By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

October 7 marks one year since Israel with full US patronage launched the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, as the first phase of a regional war throughout the Middle East that is now metastasizing into a US-Israeli war on Iran. The toll of the war of extermination against the civilians of Gaza is staggering. Between 40,000 people, according to official figures, and 186,000 people, according to an estimate published in the authoritative medical journal The Lancet, have been killed by Israeli bullets, bombs, or through famine or preventable disease. The entire remaining population of Gaza is being starved by Bibi & Co., with “the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system—anywhere, anytime,” in the words of UN Secretary General António Guterres. Up until 7 October, Palestinians were anyway going through a period of a very slow but systematic genocide. Since 7 October, it’s still a genocide. It’s just faster paced.

The official justification for the genocide and ethnic cleansing now underway is the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas. The US media seeks to present the events of October 7 as a bolt from the blue, an unexpected sneak attack by Hamas that could not have been predicted and which had no antecedent factors. But this narrative fell apart within a matter of months. In December 2023, the New York Times published a report revealing that the Israeli government was in possession of the exact document that laid out “point by point” the plan for the attack, which was “implemented with alarming accuracy.” The official UN inquiry on the October 7 attacks asserted “that Israeli authorities failed to protect civilians in southern Israel on almost every front.” It was likewise revealed that a significant portion of Israeli casualties were killed by Israeli forces themselves, who fired indiscriminately into settlements where Hamas was operating, and deliberately targeted Israelis being held hostage. According to an official UN inquiry into the attack, Israeli forces “applied the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ and killed… Israeli civilians.”

On September 22, 2023, just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, Netanyahu displayed a map at the United Nations General Assembly of the “new Middle East,” showing Israel encompassing all of the Palestinian territories, as part of a geopolitical framework with the US-aligned Middle Eastern states of Egypt, Sudan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. One year later, it is clear that Israel and the US seized upon the events of October 7 to implement this vision, as Bibi once again reiterated this viscous plan in his speech at the UN this September. If the ferocity and homicidal character of this effort have become more intense, it is because the US-Israeli genocidal war in the Middle East part of a decades-long effort by US imperialism to subjugate the whole of the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, a continuation of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the regime change operations in Libya and Syria. Now, one year later, the imperialist powers are making advanced preparations for a major strike on Iran.

Those, whose image of Israel is primarily shaped by the West – its politicians and media, may ask in retrospect ,how the so-called the land of “tolerance”, “only democracy in the Middle East”, which shares their “western values”, kill so many , civilians and children, so blatantly violate international human rights law by cutting off humanitarian aid, bombing hospitals and schools, and destroying all 12 of Gaza’s universities, kill at least 172 journalists, deliberately target their families, and not allow any international media into Gaza, and descending into fascism before our eyes – openly celebrating and advocating for the mass extermination of Arabs? They only need to look bit further!

Those familiar with the Zionist ideology that underpins Israelis’ presence in Palestine, however, will know that Zionist ideology and the founding fathers of Zionism, including David Ben-Gurion, who headed the Jewish Agency and became the first prime minister of Israel, openly advocated for territorial expansion and the displacement of Palestinians (through force if necessary). The 1948 Nakba was the first enactment of this ambition. Given Israel’s history, built as it is on a racist, settler-colonial ideology, the genocide in Gaza is entirely consistent with Zionism’s internal logic. Indeed, Palestinian scholars have long considered the Nakba to be an ongoing process rather than a single event.

For much of the past year though, Israel has failed not only to achieve anything of military significance in the Gaza Strip, but it has also failed to enunciate a strategy. It has been just a case of a repetition of ‘Nazi’ style extermination of a specified group of people as the ICJ case stressed. Israel’s ultimate aim is regime change in Iran, an emerging Nuclear power, on the mistaken assumption that an Iranian government disengaged from the conflict with Israel will transform the Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, into powerless sheep. Israel appears to be convinced that the road to Tehran runs through the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Israel’s agenda requires it to engineer a direct military confrontation between Washington and Tehran, and in US Biden, it may well have found the candidate that has thus far eluded it. Yet Lebanon has repeatedly proved to be the graveyard of Israel and American hubris. A year of killing has stripped away layers of assumptions and illusions. One is Bibi’s belief that he could manage the Palestinian issue without making concessions to their demands for self-determination. With that went the wishful thinking that had comforted his worried Western allies- the leaders in the US and UK, and others, who convinced themselves that Netanyahu could dance to their tunes. Instead, he has begun to bite them.

True! much of public opinion in the West gradually changed from pro-Israel in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s to more pro-Palestinian today. But this is not reflected in UN votes, where the US still supports Israel and most Western states abstain. When we look at what happened with the global anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, one of the things that was really important was that the last country to stop supporting Apartheid South Africa was the United States. There was a global anti-Apartheid movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions. The same is already taking shape in Palestine. However, it is not the same as in South Africa, in that the Zionist movement is certainly more entrenched, it’s larger than the Apartheid movement was.

