Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant.

Mar 15, 2026

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.”

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza. Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

SOURCE: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-world-according-to-gaza

The post The World According to Gaza- Chris Hedges appeared first on Void Network.

Written by Jamal Kanj

Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international publications.

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Amnesty International warned on November 27, that “The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal…. the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

Israel has violated the Gaza ceasefire almost 600 times, killed and injured over 1350, includingmurdering 136 Palestinian children, under various pretexts. Yet, the supposed guarantors of the truce remain hushed. Whatever they may claim to whisper or pressure behind closed doors, Israel’s actions make one thing clear: their opinions do not matter.

The so-called ceasefire served one purpose only: the release Israeli captives. Recent Israeli onslaught across Gaza, West Bank, Syria and Lebanon exposes Israel’s true intention. On November 19, Israel killed 28 Palestinians bombing neighborhoods previously labeled as “safe zones.” A day earlier, its drones struck Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, murdering 13, including 11 teenagersplaying soccer.

Three weeks earlier, on October 28 to be exact, and following the massacre of 109 Palestinians throughout Gaza, the Qatari mediator claimed that “both sides remain committed”  to the ceasefire. The reply came from Israel on November 18 and 19, in expanded attacks killing 41 more Palestinians across Gaza and Lebanon.Notwithstanding this, Washington continues to repeat that the truceis “holding.” A ceasefire, it seems, only collapses when Israeli Jews die, not when Palestinian blood is spilled.

Since October 10, Israel has murdered 352 Palestinians. Adjusted for population size, this is equivalent to more than 1,500 Israeli deaths.What if Israel was at the receiving end of this murder spree, and 1500 Israeli Jews lost their lives? Would Washington and Europe still call the ceasefire as“holding,”or would we hear the rehearsed cry: “the largest number of Jews killed since the Holocaust,” as if the Holocaust took place in Palestine?

The U.S. president would lead a long procession of European leaders paying homage to Israel. Western media would blanket every screen with the faces and names of those Israelis, cable networks scrambling to interview grieving families. The White House and other Western officials would then defend Israel’s vengeful massacres as “self-defense.”

The above is not hypothetical; we’ve watched it play out, time and again.

However, sincethe killers are Israeli-Jews, and Palestinians are the victims, then“restrain” and “de-escalation” become Washington’s and EU’s sage policy. The European Nazi Jewish-Holocaust would be religiously invoked, ritualistically and unfailingly—as to temper criticism of Israel’s massacres and genocide of non-Jews.

The fiction of ceasefire is amplified when examining Israel’s covert war in the occupied West Bank. According to reports, the Israeli army and Jewish-mobs have carried out 2,350 attacks in the month of October alone. Human rights organizations havedocumented a wave of war crimes:Israeli extrajudicial execution of young menat point-blank range, farmers harvesting olives attacked by armed Jewish-mobs, refugee camps are besieged, demolished, emptied and bombed from land and air.

A new 105-page Human Rights Watch field report, “All My Dreams Have Been Erased,” exposed chilling patterns of mass displacement and destruction. 32,000 Palestinian residents of Jenin, and Nur Shams refugee camps have been forcibly displaced and barred from returning to their homes. Hundreds of homes were blown-up and entire neighborhoods erased.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military and armed Jewish-thugs have murdered more than 1,000 Palestiniansin the West Bank. Administrative detention (jailed without charge) has surged, land expropriation and the building of Jewish-only colonies have accelerated, freed prisoners re-arrested, and torture of detainees has increased.

For Israel,the ceasefire is a tactical pause, not binding obligations. Itcurbs Palestinian resistance while permits Israel to violate it with impunity.It serves as an opportunity to ease global outrage, deflect criticism, and give Arab mediators a face-saving role, all while Israel’swar continues unhindered.Arab mediators, eager to please Washington and unwilling to confront Israel, maintain the fiction of a functioning ceasefire while ignoring the everyday Palestinian funerals.

Diplomacy has become a theater, and Palestinians are casualties ina daily live performance. This is not necessarily a breakdown of a ceasefire but rather a fulfillment of its intended purpose. It wasdevised to keep Palestinian suffering under the radar screen, and whitewash Israeli violations as “little skirmishes.”

Donald Trump, insulated within an Israel-first-bubble, pushed for the ceasefire not to end the starvation in Gaza. Instead, it was a political lifeline designed to rescue Israel from a growing isolation. It wasn’t meant to end the genocide; it was to shield Israel from mounting European pressure and to stop the EU from advancing sanctions against Israel.

A ceasefire that allows Israel to murder unnoticed, is not a ceasefire: it is a tool to fool. It is a managed apartheid killing field normalized by world powers. For Trump’s Israel-first-bubble, the ceasefire is “holding” so long as only non-Israeli are murdered.

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The article appeared also in other Middle East independent media with the title Ceasefire is “Holding”: So Long as Only Non-Israeli-Jews are Murdered

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The post A ceasefire that allows Israel to murder Palestinians is not a ceasefire appeared first on Void Network.

Wtitten By Emilia Salvanou (Hellenic Open University)

1. Introduction

In 2023–2024 mass protests erupted across Europe and North America not in the name of humanitarian neutrality, but in direct opposition to what thousands of demonstrators called a genocidal war waged by the Israeli state against Palestinians in Gaza.¹ The brutality of the images—hospitals bombed, families buried alive, bodies retrieved from rubble, and a relentlessly rising death toll—shattered long-standing taboos around how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could be named, narrated, and historicized. At the same time, the charge of antisemitism re-emerged as a powerful instrument for disciplining this emergent discourse.² In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, accusations of antisemitism have been increasingly deployed to delegitimize and suppress opposition to Israeli state violence. While antisemitism is a real and ongoing threat that demands attention, the current moment reveals a strategic instrumentalization of the term that transforms it from a category of historical and ethical urgency into a tool of silencing and disarticulation. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe lies a deeper struggle: not just over competing narratives, but over the very politics of grief—over whose deaths are grievable, whose pain is legible, and whose history can be invoked in the present.³

Rather than seeking a diagnostic of antisemitism per se, I interrogate memory as a political form—both as a regime that disciplines public speech and as a site of contestation through which the ethics of grief may be reimagined. The essay asks what forms of memory and political responsibility are foreclosed when the accusation of antisemitism is deployed to silence critique of Israel’s war in Gaza. How did we arrive at a point where Jewish identity is conflated with state violence, and mourning Palestinian lives is cast as suspect—or even as hate speech? Can we imagine a reconfiguration of historical memory that does not pit the trauma of one people against the suffering of another?⁴

In the current situation we find ourselves not in front of an absence of memory, but rather in front of the formation of a certain kind of memory—what I propose to call a memory-shell: a hard, sealed structure that preserves traces of past suffering while rendering them politically intransigent and epistemically non-negotiable. Drawing on recent historical debates, memory studies, and social movement theory, this essay proposes to treat memory not as a container of facts, but as a shell—a political form that both preserves and protects, hardens and hollows, shaping what can be said, felt, and remembered in public space. Through this lens, I suggest that European discourse around antisemitism is not simply about historical truth or falsehood, but about managing moral authority in a time of colonial reckoning.

