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genocide
Gaza: The Peace of the Genocide Alliance
The great war may be coming to an end, but the violence of occupation, apartheid, and territorial expansion is not.
Oct 14, 2025
With the silence of the guns, hope grows that Israel's genocide in Gaza may have come to an end. Hostages and prisoners from both sides have already been exchanged, and Israeli forces have begun to withdraw to the first ceasefire line in the enclave.
Much-needed aid supplies are once again reaching the humanitarian disaster zone, where an artificially created famine is raging, via the border crossings. Meanwhile, in Egypt, representatives of the US, European countries, Arab states, and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority have been discussing the next phases of the ceasefire.
At the same time, survivors and those who have been displaced multiple times are returning to where they once lived—to the apocalyptic ruins of their homeland. Among them is Gaza resident Fidaa Haraz. Like many others, she is now wandering around Gaza City, against a backdrop that resembles destroyed Berlin after World War II: “I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction. I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it. What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay?”
At least 92 percent of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed or severely damaged by Israel, over 61 million tons of rubble are piling up in the coastal strip, including hospitals, schools, and mosques, heavily contaminated and turned into hazardous material by unexploded ordnance. It will take many years, probably generations, to dispose of it and rebuild. It is the miserable and long aftermath of genocide.
US President Donald Trump is being credited with ending Israel's more than two-year massacre of the Gaza population. He pressured Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas to accept his “deal.” In fact, Hamas had already agreed to similar conditions for a ceasefire over a year ago. But Israel prevented the agreement and killed Hamas leader and negotiator Ismail Haniyya, while the US under Biden and then Trump continued to supply weapons for the genocide and blocked a ceasefire in the UN Security Council with its veto.
What has changed in recent months is that, while the Palestinians could not be persuaded to “voluntarily leave” their homeland and Hamas was by no means defeated militarily, the Netanyahu government has increasingly become a burden for Trump due to its various regional escalations.
Due to the bombing of the ceasefire talks in Qatar, a close ally of the US, and pressure from his own MAGA movement, Trump felt increasingly compelled to rein in Tel Aviv.
The accusation from conservative and right-wing circles in the US, prominently articulated by Tucker Carlson or US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, is that Israel is drawing far too much attention to itself and damaging US interests (i.e., those of the American business class) with its bombing of Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, while the Trump administration has more important things to do, such as fighting for an authoritarian-fascist social order and declaring economic war on the rest of the world. They demand: “America First.”
The growing protests in Western industrialized countries, with hundreds of thousands, even millions on the streets—from Great Britain to Italy and Spain to the Netherlands and Germany, forcing their governments to make concessions— the opposition of large parts of the so-called Global South to the Gaza massacre and the associated isolation of Israel have caused costs to rise for the US as well as for Netanyahu.
However, we should not be under any illusions: the possible end of genocide, starvation, and humanitarian destruction does not mean that peace will ensue. For peace is more than the absence of constant military bombardment, marauding ground troops, and kill zones.
The great war may be coming to an end, but the violence of occupation, apartheid, and territorial expansion is not. For example, settlement projects in the West Bank continued at an accelerated pace during the Gaza war.
We should also remember what the status quo was before October 7, 2023, when the Hamas attack occurred, which Trump's peace plan not only renews but actually exacerbates. Because now it means Israeli occupation plus military-backed foreign administration for an indefinite period. Later, according to the plan, the corrupt Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is hated by many Palestinians, will be handed control of Gaza by Trump and Co.
The occupation will therefore continue, with all its consequences. In 2023 alone, until the Hamas attack, an average of one Palestinian per day was killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories, including many children. A total of over 200 victims in the first seven months of that year. The Western media has become accustomed to turning a blind eye to Israel's ongoing human rights violations, the many minors held in torture prisons without charge, and the violent occupation regime, which the International Court of Justice has ruled to be a violation of international law.
When journalists report on the crimes in the occupied territories, they become targets of the “most moral army in the world.” Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen well known in the Arab world, was killed in 2022 by Israeli soldiers who shot her in the head while she was reporting, even though she was clearly wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet marked “Press.” Israel denied the case, and the US swept it under the rug.
All of this will continue. Nor will future Israeli military actions in Gaza be prevented by ceasefires. In total, before the Hamas attack, there were five Gaza wars, which are in reality massacres of an enclosed population, with thousands of civilians killed: 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021. You can literally set your watch by it. Afterwards, a ceasefire was always agreed upon until Israel again deemed it necessary to “mow the lawn,” as the regular decimation of resistance in Gaza against the occupation is referred to in Israeli security circles.