The past decades show a lack of global leadership. In climate or political conflicts or wherever, we’ve yet to see a global leader who is able to stand up and have a backbone. Instead, they play these little games of manoeuvring back and forth. It took weeks before the UN secretary general called for a ceasefire. It took months before any of the global leadership called for a ceasefire. The US vetoed the first attempt to have a ceasefire resolution. We could have spared thousands of lives if they hadn’t vetoed it and allowed UN to work out a feasible settlement culminating in the realisation of Palestine Statehood. Nothing that was done on 7 October justifies this genocide. We are in a place and space where we should be looking at the perpetrator and ask whether this makes sense for them in the long term to continually live by the sword rather than understand that Palestinians deserve their freedom.

The Zionist partners in crime- Israel/US’ plan has always been to make Gaza unliveable. Since 1948, they lived by the sword. And that will remain so until the world community steps forward and says, enough is enough. But this approach appears to be too remote and infeasible, in a world ruled by capitalistic and self-centered leaders with a warped moral values and hypocrisy. As the world marks the first anniversary of this latest Israeli onslaught on Palestine, it is clear that the people of Gaza, ( and also West Bank) continue to suffer under one of the most destructive Genocides in human history. The figures represent more than just numbers; they tell a harrowing story of loss, resilience and the urgent need for more robust international humanitarian intervention.

Positive Hopes and Road blocks

The brutal Israeli war prompted South Africa to file a case at the ICJ in The Hague accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Several countries joined the genocide case against Israel, including Türkiye, Nicaragua, Spain, Mexico, Libya and Colombia. Last May, the top U.N. court ordered Israel to halt its offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. It was the third time the 15-judge panel issued preliminary orders seeking to rein in the mounting death toll in Gaza and alleviate humanitarian suffering in the blockaded enclave. The devastating offensive also triggered mass protests across the world demanding an immediate end to the Israeli war on the Palestinian enclave.

As Israel’s genocide on Gaza continues, international recognition of the Palestinian state and support for its bid for full United Nations membership has also grown. In May, Spain, Norway, and Ireland officially recognized the state of Palestine, followed by Slovenia and Armenia in June. This brought the total number of countries recognizing Palestine to 149 out of the 193 member states of the U.N. In a vote on May 10, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution acknowledging that Palestine meets the membership criteria outlined in Article 4 of the UN Charter. Although the resolution does not grant full membership, it calls on the UN Security Council to revisit Palestine’s application, further underscoring international backing for Palestinian self-determination. But, US will not relent.

While public support for Palestine grows, the same change has not occurred among “the people who have the privilege and capacity to change things.  It is growing among the youth and growing among people of the working class. There is much more understanding of what the Israeli project means, and much more clarity about what is settler colonization, what is genocide, and who are the Palestinians. Yet, the UK’s position for example, has been stringently repetitive. It stands with Israel’s right to defend itself, which, again, from an international legal perspective, Israel does not have the right to defend itself against Palestine. That’s what the ICJ said. It’s been said 1,000 times, yet politicians keep on repeating it.”

Genocide in Gaza has become an illustration of the moral malaise of the political establishment in most of the West, which, in the face of unprecedented public mobilisation, continued to stand side-by-side with Israel and its apparently unfettered “right to defend itself”. The moral compass and the conscience has been tainted by the blood of the innocent, being partners in crime and accomplices, particularly the US and the UK. Thus, after nearly 365 days of seeing Israeli violence live-streamed, it is easy for Palestinian suffering to become normalised – a danger only exacerbated by decades of dehumanisation of Arab and Muslim life. To ensure Israel could rampage through the Gaza Strip with impunity and escape any accountability for its actions, Israel’s western sponsors and allies, led by the US, willingly shredded the rulebook of international law and the norms and values that underpin it.

Israel’s position as a base for US geopolitical interests in the Middle East explains why stronger international actions have not been taken. There is a very clear indication that the big US scarecrow is one of the reasons why states are afraid to take a position, and there is also fear of abiding by NATO obligations. Analysts criticize the recognition decisions as being merely “symbolic,” saying countries continue to allow arms sales and trade with Israel, which enables it to sustain its genocide. This is international “hypocrisy.” US ‘decisions are being made completely on the premises of geopolitics and economics and whatever serves the status quo to remain as it is. It is disgusting to see that the most hypocritical are, unfortunately, the Arab and Muslim countries, when South Africa—neither an Arab nor Muslim country, took the courageous step of filing a genocide case against Israel in the World Court. The Gazan genocide thus has put Western and Muslim Hypocrisy on full display.

Overall, the so-called “rules-based order” of the international system that emerged after World War II is finished. The West no longer has credibility when it criticizes Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar or any other state for human rights abuses or breaches of international law.

Disgust and disillusionment with the West is growing in the Global South. Western hypocrisy in Gaza is having real geopolitical implications. The much-vaunted values of Western society and its claims about international law, human rights and democracy have collapsed on the sands and beaches of Gaza. The West’s double standards have been exposed when comparing its positions over Ukraine and Palestine. This is something that will have repercussions on all international relations, because Gaza — small in size but big in strength of will — has exposed the blatant dishonesty of the world. Also, there is much to be written and said on the brink of the first anniversary of the genocidal war, but the note will not be complete without saluting the heroic people of Gaza, which has become an unparalleled icon of human values and the steadfastness, and of the struggle of all oppressed nations. Generally, it’s easy to be pessimistic. Yet, there is hope. So, lets ensure our voices grow louder and demand justice for the Palestinian cause!