2. From “Never Again” to “Again and Again”: The Rhetorical Capture of Holocaust Memory

While Holocaust memory has served as a pillar of European post-war ethics, it has also, from the beginning, been marked by exclusions—chiefly, the exclusion of Europe’s own colonial crimes. Scholars such as Michael Rothberg and Enzo Traverso have argued that the promise “Never Again” has always been unstable. The transformation of Holocaust memory into a kind of civil religion of the West has often come at the expense of other histories of violence—particularly those that Europe itself perpetrated through colonial conquest, racial domination, and imperial war.⁵ As Peter Novick has argued, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the United States was not a continuous act of mourning, but a historically contingent process shaped by Cold War politics, American exceptionalism, and shifting geostrategic interests.⁶ In this sense, Holocaust memory became not only a site of moral instruction but also a symbolic resource—one increasingly detached from the material history of Jewish suffering and repurposed to frame Western identity as morally redemptive.⁷ The result has been what Levy and Sznaider call “cosmopolitan memory,” a moral lingua franca that can universalize particular trauma while eliding others.⁸ Building on such insights, Gil Z. Hochberg’s scholarship further illuminates how memory operates not only as a repository of past suffering but also as an active site of political contestation and embodied resistance in contexts of settler colonialism. Hochberg’s analysis foregrounds the lived experience of trauma and the ways in which Palestinian memory challenges dominant narratives that seek to contain or delegitimize their claims to justice.⁹

This tension is not new, but in recent years it has deepened. As the realities of Palestinian displacement, occupation, and death have become more visible—especially through digital media and transnational activism—new generations shaped by intersectional politics and postcolonial critique have begun to challenge the monopoly of Holocaust memory as the sole or supreme site of moral authority. Within this shifting field, Holocaust memory has in many official and public discourses been recast not as a warning against the dangers of state violence per se, but as a symbolic shield for a particular state—Israel—even when that state engages in what many describe as apartheid or colonial war.¹⁰

This rhetorical shift has deep implications. As Enzo Traverso has shown, the exceptionalization of the Holocaust risks producing a form of moral insulation: a past that is so singular it cannot illuminate present forms of domination.¹¹ This “de-historicized memory,” he argues, cuts the Holocaust off from other histories of political violence and thereby weakens its critical power. Similarly, Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana warned as early as 1988 that the obsessive institutionalization of Holocaust memory in Israel—and by extension in the West—risked turning a collective trauma into a permanent lens of victimhood, rendering others’ suffering invisible and undermining the process of building a peaceful future.¹²

The point is not to diminish the significance of the Holocaust or to relativize its horror. On the contrary: to preserve its ethical force, we must resist its rhetorical capture. When “Never Again” is invoked to shield acts of ethnic cleansing, occupation, or military terror from critique, it becomes a reversal of its own moral intention. As Rothberg argues in Multidirectional Memory, the memory of different traumas does not inherently compete; they become rivals only within political structures that impose a zero-sum logic. In the case of Gaza, this logic has become brutally evident: expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are framed as denials of Jewish suffering, while Jewish grief is selectively mobilized to legitimize violence against a stateless people.

This logic is not without precedent. Already in 1955, Aimé Césaire warned that European humanism had turned inward against itself. In Discourse on Colonialism, he argued that the crimes of fascism were not an aberration but the return of colonial violence to the metropole—what had been rehearsed abroad now enacted at home.¹³ Today, the colonial scaffolding of Holocaust memory in European discourse risks producing a similar effect: a historical rupture instrumentalized to disavow present forms of racialized domination, even as the language of anti-fascism is invoked to justify them.

In addition to the voices analyzed above, it is crucial to acknowledge Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, who have long emphasized the ethical imperative to remember trauma in ways that challenge dominant narratives and foster a politics of responsibility. Said’s reflections on exile and the role of the intellectual exemplify a memory that is at once disruptive and dialogical. In Representations of the Intellectual and elsewhere, he insists that the task of the intellectual is not to consolidate consensus but to “speak truth to power”—to inhabit a position of principled disobedience, even (or especially) when it entails marginality or estrangement. For Said, exile is not only a physical condition but an epistemological stance: to remember, from exile, is to contest the authorized versions of history and to reinsert the silenced, the excluded, and the ungrievable into the historical record. Memory here becomes a political force: it interrupts, unsettles, and demands reparation. It is not a duty to the past alone but a responsibility toward the future.¹⁴

Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and prose evoke the pain of loss and the disarticulation of homeland—but not as a static lament. Rather, his work affirms the necessity of bearing witness across boundaries of nation, confession, or language. In his hands, memory is both elegiac and insurgent: it recovers fragments of a shattered world not to restore them intact, but to expose the violence of their destruction and to imagine new forms of collective life. His verse performs the impossible simultaneity of love and rage, intimacy and defiance, absence and presence. As such, it marks a refusal to let historical trauma be domesticated by abstract humanism or geopolitical cynicism. Instead, it situates Palestinian grief within a broader, decolonial poetics of survival and historical reckoning. Darwish’s poetry resists the teleological loop of trauma that locks the subject into binary positions of either perpetrator or victim. As Ella Shohat observes, Darwish “provincializes” the Holocaust not by denying its magnitude, but by returning it to a historical and political terrain—a terrain marked by colonial displacements, Mediterranean crossings, and shared griefs. In this way, he breaks the singularity of Holocaust memory as the limit-case of suffering and repositions it within a relational field of loss.¹⁵

In State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah in 2002, Darwish writes:

“We do what prisoners do, // what the unemployed do: // we cultivate hope.”

Here, hope is not redemptive; it is neither messianic nor compensatory. It is a minor practice, a labor of dailiness that works against the suspended temporality of siege and trauma. As Ariella Azoulay and Gil Hochberg have argued, this kind of aesthetic labor—particularly in Palestinian poetics—reclaims futurity not as promise, but as unfinished inheritance: a way of inhabiting memory without enclosing it.¹⁶

Together, Said and Darwish articulate a form of memory that is unhomed yet generative, one that confronts power without mirroring its exclusions. Their interventions push us to imagine a politics of grief and recognition that is capacious enough to hold multiple histories of violence, without flattening their specificities or reinscribing new hierarchies of suffering.¹⁷ Against the backdrop of a Western memory regime that often instrumentalizes the Holocaust as a civil religion while obscuring the colonial and imperial violences in which Europe remains complicit, their work insists on the right to narrate and the imperative to remember otherwise. 

Alongside these perspectives, diasporic Jewish activist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, and the former Not In Our Name offer a critical intervention into the politics of Holocaust memory. Refusing the instrumentalization of Jewish suffering to justify the oppression of others, they reclaim a Jewish ethical tradition rooted in justice, solidarity, and anti-colonial resistance.¹⁸ Their actions and writings challenge both the ethno-nationalist appropriation of the Shoah and the silencing of Palestinian grief, asserting instead a memory that is relational and emancipatory. By organizing protests, issuing public statements, and engaging in civil disobedience—often at great personal and communal cost—these groups articulate a diasporic Jewishness not defined by state power or military force but by historical conscience and political refusal. In their hands, Holocaust memory becomes not a license for exceptionalism but a moral and historical imperative to stand against apartheid, occupation, and genocide in all their forms. Recent interventions—such as the mass protest at the U.S. Capitol on October 18, 2023,¹⁹ and the disruption of Grand Central Terminal in New York on October 27, 2023,²⁰ demonstrate how these activists seek to reclaim Jewish memory as a tool of decolonial solidarity. This refusal to be confined within the dominant “memory-shell” enables a different temporality and ethics: one in which Jewish and Palestinian histories of dispossession need not be mutually exclusive, but can become the basis for shared mourning and collective responsibility. Their activism thus disrupts hegemonic memory regimes and gestures toward a horizon of justice where grief is unbounded by ethnic, national, or religious divisions. The interventions examined above—Palestinian, diasporic Jewish, and decolonial—challenge this closure and reopen the possibility of a memory otherwise: one that is committed to justice, multiplicity, and shared vulnerability.²¹

3. Memory-Shells and the Floating Signifier: A Theoretical Framing

In this sense, the appropriation of Holocaust memory as a hegemonic moral grammar—mobilized to justify ongoing colonial violence while silencing other histories of grief—illustrates how memory regimes operate through exclusion as much as through commemoration. Rather than serving as a space of ethical confrontation, Holocaust memory increasingly functions as a memory shell. In what follows, I propose the concept of the memory-shell as a heuristic device to understand the transformation of memory from a site of historical and affective disturbance into a hardened vessel of moral authority. The memory shell should be understood as a political form that preserves the outer layer of historical trauma while hollowing out its disruptive, universalist potential. The notion refers to a dynamic formation in which memory does not function as a straightforward recollection of the past but as a flexible container for resemanticization. It is neither true nor false; rather, it is contingent — open to reactivation, ideological reframing, and symbolic contestation depending on the political conjuncture and the struggle for moral authority. As such, memory is not merely selective; it is actively negotiated and often antagonistic. A memory-shell preserves the symbolic imprint of past trauma while increasingly detaching it from the contexts that made it politically and ethically disruptive. In this sense, memory-shells resemble sealed containers: they protect, encapsulate, and abstract memory from lived histories and struggles, thus regulating what can be said, grieved, or imagined in public discourse.

