Tag: palestine

Israel is lost.

Every day for the last three years, the decent people of the world — in our untold millions — have been sunk in a pit of moral despair, weeping, having breakdowns or being permanently enraged by the most extraordinarily depraved example of full-spectrum, live-streamed barbarism in our lifetimes — the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by the State of Israel.

The trigger for Israel’s ongoing genocide was, of course, one particularly bloody day, October 7, 2023, when militants from the Gaza Strip, which had been maintained by Israel as an “open-air prison” for the previous 16 years, broke out through the perimeter fence and went on a killing spree in southern Israel in which 1,195 people were killed, and 251 others were taken hostage.

These are the bare facts, and, for anyone like myself who is an intuitive lifelong pacifist, they are, of course, deeply unpalatable. 1,124 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals, who all had hopes and dreams and loves and fears, were killed on October 7. 367 of them were members of the Israeli security forces, while the rest, including 36 children, were civilians.

We should mourn them all, but we cannot regard their deaths in isolation, because, in response, beginning on the evening of October 7, 2023 and continuing ever since, the Israelis have killed, at the barest minimum, 75 times as many Palestinians over the last three years, including over 21,500 children — at least 600 times as many children as were killed on October 7.

In total, according to statistics with which no one can seriously argue, 74,228 Palestinians have been killed and 175,188 injured (many very severely so) by Israeli forces over the last three years, although those figures are undoubtedly a serious undercount (see my notes at the end of this article). The remains of at least 8,000 Palestinians are still buried under the rubble, and untold numbers of others are unaccounted for, or are dying of secondary causes beyond the direct military attacks — of starvation and disease, and of everyday ailments, grievous wounds or chronic pre-existing health conditions, few of which can be adequately treated in a healthcare sector that has been deliberately destroyed by Israel, and from which it is still deliberately preventing the delivery of essential medical supplies and equipment.

According to an invisible assessment of the relative value of lives that Israel uses, and that has been shamefully adopted by most western leaders, we’re meant, today, to continue mourning those who died on October 7, 2023, while completely ignoring the genocidal carnage visited on the Palestinians ever since.

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Today, October 7th, 2026, will officially mark three years since the beginning of a non-stop genocide against the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Today, the airwaves will be full of relentless propaganda falsely asserting the victimhood of Israel and using every confounded twist of logic imaginable to paint the occupiers as the oppressed. Media will be rife with discourse that attempts to frame the slaughter of innocent people as righteous, with a collective amnesia that pretends to assert that all of this began only three years ago.

This disingenuous distortion of reality shouldn’t be allowed to stand. So allow us to counteract that narrative by comparing the myths with the actual facts.

Myth: October 7th was a surprise attack.

Fact: In the last three years copious amounts of information have come out conclusively proving that October 7th was, in fact, not only not a surprise, but it was an outright false flag attack.

An investigation from the Israeli news outlet Haaretz recently confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had foreknowledge of the impending attacks, deliberately doing nothing to prevent them. This corroborates previously revealed information that the Israeli Prime Minister was given express warning from neighboring intelligence agencies that, if acted upon, would have prevented the attacks from happening.

Myth: The casualties of October 7th were entirely inflicted by Hamas.

Fact: While it is true that Hamas did kill many Israelis during the attack, it is incorrect to say that they were solely responsible for Israeli casualties. Several investigative reports in the years since, as well as admissions from Israeli officials themselves, openly acknowledge that the Israeli military authorized the Hannibal directive during the attack — a protocol that authorizes the Israeli military to kill their own people.

The official stated purpose of the Hannibal directive is to prevent the capture of Israelis, operating under the supposition that it is better to be killed than captured. In practice, however, the Hannibal directive is utilized by Israel as a means of killing its own citizens to then falsely attribute the deaths to groups such as Hamas as a means to further justify violent actions against Palestinians.

Myth: Hamas committed mass rapes and the beheading of babies during the October 7th attack.

Fact: This is a classic example of atrocity propaganda. Numerous investigations, including by Israeli sources, have found no credible evidence of any such atrocities taking place during October 7th. Such claims were deliberately spread as a part of a mass propaganda campaign to manufacture justification for the Gaza genocide.

Myth: After taking several Israelis hostage, Hamas refused to let them go even when concessions were made during peace negotiations.

Fact: Another blatant example of disinformation. Reports indicate that Hamas leaders immediately offered several times to release all of their hostages so long as basic conditions were met by the Israelis to secure the safety of Palestinian civilians. It is on record that Israel refused to accept these terms.