Since Israel's Six-Day War in June 1967 and the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, US-Israeli peace plans have also been adopted at regular intervals. Virtually every US president, with the exception of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, has produced one. None of them have come to anything. Trump's 20-point plan is the most substance-free of them all, as political analyst Norman Finkelstein said on Al-Jazeera.
The other plans at least referred to international documents such as UN Security Council Resolution 242 after the Six-Day War, which calls on Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories and to recognize the sovereignty, political independence, and right of every state “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” Or they referred to the territorial borderline (“green line”) as the basis for a two-state solution in sync with the international community.
None of this is included in the Trump plan. It is simply 20 short points, without any references or coherence. There is not even any mention of whether Israel will continue to occupy the Gaza Strip by controlling its land, sea, and air borders. It simply assumes that this “norm” will not change.
The rights of Palestinians are absent from the plan, except for a vague formulation at the end: if the residents of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority behave properly (“Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform programme is faithfully carried out”) — which, of course, will be judged by the US and Israel — then “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Such meaningless statements are not worth the paper they are written on. Israel has repeatedly rejected a Palestinian state within internationally recognized borders, like they are implicit in UN Resolution 242. For 50 years, this peace has been offered by the Arab states and the Palestinian side. Israel has blocked the solution also in the rare cases of bilateral negotiations by at most presenting unviable cantons. Meanwhile, over the decades, illegal settlements and walls have created facts on the ground, and fertile land in the West Bank and around Jerusalem has been unlawfully appropriated.
It is obvious that there is no willingness to hold those responsible for the genocide and their accomplices in Washington, London, Paris, or Berlin accountable, or even those in the executive suites of companies that profit from Israel's violence – because who would enforce this internationally?
At the same time, the US regularly uses its veto when the solution is put to a vote in the UN Security Council, while the Netanyahu government, with the support of the Knesset—and also in line with an increasingly rejectionist population in Israel—has now openly declared that it will no longer allow a Palestinian state. Israel and the US are completely isolated internationally on this issue. Hence, in order to appease the Western liberal public in particular, vague talk of Palestinian statehood is again used: a rhetorical facade with no political value, pretending “goodwill” where there is none.
There will be no peace without justice. As long as the root cause of the crisis in the Middle East—an end to occupation and apartheid, a viable state for the Palestinians within internationally recognized borders—is not seriously addressed, there will continue to be violence and, at best, a peace of the graveyard.
To this day, we do not know how many people in Gaza have actually been killed, how many more will die as a result of the famine and genocide (some estimates put the final death toll at hundreds of thousands), and how many will be scarred for life by mutilation.
However, it is obvious that there is no willingness to hold those responsible for the genocide and their accomplices in Washington, London, Paris, or Berlin accountable, or even those in the executive suites of companies that profit from Israel's violence—because who would enforce this internationally? The states that support Israel essentially rule the world and all have blood on their hands. This is nothing new, see the “war on terror” or the Indochina wars of the US.
What is now to be decided and implemented is good if it ends the mass deaths in Gaza. But it remains a peace of the perpetrators and a genocide without accountability, with which the survivors have to live.
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Mahmoud Khalil and the Israelification of the US: Wake Up!
Palestinian human rights advocate, Mahmoud Khalil, knows authoritarianism when he sees it. “I lived under the Assad regime [in Syria]. I know how that feels.”
Oct 12, 2025
A negotiator for the pro-Palestine student protests on Columbia University's campus in 2024, Khalil and I spoke late last month. Thousands of National Guard had already been deployed to Los Angeles and Washington DC, supposedly to “crack down” on crime, leading to hundreds of arrests and seizures.
Khalil was arrested and seized — by unidentified men, without a warrant, at his home — this March. Snatched away from his pregnant wife he was transported in shackles to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where he was held for 104 days until a New Jersey judge ordered him to be released. A legal, permanent resident who had committed no violence and broken no law, Khalil’s detention was just the first and most visible abduction in a wave of arrests targeting international students and faculty who were speaking out against genocide in Gaza.
Reflecting on his experience, Khalil said: “I think people mistakenly think that what's happening is far from their doors. They think that this would never happen to them, whether, you know, because of their social status, because of their ethnicity or any of that.”
People call it the “Palestine Exception.” That’s the idea that all sorts of behaviors and speech that are acceptable in other contexts are selectively denied and punished when it comes to advocacy around Palestine. Conversely, many Americans have believed that if they only steer clear of the issue of Palestine and the treatment of Palestinians, their rights to free speech and assembly will be protected and secure; that they will be “safe.”
