By Jeremy Salt

At this stage, there is surely nothing new left to say about Israel. All has been said in the past 80 years.

Even the current stage of the genocide is not the end of the road. Israel has shown that it will not stop before getting what it wants. It has already used all the conventional weapons in its armory, largely US armory.

Nuclear weapons will be next if it is thwarted. Sooner or later, this is likely to happen.  The signs are already there. The world is revolted by Israel.

The fact that Israelis blame ‘antisemitism’ for global disgust at the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians is another measure of their moral blindness. In their reckoning, genocide is self-defense. All Gazans are Hamas or will be one day, and deserve to be killed. The mass murder of children logically follows.

Bringing Hell to Gaza

Israel is a full-on nightmare. An extra level needs to be added to Dante’s nine levels of hell to capture the full depravity of what its military minions have done in Gaza. In the past two years, like demons in the flames of a medieval woodcut, they have been laughing, jeering, and dancing on the sands as they destroy Gaza’s homes, schools, universities, and hospitals.

They mock their female victims by wearing their clothes and mock their child victims by smashing up their classrooms. They are amused by their own behavior. The family and friends to whom they send their videos think they are funny too, but the world outside the walled-in ghetto they have created for themselves is disgusting.

No sadistic twist is left out of the destruction and desecration of what was a living space for the more than two million human beings these savages dared call “human animals” deserving of extermination. The ungodly claim this is the land God gave them. How can that be?

None of this is random. It was planned from the beginning. Genocide is in the DNA of Zionism because there could not be a Zionist state unless and until the people who lived on, owned, and inherited the land were removed. That was the aim from the start – to take the land without the people, the truth behind the lie of “a land without people for a people without land.”

Neither should anyone be deceived by Herzl’s whimsical phrase of “spiriting” the penniless population beyond Palestine’s border or Weizmann’s “miraculous simplification of our task” after the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

This was no miracle. The Palestinians were removed by killing or terrorizing them into flight. God had nothing to do with it, and if he did, he would have been the devil in disguise.

Neither was the genocide going to be done in an instant, at the blow of a whistle as Herzl also said. No, it was going to be a bloodthirsty grinding task because the Zionists at the top knew the Palestinians would fight for their land every inch of the way. Weak at first, relying on British protection, the Zionists bided their time until they were strong enough to take what they wanted.

The US ensured they got it by corrupting the workings of the UN. It rigged the partition vote of 1947, creating the paradox of a colonial settler-state being recommended for Palestine at the height of decolonization and self-determination.

Imperialism behind Zionism

Without imperialism, there would not have been a state of Israel. Without imperialism, Palestine could not have been plundered and stolen from its people. Without imperialism, Zionism would have been discarded as the mad ideology that it was. Without imperialism, there could have been no genocide.

And only thanks to imperialism, Israel has “succeeded” in its own warped understanding of the word. Succeeded in stealing Palestine from its people, succeeded in slaughtering its people, succeeded in massacring its children and succeeded in bringing the loathing of the world upon itself.

At least, after Gaza, the lies that worked half a century ago work no longer. Confident that no one is going to stop it, Israel has shed all restraint. It doesn’t even pretend to care any longer, as symbolized in the December 9 attack on the UNRWA headquarters in the occupied east Jerusalem quarter of Sheikh Jarrah.

Occupation “police” and officials arrived with trucks and forklifts, forced their way inside, cut off communications, stole furniture and IT equipment and pulled down the UN flag, replacing it with an Israeli flag.

Colonial Expansion and Torture

There can only be one response to this outrage: how is it remotely possible that this state can still be a member of the UN?

Israel is on the attack across Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. It is building a wall inside southern Lebanon and has taken advantage of the overthrow of the Syrian government to seize all of the Golan Heights, and set up deep “forward positions,” from which it is attacking Syrian villages and threatening Damascus.

Netanyahu says this is now Israel’s border, but as soon as it can take more territory, that will be Israel’s new border. It is the same with Israel’s new border in Gaza, the “yellow line.” A new border is new only until more territory can be taken.

The Israeli public sobbed and howled over the fate of a few Israeli prisoners in Gaza while remaining indifferent to the abduction, imprisonment and mistreatment of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children.

The Israelis in Palestinian captivity were well looked after, insofar as they could be. By comparison, the Palestinians inside Israeli prisons are starved, beaten, tortured, raped, and murdered. Basically, the Israeli public could not care less and even applauds the torturers and rapists.