Now that we’ve debunked some of the primary myths surrounding October 7th itself, allow us to focus on some of the historical context and myths that continue to circulate contributing to the spread of disinformation promoting the Zionist narrative.

Myth: Hamas is a terrorist organization started by Palestinians who hate Israel for the express purpose of committing violence against Israelis.

Fact: Hamas is a creation of Israeli intelligence. Similar to how other terrorist organizations the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS exist as a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the US, the formation of Hamas was largely fomented by Israel’s Mossad.

It is a documented fact of historical record that Israeli intelligence deliberately empowered Hamas over more secular, less militant, Palestinian political organizations so that the Israeli government could use the political prominence of Hamas as a justification for enacting more violence against the Palestinian people.

Previous investigations by Haaretz have found that Benjamin Netanyahu himself personally oversaw the transfer of funds to Hamas to ensure they remained in power, including a recent investigation finding that a request was made by the Israeli government to increase funds to Hamas just a week before the October 7th attack.

Myth: Jews and Muslims have historically never been able to coexist peacefully, particularly in Palestine.

Fact: Hostilities between Palestinian and Israeli people are a relatively modern invention. For centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike all lived relatively peacefully and cooperatively in the Palestinian territory.

It is a matter of historical record that during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim caliphate, the Ottoman Turks willfully encouraged and embraced the immigration of Jews into Ottoman territory after the Jewish people experienced decades of discrimination from European countries.

Hostilities began shortly following the end of World War 1, after the Ottoman Empire dissolved and Great Britain seized control of the Palestinian territory.

British authorities had officially pledged to grant the Palestinian people their independence, but quickly betrayed this agreement in the favor of Zionist lobbying groups in Britain.

In 1917, at the behest of a Zionist campaign headed by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the openly anti-Semitic British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour put forth what is known as the Balfour Declaration — an intentionally racist anti-jewish policy that supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine specifically to encourage the expulsion of Jews from Britain and other Western countries. Zionist groups, who have historically never cared about the safety or the security of the Jewish people, seized upon the opportunity.

Myth: The Israeli people have the right to occupy Palestine because it is their historic homeland.

Fact: The settlers who currently occupy Palestine under the Israeli colonial project are not ethnically ancestral semitic Jews, and have no rightful claim to the ownership of that territory.

History shows that the majority of Israeli settlers, particularly in the early days of Zionist colonialism, are of European descent, specifically from a group known as the Ashkenazi — a group of non-semitic ethnic eastern Europeans. While they may follow the Judaic religion, they are not ethnically Jewish semites.

Myth: All Jews are zionists, and all zionists are Jews.

Fact: This is a particularly pervasive piece of anti-jewish propaganda that is deliberately spread by zionists.

Numerous Jewish organizations outright reject the existence of Zionism as being incompatible with Judaism. Several Orthodox Jewish groups even go so far as to condemn the existence of Israel as a violation of Talmudic law, referring to the Zionist colonial project specifically as an abomination to God, since Jewish religious texts expressly specifies that a historic homeland for the Jewish people can only be granted upon the return of their Messiah.

Several Jewish organizations, most of which overlap in their opposition to Zionism, have also openly taken a stance against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the decades of apartheid committed against Palestinians.

In regards to the existence of zionism, it is also an incorrect assertion that all zionists are Jews, since Zionism is a political ideology rather than a religious one. In the United States, the majority of zionists are actually Christian nationalists — a sect of religious extremists that promote a narrow interpretation of fundamentalist Christianity, which in part promotes a Judeo-Christian covenant that materializes as support for Zionism.

Ironically, Zionist settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory have a history of attacking Palestinian Christians as well, including destroying ancient churches and Christian holy sites.

The biggest myth of all: This is not a genocide.

Irrefutable fact: Every relevant human rights organization on the planet has characterized what Israel’s Zionist regime has done in Gaza for the last three years as a genocide, exacerbated by numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Prior to the outset of the genocide three years ago, human rights organizations declared conclusively again and again and again and again over the years that Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people constituted the crime of apartheid.

In October of 2023, shortly after the launch of the genocide, The Free Thought Project provided an extensive historical synopsis elaborating upon the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict with distinct clarification of the history of Zionist brutalization against the Palestinian peoples.

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Looking across the devastated landscape of the Gaza Strip, where surviving generations now carry the permanent physical and psychological scars of war, the ultimate indictment of our era is damning:  The world watched the horror unfold  in real-time, possessed all the legal, political and institutional mechanisms to stop it, and did nothing.

