2. ALL OF US
Reflecting on a year of genocide since October 7th: the abolition of power, and the endless total exasperation of continuing to live in this world
The History that Matters
On October 6th, 2023, the United Nations reported that it had been the deadliest year thus far for Palestinian children in the West Bank.
On April 5th, 2023, Israeli defense forces raided the Al Aqsa mosque, the holiest site for Muslims in Palestine, all so Israeli settlers could conduct attempt ritual sacrifices in contravention of the religious peace status quo that had existed for centuries. They did so again in 2021, wounding hundreds in either instance.
In 2018, Gazans marched peacefully to the border fence that Israel erected in the aftermath of Hamas winning the 2006 elections in Gaza. This fence was meant to keep the strip in a permanent state of siege until such a time that Hamas could be removed from power. Twelve long years had passed and Hamas remained as did the fences. The Gazans of the Strip marched to be free, to end a decades-long occupation. Hamas after all was here to stay, for a popular nationalist Islamic party existing is the de facto standard in the Muslim world, especially after the failures of Arab socialism to achieve any sort of just outcome. Attempts to excuse away Hamas as a temporary entity are just fantasies of deluded minds.
When the protestors neared the fences, Israel responded by sending snipers to shoot protestors en masse, often going for the kneecap, to render these civilians as permanent invalids. Peaceful resistance, violent resistance: it didn't matter to Israel; all resistance no matter how pathetic, no matter how peaceful, will be quashed.
In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which was a stated effort to colonize the present Palestine with Jews to thus create an ethno-nationalist Jewish state. No Palestinians were ever consulted in drafting and publishing this declaration. Nor were they in 1947, when they were yet again left out of the UN decision to impose upon Palestine an Israeli state.
In 1948, with full UN backing, Israel drove out 750,000 Palestinian people into refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. Nearly 76 years have passed without a change in the status quo—descendants of the initial flight, the Nakba, are still holding onto the keys of the homes they lost. Throughout it all, the imposition of a solution continues to not include Palestinians. At Camp David, at whatever summit: the status quo is presented as immutable. All that changes is how brutal the occupation will be.
Israel possesses all of the rights of a state and Palestine none of them: they alone get to determine what is acceptable. Peace is entirely dictated by the Israeli government, a peace Palestine must acquiesce to without resistance. As it stands, Palestine today is a non-sovereign entity, a vassal of the Israeli security establishment or otherwise tacitly propped up by them. This is the role the Palestinian Authority governing the West Bank plays: to act in concert with the Israeli security state to keep the Indigenous population in check. Hamas too appeared to play this role until October 7, 2023. They were seen as an important ally in keeping the strip secure and preventing any major terrorist incidents since the 2014 war. They more importantly kept whatever nascent Palestinian identity of nationhood divided between the Hamas-aligned Gaza, and the Fatah-aligned West Bank. To that end Israel helped and assisted Hamas with funds to manage the strip, the same policy that they have in the West Bank for the PA.
At no point in this long sordid affair did Israel or the United States concede to the creation of any Palestinian state, and if they conceded to anything it was a state so neutered it could be reasonably counted amongst other nations as one itself. A state needs an army, needs a definable border, needs to be able to enter freely into agreements and arrangements with foreign powers, needs to have the power of the purse. The Palestinian Authority possesses none of those attributes and it is unlikely they ever will.
What Could be Done?
What else could Palestinians do? The theoretical Palestinian Gandhi or MLK has been bombed, sniped, starved into submission—Israel made sure of that, such that even if such a person could exist, no one wants to be that guy. Non-violent resistance is a great asset in certain contexts, but not one where you will be murdered regardless of what you say or do; Israel demands of its Palestinian subjects total, abject submission. Resistance is death. In the best case, you resist and become enough of a nuisance that Israel co-opts you into their security establishment.
