The brutality the Palestinians suffer, and the lack of any repercussions for the perpetrators, show that international law doesn\u2019t matter<\/p>\n
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations launched an attack out of the Gaza Strip and into Israel under the code name \u201cAl-Aqsa Flood.\u201d Israeli and Western mainstream media and politicians rapidly labelled this a massive act of terrorism and flooded the world with tales of horrific atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the Palestinians, such as sadistically murdering children and women and committing mass rape.
\nWe now know that these atrocious tales were lies calculated to generate domestic and international outrage against the Palestinian resistance and Palestinians in general. They were part of the same poisonous Israeli narrative that labeled these people\u00a0\u201cAmalek\u201d \u2013 a reference to a perversely \u201cexemplary\u201d genocide in the Old Testament \u2013 and denied that they were human beings. They were taking steps, in other words, to start a genocide.
\nThese atrocious propaganda lies were made up and spread by, for instance, Israel\u2019s Zaka activists and Western mainstream journalists, such as the New York Times, high public officials such as the UN\u2019s Pramila Patten, and activists. For instance, former Meta executive\u00a0Sheryl Sandberg acted as a Zionist propagandist, who chose to rely on Israeli disinformation.
\nIn reality, there were no mass rapes,\u00a0there were no sadistic baby murders by beheadings or in microwave ovens, no pregnant woman was found killed with a headshot, with her baby stabbed and still attached to the umbilical cord. It \u201csimply didn\u2019t happen,\u201d as a detailed investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz found.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
Netanyahu\u2019s October 7 response has no endgame. Russia has a stake in what follows<\/p>\n
What did happen on October 7, 2026 was not a savage, sadistic rampage but a daring military resistance operation. It was also a mass break-out from the Gaza Strip, which was under a long Israeli siege so brutal that Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling had already called the Strip the \u201cworld\u2019s largest concentration camp ever\u201d\u00a0almost a quarter-century ago.
\nThe core of this offensive targeted Israel\u2019s Gaza Division, which, according to high-ranking Israeli officers was \u201coverpowered.\u201d In the process, Palestinian resistance fighters killed and captured Israeli military personnel. While Israel\u2019s propaganda has done its best to obfuscate this fact, these actions were neither \u201cterrorism\u201d nor hostage-taking but legitimate acts of armed resistance under international law.
\nThe Palestinian fighters also attacked a music festival as well as several settlements. There, according to an Amnesty International summary in early 2024, they did commit crimes, including the deliberate killing of civilians and the taking of hostages, that is, civilians, not soldiers, whose capture makes them POWs and not hostages. A crime, in any case, is a crime even if it\u2019s only realistic to recognize plenty of mitigating circumstances in the immense injustice, dispossession, and often sadistic and humiliating violence Palestinians have suffered from Israelis over decades.
\nHonesty also dictates that we take three key facts into account: First, the leader of the pro-Israeli UAE, has revealed that he warned Israel\u2019s leader Benjamin Netanyahu personally of Hamas\u2019s plans. In a similar vein, Qatar\u2019s leader claims that Hamas was ready to free all civilian hostages immediately after the attack (which would have left it with only military prisoners). Yet the Israeli leadership ignored the warning and rejected the offer to free all civilians.
\nIt\u2019s\u00a0almost as if it wanted the attack to happen, as a pretext to initiate a massive ethnic cleansing-by-genocide campaign, and for the civilian hostages to stay in Gaza, as a pretext for\u00a0 continuing that campaign.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
October 7 blame game grips Israel ahead of election \u2013 RT reports (VIDEO)<\/p>\n
Second, it has long been clear that Israeli authorities activated an expanded \u201cHannibal Directive\u201d: Usually prepared to kill their own soldiers rather than let them be captured, on October 7, Israeli forces also killed Israeli civilians and, most likely, in large if unknown numbers, deploying tanks as well as helicopter gunships to \u2013 in the words of an Israeli officer \u2013 \u201cmass Hannibal\u201d their own. Of the roughly 1,200 casualties on 7 October, hundreds are likely to have been due to Israeli-on-Israeli violence; others were soldiers and as such legitimate targets.
\nAnd finally, a simple point all too often drowned out by Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda: A legitimate military force does not lose its overall legitimacy \u2013 or that of its goals \u2013 even when some of its members commit crimes. If that were the case, most armies in this world would have to be dissolved because none of them have a history entirely free of crimes. Armed Palestinian resistance is fundamentally legitimate under international law \u2013 and morally, too, obviously \u2013 and remains so. In fact, in the future, the outnumbered, outgunned, and abandoned Palestinian defenders of Gaza will be remembered as heroes, as they should.
\nThings are different, as a matter of fact, if we look at the actions of the Israeli military since October 7. Unlike with anything that individual Palestinian resistance fighters may have done, in the case of Israel\u2019s euphemistically mis-labeled Defense Forces \u2013 a \u201ccitizen army [and] representative sample\u201d of Israeli society \u2013 we are looking at a clear case of a whole, large organization deliberately and enthusiastically dedicated to committing every war crime and crime against humanity in every book, including ethnic cleansing and genocide.
