followed an intentional provocation at the Western Wall of the type that Israel’s National Security Minister Ben-Gvir continues to take part in. Sheean’s observations provide important insight. In his 1934 book Personal History, I believe the first major American text to speak out against the colonization of Palestine, Sheean writes,
“I made my first acquaintance with we may call the pogrom heritage, or pogrom complex. It was a state of mind I had never seen before, and it required a powerful effort of the imagination to understand it. It was, briefly, this: that the moment the Jews felt themselves under attack, their lives in danger and their future insecure, they assumed that the world was in league against them—that all persons who did not happen to be Jewish were their enemies. I had seen many people of all nationalities under attack, but I had never seen anybody behave as the Jews did…In its simplest form it was the conviction that a Jew had no friend but God. “ [VIII.8]
Note that this was before the Holocaust, and before decades of study on the impacts of such things. Since 10/7 Israelis and their supporters have said “anyone would respond this way” but to those who are not Zionists this is obviously untrue. The United States did go crazy after 9/11, but not this crazy, and that says something because the vast majority of the American population did not expect or understand what happened, whereas Israel’s original sin and key challenge has always been the status of Palestinians and these are wars they have been fighting for all of almost everyone’s lives. The “pogrom complex” goes far in explaining their hostility to everyone who isn’t unflinchingly loyal and their view that everyone will turn on them anyway so they should do whatever they want.
The reality though is that Israel does have many friends, certainly far more than it deserves. After 10/7 majority opinion in all of the Western countries was strongly sympathetic and this carried them through 20 months of committing some of the greatest evils of the modern era, even as they lost their minds about campus protests or microaggressions. While Israel may be losing support across “the West,” including tepid condemnation from Democrats, Trump and the Republican politicians remain fanatical Israel supporters. On top of the bizarre issue where states and municipalities with BDS laws were going to be denied disaster relief grants, a huge number of Republicans including House Speaker Mike Johnson have been in Israel for the recess, when they would generally be at home meeting with constituents.
It is true that as Pat Buchanan famously said, “Capitol Hill is Israel-Occupied territory.”
It seems that Netanyahu will stop at nothing to stay in power and exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza. The attempted firing of the Attorney General on his corruption case is a big deal representing a major erosion of the separation of powers- a longstanding goal of Netanyahu’s regime. But domestic opposition is building, with two of Israel’s largest rights groups accusing the government of genocide, while more than 1,000 major Israeli artists signed a petition to that effect. Even the stalwart Zionist New York Times published an op-ed from a genocide scholar calling it genocide [they made sure to follow it with a genocide-denying article though.] More importantly, it appears almost everyone in Israel is against Netanyahu’s plan to expand the occupation of Gaza regardless of dangers it may pose to hostages. The Jerusalem Post, one of the most violent of Israel’s “mainstream” publications, published a staff editorial explicit in its opposition to expanding the war, writing, “Occupying Gaza won’t eliminate Hamas; it will fuel resistance and guerrilla warfare in dense urban terrain, raising Israeli casualties and putting the hostages at even greater risk.” Still, all indications are that whether it is today or soon, the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza will push forward, and the odds of enough food getting in fast enough prevent famine deaths of Biblical proportions are near non-existent.
Time is running out for Gaza and there is every indication that the Netanyahu regime intends to make things worse instead of better, even if they do let in a nominal amount of food to provide themselves with an alibi. International law, always fragile, is collapsing under the weight of Israel’s genocide which is backed and enabled by the powers that consider themselves to be world police. America’s political leaders are determined to involve us in these crimes and put the guilt onto our entire population, following Israel into perdition. It is time for a radically different course: the world must come together to stop Israel and save what people of Gaza can still be saved. Given the scale of Israel’s well-documented crimes, supporting an international invasion force to overthrow the Likud regime and protect the Palestinians is at this point a moderate position. By committing genocide Israel has lost its place among the nations of the world: the only question now is how many more they bring down with them.
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I’ve wanted to bring up the Siege of Jerusalem many times throughout the war on Gaza, but the fact that Zionists don’t believe in Josephus combined with the fact that terrorist groups controlling Jerusalem was the reason the Romans could not reach a settlement to avert the catastrophe has led me to believe trying to discuss this would be as maddening as it would be pointless.
Adam Tooze recently wrote a bizarre article- such as only he would- arguing that the Holocaust used substantially less German industrial capacity than is commonly believed. I never did figure out what his point was.
The calculus has always been pretty simple. They’ve destroyed a critical mass of infrastructure, and can prevent importation of the materials necessary to rebuild it. Which is exactly what they will do.
What Israel is doing in Gaza (absolutely horrible) reminded me of a dialogue Theodore Dalrymple had as a psychiatrist with a convict who had killed his girlfriend. He says: Doctor, I had to strangled her, otherwise I don't know what I would have done! And TD's sarcastic comment is: he would have done something serious, probably.