As we spoke, President Trump (a convicted felon) was ordering National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee, and Portland, Oregon, and calling for “expanded deployments” to other places. At a crackpot convening of the nation’s top brass, Trump urged the military to use US cities as “military training grounds” For what? For domination? Occupation?
“What's happening around us should alarm us that this is at our door, it's in our house,” said Khalil.
Palestine may not be the exception, but rather the test. The treatment of Palestinians and human rights advocates like Khalil has tested our tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism, and until recently, it’s a test that our anti-fascist movements have failed. Go down the list that scholars have compiled. What do authoritarians do? They name an enemy, declare an emergency, and invoke extraordinary, often military powers to shock and intimidate every credible source of opposition and dissent, the law, the media, the academy, free speech, and other politicians. Mahmoud Khalil has seen all those moves up close, and he is far from alone. Speaking in solidarity with Gaza has cost jobs, funding, landed people on watchlists and led to widespread campus arrests.
He thought it couldn't happen here. He thought that in the US, people had rights. Having left Syria and coming to prestigious Columbia University to take up graduate studies with a view to becoming a diplomat, Khalil, too, thought that he was safe:
“I was, to be honest, like I was confident, you know, nothing would happen to me. I never did anything wrong. I literally was protesting a genocide.”
He was wrong, and he learned different, and Americans are also learning.
National Guard and ICE agents have arrived in Portland, where they’ve fired pepper balls at senior citizens, journalists, and shot one priest in the head as he attempted to pray for peace. Federal agents including ICE and Border Patrol have started patrolling the streets of Chicago, where they’ve reportedly shot chemical munitions at civilians in broad daylight.
On September 30, the very next day after Khalil and I talked, federal agents rappelled in darkness from a Black Hawk helicopter onto the roof of a five story building in South Chicago’s South Shore, kicking down doors, deploying flashbang grenades, and forcibly entering nearly every apartment, removing adults and kids, zip tying their hands before separating them from their parents.
“It’s not that the US is becoming authoritarian. It is authoritarianism now,” said Khalil.
Khalil is once again under a deportation order, issued by the same immigration court judge who oversaw his detention in March. Citing paperwork errors on his visa application, he’s once again threatened with deportation to Algeria or Syria where his life would be under threat.
“Americans need to wake up,” said Khalil.
It all makes one think about that Palestinian experience we’re not supposed to speak about. What if, instead of the Palestinian exception, we need to be talking about the Israelification of the U.S.?
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Gaza and Ireland: Shared Experiences and a Warning Going Gorward
Famines, especially those driven by political subjugation or military occupation, have often produced persistent calamitous consequences for the survivors long after the bullets stop flying or the bombs dropping.
Oct 12, 2025
Regardless of how the long-delayed, welcome ceasefire in Gaza plays out, there are historic parallels that shed a warning on the future for Palestinians devastated by a two-year genocidal war following decades of ruinous occupation.
Early media reports raise red flags. It is uncertain whether the agreement will lead to a permanent end to Israel’s war on Palestinians, especially given the long-term far-right Israeli goal of full ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank.
Further, Netanyahu’s extremist government has made no commitment to fully withdraw from Gaza, and there is no commitment to any real plan to rebuild the massive devastation Israel has created in Gaza with any role for any Palestinian leadership. And even with the announced ceasefire “food, water and medicine remained scarce,” the New York Times noted.
One horrific fact is clear. As of October 5, at least 67,139 Palestinians have been confirmed killed with tens of thousands more unaccounted for and likely still buried under rubble. Of those dead, more than 20,000 were children. At least 459, including 154 children, have died from starvation due to the famine imposed by Israel as a weapon of war.
Famines, especially those driven by political or military policy, have often produced persistent calamitous consequences for the survivors. Signs are already evident for Palestinians in Gaza. A study led by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees, published by the medical journal The Lancet this week, disclosed that nearly 55,000 children under the age of six in Gaza are estimated to be acutely malnourished.
UNRWA researchers found that 5 percent of children screened in January 2024 showed evidence of wasting. By May 2025 May 2025, “levels of wasting among screened children rose to nearly 16 percent, with almost a quarter of these suffering severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous form of the condition,” the Guardian described.
Even before the war, after years of an Israeli blockade of Gaza, children in Palestinian refugee families in Gaza were already “food insecure,” said UNRWA nutrition epidemiologist Dr. Masako Horino, and now, due to the famine “face an increased risk of mortality.”
