Israel Reaches Its Mass-Murder Quota

The ceasefire observed in Gaza results in part from simple murderous arithmetic. Specifically, Israel’s bloodletting reached its numerical target, so Israel has finally signed on to a ceasefire.

After October 7, 2023, former Israeli military intelligence chief Aharon Haliva declared that for every Israeli killed, “50 Palestinians must die.” Around 1,275 Israelis died as a result of the attack on October 7. Israel’s mass murder quota was therefore around 63,750 (= 50 x 1,275). This was reached in recent weeks, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and as reported by the United Nations. When the rubble is cleared and epidemiologists do their detailed work, the death toll is likely in fact to reach hundreds of thousands, including those who have died due to lack of medical care, starvation, and other critical shortages of life support.

Israel is committing genocide. This is thoroughly documented by the United Nations, and as confirmed by The International Association of Genocide Scholars. What is the basis of Israel’s despicable campaign? There are in fact two interrelated reasons.

The first reason is that mass murder has been the repeated instrument of choice for colonial-settler societies such as Israel. In her recent book They Called it Peace, historian Lauren Benton described how colonial-settlers deployed mass murder and terror as mechanisms of control. Benton writes that for colonial settlers,

“Peace was imagined not as the cessation of violence but as the imposition of order through fear and punishment.”

Elsewhere, Benton writes, “Punitive expeditions and mass killings were justified as instruments to discipline populations, to break resistance, and to render the conquered both submissive and useful.”

Israel’s genocide in Gaza and annexation of the occupied West Bank follow this precise colonial-settler logic. Israel aims to terrorize Palestinians and break their will—all in pursuit of the maximalist objective of eliminating any possibility of a Palestinian state. What Haliva and those like him wanted most was neither to defeat Hamas, nor to free the hostages (which could have been accomplished through negotiations). He wanted to teach the Palestinians and the international community a lesson. For the Palestinians, the lesson is that they must never challenge their occupier. For the rest of the world, the lesson is that Israel is above international law, even if it commits genocide.

When the rubble is cleared and epidemiologists do their detailed work, the death toll is likely in fact to reach hundreds of thousands, including those who have died due to lack of medical care, starvation, and other critical shortages of life support.

The second and related reason is the Old Testament literalism of part of the Israeli government and society, that espouses an ethics of the 10th century BC rather than an ethics of the 21st century. The Old Testament contains numerous accounts of God-commanded genocides, and Netanyahu and his colleagues cite these Biblical accounts to justify mass murder.

For example, Prime Minister Netanyahu chillingly invoked the ancient Biblical story of the Amalekites. The Amalekites appear in Exodus 17, where they attack the Israelites in the wilderness. Later, in 1 Samuel 15, God commands King Saul through the prophet Samuel to 'utterly destroy' Amalek – man, woman, child, infant, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey. When Saul murders the men of the Amalekites but takes King Agag hostage and spares some of the animals, Saul is condemned by God for failure to fulfill the command of total mass slaughter. In fact, Saul loses his kingship because he fails to commit a complete and total genocide. And this is Netanyahu’s chosen text!

The link between colonial-settler violence and Old Testament genocide is more direct than it seems. Colonial-settlers often saw themselves as the “New Israel,” in North America, South Africa, and of course in Israel (and occupied Palestine) today. Their violence stems not only from efforts to subdue Indigenous peoples but also from a supremacist belief in a God-given right to act this way.

The genocide in Gaza is an escalation of persistent Israeli behavior—it is, in the words of historian Rashid Khalidi, a “continuation of ethnic cleansing.” This decades-old strategy of “mowing the lawn,” episodic mass killings, is intended to advance Israel’s goal of permanent control over all occupied Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, as promised by the original 1977 Charter of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To achieve this objective, Netanyahu and his allies are committed to ethnic expulsions, murder, or the severe suppression of nearly seven and a half million Palestinians living in the area they call Greater Israel.

Even with the ceasefire, even with the disarmament of Hamas, Israel will not agree to a State of Palestine alongside Israel.

Netanyahu made that crystal clear during his speech at the UN General Assembly. As he recounted, the Knesset overwhelmingly voted against the two-state solution with 99 out of 120 members opposing it, reflecting the stance of over 90% of Israelis. He clearly stated, “my opposition to a Palestinian state is not simply my policies, or my government's policy, it's the policy of the state and people of the State of Israel.”

While fulfilling Israel’s 50-to-1 quota was one reason for its agreement to a ceasefire (when one could have been achieved many deaths earlier), another decisive factor is that Israel and the US now face near-total global isolation over the issue of Palestine, with Israel widely reviled across much of the world. More than 150 countries, with around 87 percent of the world population, have now recognized the State of Palestine, even as the US continues to veto Palestine’s permanent UN membership. Arab and Islamic leaders have made it clear to President Trump that they are committed to Palestinian statehood. And American public opinion has decisively shifted, along with global demonstrations to support the Palestinian cause.

The US government, aware of those dynamics, has therefore begun to bend its policies at least a little bit. The ceasefire therefore signals a vital opportunity to push the US further, and to assert the will of the world community. A lasting peace is within reach, based on implementing the two-state solution. The Arab nations must not once again allow the United States to conjure another phony and endless “peace process.” Israel will never negotiate a peace with Palestine.

On September 12, 2025, the UN General Assembly endorsed the outcome document of the High-Level International Conference on the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. The UN General Assembly, with or without the United States, must now act decisively to implement full Palestinian statehood, despite Israel’s ongoing obstruction.