For there is no hope of a Palestine freed. The last, desperate attempt to do so in 1993 led to the assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel by a Zionist terrorist in 1995. The half-offer of peace in 2000 was a joke. Peace thus ruled out, Israel tightened the noose. Gaza was placed under total siege. The West Bank has become more and more settled by Israelis, such that even if a state could exist now, it would require the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of settlers. All the while, the United States gives Israel unlimited diplomatic, financial, and military aid, feeding and funding this death machine to the hilt. There will be no peace, no Palestine: Gaza will be sieged until Hamas falls at which point the West Bank policy of settlement will be copied there. The remaining Palestinians, those who don't flee into Jordan, or Egypt, or Lebanon, will then be rendered into a third-class of barely-paid laborers, brutalized endlessly for Israeli profit.
What more could Palestinians do? If we take Israel and the West at their word: life would be better if Hamas could just disband, if all its fighters just killed themselves, that a new political movement that is just as subservient as the PA is in the West Bank is formed. Let's say that they did that, say in 2022. Hamas disbands, all its fighters commit suicide, and a new political party in Gaza vows loyalty to Israel. What happens next? Why, the return of Israeli settlements to Gaza, of course, who left only as recently as 2005. It would just allow for a repeat of the West Bank policy to take place: a cycle of settlement building, expropriation, and death. Faced with the choice between a slow death by Israeli occupation and the quicker death of Israeli bombing: is that even a choice?
What would you do? If in 2023 you were 21 years old living in Gaza, you were born in 2001 during which Israel was busy pounding the Second Intifada into submission. When you weren't even 5 years old, Hamas took over the Strip. Yasser Arafat is dead. So many Palestinian leaders are dead. All that remains are parties like Hamas, who stand alone in opposition to Israel. The Palestinian Authority and Fatah both meekly submit to Israeli domination.
When you are 8, Israel bombs the strip in what they call a war, but to you, all you see is senseless slaughter, buildings being bombed into dust, whole families evaporated. You're not thinking of religion, of who owned what when thousands of years ago. You're thinking about where you're going to get your next meal, about whether that next bomb will fall on you. Israel bombs Gaza again when you are 13. And again when you are 19. All the while: you are stuck in this tiny strip of land. You cannot leave, you cannot emigrate. Anything you own or possess—food, medicine, clothes—is stuff the Israeli government has allowed to pass through the many checkpoints to reach your hands. Above, drones hum loudly 24/7. You've never had a silent night of peaceful rest in your entire life. Your father died in the strip before you were 5. Your grandfather died in the strip twenty years ago, still clutching the keys your great-grandfather had given him forty years before you were even born. You may live until you're 80—the year will be 2081, and you will still be in the Gaza concentration camp, never having left this tiny enclosure, still clutching great-grandfather’s keys.
That is the reality of being a Palestinian in Gaza. It is the reality of being born into a situation entirely out of your control, a prison from which there is no escape save through death. No one is coming to save you. While Israel has the United States, Palestine has nobody save distant allies in Iran and Hezbollah; important yes, but so far away and so disproportionately outgunned vis-à-vis America that they as well be operating from Mars.
What else could Hamas have ever done? Even had they gone through with a noble suicide, it wouldn't have ended the occupation and genocide. It might have even made it worse. With no other alternative, they resisted.
Israel has refused to contend with the fact that militarily occupying a population of 9 million people while seeking their extermination and replacement with ethnic Jews creates resentment and resistance. This delusion festered because years and decades of military spending has created the veneer of perfect, unimpeachable security. The Iron Dome kept Israel’s skies clear of missiles, even when Palestinians launched hundreds into Israel. Long border fences, walls, and high-tech surveillance kept the Palestinians bottled up and observed carefully like lab rats. And the frontier settlements ever grew more and more, encircling more and more Palestinian towns and villages.
Thus the warmth of the security blanket; they remain thus totally ignorant that there has never existed a military solution to Palestine, only a political one. But the imagined security of that blanket allowed life to continue on normally, even as the fires of resistances grew larger and larger.