The concept draws on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the floating signifier, a signifier emptied of fixed meaning that becomes hegemonically rearticulated within different political contexts.²² In other words, a term that condenses historical trauma into a point of moral certainty, while allowing it to be rearticulated across divergent political projects. Like the floating signifier, the memory-shell is not bound to one content but gains force precisely through its ambiguity and moral overdetermination. We may approach shell-memory as a nodal point emptied of fixed referent but capable of being invested with divergent political meanings. It can stand for “never again,” for trauma, for justice, or for exceptionalism—depending on who invokes it, and when. Like “democracy” or “freedom,” memory — and particularly Holocaust memory — can be appropriated across ideological divides, charged with contradictory emotions, and mobilized for competing claims to victimhood. In this sense, the memory of the Holocaust has become a site of articulation, simultaneously enabling resistance to injustice and functioning as a tool for discrediting criticism of Israeli state violence. This is not a symptom of forgetting. On the contrary – memories that turn into memory shells are usually those that are so securely embedded in historical culture and identity, that is impossible to bypass. Therefore, resignification and even contestation is rather a symptom of political appropriation: memory as a vessel for hegemonic realignment. Memory shells are, in this sense, not merely a mode of historical recall but a technique of governance, echoing Michel Foucault’s insight that regimes of truth function through what is rendered sayable, thinkable, and grievable.²³ Memory here becomes a terrain of political struggle: a contested medium through which hierarchies are encoded, disrupted, or suppressed. 

Yet the memory-shell does not merely float; it shields. It becomes an ethical armor that protects hegemonic narratives while repelling interpretations that might link past and present forms of violence. Shell-memory thus reveals memory as a terrain of contestation rather than a stable referent. This is particularly evident in the case of Holocaust memory in the post-1945 West, which has undergone a transformation from traumatic rupture to moral consensus. The memory of Auschwitz, once disruptive and historically embedded, now circulates as a normative grammar of recognition and punishment, deployed to name and shame certain actors while exonerating others. Such deployments, while not new, have intensified in the wake of global protest against the genocide in Gaza. In the case of Gaza, the struggle for remembrance is not simply historiographical or humanitarian; it is a battle over who can legitimately invoke trauma, define victimhood, and occupy the moral register of History. The very act of linking Gaza to Auschwitz becomes unspeakable—not because of historical inaccuracy, but because the memory shell has become performative, disciplinary, and sacrosanct. What is at stake, then, is not the truth-value of memory, but its instrumental function: to govern grief, regulate dissent, and secure geopolitical alliances.

As Donatella della Porta argues, memory is never politically neutral. In moments of political contestation, memories of past violence can become central to the framing strategies of both protest movements and hegemonic actors. Memory does not merely recall the past; it reconfigures the present by legitimizing certain claims and delegitimizing others. In her work on social movements and contentious politics, she highlights how symbolic references to historical traumas—whether of war, fascism, or genocide—are mobilized to shape collective identities and to justify political action or repression.²⁴ The memory shell, then, is not only a metaphor for historical closure, but also a political instrument—a site where affect, legitimacy, and power intersect. 

In the current conjuncture, the sacralization of Holocaust memory often serves not to expand the democratic horizon of solidarity, but to shield specific state actors from critique, transforming memory into a disciplinary tool that regulates the limits of political imagination. Affectively, memory shells operate as technologies of emotional capture. They command reverence and impose silence; they channel sorrow into specific, allowable directions. This memory shell enshrines the Holocaust. But it does so by detaching it from the plural and contested terrains of historical remembrance and by repositioning it within a moral grammar that demands loyalty, not inquiry. Here, memory becomes a surface rather than a depth—a performative invocation rather than a space for reflexive engagement. As such, the memory of the Holocaust is reified: placed behind a transparent barrier through which it can be seen, reverently cited, but not recontextualized. In this context, “antisemitism” is increasingly unmoored from the specific genealogies of hate, exclusion, and extermination that gave rise to it, and becomes instead a floating moral charge: one that can be affixed to anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinian activists, human rights NGOs, and even ceasefire protesters.

The functionalization of antisemitism as a mode of accusation has a long genealogy, but it has intensified in the wake of 7 October 2023. In the months that followed, institutions across Europe and North America adopted punitive measures against individuals and groups opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Humanitarian workers were suspended or investigated for public expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. University presidents in the United States were summoned to Congressional hearings and forced to resign under the pressure of donor campaigns and orchestrated outrage. Protesters in cities from Berlin to Paris to London faced bans, arrests, or police violence, justified by the claim that any public dissent against the war amounted to an incitement to hatred or a threat to Jewish safety.²⁵ In such cases, the invocation of antisemitism operates not as a means of protecting Jewish communities, but as a mechanism of anticipatory repression—a form of delegitimization of actors, practices, and narratives before they can generate political traction.²⁶ Memory, in this schema, becomes the moral substrate for a new regime of securitized speech. One must not only avoid antisemitism; one must not appear to contest the state’s definition of what antisemitism is. 

4. Definitions and the Politics of Memory

This process is most evident in the strategic adoption and dissemination of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism, which blurs the line between anti-Jewish hatred and criticism of the Israeli state.²⁷ By contrast, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, authored by a group of Jewish scholars and public intellectuals, insists on the distinction between antisemitism as a form of racialized hatred and legitimate critique of Zionism or Israeli policies.²⁸ Yet in the institutional field, it is the IHRA definition that has prevailed—endorsed by governments, universities, and cultural organizations across the West, often as a condition for funding or partnership. Here, the memory-shell operates as a shield and a filter: it shields a particular narrative of Jewish victimhood from scrutiny and filters out alternative forms of remembrance—especially those that foreground Palestinian dispossession as part of the same historical arc. The memory-shell does not deny the Holocaust; it monopolizes its meaning. It demands that Holocaust memory serve as the ground for identification with Israeli state violence and casts any deviation from this moral script as a betrayal of Jewish suffering itself. As Sara Ahmed has argued, emotions are not private states but forms of contact and orientation: they stick to certain bodies and histories more than others. The memory shell ensures that grief over Jewish loss remains politically permissible, even compulsory, while grief over Palestinian death becomes suspect, antisemitic, or uncivil. This is not a failure of memory, but a political use of memory as moral governance. 

This logic of exclusive mourning produces a condition I describe as a memory impasse: a blockage in the field of public memory, where the imperative to remember is transformed into a prohibition on historical analogies. One cannot remember the Nakba alongside the Shoah. One cannot recall Gaza’s destruction in the same breath as Auschwitz. One cannot draw the analogies between antisemitism of the past and islamophobia of the present. The charge of antisemitism thus becomes not only a political weapon, but also an epistemic veto: it forbids certain associations, disqualifies certain comparisons, and discredits alternative genealogies of violence and resistance.²⁹ What is at stake here is not only the distortion of a term, but the foreclosure of a political horizon. The memory shell is not simply an inert object; it is a technology of governance. It shapes what can be said, who can speak, and which memories are allowed to co-exist in public discourse. It organizes affect, affiliation, and recognition. It institutes a hierarchy of grief—where some lives are legible as victims and others are not.³⁰ Thus, the memory-shell functions not merely as rhetorical armor, but as a form of mnemonic power—shaping not only discourse but the affective contours of grief itself.³¹

5. Toward a Decolonized Memory

The current regime of Holocaust memory, while deeply entrenched in Western political and cultural institutions, remains profoundly unstable. As with all hegemonic formations, it is continually contested from within and without, by diverse actors including Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals, activists, artists, and survivors. These contestations do not advocate for the rejection of Holocaust memory itself, but rather call for its decolonization—a reconfiguration that acknowledges Jewish historical suffering while simultaneously opening space for solidarities that refuse to erase or marginalize other histories of violence and dispossession. In the sense Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o articulated, decolonization entails not simply political realignment but a radical transformation of the epistemic and representational order—a refusal to let dominant narratives foreclose the complexity of human suffering.³²

Decolonizing memory means disrupting the monolithic narratives that function as what I have termed the “memory-shell”—a protective and restrictive framework that preserves a singular understanding of trauma, while foreclosing alternative or conflicting memories. This memory-shell often operates to shield a particular political agenda, conflating Jewish victimhood with uncritical support for the Israeli state, and thus excluding Palestinian experiences of displacement and ongoing violence from the collective mnemonic landscape.

