by Craig Mokhiber, published on Mondoweiss, October 8, 2024
One year later the flames of genocide still burn, but after decades of persecution and bloodshed we may well be seeing the beginning of the end of the settler-colonial project in Palestine.
We have reached a grim milestone. A full year of gruesome Israeli mass murder. A year of epic Palestinian suffering.
A year of direct Western complicity. A year of continuous media incitement. A year of shameful inaction by international institutions.
For twelve months, we have seen relentless persecution of human rights defenders across the West, solely for peacefully opposing genocide and apartheid.
And fifty-two weeks of a horrified global public helplessly witnessing on their screens the first live-streamed genocide in history.
The carnage of this past year is unprecedented. The destruction is almost unimaginable.
Still, this genocide will end. The Palestinian people and their besieged nation will undoubtedly emerge from the ashes of genocide, recover, and reassert their inalienable rights in their ancient homeland.
But international institutions and the global human rights system will be left bruised and battered.
The political capital expended by the US empire and the broader West in defense of the slaughter, as well as their global standing and reputation, will never be recouped.
And, almost certainly, this year of cruelty and lawlessness will mark the beginning of the end for the Zionist project in Palestine and, therefore, of the state of Israel as we know it.
A formula for disaster
Of course, neither the genocide nor the current wave of slaughter of Palestinians started in October of 2023. The systematic massacre, purging, and erasure of the indigenous Palestinian people began in earnest with the Nakba of 1947-48, and it has not ceased since that bloody beginning.
And the genocidal threat was always obvious. Any thinking person could see, even prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, that the Zionist project of the West was a formula for disaster.
First, at the very historic moment when colonialism was being dismantled around the world, and global human rights rules were being adopted at the United Nations, the West carved out an exception for Palestine.
It was at this moment that Zionist forces chose to attack Palestine, murder and terrorize its population, chase many survivors away in terror, and begin the erasure of the indigenous people, and their replacement with a European settler colony founded by foreign invaders and radicalized by a deeply racist and fundamentally violent political ideology.
The colony was to be sustained at the barrel of a gun, by waging constant war both against the indigenous people and against the neighboring states.
A colonial education system and a media ecosystem were built to dehumanize the indigenous and neighboring peoples and to instill a supremacist ideology into the settler population.
The settler state, its economy, and its society were thoroughly militarized, enlisting all adults in the project of state violence, arming it to the teeth including with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and even integrating the field-testing of new weapons on captive civilian populations as part of the business model of the colony’s arms industry.
They ring-fenced the entire project with western-guaranteed impunity, carving out an exception to the application of all rules of international law.
And they built an all-encompassing machinery of repression, including laws, policies, practices, and technologies to ensure the constant subjugation, dehumanization, and persecution of the indigenous Palestinian people.
The toxic cocktail was complete.
Maintaining Western support
Of course, an artificially imposed European colony in the heart of the Middle East, which is necessarily maintained by force, could never become self-sufficient. Rather, it has always and will always rely on massive support from Western states, especially the US. Maintaining that vital support was to become a key goal of the Israeli state and its transnational network of proxy groups.
As such, in the intervening years, the Israeli regime adopted a strategy of incremental genocide, with simmering persecution and dispossession, punctuated by periodic full-blown massacres, and marked by a continuous march of expansion.
It was a pace, tried and true over 75 years, with which the regime’s Western sponsors were comfortable, allowing them to continue unbroken the flow of military, economic, and diplomatic support without significant domestic pressure at home.
And it allowed like-minded media corporations, decade after decade, to continuously disseminate pro-Israel propaganda as a smokescreen to obscure the horrific realities being perpetrated against the indigenous people on the ground.
Expedited genocide
But when Israel’s current ultra-Zionist government took power last year, it immediately abandoned the strategy of incremental genocide.
In its place, it moved to expedited genocide (beginning with waves of ethnic cleansing in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank), betting that its Western sponsors (and their captured politicians and complicit media) would not dare (or care) to take the steps necessary to stop it, even when it launched wholesale civilian slaughter in Gaza.
They were right.
So much so that Western countries like the U.S., UK, Germany, and others, quickly moved beyond mere acquiescence for the genocide, and into direct complicity and participation in it.
As a result, one year later, we are witnessing unprecedented bloodshed in the region, and the broader world is in deep trouble.
Axis of Genocide
Thus, Israel is not alone in its march of terror. It is accompanied, in lockstep, by what has been called the Axis of Genocide.
Four members of that Axis, Israel, the U.S., the UK, and France, are nuclear-armed states. A fifth, Germany, is a serial genocide perpetrator and a major European economic power. Three (the U.S., UK, and France) have veto power in the UN Security Council.
Adding to the danger, all of its members share a common ideological grounding in militarism, colonialism, white supremacy, and political Zionism. Most have the stain of genocide on their historical records.
All have political systems that are deeply compromised and corrupted by the influence of the weapons industry, the billionaire class, and the Israel lobby. And all are marked by profound societal levels of Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian bigotry.
And, in defense of a single, small, oppressive, and violent settler colony in the Middle East, all have quickly abandoned the entire edifice of international law and international institutions built up since the end of the Second World War, and which they once claimed as part of their brand.
As recent history has shown, these biases, linkages, and incentives have become a formula not only for genocide in Palestine but for catastrophe on a global scale.
Breaking bones and records
And, indeed, the cost of Western-secured Israeli impunity has been shockingly high.