Millions more people moved to Israel in the 1990s due to the collapse of the USSR. This was the golden age of Hasbara, of the myth of Israeli supremacy. In Israel, you could be anything you wanted. You could be an atheist gay, living it up in the nightclubs of Tel Aviv. You could choose a life of religious contemplation, your life of study paid in full by the Israeli state. You could become a patriot for Israel, and kick a Palestinian out of their home in the West Bank and settle it yourself. You could even larp as a socialist, living in a kibbutz and partaking in a pseudo-communal lifestyle as Palestinians did all the hard, back-breaking work in the fields. By the 2010s, Israel was safe. All that Israel demanded was both an ethnic familial heritage of Jews in the family tree, and an undying loyalty to the Israeli state. This explains in part the events that followed October 7, the resultant shock and awe.
The promulgation of the Iron Dome succeeded at first: it shut down the last avenue for Palestinian active resistance against the genocide. Already, the surveillance and security state had rendered active guerilla warfare, with bombings and shoot-outs, impossible. The Second Intifada proved that. Once the dome was up, that was it: Israel became totally secure from all attacks.
But of course, it wasn't. The Iron Dome merely prolonged the suffering of the Palestinians while Israel continued to live in their deluded fantasies. For every member of the Resistance Axis could do basic math: an interceptor of the Iron Dome cost $100,000 at minimum. The launchers are even more expensive, running into the millions. That's not even counting the graft at the military-industrial complex. How much does a missile cost? A few thousand at most. The launchers, the same.
And of course, time didn't stand still. Whereas a party like Hezbollah started in the 1980s with ancient World War 2 Soviet katyushas, by 2006 they could already produce pinpoint accuracy missiles, capable of striking any singular point in Israel with stunning accuracy. Thus the Dome would always fail, as indeed it did and has done ever since October 7. Too many cheap missiles, too accurate, not enough interceptors.
There is no safeguard against a national resistance movement outside reconciliation and incorporation into the ruling state. If the Indigenous people oppose your rule and there are enough of them, you will have to either kill them all or otherwise bring them into your government. As the latter is antithetical to Zionism, the only remaining solution is the slaughter.
With all peaceful alternatives ruled impossible, resistance became necessary. People will resist their own extermination, even if such resistance is futile, for there is no true choice here: the choice was already made.
October 7
On October 7, 2023 and for several days after, Hamas conducted a military raid into Israel with two primary objectives: to destroy Israel’s false sense of security by destroying as much of the physical security infrastructure keeping Gaza under siege as they could, and to collect as many Israeli hostages as they could. This they did relatively openly, planning and doing drills in plain view of Israeli drones.
It was Israeli hubris that caused the events that transpired on that day to occur. Their inability to view Hamas as anything other than rabid dogs, their inability to view any Palestinian as human, caused the Resistance to truly shock and awe the Israeli security establishment. In a matter of hours, the first objective had been achieved with stunning success: an entire Israeli division had been defeated, routed. The fences surrounding Gaza were torn down. The towers filled with AI-powered snipers were destroyed. This enabled the second objective to proceed with relative ease.
It is said that the taking of hostages is a war crime. Again I ask: what else could Hamas do? Israel has been kidnapping tens of thousands of Palestinians for decades, throwing them in jails where they are tortured, raped, and executed—all without trial, all without even the filmiest pretext and excuses. Hamas did not innovate here; Palestinian resistance movements, in light of the mass Israeli abductions also started to nab hostages of their own, to exchange for Palestinian hostages. It's how the present leader of Hamas Yahya Sinwar became a free man, after all. Thus had the conflict been for decades—a tit for tat of raids, hostages, bombings, back and forth without any foreseeable end.
But October 7 changed things forever. Hamas hoped above all else it might lead Israel to seek the rational outcome, and sit down for diplomacy, peace, and reconciliation. It instead shattered the Israeli mentality and ability to think of anything else other than kill.
