By Jeremy Salt

Weiss’s god is as inhumane as she is, and outside her twisted self-serving inhumane fantasy world, obviously no god at all but a devil.

A friend calls to say Israel has just bombed a five-storey residential building next to land owned by her extended family in northern Gaza. Razed it to the ground. The building consisted of family apartments, full of men, women, and children. No connection with Hamas, even if that was used to justify this massacre. Seventeen bodies were pulled out of the rubble; the rest are probably entombed forever because there are no means of pulling them out.

Once upon a time, this one atrocity would have made headlines around the world. Now, because there have been thousands of massacres like this one in the past 20 months, it is almost a lost detail on the broad canvas of mayhem, madness, and mass murder.

The greater the atrocity, the greater the number of atrocities, the smaller the individual crime becomes. The horror is reduced to a detail, a mere mention in the media in the unlikely event it gets even that far.

Why would Israel want to bomb this building? Probably because it is about the only one left still standing in the district. That is reason enough, plus it is full of the people Israel is determined to exterminate one way or another.

The Gazan population is now estimated to number about 1.8 million, compared to 2.3 million in 2023. So, well above the estimates of those actually killed in Israeli missile strikes and tank shelling, about half a million Gazans who used to live, live no more.

Those who do live are close to the level of starvation from which bodily organs cannot recover, even with the delivery of food and medical aid. If they do survive, it will be behind the fence of a concentration camp from which they will never be allowed out.

Brains battered by this relentless, sadistic cruelty, people of common humanity around the world are so traumatized they no longer know how to react. They cannot look on any longer, but they cannot look away and know that to retain their humanity and identification with the annihilated, they must continue to know what is going on.

They do what little they can. They join protests in the streets, they can write letters to the editor or their local MP or even articles of their own, but beyond that, they feel helpless, gagged, bound hand and foot, forced to watch these horrors like prisoners in some psychopath’s cellar. Far from representing their interests, their governments represent those of a genocidal state. They support the psychopath, and thus become psychopaths themselves.

Those doing their best to defend the Palestinians long ago ran out of language, of adjectives, of curses of the monsters responsible for these crimes. Yes, we call them monsters, but like all the other humans we have called monsters, they are humans. Inhumane humans, but still humans, and determined to destroy humanity itself along with the physical destruction of their Palestinian victims.

Interviewed by Piers Morgan, Daniella Weiss, the so-called godmother of West Bank settlers, is asked about her reaction to the killing of 20,000 Gazan children by the Israeli military.

She smirks, smiles, chuckles, and laughs as Morgan presses her for an answer, which seems to be that, as her god gave the Jewish people this land, they are justified in ridding it of the people who live there.

Her moral indifference to the mass murder of children is clear. Let the army kill 40,000 and she still won’t care. Weiss’s god is as inhumane as she is, and outside her twisted self-serving inhumane fantasy world, obviously no god at all but a devil, applauding the killing of every Palestinian and urging his chosen people to go still further in their cruelty.

The central question is raised about what these chosen people think they were chosen for. Jewish supremacy is what Weiss thinks, against the command of the Prophet Isaiah that Jews were chosen to serve as a “light unto the nations.”

In fact, what we see every day is not light but a blight unto the nations – mass murder and annihilation corresponding to the bloodiest injunctions to be found in Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Is this what the Jewish people were chosen for? In Weiss’s view, yes. In Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich’s view, yes. In the view of the settlers murdering civilians and burning villages on the West Bank, yes. They regard these atrocities as righteous acts, and their rabbis support them.

They seem never to have asked whether a real god could have chosen them for this, whether their god is not in fact a demon behind the mask, leading them further and further into the trap he has set for them. Could it be that it was not they who were chosen, but the false god they chose because they coveted the land of another people and only a false god of hatred and violence could sanctify its seizure?

They cannot imagine a time coming when they will have to answer for what they have done in human courts. There will be no god to protect them then, no god to blame. After leading them into the trap he has set for them, he will disappear, laughing at the way he tricked them. He promised them power and glory, while all the time he intended the hatred he created through them and of them.

