Al-Qassam Brigades _ Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp”. Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realize what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorize Palestinian civilians under cover of war.

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. 

The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonize all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants. 

Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its “diet”, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment. They destroyed those “orchards” and transformed the “diet” into a full-blown starvation blockade - a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court. 

Past familiar 

Israeli soldiers have been murdering Palestinian babies for decades. Yet none of it has roused an ounce of the outrage uniformly expressed by western media and politicians at Israel’s entirely fabricated claim that Hamas killed 40 babies on 7 October 2023. 

Since 1948, Israel had been waiting for a moment to carry out additional expulsions and seize the last parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories it had been denied for the completion of its violent settler colonial project. Israel began the mass destruction of Palestinian communities, as it had done after 1948, so there would be no homes for Palestinians to return to.

Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, today’s western leaders and their media chose to buy Israel the diplomatic time and space it needed - as well as providing the weapons and intelligence - to destroy Gaza. The genocide would have been impossible without their assistance. 

As western politicians and media happily forget Gaza, still Israel keeps up the relentless pressure and misery there. A so-called “Yellow Line”, demarcating Israeli military control over the destroyed enclave, an area off-limits to Palestinians, has gradually expanded from half the land to 70 percent. 

Prisons of complicity.

Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it. 

If western publics knew what has really been happening to Palestinians for 80-plus years - first, from the Zionist movement and then from the Israeli state - they might swell further the ranks of the protest marches, making these demonstrations politically impossible to ignore.

Armed with knowledge rather dulled by ignorance, more westerners might board boats, amassing an armada that it would be impossible for the western media to disregard. But most critically of all, were the real context understood - were Israel’s decades-long pattern of murdering, raping, and expelling Palestinians known - western publics might wake up to the fact that their political and media class are not moral actors. They are not upholding the values of a superior civilization. They are not the guardians of international law and a democratic liberal order.

They are imposters. Or more accurately, they are working within political and financial structures that make it impossible to tell truths that would rock a system of power in the West that enriches tiny elite through a lucrative war machine used to protect the gargantuan profits of the fossil fuel industries. 

That system of power drives some Palestinians into an early grave and others into concentration camps, or exile, or penury. Meanwhile, it drives us in the West into prisons without physical walls - prisons either of ignorance and complicity, or of knowledge and impotence. We find our humanity deadened. Our hearts are hardened or broken. The challenge we face is the same as the Palestinians: to find a path out of our confinement.