If one believed in demons or the devil, one would think that these people have been penetrated by evil spirits to behave as they do. They are not “human animals” any more than the Palestinians are, but their minds have been deeply poisoned by generations of propaganda and indoctrination.

They have been taught to hate their victims and believe that they themselves are the victims. They hold everyone responsible but themselves. Accordingly, the videos filming their crimes are just Hamas propaganda. The millions of people demonstrating around the world against genocide are guilty of blood libel.

The slaughter of 20-30,000 children is turned into the medieval Christian anti-Jewish accusation that children’s blood is needed to make unleavened bread. The mind that can turn opposition to genocide into a blood libel is unhinged, but this is the mind of Israel’s prime minister.

In a conversation with Israel’s chief media propagandist in Australia, Sharri Markson, Netanyahu repeated the lies of October 7, that women were raped and “babies burnt alive in front of their parents.”

Netanyahu lies as a matter of course, but the problem is not just him or Smotrich or Ben Gvir but the Israeli people. The majority are complicit across the entire range of criminality. The few righteous Israelis who have had the courage to stand against genocide will be remembered for it in history. The rest will be remembered, too, but for their acquiescence in the greatest crimes of our time.

The world outside the rapidly thinning ranks of Israel’s supporters is frozen in the moment, numbed in its incomprehension that any human being could be capable of committing the savage and sadistic crimes for which Israel and Israelis are guilty. How and when is this going to end? No one knows.

Part of the incomprehension is that the governments that could stop it are enabling it through their arms deliveries, the continuation of their diplomatic relations, and their trade deals with this genocidal state. Through intimidation, fear of the lobby, and the destructive power of money, the genocide has corrupted them, too.

So far, Israel continues to get away with murder every day, in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon. It does not kill soldiers. It kills civilians, even small children straying across its self-declared “yellow line” in Gaza and even the two children sheltering with their father in a tent set on fire in Mawasi after a missile strike.

The killers of the children crossing the yellow line knew they were children. The pilot firing the missile knew he was aiming at a tent. By what possible argument could a tent and two children crossing a line they didn’t even know was there be described as a military target?

Yet these deaths are not aberrations or mistakes, because Israel has killed countless thousands of children since 1948.  In the two decades before the 2023 Hamas attack on military Israeli bases and settlements, Israel had killed hundreds of children. Since then, it has slaughtered at least 20,000 more.

Wherever they live, who can look at children now playing in a park or on the street without thinking of all those murdered children in Gaza? Yet in Israel, there is no guilt, outrage, or remorse, only indifference, justification, and accusations of blood libel.

A Failed Military Backed by the US

Israel has an impressive record in massacring unarmed civilians. On the actual battlefield, its record is less than impressive. Its military is only a shadow of what it used to be. Its military intelligence is strong yet somehow missed preparations for the Hamas attack. It is good at gimmickry and assassination. but even after more than two years, it has failed to defeat Hamas.

It was run out of Lebanon in 2000 and failed to defeat Hizbullah in 2006. It would have lost the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria except for the treachery of Anwar al-Sadat. It was clearly defeated by Iran in the 12-day war it chose to launch in June.

Netanyahu had to go running to Trump to get himself out of the mess he was in, but Trump is not going to be there forever, and his successor might not be there at all. Americans are showing that they have had enough of Israel and shelling out the billions of dollars urgently needed at home for urban and rural reconstruction so that Israel can murder more Palestinian children.

The dilapidated state of town after town in the US deep south is as bad as, if not worse than, the third world. More than 36 million Americans are living in poverty, yet instead of attending to these severe problems at home, the US government gives Israel billions of armaments every year, $21 billion since 2023 alone, not counting the billions in future commitments made by Biden and Trump.

The unstinting provision of these weapons makes the US a partner in the genocide, further dragging its global reputation into the mud. The US is showing that it is as mad and bad as Israel. It knows these weapons are being used to kill civilians, yet it continues to supply them. This is not policy but policy derangement by the dealmakers, real estate agents, and other opportunists passed off as a “government.”

This madness cannot last forever.  At some point, there will be a break. It could be military; it could be Israel tearing itself apart; or it could be the US finally overwhelmed by a financial crisis that printing more money can no longer stave off. In West Asia. The people will rise against the fate decreed for them sooner or later. They have risen before, and they will rise up again.

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