There will be no point in any of them saying they were only obeying the commands of this god, as the Nazis said of their god at the Nuremberg tribunal. The court will not be impressed because they actually committed these crimes and are to be held responsible, not their god. They could have said ‘no’, but they did not. They could have questioned their god,m but did not because why ask, when their god was giving them exactly what they wanted.

How, it will be asked, could Weiss and people like her believe in such a cruel, sadistic god? Weren’t they suspicious? Where was their conscience? Was it not obvious that this was a god of hatred and violence, not compassion and love, a creature of demonic appetites demanding that its acolytes constantly feed it?

Which they did. The bodies piling up in their god’s temple of death in Gaza quickly overflowed into the streets of Jenin, Gaza, Beirut, and wherever elsewere  laid waste in his name. Chosen for this task, his acolytes laughed as they proudly posed for ‘selfies’ in the apocalyptic landscape they created.

This is the god that led Daniella Weiss to chuckle when she was asked if she had anything to say about the 20,000 children murdered in Gaza. The question amused this settler of Polish origin who dared to claim that Palestine belongs to her and not the people who have lived there for countless generations.

She could hardly take the question seriously. It seemed absurd to her. Wallowing in her arrogance, hatred, and contempt for the Palestinians, even their children, devoid of any sympathy for them, but rather laughing at their subjection, she is the equivalent of the female guards tormenting Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps.

Tried at Nuremberg, they were hanged. Most probably,y this will never be Weiss’ fate, but if justice is ever served in her lifetime, she will end up in prison for the rest of her days.

Her false god commands her through his “false messiah,” as Nathan Weinstock described Zionism back in the 1970s. If she would snigger at the possibility of one day being held to account, that’s because the powerful – whether individuals or empires – can never imagine the day coming when they will no longer have the power they once had and will be held to account for the crimes they committed.

That is their great weakness. It does not occur to Weiss, Netanyahu, Smotrich and the rest of them that without the United States, Israel would have no power. It cannot stand alone. Without US intervention, it could have been destroyed by Iran, had Iran chosen to keep going in the recent war.

This was a momentous event in Middle Eastern history, an outcome unimaginable until it actually happened. It showed that Israel’s power turns out to be the same thin glasshouse of European power that the 19th-century Muslim thinker and activist Jamal al Din al Afghani said could be shattered with a single stone, if the Muslims could just unite.

Their disunity has always been their great weakness, and the greatest weapon in the hands of their enemies, but the total horror of the Gaza genocide spills over all sectarian borders and seeps into the foundations of the moral and legal structures built over thousands of years to stop the world collapsing into barbarism. In Gaza, this barbarism is not just what we now see but is upheld by governments spitting on the corpse of their own ‘rules-based international order.’

In the Middle East, corrupt dictators and autocrats hold the line for Israel against the interests and aspirations of the Arab and Muslim people. In the collective ‘west’ politicians and the media defend Israel against the outrage of their so-called ‘own’ people. They are as guilty as Daniella Weiss.

Israel long ago ceased to be invincible – if it ever was. While it could never exist without the lifeline of US weapons, it could still fight alone in a real war. As Iran’s missile retaliation showed, that time has passed. If Israel wants to attack Iran again – and there is no doubt that this is what it does want – it will have to attack with the full battlefield participation of the US.

Increasingly, however, the US is at war with itself. There is no appetite for another Middle East war among the American people, and definitely not one on behalf of a genocidal state whose viciousness has been live-streamed around the world for the past 20 months. Gaza is the window into what Israel has been doing all along and the American people are now more aware than ever.

The stone that may finally break the Israeli glasshouse could be the consequences of the Epstein affair and the public exposure of Israel’s penetration of US federal and state governments at every level.

There always had to be a point where this unnatural ‘special’ relationship would end because of the harm it is doing to the US. Perhaps that point is now closer than ever to being reached, but when it is finally reached, Israel will be left alone in the Middle East to face the fury it has built up in the past eight decades.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.