In this context, we must imagine forms of memory that are porous, dissonant, and dialogical—memories that resist closure and instead keep the past open as a contested site of ethical struggle and political connection. Such memories defy attempts at monopolization or instrumentalization and refuse to allow trauma to become the exclusive property of any state or political entity.³³ A radical, decolonial ethics of memory must not only open to the possibility of plural and conflictual histories; it must refuse the confiscation of mourning, the closure of the past, and the foreclosure of the present. This gesture resonates with Ariella Azoulay’s call to treat the archive not as a repository of state-sanctioned facts, but as a site of violence, exclusion, and imperial governance. In her account, the logic of imperialism does not only destroy lives and lands—it destroys the very conditions of co-seeing and co-witnessing. Against this regime, Azoulay proposes a radical civil contract of photography and memory, one that decenters the sovereign gaze and instead reclaims the right to narrate, to mourn, and to remember without prior authorization. In this sense, a decolonial ethics of memory requires not only a critique of mnemonic violence but an insurgent stance toward the monopolization of memory, archival closure, and historical legitimization. This vision draws on decolonial thought, which insists on the necessity of unsettling hegemonic narratives and restoring multiplicity and relationality in historical consciousness.³⁴

To decolonize memory is not to deny or diminish the Holocaust’s significance but to reclaim its ethical force—its capacity to unsettle settled narratives, to challenge complicity, and to demand ongoing responsibility and justice. Memory might as well function as a rupture: a deliberate break in the circuits of power that govern public discourse, opening space for solidarity across difference and for political horizons beyond exclusion and erasure.³⁵ Such a reframing also aligns with Edward Said’s call for the intellectual to embrace a memory that resists closure and demands critical engagement beyond nationalist or sectarian frameworks.³⁶ Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic work exemplifies the necessity of bearing witness to multiple, intersecting histories of loss and displacement. In this way, decolonized memory becomes a transformative practice: one that reconfigures affect, recognition, and belonging in ways that resist closure and demand accountability.

6. Mourning, Solidarity, and the Ethical Risk of Historical Comparison

In the face of institutional repression and widespread political censorship, recent mass mobilizations across Europe and beyond have articulated new forms of political mourning. Led by coalitions of Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Black and brown communities, and younger generations of activists, these movements reject the binary logic of competing victimhoods and insist instead on entangled solidarities: a right to remember without erasure, and to grieve without state sanction.³⁷ This emerging counter-memory does not signify an erosion of Holocaust remembrance but rather a radical refusal to prioritize past trauma over present atrocity. To affirm that Palestinian life matters, to name apartheid or to mourn children killed in their beds is not antisemitic. What becomes antisemitic, however, is the conflation of all Jews with the actions of a state, instrumentalizing Jewish identity to shield state violence from accountability. This moment demands a reimagined Jewish voice—one that breaks with ethno-nationalist paradigms and reclaims diasporic, anti-colonial, and ethical traditions within Judaism.³⁸ Jewish scholars, artists, and activists have been among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies, not despite their Jewishness but precisely because of it.³⁹ To silence these voices under the guise of combating antisemitism risks erasing the very dissent crucial for a pluralistic political discourse.⁴⁰

In this context, mourning transcends affective expression to become a radical political act: a refusal to permit the state to monopolize death or history, and a form of remembering against the grain, across time, and through rupture. Where the memory-shell erects barriers around the past, preserving moral certainties, mourning fractures this enclosure, demanding that memory remain porous, responsive, and accountable. Far from being antithetical to politics, mourning becomes its very condition, transforming memory from weapon to threshold of justice.⁴¹

Yet mourning also opens the terrain of political risk, particularly the risk of historical comparison. The invocation of genocidal analogies in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza has sparked heated debate, with some perceiving such comparisons as a transgression against the singularity of the Holocaust and a moral affront to Jewish suffering. Others assert that naming the systematic targeting of civilian populations as genocide is not only justifiable but ethically necessary.⁴² The legal challenges brought before international bodies like the International Court of Justice have foregrounded the Genocide Convention as a critical framework for adjudicating contemporary crises.⁴³

Beyond juridical proceedings, the question remains epistemological and political: Are historical analogies inherently dangerous, or can they function as tools of ethical reckoning? Must the past be policed to safeguard singular traumas from appropriation, or can comparison open pathways for solidarity and critical reflection? Against the hegemonic logic of exceptionalism, comparison need not imply a flattening or erasure of difference; rather, it can serve as an ethical disruption that destabilizes hierarchies of suffering and exposes structural continuities of violence.⁴⁴ Thus, comparison can be a pedagogical and political act—not to equate atrocities but to reveal dangerous resonances that demand attention. To prohibit comparison is effectively to foreclose history as a contested and dynamic field. It treats memory as fixed and sacralized rather than as a site of ongoing negotiation and political struggle. For societies to confront contemporary crises without replicating past exclusions, they must permit historical analogies to circulate—not as incontestable truths but as critical provocations to be debated, contextualized, and when necessary, contested.⁴⁵ Criminalizing such discourse risks stifling political agency and ethical reflection.

In sum, the politics of memory today extends beyond what is remembered to encompass who is allowed to remember, under which conditions, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. It has turned into a truth regime. The concept of the memory shell exposes the instability and contestation inherent in memory as a field of signification and power. Recognizing this contingency does not imply relativism but calls for a responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attuned to asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of suffering and injustice. At a historical moment when the genocide in Gaza is silenced beneath rhetoric of security and historical exceptionalism, insisting on a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory becomes not only an act of solidarity but one of historical justice.

This emergent politics of mourning and solidarity not only challenges dominant narratives of victimhood but also exposes the underlying structures of power that govern memory itself. The contemporary politics of memory thus encompasses not only the content of remembrance but also the power to define who may remember, under which terms, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. The recent genocidal violence in Gaza exposes the limits of Holocaust memory as a politically neutral foundation of Western moral order; instead, it necessitates a critical interrogation of memory as a contested and politicized instrument of power. 

Memory is inherently dynamic and pluralistic, a contested field where divergent narratives and claims to historical truth are negotiated, among others taking into account the political stakes of representation. The concept of “memory shell” captures this ambivalence: memory functions as a protective yet constraining form that preserves the outer shell of trauma while frequently neutralizing its disruptive ethical potential. Acknowledging this complexity is essential for advancing a more responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attentive to structural asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of injustice. 

Historical comparisons, particularly analogies invoking genocide, remain among the most divisive and fraught dimensions of this politics. While many see such comparisons as a threat to the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a moral affront to Jewish suffering,⁴⁶ others argue that naming contemporary atrocities—such as the systematic violence against Palestinians—as genocide is both justified and ethically imperative.⁴⁷ These debates extend beyond public discourse into legal arenas, with international tribunals and courts grappling with the application of the Genocide Convention.⁴⁸ Yet the core question is epistemological and political: are comparisons inherently reductive and dangerous, or can they function as critical tools for ethical disruption and pedagogical engagement?⁴⁹

The prohibition of comparison risks freezing history into a sacralized and immutable domain, disconnected from present struggles. Conversely, ethical comparison can destabilize hierarchies of suffering, reveal the structural continuities of violence, and foster solidarities across social and political divides. As Enzo Traverso and Dirk Moses, among others, compellingly argue, the Holocaust’s significance lies not in its unique exceptionality but in its illumination of modernity’s violent rationalities.⁵⁰ In this frame, comparison serves not to equate atrocities but to provoke reflection, political responsibility, and a critical reconsideration of power.

This theoretical framework resonates with the emergence of counter-memories articulated by diverse coalitions who reject binary victimhood and the monopolization of suffering. Their political mourning demands the right to remember without erasure and to grieve without state sanction, challenging the instrumentalization of identity to shield violence. Mourning thus becomes a radical political act that ruptures the “memory shell,” opening memory to ethical porosity, responsiveness, and justice. In a moment when the genocide in Gaza is obscured by discourses of security and exceptionalism, advocating for a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory constitutes both an act of solidarity and a demand for historical justice.

