No one can say they didn’t know: Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza

Because hearts are heavy and minds are mesmerised by scenes of unending slaughter captioned with discordant tales of self-defence, of righteousness, today, I am beginning at the conclusion and working my way backwards. 

Before we get to the latest happenings from the depths of human depravity, I want to stress a particular point over and over again until the red heifers come home. Shattered attention spans and stunted critical thinking faculties are not a good enough excuse for failing to understand this.

No one can say they did not know. 

No one. 

Not the Prime Minister. Not the Foreign Minister. Not the journalists. Not the dumbest kid you went to school with. It does not matter. No one. 

It is not the 1940s this time around. 

You can literally roll-over in bed and watch primary sources document their own doom before you’ve had your morning coffee. (Do not do this too often, it will shatter something inside you.)

Palestinian journalists have recorded atrocity after atrocity after atrocity. 

Inevitably, they do this until they are murdered by Israel. Their timeline goes dark and a universe dies alongside a piece of the truth. 

140

141

142 

143 killed to date in Gaza alone. I need to get faster at writing these articles.

The six above, recently named by the IDF as Hamas – who hasn’t! – will almost inevitably join the tally. And it will happen to the shameful silence of the American, Australian and British journalists you see on television: from the Zionist fanboys anchoring at CNN to Patricia “please untag me” Karvelas at the ABC, a national broadcaster captured by rot, cowardice, American Imperialism, Zionist fanatics, and stupid dickheads.  

The cosy reality presented to you by the nightly news, by newspapers, by cowed cultural institutions like the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the State Library of Victoria, is as shattered as all the hospitals, mosques and schools in Palestine. The depravity and sadism evident in Israel’s assault is outside the realms of plausible deniability.

Perhaps not soon enough, but one day there will be a reckoning. And everyone that tries to claim they didn’t know will be lying to you. 

“Israel has bombed Palestinians to death, maimed them, starved them, and is now ridding them of their biggest lifeline of aid. Piece by piece, Israel is systemically dismantling Gaza as a land that is autonomous and liveable for Palestinians… We are in no doubt that Israel and its allies are fully aware of the terrible consequences that this decision will have on Palestinians living in Gaza, many of whom are already starving. We join others in warning again that this will result in more death, more suffering, and more forced displacement of people from their besieged homeland. It is impossible not to believe that this is their aim.” 

That is not a rogue nation or a terrorist proxy or even a Hamas leader disguised as a hospital. That is Oxfam International. 

This has never been a war. It is a slaughter. For territory. And this is such an obvious truth that an entire media ecosystem and lobbying network co-exist to make you doubt your own eyes. Heavy from livestreamed infanticide and weary from all the bullshit – all the “it’s complicated”s and the “Israel has a right to defend itself” – you are invited to unsee what you have seen. 

Israel is a deeply racist apartheid religious ethnostate with a raging fetish for incinerating life in Palestine and now Lebanon. IDF soldiers like to celebrate this by photographing themselves in the clothes of the women they have ethnically cleansed from the destroyed homes they post to Instagram from. Like absolute fucking sickos.

Israel has admitted, championed even, its expansionist plans, over and over again. Yet liars like Penny Wong still tweet about supporting a two-state solution while Gaza undergoes its own Holocaust.

You either stand against all of this, as unequivocally as you can muster, or you do not, and you are complicit. 

That part isn’t complicated either.

All you really need to know about Western morality is that across the USA, Australia, the UK, and Canada, all major political parties, red and blue – both those claiming to be the “lesser evil” and those giddy for blood – support Israel’s genocidal conquest of Palestine. Literally all of them. From those claiming to be the “good guys”, claiming to be the “lesser evil”, claiming to stand for humanitarian values and “fighting tories”, and even those led by the founder of the “Parliamentary friends of Palestine”, to those openly advocating for a bloodbath and religious rapture. All of them. There is no material difference for Palestinians whatsoever. 

I resent using a cliche, but sometimes they’re cliche for a reason. If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done in Germany in the 1940s, you are doing it now. 

Our politics has failed these people. Our politics has failed humanity. 

***

Not a drop of water has entered northern Gaza since October 1. After 13 months of US-funded and Australia-supported slaughter, the IDF is marching Palestinians from the ruins of their lives at gunpoint. Mass graves have been dug along the way, filled with the indiscriminately murdered.

On Monday, South Africa submitted its monumental case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The legal team, alleging Israel is committing genocide, told Al Jazeera that its largest problem to date has been “too much evidence”.

In the south, along the Israeli side of a border that will inevitably cease to exist, Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke to a crowd of hundreds at a two-day festival called “Preparing to Resettle Gaza.” 

“We will encourage voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us,” he said, torturing the word “voluntary” beyond all recognition.