What does the future hold? A forewarning could be found in perhaps the world’s most chronicled famine in Ireland from 1845 to the early 1850s, following a devastating potato blight, a crop that dominated the food source in Ireland. An 1841 census recorded a population of 8.4 million people in Ireland. Ten years later, following years of famine and a mass emigration by desperately sick people, many forced off their land by British landlords, the population had plummeted to just 6.5 million, and it continued to decline for decades.
In 2025, the combined population of the Irish Republic, even after the economic gains of the so-called Celtic Tiger since the 1990s, and ongoing British controlled Northern Ireland, is still just 6.8 million people, less than before the famine. By comparison, the United Kingdom’s population in 1840, including all of Ireland, was 26.7 million. Today, the UK population, including Northern Ireland, has climbed to nearly 70 million.
In what may well be the definitive history of Ireland’s suffering, "Rot. An Imperial History of the Irish Famine," Padraic Scanlan, explains that the Irish famine does not fit the international law definition of starvation crime. That requires deliberate action “by government or military committing the crime must act either to destroy the means of producing or obtaining food, or to forcibly displace people to cause starvation.” These are terms that directly apply to Israel’s forced famine in Gaza.
Though Scanlan does not directly address Gaza, there are multiple parallels. “The hyper dependence of so many of the Irish poor on the (potato) crop was an adaptation to English and British conquest, and to the subsequent growth of the British empire and imperial capitalism,” he writes.
Central to that were intentional policies following the Protestant Reformation. “English forces seized almost all Irish land” held by Catholics and “redistributed it to Protestant loyalists. The English Parliament passed the Penal Laws, which legalized the persecution and dispossession of Catholics (in Ireland) and strictly limited Ireland’s political and economic independence.” Echoes of Israeli apartheid policies, especially in Gaza and the West Bank, are not hard to find, from land grabs by settlers to discriminatory laws, denial of political rights, and other restrictions and repression.
Increasingly, Irish people, especially in rural areas, were landless, forced to pay rent to British landlords, while the British political leadership stripped Ireland of any potential wealth through its devotion to early capitalist market fundamentalist policies, including export and transfer to England of other food products and capital.
Frederick Douglass, Scanlan notes, visited Ireland at the invitation of slavery abolitionists in 1845-46, and was shocked by what he observed. Douglass viewed that “the Irish poor and the enslaved and free Black workers in the US were united by a common struggle to survive in different, but pitiless, conditions.”
Longtime British racialized stereotypes of poor Irish laborers were reinforced by the rising orthodoxy of market ideology. The Irish rural poor were depicted as “resistant to modernity and reform,” as “inert and indolent,” as ”lazy, apathetic, backward,” unwilling to work for wages, and similar pejoratives. Those slanders were seen as “justification for conquest, and British rule. British relief programs during the famine were characterized by work requirements, means testing, or agreement to surrender land, to qualify for food assistance.
Ultimately, British landlords and would-be investors welcomed evictions and forced migration to "liberate" what was deemed “valuable land from inconvenient or unproductive tenants,” Scanlan writes, another parallel to how Israeli settlers, with the assistance of the Israeli government and military, treat West Bank Palestinians. There are even US land speculators leading the current Gaza peace negotiations.
Racist, supremacist rhetoric is pervasive in Israeli dehumanized depictions of Palestinians as well, with even worse terms like “human beasts,” “children of darkness,” and insensitivity to the murder, even of Palestinian children, which have escalated since October 7, 2023.
It has carried over to indifference to those dying of famine. In Ireland, the famine killed the weakest and most vulnerable, Scanlan reminds his readers. “The soup kitchens like the public work programs kept people alive but not healthy.” In Gaza too, we’ve heard claims that it has been pre-existing conditions or other justifications, not deliberate famine, that have led to starvation deaths.
Other European countries also suffered famine deaths in the 1840s from the potato blight, “but only Ireland experienced demographic collapse during and after the blight pandemic,” Scanlan adds. “Years of starvation and disease dissolved bonds of community and family in the hardest-hit parts of Ireland.”
Ireland’s history with settler colonialism, occupation, political repression, and famine has helped make the Irish people among the strongest critics of Israel’s genocide and for many years among those with the most solidarity for Palestinian rights. The population decline in Ireland, and many years needed to finally secure political freedom for the Republic of Ireland, and ultimately unification of the island are a message. Even if the proposed ceasefire agreement does lead to an end to the war and some gains for Palestinian sovereignty and rights, it will be up to the entire international community and all of us to demand it.
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