Their immediate response to the unfolding disaster was telling: across the IDF chain of command, the order went out. Implement Hannibal. Kill the hostages before they can make it into Gaza and thus be used as leverage. There would be no negotiations.
Hamas had by that point cut through the military defenses quite effortlessly. Where resistance existed, it was in settlements—as every settler was in effect a soldier (indeed this is what settlements are: military outposts, the first line of defense against Palestinian resistance), their attack slowed as differentiating between who was a non-combatant and who wasn't became a near-impossibility as the fog of war descended. Command of the battlefield ceded to anarchy, just as Israeli helicopters began to swoop down on Southern Israel.
What happened next was a slaughter of both Palestinians and Israelis alike. All told, between the firefights, bombings, and general chaos, 1600 Palestinians laid dead on the battlefield alongside 1200 Israeli ones. The knowledge of who did what, when still remains to be discovered, and it may never be truly, fully known as Israel moved to bury everyone, even people allegedly raped, before any forensic analysis could be conducted. As for the surviving Hamas fighters, they retreated into Gaza proper, taking with them 251 Israeli hostages.
As things stood immediately after, there remained an obvious path forward. Of course Israel would exchange the Israeli hostages for the Palestinian ones, as they had done so every single other time. And with the shattering of the veneer of security, Israel would at least realize their hubris, and recognize that a diplomatic solution with Hamas specifically but the Palestinians in general would be the only way to secure Israeli state security in the long-term. The siege of Gaza would have to end. Palestine would have to exist. The alternative would be to engage in genocide, with all the risks such a policy entailed.
Predictably by any who possessed a brain (yours truly included along with many others, but of course: no one in our government) an apocalyptic temper tantrum ensued. Israel imposed a complete and total blockade: no more food, no more medicine, no more water. They declared this openly, calling the Palestinians animals deserving slaughter. Then the bombing started. Whole residential blocks were wiped out, day after day. Israeli targeting was lax, to say the least. If you were a military aged male (aka anyone aged 18-60) and if an AI outside human review determined you were a threat, the IDF would wait until you were at home before leveling your entire complex, thus killing not only you, but also your entire family and neighbors.
Every hospital has thus been destroyed. School in Gaza is not in session this fall semester because every single school has been bombed, including the universities. To say nothing of the teachers: many too have been slaughtered or snatched by the IDF. Mosques and churches have not been spared, even those antique treasures hundreds of years old. What little remains of life in Gaza has been squeezed into refugee tents, still routinely bombed, day after day, with hundreds of casualties reported for each consequent bombing. Everyone is starving. Everyone has some virulent disease like polio or typhus or dysentery ripping through them. A population of 2.1 million on October 6th, 2023 has been reduced to roughly a population of 1.1-1.6 million starving, broken survivors. And still the slaughter continues.
We have known all of this since day one. We have seen it happen, night after night on our phone screens, fathers holding up the mangled corpses of the children; children buried under rubble, calling out for their mother. The slaughter continues unabated. There is no freedom under the Israeli sun, only death.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza. If Israel does not bomb you, they starve you. And if you survive starvation and bombing, an Israeli sniper might get bored and shoot you in the head. And if you survive all that, survive the bombings, the hunger, the disease, the shootings, then you are kidnapped, to be sent into a hellhole where you will be raped, beaten, abused, before finally being summarily shot.
In terms of brutal regimes in modern times, Israel shares a near-equal spot with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge: a totalizing, brutalizing society built on infinite torture and pain. Like with Pol Pot's regime, Israel will kill without end. Their new society they are building is an impossible dream, yet they kill all the same. And perhaps even more so like the Khmer Rouge, they have the full backing and support of the US national security establishment.