In one year, Israel has set new records for the pace of civilian killing, the rate of destruction of civilian infrastructure, the killing of children, the killing of medical personnel, the killing of journalists, the killing of humanitarian workers, and the killing of UN staff.
The depravity of Israel’s actions has shocked the world. Collective punishment, a chain of massacres, summary executions, torture camps, systematic sexual violence, starvation tactics, imposed disease, the direct targeting of small children with sniper rifles, and the blocking of humanitarian aid to facilitate starvation.
We have all seen the images. The methodic eradication of whole neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, universities, food stores, shelters, refugee camps, agricultural fields, and even cemeteries.
The mangled bodies of Palestinians, the fear-filled eyes of the children, the terror as bombs fall on bread lines. The cold-blooded murder of innocents, of defenseless children like Hind Rajab, trapped in the family car, terrified for hours and then slaughtered by Israeli soldiers, and of thousands of others like her.
And we have seen the cold, cruel laughter of the Israeli soldiers, the deranged chants of violent Israeli settlers, the genocidal pledges of Israeli political and military leaders.
The promise of the Prime Minister to wipe out the Palestinians “like Amalek”, a biblical verse that calls for Israel to “utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
The calls of Israeli leaders to perpetrate another Nakba, to raze Gaza to the ground, to make no distinction between civilians and fighters. To “bury them.”
And, by now, we have all memorized the familiar barbarous pattern of Israel’s crimes: target civilians and civilian infrastructure, then target the rescue workers who come to help, then celebrate in Hebrew but switch to English to claim that they were all terrorists, human shields, or collateral damage, then reload and do it again.
The accumulated criminal guilt of the Israeli perpetrators and their complicit Western partners is staggering. But so too is the historic moral lapse of the wider world, both those who have defended the genocide, and those who have remained silent as it has been carried out with their tax dollars, with their government’s political support, or in their name.
Today, everyone knows. No one can say they were not warned before the catastrophe. And no one can say they did not know of the horrors that followed, broadcast in real-time to all of us.
Seventy-six blood-soaked years into this colonial enterprise, it is clear to all who will see that what the West has constructed in the heart of the Middle East is not an enlightened project, but rather a rampaging Frankenstein monster that threatens to drag the indigenous Palestinian people, the region, and the world into a conflagration from which it may not recover for generations.
The darkness spreads
How long the rampage can be sustained is an open question. But there will undoubtedly be much more darkness before the dawn.
Israel, drunk with Western-backed impunity, even as it continues its genocide in Palestine, is now spreading its attacks across the region and leaving mountains of bodies and rivers of blood in its wake.
In a matter of weeks, it has waged terror attacks with booby-trapped communication devices in Lebanon, assassinated leaders across the region, launched military attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, has invaded Lebanese territory, and is now seeking to draw its U.S. sponsor into an all-out regional war of conquest and domination.
For their part, collaborationist governments in the West show little appetite for reining in the rampaging monster that they themselves created in the Middle East, and to which they continue to provide endless flows of arms, money, intelligence, diplomatic cover, legal exceptionalism, and a heretofore impenetrable cocoon of impunity.
When the reckoning comes, as it must, the accountability of both Israel and its Western accomplices must be secured, lest these horrors be repeated in an endless cycle of atrocity, impunity, and recidivism.
Israeli impunity is coming to an end
But there are flickering lights in the darkness, and they are growing.
The just cause of Palestine and the steadfastness of her people have inspired millions around the world to stand up and fight back. The civilized world is now more mobilized than it has been in generations to oppose the horrific evil unleashed on the world by Israel and its Western sponsors.
More and more people are escaping from the distorting matrix of Western corporate media and turning to independent media and first-hand sources on social media, delivering a powerful blow to the controlled, pro-Israel narrative of official Western institutions.
Today, Israel is on trial for genocide at the World Court, and its leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, including extermination.
The ICJ has already issued a series of provisional anti-genocide measures against Israel, and a growing list of countries is lining up behind Palestine and South Africa in the genocide case against Israel.
A dedicated international tribunal is under discussion at the UN. Cases have already been brought in national courts around the world, and more are certain to follow. Plans are also underway to mandate an international anti-apartheid body to focus on Israel.
In the meantime, the United Nations, its independent human rights mechanisms, and the leading international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights organizations have all collected massive quantities of evidence, have strongly condemned Israel for its shocking criminality, and are working to ensure accountability.
Mass demonstrations against Israel are not only daily occurrences in capitals around the globe but they are actually growing, undeterred by the often-brutal efforts (especially of Western governments) to suppress them.
The ICJ has declared the obligation of all states to cut off all recognition, aid, investment, trade, weapons, and support of any kind with Israel’s colonial project in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Israel is increasingly isolated on the global stage. And the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions is growing with every passing day.
In other words, the age of Israeli impunity is coming to an end, despite the best efforts of the U.S., the UK, Germany, and other complicit Western states.
And we may well be seeing, after decades of endless persecution and bloodshed, the beginning of the end of the European settler-colonial project in Palestine.
One year later, the flames of genocide still burn. At this tragic moment, it is hard to see through the smoke that obscures the path forward. But white supremacist settler colonialism was defeated in South Africa, Rhodesia, Namibia, and Algeria. It will be defeated in Israel too. Through struggle and solidarity, with law and politics, in resistance and resilience, this will end.
*Featured Image: A photo released by the Israeli military on Dec. 3, 2023 shows Israeli troops conducting military operations in the Gaza Strip. (Photo: © Xin Hua/Xinhua via ZUMA Press APA Images)
Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law.