Author Bio:

Emilia Salvanou is a historian working at the intersection of social and cultural history, with particular attention to migration, refugee movements, and historical culture. She currently teaches public history at the Hellenic Open University. Her research explores how cultural memory, historiography, and public debates about the past shape historical consciousness in the present. Email: emilia.salvanou@gmail.com

Published on July 17, 2025. 

SOURCE: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2025/07/15/haunted-pasts-and-the-politics-of-grief-memory-shells-and-the-struggle-for-ethical-grief-after-gaza/

Footnotes:

1. The term ‘genocidal’ is used here not as a legal determination but as a political charge articulated by numerous civil society organizations, scholars, and activists in reference to the scale, intent, and continuity of the assault on Gaza. See UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ (2024) https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/. ︎
2. For analyses of discursive constraints around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Western media and academia, see Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out. An everyday occupation (New York and London: W.W. Norton  2008); Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press 2012). ︎
3. On the entanglement of memory, mourning, and political legitimacy, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2004); and Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009). ︎
4. Antonis Liakos, “Βγάλτε τους νεκρούς από τη ζυγαριά” [Take the dead off the scale], Chronos 8, 2013 https://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/ls-gl-p-g.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
5. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Enzo Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity (London: Pluto Press, 2016). ︎
6. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). ︎
7. Ibid., esp. pp. 13–14, 195–205. ︎
8. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider,The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), esp. ch. 2. ︎
9. Gil. Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). ︎
10. Butler, Parting Ways, esp. chs. 1 and 4. See also the analysis of performative memory in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004).  ︎
11. Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity, pp.186–190. ︎
12. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Haaretz, March 1988; republished in Haaretz Magazine, 2004. For contextual discussion, see Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir,The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). ︎
13. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 35-49. ︎
14. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Also, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). ︎
15. Ella Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims,” Middle East Report 178 (September/October 1992). ︎
16. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, pp 140-180; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. (London: Verso, 2019). ︎
17. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness. Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). Also, Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ︎
18. See Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Our Principles” https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/our-vision/ and IfNotNow’s platform https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/principles (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
19. JVP led a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/jewish-activists-arrested-at-us-congress-sit-in-calling-for-gaza-ceasefire (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
20. Thousands of Jews and allies gathered inside Grand Central Station, staging one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in NYC since 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/world/middleeast/grand-central-protest-nyc-israel-hamas-gaza.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
21. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
22. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 105–110.  ︎
23. Michel Foucault,The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). ︎
24. Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995).  ︎
25. See reports on the post-October 2023 crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists across the US and Europe, e.g., Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
26. Donatella Della Porta, “Moral Panic and Repression: the contentious politics of anti-Semitism in Germany”,PArtecipazione e COnflitto * The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies PACO, Issue 17(2) 2024: 276-349.  ︎
27. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism was adopted in 2016 and has been widely institutionalized; see IHRA official website, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
28. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), available at https://jerusalemdeclaration.org, is an alternative framework developed by leading scholars to safeguard free speech and clarify legitimate criticism (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
29. Butler, Frames of War; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press 2004). David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Wiley-Blackwell 2002); Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000). ︎
30. On the concept of hierarchy of grief, see James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero (University of Hawaii Press 2001), and Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (2002). ︎
31. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale: Yale University Press 1993). ︎
32. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (James Currey Ltd / Heinemann, 1986). ︎
33. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press 2017). ︎
34. Azoulay, Potential History; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Duke University Press 2011). ︎
35. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961). ︎
36. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994). ︎
37. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso 2004). ︎
38. Ella Shohat,Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), especially the introduction and Chapter 2.  ︎
39. Ella Shohat, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Butler, Parting Ways. ︎
40. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005).  ︎
41. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
42. Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide.” In Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, edited by George J. Andreopoulos, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64–94. ︎
43. International Court of Justice, Case Concerning Application of the Genocide Convention (South Africa v. Israel), 2025 (pending). https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192 (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
44. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York and London: New Press 2003). ︎
45. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press 2003); Antonis Liakos, Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία [How the Past turns into History (Athens: Polis 2007). ︎
46. See for example, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now. Schocken Books, 2019. ︎
47. M. LeVine & E. Cheyfitz, “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited”, Journal of Genocide Research, (2025), 1–23. ︎
48. International Court of Justice, Case on Palestine (South Africa v. Israel), 2024. ︎
49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present ( Harvard University Press 1999). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge 1994). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). ︎
50. Traverso,The Origins of Nazi Violence. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology”. The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books 2012), pp. 272-289. ︎

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I recently saw yet another progressive with a huge platform say that Trump’s ongoing horror show is proof that we all should have done more to get out the vote for Kamala Harris. This kind of historical amnesia, whether it’s the result of intentional manipulation or panicked myopia, makes me sick to my stomach. I want to take a moment to explain why.

We cannot argue for the lesser of two evils if the difference between those two evils is not enough for survival. If the difference between two choices is not enough to make the difference between life and death, we all have the responsibility to denounce both choices and create other options.

If Republicans under Trump devise new ways to terrify immigrants and weaken meager protections against deportations, but the Democrats still manage to deport more people, the ethical and strategic response is to fight against both parties and the entire system they represent.

Greenhouse gas emissions are shooting past tipping points whether it’s the Right or the Left in power, such that an increasing number of scientists are finally admitting what anarchists and other radicals have been warning for a long time: that in the next few decades there is a very real danger of billions of humans dying¹ amidst a mass extinction event that could wipe out over half the species on the planet. In this situation, anyone who frames capitalism as a lesser evil that can be made sustainable is either harmfully ignorant of what’s actually going on or they have a psychopathic ability to barter unimaginable suffering for short-term profit.

And then there’s the question of ongoing genocide. I wish we could put a spotlight on these progressives and ask them, is genocide not a red line for you? Do you honestly believe that the political Left, in either North America or Europe, when in power, has not enabled or supported Israel’s genocide against Palestinians?

Obviously, the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany all directly arm, supply, and militarily participate in the genocide. The antisemitic government of Hungary gives a great deal of political support to Israel, while Netanyahu helps cover up Orbán’s antisemitism, and the anti-Roma, anti-antifascist government of Germany shows they in fact have learned nothing from the Holocaust and give their own big, self-serving stamp of approval to Israel’s continuous war crimes.

The Socialists in Spain made a few noises and delayed a shipment or two, but in the end it was little more than a symbolic protest.

What the hell is wrong with the world where, on top of all the shitty things going on, we have to say that an ongoing genocide requires more from us than symbolic or peaceful protest? And what the hell is wrong with people that they’ve already forgotten that the largest peaceful protest movement in human history—against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003—quickly killed itself through ineffectiveness and did absolutely nothing to slow or stop the invasion and the US/UK/Australian² slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?

Recently, the Boston Globe, the most progressive major newspaper in the US, reprinted a New York Times article about the recent assassination of two employees of the Israeli government outside the consulate in DC. The article worried that “the killings of the Israeli Embassy workers […] cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel. […] The killings also risked painting all pro-Palestinian activists, the vast majority of whom do not engage in violence, with the same brush”.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations and Jewish Voices for Peace both gave voluminous quotes condemning the violence (by which they meant the two dead Israeli government employees), saying things like “Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and political engagement are the only appropriate and acceptable tools”.

I’ve heard several people claim that the two people killed were not complicit in Israel’s genocide. To be clear, one was an IDF soldier who did “political research” for the Israeli government, whereas the other, Sarah Milgrim, worked on “public diplomacy” and described herself as encouraging “dialogue” and “peacebuilding”. I can’t state emphatically enough, this is a whitewash. Any large US embassy around the world has similar missions, including in countries where the US military supports death squads or has carried out war crimes: the purpose is always to improve the image of the home country so it can continue to carry out atrocities with less resistance. There is no way the Israeli government was paying someone to do public diplomacy if that involved so much as acknowledging the ongoing genocide.

Farther down the page, the Globe ran this article:

This article distorts what is going on in a number of ways. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been subjecting the Gaza strip to starvation conditions, using hunger as a weapon, which is a war crime and a form of genocide. Sometimes they let a little food in, sometimes they let no food in. The tiny convoy Israel allowed last week was not “minimal,” it was completely insufficient to reduce the ongoing starvation caused by the prior two months in which Israel had completely stopped food shipments. Gazans do not “face a high risk of famine” as the article claims; they have been enduring famine for over year, Israel has deliberately engineered these conditions, and thousands of Palestinians have already died from famine. In just two days, the same week as the attack on the Israeli Consulate workers, 29 people in Gaza died of acute starvation, and 71,000 Palestinian children under the age of five are estimated to be suffering acute malnourishment, which can lead to premature death and lifelong disability, and chronic health problems.