Before the facts on the ground were even known, Washington—that is, all members of Congress, the President, the military, anyone with any political influence, all of them denounced Hamas' attack as a terrorist crime and immediately endorsed an Israeli response via bombing, despite anyone with a brain knowing it wouldn’t free any hostages, nor was “dismantling Hamas” actually a plausible idea. Here was the crucial choice: at that moment, the United States abdicated its role and authority as an entity possessing any independent power. It became, in effect, from top to bottom, an arm of the Likud-run Israeli regime.
“For Israel has a right to defend itself,” they said. “To what end?” many asked. The answer became clear in the coming days: to whatever end the Israeli state determined was necessary. Even as Biden flew to Tel Aviv to warn Israel not to repeat the mistakes of what the US did after 9/11, he was unequivocal in his bear-hugging full support, even going so far as to conjure up fake atrocities (Hamas burning and/or decapitating 40 babies in an oven) while ignoring real ones (just hours prior to his arrival, Israel had bombed a hospital, the first of many, causing hundreds of civilian deaths).
Israel of course had no plan for victory save a final plan, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. “Enough is enough,” their society seemed to say. “We will kill them all.” It was never about the hostages. Israel prefers them all to be dead because they are a political distraction to that final plan. No wonder so many hostages have died to Israeli gunfire and bombings. Nor is a ceasefire possible. That will never happen, not until every Palestinian is dead and rotting.
A year has passed. At no point since then has the US exercised any of its real, existing power to reel Israel in. After all, US bombs enabled the massacres—children have been pictured picking up bomb fragments, with labels noting which specific US arms factories were involved in the killing and maiming of endless lives. After each senseless slaughter, the world wonders: will the US take any action to reel in its out-of-control client state? Immediately post October 7, there was some hope of that, but that hope has long been quashed into ceaseless, endless dread.
There is no red line that exists for Israel. Not the massacre of a million Palestinians in Gaza, not the end-stage expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Not the killings of US-born American citizens by trained Israeli snipers. Not the bombing of US aid workers. Not the ground invasion of Rafah, a specific red line the President himself cited was his red line. Not the escalation and repetition of the Gaza total bombing strategy now taking place in Lebanon. Not even the potential for a genuine regional war against Iran, a war the US has tacitly admitted it can't win in a way that's worth fighting. The United States government has abdicated all power. All they do is rubber stamp approvals to ensure billions of dollars in aid continues to be sent to Israeli bombers in a timely fashion.
Whatever remains of human rights, of international law, is a dead letter. It has been buried beneath a sea of Palestinian and now Lebanese corpses. A society that can excuse bombing entire apartment complexes to kill one suspected militant, that nearly broke into civil war when they arrested a rapist prison guard, is a society that exists beyond any idea of law. The world has taken notice.
There was a time, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that a delusion came to take hold. That the United States was now truly in favor of democracy, of human rights, and international law. How quickly things changed. It took a little more than a year, and the US disabused the world of that notion for good. If killing innocent civilians nets you billions in US arms transfers and a podium to lampoon in front of Congress, we should invite Putin to give a speech next year before a joint session. After all, Russia has a right to exist, a right to defend itself.
And so on.
But, it's not just Israeli society. It's ours. We are okay with this. We have to be. We live, and continue to do so, paying our taxes as we go about our lives. Ultimately: this is our policy; we support this. After all, we elected this government. Regardless of the new government elected this November, that next government will continue the slaughter. It doesn't matter if you've marched, or donated, or voted, or helped in any other way. Why? Because we haven't stopped it yet. Because the decision-makers who okayed the slaughter of 9 million people still remain in power, and are still enabling this endless slaughter.
At this point: what else can we do?
What else, should we do?
My sincere belief: whatever it takes, however long it takes, regardless of the cost individually or to our own society:
Free Palestine.
On Sources
Read the ICC and ICJ indictments. Then the reporting done by every single outlet for over a year now.
But also, just reflect. Unless if you're reading this 600 years in the future, you have seen the carnage unfold before your eyes. Even if you live the most sanitized life, you've seen it, born witness to it. Don't forget what you saw. Never forget.