“What we have learned this year is that everything is up to us. We are the owners of this land… when Israel acts like the rightful owners of this land, this is what brings results.” 

Yes, that can-do supremacist attitude did play a huge role in the landscaping of whatever Israel decides to call its newest seaside resort, but please also ascribe much of the blame to the US$22.76bn in military aid over the last 12 months alone, not to mention American veto powers over the UN (can we re-examine that please; what the ever loving fuck is that about?).

Ben-Gvir went on to cite his own mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners as evidence of Israeli superiority. “I see it in the terrorists’ jail cells. We took their jelly sandwiches. We took their chocolate. We took their TV sets. We took their ping pong tables and their exercise time. You should see them whining and crying in their cells. And this is our proof: When we decide we can, we succeed.” 

Haaertz reports that the crowd chanted “death to terrorists” in response (Note: Ben-Gvir and zealous Zionists like him consider all Palestinans “terrorists”). He then danced and sang to cheers from a crowd ready to strip the corpse of Gaza for sustenance.

Reshit was at the Resetling Gaza festival, too. The daughter of an IDF soldier, she told UK Sky News her solution to the Palestinian problem. “We should kill them, every last one of them.” 

But that’s just one random psychopath and one government minister (also a psychopath), I hear a swarm of bots and confused Americans screech in the replies. There might be nice people elsewhere in the administration systematically sniping children!

Seriously, go fuck yourselves.

This barbarity is not natural, it is cultivated. It is what a society engineered around dehumanising its oppressed through education, media, politics and religion is capable of churning out. It is hatred of a serene, fervorous variety, one I have personally encountered along my travels and in conversations with former IDF officers. I can only describe it as creepy as fuck.

As world-leading trauma expert, psychologist, best-selling author and anti-Zionist Jew Gabor Maté said recently after the world saw hospital patients burned alive with IV drips in their arms: “This morning’s images are like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok. Had there been YouTube and Instagram and TikTok around Auschwitz, this is what we would have seen. People burning alive. It is beyond horrendous, it is beyond comprehension.”

“When people like this are empowered and encouraged and allowed and supported to perpetrate their horrors, they get more crazy, they get more cruel. They get more remorseless, more relentless. More ruthless. That’s what happened to the Nazis. The Nazis did not start off with gas chambers. They started killing their mentally ill people in gas vans. Then they started shooting Jews in Eastern Europe. And then they end up with the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It’s a progression of madness and cruelty that’s almost inevitable.” 

“In 100 years, Zionism will be looked upon as one of the greatest disasters in Jewish history.”

Mainstream Israeli society fervorously believes in its own supremacy: a chosen people divinely destined to rule the surrounding lands. Decades of ethno-nationalist education, compulsory military service, a deeply traumatised population, and rampant ahistorical propaganda – coupled with the supremacist beliefs of Zionism – has led to the dehumanisation of Palestinians to the point that Israel is slaughtering tens of thousands of children without any qualms whatsoever. 

We see this in Israeli words and deeds, of their ministers and soldiers and ordinary citizens belittling and mocking those they slaughter.

***

Because all of this is happening inside Gaza and still leaking out via the last remaining Palestinian journalists, CNN went into overdrive to make us feel sympathy for Zionist war criminals. It published a tearjerker about an IDF soldier that was so traumatised by bulldozing hundreds of Palestinians, many of them alive at the time, he killed himself.

Guy Zakan, the still breathing co-pilot of the bulldozer, told a Knesset inquiry that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.” 

CNN added a nice editorial touch: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza, and struggles to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head.” Adding carefully: “He maintains that the vast majority of those he encountered were ‘terrorists.’”

You don’t need me to spell it out for you because you already have all the information in between the cracks. But hey, because journalists aren’t doing this, I will anyway. To bulldoze people by the “hundreds”, “both alive and dead”, they need to be captive and bound. And we’ve already established that Zionists are pretty fucking liberal with their definitions of who is a terrorist. 

Please think long and hard about the fact CNN wants you to feel sympathy for the people doing the bulldozing. This is normalising psychopathy.

***

You’ve already read my conclusion at the top. No one can say they didn’t know, from the fucking Prime Minister, to you and everyone you know. 

Be certain that in the years to come, they will try to claim it, though. 

They will try to tell you they didn’t know. Or they did know but they were secretly trying to help from the inside. 

And it will all be shit. 

Do not let them say this. You have a moral responsibility. In your words, actions, votes, minds and hearts, hold them responsible.

Genocide is the crime of all crimes, and you inhabit a part of the world that desperately wants to turn away from it. Do not let it. 

Be brave. Be human. If ever there was a time for it, it is right now. 

No one can say they didn’t know.