Now let’s take these two articles together. Somebody kills two Israeli government employees who are taking large paychecks to help cover up an ongoing atrocity and improve Israel’s political position in the world even as it promises to continue the killings. According to progressives, even though more than 300,000 Palestinians have probably been killed by bombs, guns, starvation, and skyrocketing disease rates in a calculated campaign of genocide, it’s not justifiable to kill two people who are complicit in that genocide, even after the campus occupation movement tried peacefully for over a year to get one set of institutions—the universities—to divest from the genocide, with no major successes. Not only that, but the consulate shootings, carried out by one person, cast a mark of shame and should potentially be cause to demobilize the entire movement.

Meanwhile, that same week, the Israeli military murders 60 Palestinian civilians in an area where they are deliberately subjecting 2 million people to starvation, and Israel’s supporters and business partners are not stained at all, they can just walk around with their heads held high?

Here are some relevant facts that rarely get mentioned in the mainstream conversation about the genocide.

• On a weekly basis, the Israeli state, together with paramilitary settlers, demolishes Palestinian homes, destroys Palestinian orchards and farmland, and steals Palestinian land. On average, every year over 1000 Palestinian homes are destroyed and 2000 hectares of Palestinian land are stolen, with an average of 12,000 Israeli settlers streaming onto those lands every year. (2000 hectares of land equals almost 5000 acres or 3,700 football fields.)
• In the decade prior to the October 7 offensive, the Israeli military killed around 1000 Palestinian children, and over 4000 total Palestinian civilians. They injured over 100,000 Palestinians, leaving many of them permanently disabled.
• By the UN’s count, Israel has killed over 16 times more Palestinians and injured 30 times more Palestinians (i.e. Palestinians are not the aggressors: the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians is miniscule, and all of those killings happen on Palestinian land, which the Israelis are invading).
• The UN inflates the numbers to Israel’s favor, setting a lower bar for registering injuries to Israelis and admitting that they don’t count casualties that overwhelmingly hurt Palestinians, like “access delays” [i.e. ambulances held up at checkpoints] and “unexploded ordnance”. In other words, we’re looking at something closer to 20 Palestinians killed for every 1 Israeli.

This isn’t a secret genocide. It’s not like Israel is effectively covering it up. Just this Monday, Israelis held their annual, state-funded, police supported racist march through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, celebrating the ethnic cleansing of 1967 when Israel seized all of Palestine, and shouting pro-genocide slogans like “Gaza is ours,” “death to Arabs” and “may their villages burn!” as they vandalize and ransack Palestinian shops and homes.

The only people who can’t admit that Israel is the clear aggressor are white supremacists who refuse to believe Palestinian lives have any value.

Since the Hamas offensive in Gaza on October 7 2023, the IDF began killing many more children in the West Bank, which is controlled by the PLO, an anti-Hamas organization not connected with the October 7 attacks. And they accelerated their land theft and forcible displacement—also acts of genocide—in the West Bank.

Saying that Israel is taking advantage of the war to carry out ethnic cleansing isn’t exactly correct, since whether or not Palestinians are rising up in resistance, the Israeli government and paramilitary settlers are killing Palestinians and stealing their land. Nobody can point to a single year this century without Israel erasing Palestinian communities through home demolitions, land theft, torture, mass imprisonment, and lethal force. There is no modern Israel without ethnic cleansing.

(I strongly recommend this historical overview from Al Jazeera, that includes plenty of maps and visuals that represent the progressive occupation of Palestine, as well as this chronology of the occupation and Amnesty International’s description of 50 years of dispossession.)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/27/palestine-and-israel-brief-history-maps-and-charts

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/6/4/the-naksa-how-israel-occupied-the-whole-of-palestine-in-1967

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/

Most of the death tolls that are cited in the media do not include the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died premature deaths because the Israeli military and apartheid regime denied them access to food and medicine. And it usually does not include Palestinians who fight back against the genocidal Israeli regime. For example, the study on the 126 Palestinian children killed in the West Bank in 2023 simply leaves out any children “involved in hostilities,” which as near as I can tell means throwing stones or running messages for resistance groups.

And yet, Israeli deaths are counted even if they’re soldiers engaging in war crimes. Israeli paramilitaries—settlers armed with uzis and sniper rifles living on recently stolen land—are routinely referred to as “civilians” by the news.

With the complicity of the military, police, and rightwing parties, heavily armed, racist and ultranationalist settlers have captured the mainstream of Israeli politics and now set the agenda. Click the link to read a detailed story of how it unfolded.

Here’s something else you probably didn’t know:

Hamas didn’t kill 1,195 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Their primary mission was to take prisoners to use as political leverage. Who caused how many deaths is unknown, but it is well documented by video records and the testimony of the Israeli military itself that the Israeli military opened fire on the music festival as well as convoys and military bases full of imprisoned Israelis, because they have an official policy to kill Israeli soldiers and civilians in a potential hostage situation, to deny any leverage to their enemy.

Also, according to the media, Hamas “kidnaps” or “takes hostages,” whereas Israel “arrests” or “detains,” even though Israel has around 10,000 extrajudicial Palestinian hostages taken from Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, many of them children, and Palestinians held by Israel have no rights of due process, face “sham trials” with 100% conviction rates, and are systematically subject to torture, racist treatment, and sexual violence.

Additionally, the Israeli military systematically uses Palestinians, including children, as human shields, forcing them to walk in front of columns of soldiers, and to open doors and tunnels that are potentially booby-trapped. And yet the media consistently use language that portrays Israelis and Israeli institutions as more legitimate.

What we are dealing with are a series of double standards, many of them reproduced across the political spectrum, that are used either to justify genocide or to pacify and delegitimize any real resistance.

Israel is allowed to have a military, but even though Palestinians are facing down genocide every day, if one of them picks up a gun they become a terrorist. And if a Palestinian child picks up a rock, they are no longer a civilian and their death is quite literally not counted. An Israeli “civilian,” though, can walk around with a semi-automatic rifle, assaulting unarmed Palestinians, destroying their property, harassing them with racist insults, smug in the knowledge that Israel’s military administration of the West Bank is there to protect them and their systematic land theft.

We know peaceful protest is incapable of changing the hearts and minds of IDF soldiers or the Israeli government, and we also know it’s incapable of materially sabotaging the war effort at an effective scale.

We can accept that historically, people who shot back, who killed Nazis, were doing the right thing. When looking at the 19^th century or earlier, many people will also accept that Indigenous peoples had a right of self-defense against the genocidal settlers who founded the US, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Australia… Fewer people will apply those same principles to, say, Iraqis fighting the US invasion and occupation from 2003 onward. A more common version of NIMBY, Not In My Backyard, is Not In My Century: so many people cannot admit that the governments that rule them are completely evil and irredeemable, even if they are carrying out genocide or, in the case of NATO, killing millions of people.

Instead, they claim these are bad things that need to be solved by getting out the vote and choosing the lesser evil. There is nothing about this viewpoint that is reasonable, or caring, or nuanced, or engaged with reality. It is a panicked dissociation based in fear, comfort, and self-interest.

We need to be able to acknowledge that Palestinians have both a valid right and an existential necessity to shoot back; and we also need to be able to criticize the PLO for their total corruption, and to criticize Hamas for being a far Right, homophobic, patriarchal, authoritarian organization.

But if we can’t even validate Palestinian resistance and international solidarity, we become complicit in the current situation, in which Palestinians are subjected to the corruption and brutality of the PLO, the oppressive, authoritarian politics of Hamas, and—the worst by far—the mass killings, calculated starvation, torture, land theft, housing demolitions, hospital bombings, racism, and harassment at the hands of the state of Israel.

Validating Palestinian resistance, supporting meaningful and high-impact acts of solidarity, and supporting the many initiatives and groups that are fighting against apartheid and for a free Palestine and a free world: that is the only conscionable response to the genocide, which has been occurring in one form or another for well over 60 years.