For months, then years, the catastrophe in Gaza tested the fabric of international law, the integrity of global governance and the moral conscience of humanity.  From the halls of the United Nations to the high courts of The Hague, what followed was not information failure, but a shameful surrender of political and moral will.

Rarely does history deliver such swift and scathing hindsight. Three years after October 7, 2023, the real horror of Gaza is that this barbarity was never hidden; it was broadcast live in high definition to a global audience that watched, debated, proceduralized, and allowed it to continue.

Israel’s war on Palestinians continues uninterrupted. Despite having the influence to halt the crisis, major international powers have not intervened, allowing the regime and its colonizers to increase their violence across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

As time lifts the fog of war, the systemic breakdown of global institutions and governments becomes unmistakably apparent. The world failed to stop the genocide in Gaza not because it lacked awareness or warning. It faltered because the “rules-based” international order (aka Western order) is structurally and morally bankrupt, paralyzed by complicity, cowardice and double standards.

The war exposed international humanitarian law as a selective tool of the West – applied swiftly to some, but suspended when it inconveniences the powerful.  Governments that traditionally postured as champions of human rights have prioritized strategic alignments over universal legal and humanitarian obligations.

During the initial months of the onslaught, as the number killed rose into the tens of thousands and entire neighborhoods were flattened with their residents inside, global diplomats did what they do best: use bureaucratic delays to stall for time.

While hospitals were besieged and children underwent amputations without anesthesia, on blood-soaked floors, the UN Security Council degenerated into a theater of deadlock.  The world’s premier body for collective security rendered global consensus impotent and buckled under superpower threats.

Repeated resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire were either vetoed or watered down into toothless rhetoric. Meanwhile, international courts meticulously deliberated over the legal nuances of genocide while graves multiplied and  atrocities continued uninterrupted.

Today, as the International Court of Justice unhurriedly considers its final ruling on South Africa’s 2023 genocide case against Israel, tangible memories of Palestine are being erased; centuries of history, culture and ancestral lineages are being obliterated.  For Palestine, justice delayed is not justice denied; it is genocide completed.

Three years of impunity, of unprosecuted genocide, reveals that the value of human life is being measured on a sliding scale; that it is weighed based on race, geography and political utility.

In retrospect, these procedural and administrative delays look less like structural gridlock and more like an active cover-up. Every month spent debating the semantics of humanitarian corridors or compliance with international law gave carte blanche to Israel’s military onslaught.

The harshest criticism of the last three years falls on Western powers. Governments that never tire of lecturing the world on human rights, rules based order and international jurisprudence performed moral gymnastics to justify the unjustifiable.

We watched as world leaders converged on Israel with blank checks of allegiance, supplying an uninterrupted stream of munitions that reduced universities, schools, hospitals, markets, bookstores, bakeries, places of worship and apartment blocks to rubble.

While publicly wringing their hands, in private, these same leaders approved the weapon shipments.  And, in a cruel theatrical act of humanitarian absolution, they authorized the aerial dropping of meager sacks of flour into the very zones in Gaza they helped leave in ruins.

Failure was not restricted to the halls of power; the entire mainstream media landscape failed alongside it.  For months, reporters on the ground in Gaza – those who were not among the hundreds systematically targeted and killed – fought to pierce a wall of severe censorship and dehumanization.

In the West, corporate media tied itself in knots trying to sanitize language in order to obscure Israel’s direct responsibility for the ongoing violence.  Outlets downplayed Palestinian deaths by using passive language like “died” to treat mass casualties as collateral damage, all while elevating voices that defended the legitimacy of the war.

The public response, however, revealed a deeper fracture.  Millions marched in cities worldwide, launching one of the largest sustained anti-war mobilizations in a generation. Yet, the disconnect between the governed and the governing remained absolute. Western democracies proved entirely immune to the moral demands of their own citizens.

The silence of the last three years has been deafening. There was never any doubt about the genocide, nor a dearth of international laws to end it. Instead, the failure lies entirely with Western institutional gatekeepers who have lacked the courage to act.

Allowing genocide to go unpunished creates a dangerous precedent for global security. If international law and justice are buried in the rubble of Gaza, the global community will ultimately be digging its own grave.

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On Sunday morning, without notice, a private plane carried Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel and into Abu Dhabi. Channel 12 broke the story while he was still on the ground. A day later both governments confirmed the meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calling it a conversation about bilateral relations. The Israeli account gave the errand away. Netanyahu had gone to ask the Emirati president to deny publicly a report that he had telephoned Netanyahu days before 7 October 2023 to warn that Hamas was preparing a major assault.

