We made a genocide and called it peace.
Israel's genocide against Palestinians struts as proud as a peacock across a bloodied landscape in Gaza, The West Bank and now Lebanon. Come next week, the battlefront has a good chance of stretching to Iran because Washington and Tel Aviv believe they have a "once in a generation" opportunity to return the Mideast to colonialism. Should the green light be given for war with Iran, it will be a folly for neoliberalism as consequential as Hitler's invasion of Russia, in 1941.
It's doubtful our democracies in the West who cater to the whims of top-income earners rather than the real needs of average citizens will survive their normalising of this genocidal war. Gaza has created a fissure in society because too many of us, who live in neoliberalism’s lower decks are against the slaughter of Palestinians. Neoliberalism won’t tolerate a mutiny but it does have a affinity for authoritarianism. So, the writing is on the wall where this all ends.
The West can’t distance itself from this catastrophe because this is our genocide just as much as Israel’s. The US alone has provided Israel with close to 18 billion dollars in military aid that allowed Netanyahu to make Gaza look like Carthage after Rome's 3rd Punic War.
To paraphrase the historian Tacitus, we made a genocide and called it peace.
For over a year, the residents of Gaza have lived through a cauldron of extermination that is has tasting notes reminiscent of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War or the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943.
Israel's genocide against the Palestinians isn't industrial like the one Jewish people faced during Hitler's reign of terror. It's a bespoke genocide that has a particular fondness for annihilating Palestinian children. To date more than 15k kids have been exterminated and the war has created a 100k childhood amputees from the bombs our politicians gift to Israel.
Only Last night, Palestinians in Northern Gaza who camped in tents outside of a hospital overburdened by war wounded were attacked in an Israeli bombardment that created a firestorm so intense everyone in the fire zone was burned alive. I wonder if one of those bombs had Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s signature on it before exploding death all around and incinerating babies, who were so young they didn’t even know how to crawl.
Yet there was no outrage from the heads of western governments or sanctions, for this war crime. They don't even get heart emojis or thoughts and prayers from our leaders. Most journalists ignored this atrocity not from war weariness, but because their bread is buttered by diminishing the genocidal nature of this war.
The world's democracies don't care much about the fate of Palestinians. The indifference and outright contempt for Palestinian life, by those who hold power in Washington, Ottawa, London, Paris or Berlin always brings to mind; Glouster's words in King Lear, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport."
Palestinians today experience an existential despair that is similar to what Jewish People felt when they were trapped for extermination in the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. It’s the understanding that you are alone and no one will come to your aid as you are consumed by evil. The "civilised" west won’t lift a finger to stop the bloodshed but instead have prolonged it- with both moral and material support for Israel.
Western politicians and the corporate news media became "death the destroyer of worlds" in 2024 because it was our year of living genocidally. They enabled Netanyahu's variant of the Final Solution against Palestinians because they thought it was the right thing to do. How anyone can believe that a politician who abets a genocide will stop the climate crisis or prevent fascism at home is beyond my comprehension.
Western governments could have walked away. They could have said no, not on our watch we will not permit a genocide. Even Ronald Reagan stopped Menachem Begin from committing genocide in 1982. But they didn’t. Biden, Trudeau, Starmer, Macron the whole gang of neoliberals reasoned- sure Netanyahu’s a corrupt fascist; but those are mow western values.
The West is so morally compromised by its support of Netanyahu that the developing world has no reasons to trust us on good governance, economics or warfare. It makes our political and economic demise to China and India an event that will drop in 5 years rather than decades. The chaos that awaits us- will make the fall of the Soviet Union look like a well-orchestrated transfer of power.
For us ordinary folk living in Western society, the near future is dark. It's only a matter of time, but the West will be visited vengefully by the law of what goes around comes around. There is no possible other fate but that for us, and we deserve it.
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The greater Israel project continues, with smugness, smirks and a finger to the UN peace keeping force.
In your opinion, should the organizers of the violence of October 7, 2023 have returned all of the remaining hostages to Israel as soon as it became clear that Israel was organizing its own military action in Gaza?