If you encounter anyone who makes knee-jerk condemnations of Palestinian resistance or says we should support the Democrats, the Liberals, Labour, SPD and the Greens – please, call them out and try to explain how they are legitimizing genocide. And if you’re too shy for that kind of confrontation, just drop them a link to this article.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

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Read more articles by Peter Gelderloos and support his magnificent work here: https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/deadly-double-standards

Peter Gelderloos is a writer and social movement participant. He is the author of The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Non-Violence, and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation. He has contributed chapters to the anthologies Keywords for Radicals and Riots and Militant Occupations. His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Greek and Serbo-Croat. 

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NOTES:

1. If you google search for the predicted death toll of the climate crisis, you are likely to get articles from 2023 that claim “a billion” deaths over the next decades. Few of them mention that the August 2023 study they reference describes 1 billion as a conservative estimate, and several billion as a more likely death toll. Conservative sources like the University of Chicago and World Economic Forum articles claim that there “might be” hundreds of thousands or even a couple million yearly deaths “in the future,” obscuring the fact that tens of millions of humans are already dying every year from the compounded effects of the ecological crisis, a figure I demonstrate in The Solutions Are Already Here. ︎
2. The Australian government still claims that Saddam Hussein’s regimes had weapons of mass destruction and ties with terrorist groups like al Qaeda, even though both of these justifications were known to be lies even before the invasion was launched in 2003. ︎

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Written by Soraya Chemaly

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Τhere is an irony in the fact that students protesting the Israel-Gaza war grew up hearing that they were “coddled” and “lack resiliency.” Critics scolded Gen Z for “needing safe spaces” and being “unable to cope” without trigger warnings. They claimed society was raising this generation in a “feminized” culture that’s left it weak and without purpose.

The early 2000s, the birth years for many of the students now protesting, marked the start of a period in which parents and educators worried that American children were not resilient enough. These concerns centered on children in upper income brackets attending elite institutions like the ones where protesters are now clashing with administrators and law enforcement. In 2006, one psychologist dubbed privileged children “America’s newly identified at-risk group,” leading to the warped conclusion that social vulnerabilities were resilience advantages for materially impoverished children. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put it, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, this generation has been “set up for failure.”

And yet, here they are, many of them the most privileged students in the country, risking their physical safety, academic standing, and futures by demanding accountability from powerful administrators. They are facing down militarized police and being threatened with arrest, tear gas, tasers, and brutality. They are, in fact, exhibiting the grit and competence, control and commitment that they have been castigated, as a generation, for lacking.

Resilience-shaming critics often conflate two different things: “resilience” as a process of adaptation and resilience as a proxy for a worldview. A worldview that is, at best, individualistic, hyper-masculinized, universalizing, and, at worst, invested in perpetuating supremacist norms and violent domination. That’s a lot to pack into “resilience,” I know, but bear with me.

The presumption behind the suggestion that younger generations lack resilience is that there is one “best way” to cope with hardship that is optimized for achieving personal well-being and success. This standard includes, among other factors, the belief that we grow from suffering and that only the fittest survive, through an amorphously defined “mental toughness.” Young people are supposed to be self-sufficient, optimistic, able to “bounce back” and quickly return to productivity and be grateful for what they have.

In this estimation, resilience is an individual trait demonstrated through self-sufficiency, control, and competence. Insofar as this notion of adaptation highlights independence and productivity, it takes for granted the emotional labor and care work that make both possible. It’s an ideal well-suited to competition, workplace needs, and winning, and it is invested in the belief that we personally “grow” from our suffering. In the process, however, this paradigm of resilience erases power, social context, and history. It depoliticizes circumstances of stress and crises. At its core, it is a resilience based on separation, competition, and domination.

The students protesting today have had to adapt to the world as it is. Younger people aren’t “different” and distressed, because they lack the right mindset or don’t understand what is happening around them. They are distressed, because they understand that the world is burning, and that adults have repeatedly failed them.

We are all familiar with the crises that this generation faces: climate catastrophe, widening economic inequality, highly visible and violent social injustices. They’re inheriting water, land, and bodies filled with chemicals. They’ve grown up, carrying bullies, racists, and rapists in their back pockets, as ever-present threats that live on their phones. They’ve watched delusional billionaires benefit from their addictions and anxieties. Their introduction to public and civic life—going to school—was shaped by gun violence and the constant threat of death. All of this before a pandemic derailed their adolescent lives. Covid-19 turned every social interaction into a life-or-death ethical dilemma, highlighting inequalities of wealth and poverty; gender, class and race; global power and powerlessness.

Notably, this generation grew up in accelerated sociotechnical environments. Digital natives, their understanding of the world has been shaped by visually intensive, networked, global media that has exposed them to intense social dynamics, fraught political debates, diverse perspectives, and viscerally raw depictions of current life and history. Their media—from Tumblr to TikTok—reveals connections between people and ideas and time. In the process, their way of adapting is relational, not individualistic. Older pundits routinely ignore or minimize our entanglements with one another and our environments, but students who are protesting, like so many of their peers, cannot. To them, our interdependencies are undeniable. Why would they adapt in ways that ignore those interdependencies?

It’s not as though they have a choice. Most traditional turning points in their lives—relationships and sex, school life, graduations—have been marred or prevented by crises that extend far beyond their personal environments or control.

As a foundation for envisioning the future, the hard truths of the past 25 years would depress even the most dedicated positive thinker. Escalating rates of mental distress, anxiety, depression, and self-harm are the source of legitimate and grave concern among parents, educators, and social scientists. But rates of despair and despondence have been rising for decades, during which time experts have pinned the cause on everything from late-stage capitalism and environmental toxicity to unregulated technology and (also unregulated) women’s liberation. If this generation suffers more, it could very well be the compression effects of acceleration and of exposure to the many indicators of what can feel like imminent collapse.

Sometimes, however, distress is the appropriate response to crisis. It is a resilient response. In the traditional paradigm, optimism and stick-to-itness are paramount. But there are names for optimism when it exceeds its usefulness and leads to denialism: illusion and delusion among them. Younger people’s emotional distress signals instead the cognitive flexibility required to employ pragmatism, optimism, and pessimism strategically. Their protesting is, in fact, adaptive optimism. What after all is a protest if not the hopeful belief that you can change the future?

Student protesters also demonstrate another key resilience attribute: cognitive flexibility, which allows them to resist stereotypes and oppositional thinking, such as, for example, a victim/perpetrator binary. Students go out of their way to acknowledge the complexity of the Israel/Gaza conflict, recognizing that the current situation is shaped by historical, political, and social factors that defy simple, black-and-white categorization.

Consider, for example, that across justice movements—for Black Lives, against gun violence, for women’s rights, for peace—young people show that they are able to think in terms, as Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg puts it, of our being “implicated subjects.” They are more honest about the ways we are enmeshed in harms by virtue of being socialized in, belonging to, and benefiting from systems that perpetrated and continue to perpetrate injustices. In the case of the current campus protests, they want to stop being implicated in a specific ongoing injustice and hold power accountable.

While media and administrators seem to cling to an ideal of faux “normalcy” in which injustices were ignored, these students are not. They are intent on repair, not restoration. They are well-versed in holding many truths at once and aware of how violence and oppressive systems make their way into not only institutions but interpersonal relationships as well. How else do you understand Jewish students holding Passover seders with classmates at university protest camps for peace and Palestinian rights and dignity?

These students are politically engaged, sophisticated thinkers who are using their life experiences and adapting to each other and to the planet in healthier, fairer ways: relationally, collectively, and purposefully.

None of this is to say that protesters and their protests are either absolutely ideologically or philosophically aligned. Mass movements are snarly, complicated messes, and no one person or group can define or contain them or people who attach themselves to them. There have been egregious acts of antisemitism on some campuses, and words and actions can, even if unintentionally, fall back on historically resonant dog whistles. However, pro-Palestinian students, many of whom are themselves Jewish, have been consistently outspoken in their denouncements of antisemitism while rejecting its evolving conflation with anti-Zionism.

As citizens who have grown up protesting, they are experts in exercising their free speech rights, almost always, peacefully. Already seasoned activists through repeated necessity, they strive to listen to others and to foreground historically marginalized voices. As a cohort, they evidence an ethics of care that leads them toward dialogue, not debate.