A prime minister who wanted the record corrected would send a lawyer or a spokesman. This one flew across the Gulf in secret, a month before an election, to ask a foreign head of state to say a warning never happened. The method is the tell, and it points at everything the errand is meant to protect.

What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed.

In Gaza the army holds more than half the territory after the autumn ceasefire, and the plan for what remains was drawn up in Washington. A proposal built around Donald Trump would place the enclave under American trusteeship for at least a decade and rebuild it as a coastal resort on cleared land. Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the voluntary transfer of Gazans to third countries, and his defense minister ordered the army to prepare for a mass departure. A UN commission gave the campaign its legal name last September, finding that Israel had committed genocide and that its object was permanent control of Gaza and a Jewish majority across the land it holds. Israel rejects the finding. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over the conduct of the war, which his office calls false.

The other fronts complete the picture. In the West Bank the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, pushed through the E1 settlement, some 3,401 homes on the corridor that severs the territory, and said its approval buries any Palestinian state. His cabinet colleagues inaugurated two new settlements last week, and Smotrich has demanded the army wage in the West Bank what it waged in Gaza. In Lebanon the military sits on some 234 square miles of the south. In Syria, after the fall of Assad, it crossed the old disengagement line into the UN buffer zone and dug into nine positions, including the peak of Mount Hermon. The war opened on Iran this year runs on the same logic. The Atlantic Council, no enemy of Israel, describes an emergency response to October that has hardened into a permanent doctrine of forward defense. None of this was concealed as intent. Handed a map of the promised land on live television last August, Netanyahu said he felt very attached to the idea of a Greater Israel reaching into Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been. When the fighting began, the expectation across Israel was that it would close within months, the coalition would fracture, and Netanyahu would answer for the worst security failure in the country’s history. A New York Times investigation later set out how the opposite came to pass. He stretched the fighting past the point his own commanders judged necessary and added war aims as ceasefire talks matured. In April 2024 a six-week truce that would have freed more than thirty hostages reached the edge of a cabinet vote, and Smotrich ended it with a line, warning Netanyahu that if the deal passed, you no longer have a government. In March 2025 Israel broke a standing ceasefire, which brought the departed Itamar Ben-Gvir back into the coalition. The hostages were the cost, paid in installments.

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The international legal order is in shambles. But from the ruins of impunity and lawbreaking, a group of nations is working to enforce accountability.

On Monday, the UN general assembly’s high-level meetings opened to news that Washington had drawn up sanctions against the international criminal court, targeting its bank accounts, software, insurers and staff.

On Tuesday, the US president stood at the podium and threatened Iran with annihilation. On Thursday at the same rostrum, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC for war crimes, cast all those seeking accountability as “barbarians who threaten our common civilization”. Palestinian officials were absent, denied travel visas by the United States.

Netanyahu has never pretended to respect international law. When South Africa brought its Genocide Convention case against Israel’s actions in Gaza, Netanyahu declared: “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague.” This summer, he mused on American television that, should his plane ever be forced down in a country that honours the warrant, Israel’s special forces could be given “a new task”. The American president has promised he will not be arrested on US soil “in any way, shape, or form”.

I was arrested protesting Netanyahu’s New York visit. Here’s why we took a standRead more

The message to the world is plain: crimes committed by the allies and acolytes of power will never be punished.

This impunity is not limited to Gaza. It’s playing out in the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It has travelled to Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 4,000 people this year and displaced more than a million. In southern Syria, Israeli troops shell and raid villages in the countryside around Damascus. In Sudan, massacres are carried out with arms, technology and financing of the United Arab Emirates, an ally of the Israeli government.

Every commander with a patron has learnt the lesson of the past three years. Mass atrocity carries no price if your friends are strong enough.

States that resist encounter punishments in dizzying varieties – sanctions, tarriffs, threats and isolation. South Africa lost US aid after bringing its genocide case to The Hague. Colombia’s president had his visa revoked after speaking out on Gaza in the streets of New York.

This too will not remain confined to the global south. Instruments built for terrorists and drug cartels are now pointed at judges. More than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including the court’s president, already live under US sanctions. A designation of the whole institution would reach every European bank, insurer and technology supplier serving a court that sits in the Netherlands.

Tools like these, once deployed, are never put back in the drawer. Governments in Europe that shrug today should ask how long before the same instruments are turned on their regulators, their competition authorities, their own courts.

What can countries do? History points to some answers.

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