Israel has upped its repressive occupation and insidious ethnic cleansing to a generally identified level of genocide. Increasingly, shocked observers of the flattened Gaza cityscape compare it to the aftermath of Hiroshima. This is unfair. The Japanese city was the target of just one bomb. Unlike the IDF in 2025, the American occupiers in 1945 did not go in afterwards to demolish systematically every surviving structure, nor to strafe, bomb and shoot survivors. The sheer methodical vindictiveness of the Gaza operation has shocked even those of us who had begun with very low expectations of the Israeli forces’s conduct.
The shock was not based on any misconception that the Israelis are too nice for this, but rather that the government renowned for its hasbara had stopped caring about the global optics of their exultant atrocities – or had given up trying to control or discipline their army of professional pogromists. More and more it invites the most odious comparison, with what the Nazis did to the Warsaw Ghetto which only lasted a month but did directly kill almost as many people as recorded in Gaza.
Overwhelmed by the horror of the direct casualties, we are not just witnessing genocide, but ecocide as it has been doing for many decades. Israel has always appealed to its own brand of “useful idiots,” as Joseph Stalin called the people who uncritically supported the Soviet Union, during the Great Purge. This enabled Israel to cultivate its image as a cosy liberal social democratic community engaged in a long-term environmental project to make the “desert green.” For example, it collected money from sentimentalists abroad to plant trees and dedicate acclaimed and named national forests. Less noticed was that these plantings were of intrusive alien intrusive species of fast growing conifers designed to obliterate the signs of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages as quickly as possible.
Similarly, Israel touts its water management skills as uniquely suited to the arid zone. Water management is much easier if it is based on water piracy. In the West Bank a major impelling fact for the occupation has been Israeli control of the aquifers there, whose waters are purloined for Israel proper and, increasingly the settlements, whose untrammeled access to water contrasts sharply with the Draconian Israeli control enforced on long standing Palestinian villages which suffer droughts as the Settlers fill their hilltop swimming pools.
Israeli apologists should perhaps be questioned about how they reconcile “making the desert green” with felling and uprooting long-standing olive trees and burning croplands.
In Gaza, already crowded and thirsty, the aquifer has been increasingly polluted by sea water as a line of Israeli pumping stations extracted water at the border line. Since the Israelis started their genocide, access for hydrologists has probably been as restricted as for journalists, but all reports indicate desperate shortages as sewage and water facilities are destroyed simply because they are there.
One has to question the so-called deal” to rebuild Gaza, which does not mention who destroyed the territory. It is undoubtedly one of the most thoroughly demolished development sites in history but it will be interesting to see Tony Blair’s plans on how to dispose of the millions of tons of debris left by Israeli depredations. We can be confident that there will be more, since anyone who believes that Israel will actually stop bombing and demolishing the strip because of a so-called peace deal is in the market for a suit from Hans Christian Anderson’s imperial tailor.
Like all other agreements that Israel has signed up for, its major premise is to by-pass the United Nations and all accepted international norms and treaties to produce a “negotiated” settlement. That it will break and declare is no longer binding when the other side has given Israel all that is had asked for.
With no Palestinian input, the Trump’s deal has even excavated the mummified UN Quartet, dead but not yet officially buried. The Quartet had been contrived to wrap what Kofi Annan called the “unique legitimizing power” of the UN around the Israeli wish list. This reincarnation, in the form of Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister and joint author of the lies that started the Iraq War, supervising the New Deal.
Among the “outdated” Un principles it is designed to avoid are the recent legal opinions from the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. Navai Pillay, former UN Human Rights commissioner,declared that Trump's plan “manifestly breaches” last year’s ICJ legal opinion that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is unlawful and should end unconditionally. Unsurprisingly she also noted the complete absence of Palestinian representation in the looters’ cabal proposed to “rebuild” Gaza.
If this gang were to remedy this ecocide, it will not be for the benefit of Gazans. The neutron bomb was once touted as the weapon that removed the people but left the structures intact, but the Gaza pogrom reverses that. It has destroyed the buildings but left behind a shellshocked population – or some of it.
Trump and the Israelis have been actively scouting for some obliging desert country to which they can transportany survivors. Less out of solidarity, but more because they do not want an influx of highly educated radicalized refugees, there have been few takers among the Arab autocracies to house the dispossessed. The reluctant feign a principled aversion to aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing which is, in a way, commendable. However, those Egyptian soldiers massed in the Sinai are not there to withstand IDF incursions, but rather to keep the Palestinians out.
One solution floated has been to defy several different UN mandates in one fell swoop: to transfer the people of Gaza to Western Sahara, thus cementing Morocco’s illegal annexation of that territory, now recognized by Trump, while emptying Gaza of all those people who so inconsiderately survived to spoil his perfect Mediterranean resort development. It sounds mad, but it fits the times.
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