The truth is that critics of this generation are not addressing a problem of children who can’t cope and aren’t resilient, but one of children who refuse to conform. These students are highly resilient—they’re just resilient in a way that makes them ungovernable.

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Soraya Chemaly

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and an advocate for women’s freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement.

SOURCE: The Nation magazine

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The dangerous choices started in earnest with the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when the Israeli authorities made the unfathomable decision to place new makeshift checkpoints at the entrance to Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. They then attacked Palestinians who gathered there to enjoy breaking the daily fast with friends and family. It took two weeks of police violence and a steadfast response by Palestinian protesters for the police to back down.

Meanwhile, the resumption of weekly demonstrations and daily vigils in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, protesting against the forcible expulsion of Palestinian families there, saw police using brutal force against residents and protesters alike. As +972’s Oren Ziv reported, the police have been ramping up their violence in a neighborhood that has become a major symbol of Palestinian dispossession.

In Sheikh Jarrah, Israel is trying to return land that was claimed to have been previously owned by Jews before 1948 to Jewish hands. To do so, it is expelling Palestinian families who owned land in what became Israel before 1948, without allowing them to reclaim the land they lost during the Nakba. One is hard pressed to find a more blatant form of racist discrimination.

Rock-throwing and confrontations around Al-Aqsa Mosque have become common around Ramadan in recent years. Often they end as soon as they start, with the police deciding to let the protests peter out. This time, the police opted for excessive violence, wounding over 300 Palestinians on Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount over the last few days. This includes a number of journalists, including Faiz Abu Rmeleh — a member of the Activestills collective and a +972 colleague — who was both shot at by sponge-tipped bullets and beaten by police.

But police violence didn’t end there; forces entered Al-Aqsa Mosque and threw stun grenades at Palestinians inside. The symbolism of armed policemen running over prayer rugs and attacking worshippers in one of Islam’s holiest sites, and during its holiest month, was clear for all to see, and could not have happened without someone making the deliberate decision to engage in such extreme acts.

When Palestinian citizens of Israel organized buses to come pray in and protect Al-Aqsa, the authorities responded by shutting down Roads 1 and 443. In doing so, they stopped thousands of fasting Muslims from traveling to Jerusalem to exercise their freedom of worship, while throwing stun grenades at those who kept marching despite police directives. The police explained their decision by claiming they wanted to prevent 20 potential “instigators” from reaching the capital. Even mainstream Israeli journalists, who are often happy to regurgitate the official government narrative, cast doubt on the validity of the claim.

If that wasn’t enough, this past month, far-right extremists from the racist Lehava organization have appeared in Sheikh Jarrah, Damascus Gate, and central Jerusalem. They have been backed by the Kahanist MK Itamar Ben-Gvir and Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Aryeh King, who publicly wished death upon a prominent Palestinian activist in Sheikh Jarrah last week.

Two weeks into the events in Sheikh Jarrah and Damascus Gate, President Mahmoud Abbas announced he was cancelling the Palestinian elections. The official reason was Israel’s decision to prevent Jerusalemite Palestinians from participating, in violation of the Oslo Accords. Yet the decision was clearly designed to serve Abbas’ interests, and as many Palestinian political activists have argued, it was still possible and perhaps even necessary to hold the election regardless of Jerusalem’s exclusion.

While this is an intra-Palestinian issue, Israel could have announced that it was acting in accordance with its obligations under the Oslo framework, respected democratic principles, and allowed Jerusalemite Palestinians to vote. It chose not to do so, and in the run-up to Abbas’ announcement, the police arrested Palestinians in the city who were vocally supportive of and trying to organize around elections. This, too, was an escalation of Israel’s making.

On Monday, during Israel’s notorious Jerusalem Day “Flag March,” Hamas militants fired rockets at Jerusalem. Israel chose to respond to the rocket fire by attacking Gaza, reportedly killing at least 20 people, including nine children. The government announced that the military operation would last “days, not hours.” Netanyahu added that he would “exact a heavy price” from Gaza. This, too, was a choice.

Too little, too late

Of course, what we’re seeing is not solely a result of Israeli unilateral conduct. Hamas firing rockets at civilians — as happened today in Jerusalem, the western Naqab/Negev, and in the towns around Gaza — is a war crime. Moreover, last month, videos published on TikTok showed Palestinians harassing and attacking ultra-Orthodox Jews. Palestinian militants have also carried out a number of shooting attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers in the West Bank, killing 19-year-old Yehuda Guetta last week. In recent days, incendiary balloons have been launched into Israel from Gaza, burning fields in the south.

And yet, it is also clear that none of this is a match for the sheer power and brutality of the most powerful military in the region, as the death toll shows time and time again. Almost at the same time, soldiers killed Fahima al-Hroub near the Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank, as a result of a criminal culture that allows Israeli soldiers and police to kill mentally ill Palestinians without paying a price.

In addition, in the days leading up to the attack on Gaza, Israel (and particularly the Shin Bet) grew frightened of what was unfolding and began trying to limit the damage. Netanyahu asked Ben Gvir to remove a makeshift “bureau” he had erected in Sheikh Jarrah and leave the neighborhood. The Supreme Court’s hearing over the families’ expulsions was postponed at the request of the attorney general. The Temple Mount was closed off to Jews on Jerusalem Day, and at the last minute, the government nixed its plan to allow the infamous Flag March to pass through Damascus Gate and inside Muslim Quarter. All these steps were presented as ways to de-escalate the situation.

But it was all too little, too late. The government’s decision on Monday evening to bombard Gaza completely undermined whatever attempts it was claiming to make to bring the violence in Jerusalem to a swift end.

These, of course, are only the developments we have seen in recent weeks. The reality of a 14-year siege on Gaza, a military regime built on separate legal systems for Jews and Palestinians, dispossession and demographic engineering in Jerusalem, systematic discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the forced exile of Palestinian refugees, undergirds everything we are seeing happening now. Netanyahu’s years-long attempt to “manage the conflict” may have erased these injustices from Israeli public consciousness, yet they remain the daily reality for millions of Palestinians — and they actively feed everything that is currently taking place.

A struggle for life itself

The Israeli reactions to Hamas rocket fire were immediate. Major media outlets and Israeli politicians — including those who hope to replace Netanyahu — parroted the well-known party line. “Israel must act resolutely and strongly and restore deterrence,” declared Yair Lapid, who was recently tapped to try and assemble a government, and who was supported by Labor, Meretz, and most of the Joint List. Former Likudnik Gideon Sa’ar and Yamina’s Naftali Bennett — the latter who may very well be the next prime minister — both joined Lapid in calling for harsher attacks on Gaza, without any reflection on Israeli actions that have led us to this moment.

On the other hand, the Islamist Ra’am party, which said it would back Lapid and Bennett in forming a government, suspended coalition talks following Israel’s escalation. Neither Ra’am nor the Joint List would be able to support the formation of a government with politicians actively calling for an escalated attack on Gaza.

Back in November 2019, when the idea of forming a center-right alliance with the Joint List first arose, Netanyahu used Gaza as the ultimate reason for the impossibility of forming such a government. Now, just days before Lapid and Bennett were set to announce the formation of a new government to oust Netanyahu, the events in Gaza are playing directly into the hands of the sitting prime minister.

Did Netanyahu plan and orchestrate this escalation? There is, of course, no way to prove such a thing. Are his fingerprints all over the developments? As the prime minister who is responsible for the various actions of the authorities under his command, the answer is undoubtedly yes. Has everything that has happened in the last month, with levels of violence unseen here in years, aided him in his attempts to avoid being ousted? Definitely.

The escalating violence is a reminder that we cannot give up the fight against occupation and apartheid, and that replacing Netanyahu with another right winger will not solve the core issues that affect every aspect of our lives in this land. This is a terrible trap to be in, but it is the trap of Israel’s colonial reality. There is no other way forward apart from a struggle for equality and freedom for all the inhabitants of this land. It is nothing less than a struggle for life itself.

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source: +972mag

written by

Haggai Matar an award-winning Israeli journalist and political activist, in addition to serving as the executive director of “972 – Advancement of Citizen Journalism,” the nonprofit that publishes +972 Magazine.

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