\nBecause that is a precise description of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians of Gaza \u2013 and not only \u2013 since October 7, 2023. It is also by now the consensus among honest observers, including the global community of genocide experts. This, indeed, has been the most public genocide in human history, despite Israeli attempts to seal Gaza off and mass murder its journalists under false pretexts.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
The October 7 survivors divided on who should rule Israel<\/p>\n
Israeli perpetrators \u2013 high and low \u2013 have proudly advertised their own crimes. Israeli society as a whole, virtually continuous polling has shown consistently, supports the genocide. In a world of real-time media and social media, the reality of Gaza could not be hidden. Only recently, Google has finally adjusted its maps to reflect it.
\nThe nature and extent of Israel\u2019s crimes is obvious and exceedingly well documented, and that is a very important thing. Humanity owes an enormous debt of gratitude to those Palestinians and others who have undertaken the harrowing task of compiling and analyzing the evidence, such as, to name only a few, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese or the tireless staff of the Electronic Intifada.
\nWhat needs at least as much attention is what the Gaza genocide says about our world as a whole: namely that genocide is not only possible \u2013 it was before \u2013 but can take place over years and in full view of the global public, with the active support of most of the establishments of virtually the entire West and the passive acquiescence of the elites of most other countries.
\nIn a more or less sane world, fulfilling its obligations under the short and clear UN Genocide Convention of 1948 \u2013 it bears recalling \u2013 the Israeli genocide perpetrators would long have been stopped by a combination of diplomatic, economic, and, of course, military intervention. That would have been the minimum of what both international law and basic ethics obviously demand.
\nYet, instead, we live in a world, where \u2013 apart from the Palestinian resistance itself \u2013 only a handful of states and political organizations have done anything at all to interfere with Israel\u2019s mass murder campaign: Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansarallah \u2013 the Houthis \u2013 in Yemen.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
ICC weakened by \u2018impotence\u2019 over Netanyahu arrest warrant \u2013 attorney (VIDEO)<\/p>\n
Think about the above what you want, like or dislike their politics, it is a fact that no one else has even remotely tried to apply the Genocide Convention in practice. If that is irritating, don\u2019t blame Ansarallah, for instance, but blame the many who have failed to act.
\nBut failure to act has been only part of this real-life horror story. In the West, many governments and mainstream establishments, including in the media and academia, have pro-actively supported Israel. This is a shameful history of criminal collaboration and complicity still to be written. Indeed, in the worst cases, such as the elites of the US, the UK, and Germany, complicity seems too weak an expression: they are better described as genocide co-perpetrators.
\nThe obvious inference from this state of the world is that international law does not matter. There is no more devastating attack on the very idea of international law and a law-based order than the impunity of Israel and its accomplices. Benjamin Netanyahu, with an International Criminal Court warrant to his name, has been able to brazenly deny his and his country\u2019s crimes at the recent UN General Assembly and even repeat the Amalek reference, as Craig Mokhiber has pointed out. Outside, meanwhile, his critics were being arrested.
\nAnnalena Baerbock, in her time as one of Germany\u2019s most embarrassing foreign ministers ever,\u00a0also justified, shielded, and supported Israel; she\u00a0has just finished her ill-begotten sinecure as the UN General Assembly\u2019s president and made a lateral move to an absurdly undeserved position at Columbia University. The examples could be multiplied endlessly: the elites of the West, including American presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have devastatingly compromised themselves by their complicity with Israel. And yet, they keep thriving.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t write off Netanyahu over Oct. 7 warning claims \u2013 Trump<\/p>\n
So, not only has international law been discredited as literally never before, but international establishments also have, and in particular those of that part of the world that still has the arrogance to claim global leadership as if it were some kind of birthright, the West.
\nNow add the fact that Israel has not \u201conly\u201d been committing the Gaza genocide. It has also escalated ethnic cleansing terror in the West Bank, invaded Syria and Lebanon, attacked Yemen, participated in and triggered brutal assaults against Iran that have also tanked the world energy economy, and, in general, has followed its usual modus operandi of assassination, subversion, torture, rape, and relentless aggression. And yet it faces no discernible consequences beyond ludicrously inappropriate, purely symbolical measures at best and, of course, massive continued support.
\nMeanwhile, those in the West who dare be human and show their solidarity with the Palestinians and other victims of Israel and its accomplices and co-perpetrators are harassed, beaten up by police, arrested, and blacklisted.
\nWhat the Gaza genocide has shown with respect to the world as a whole is simple: Those who rule us will go much farther, much more shamelessly and openly than most of us, even the pessimists, used to be able to imagine. More importantly, they will get away with it, and they will let each other get away with it. Gaza is not an exception. It is a harbinger of a world of horrors. Resistance is not an option; it is the only one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The brutality the Palestinians suffer, and the lack of any repercussions for the perpetrators, show that international law doesn\u2019t matter On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t