The site of an Israeli strike on Gaza’s al-Aqsa Hospital is pictured on 14 October 2024 (Unrwa/AFP)
The old world is dying once again, but the US-Israel axis is wrong to suggest it is slaying monsters. It is the monster.
Originally published in Middle East Eye.
The horrifying images from Gaza last week of fire consuming a Palestinian teenager confined to his hospital bed with an intravenous drip may come to define Israel’s genocide, as completely as earlier images of human depravity have defined the world.
Naked, skin-and-bone corpses thrown into mass graves in the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust. Radioactive fields of rubble, interrupted only by charred, skeletal trees, after the atomic levelling of Hiroshima by the United States. A naked Vietnamese girl, her burned skin peeling off, fleeing in terror from a napalm attack.
The flames that burned alive 19-year-old Shaaban al-Dalou, along with his mother and two others, in a tent on the grounds of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah were almost certainly unleashed by US- or German-supplied missiles, fired by Israeli pilots.
Dalou was in the tent recovering from an Israeli air strike a week earlier on Deir al-Balah that had killed 26 people. He was already malnourished and immunocompromised from many months of an Israeli blockade, which has denied the entry of food and aid into Gaza.
Dalou’s two sisters, father and younger brother all sustained severe burns from the fire caused by the strike. His 10-year-old brother succumbed to his wounds days later. The victims in Deir al-Balah were charred into oblivion - and with them the “rules-based international order” the West helped establish to prevent a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War.
The year-long genocide in Gaza is entirely a western co-production. The US and Europe send the weapons, provide the diplomatic cover, orchestrate support from their pliant state- and billionaire-owned media, and stifle all domestic dissent.
The modern era of international humanitarian law that the West proclaimed, as well as the institutions the West championed to uphold it, are going up in flames.
The parties unravelling - week after week, month after month - the rules that kept in check the dangers of a third world war are not the so-called “terrorists”. It’s not Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. It’s not even Iran, Russia or China.
It is the West. It is Washington and its allies. They are the arsonists.
Nowhere safe
Anyone trying to give a true sense of the scale of destruction Israel has unleashed so quickly, or the indiscriminate nature of its bombing, has to grasp for decades-old comparisons, mostly from Vietnam, Korea or the Second World War.
However much western politicians and media have denounced and sanctioned Moscow, and armed Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, the crimes there pale in comparison to Israel’s war on Gaza - and now on Lebanon.
The carnage being unleashed in the Middle East is from another, much darker era. The humanitarian catastrophe Israel has engineered in Gaza has no precedent in the modern era.
Israel’s genocide is not just pitiless, like so many other wars. It has been brazen, celebratory even, in its orgy of destruction. The bombs strike the very “safe zones” Israel declares. They hit hospitals, schools serving as shelters for displaced families, bakeries, mosques and churches.
There is nothing secret about Israel’s long starvation of Gaza’s “human animals”: 2.3 million people, or however many of them are still alive after the enclave lost the capacity to count its dead months ago.
Israel is now doing to Gaza precisely what it threatened to do long before it was able to exploit the pretext of 7 October. It is pummelling the enclave to send it “back to the Stone Age”.
It is not Hamas that is being eliminated in Gaza. It is the fundamentals of humanitarian law: the principle of “distinction” between combatants and non-combatants, and the principle of “proportionality” in weighing military advantage against the endangerment of civilians.
All of this is happening out in the open, concealed only by the refusal of western politicians and media to admit what everyone else can see.
Israel is not “remaking the Middle East”. It is destroying the world as we have known it for generations.
What Israel has made clear, supported by western capitals, is that there is no safe place, not even for those recovering in a hospital bed from Israel’s earlier atrocities. There are no “non-combatants”, no civilians. There are no rules. Everyone is a target.
And now that includes not just the peoples of Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon, but the very body supposed to serve as the guardian of the humanitarian codes of law created after the Second World War and the Holocaust: the United Nations.
Attacking peacekeepers
Israel’s repeated attacks on UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon - and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “order” that they leave their posts or face the consequences - are being normalised by western capitals as surely as Israel’s earlier, systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals were.
On Wednesday, an Israeli tank fired on a watchtower near the Lebanese village of Kafer Kela, damaging it and its cameras.
A week earlier, two peacekeepers -belonging to the Unifil force in Lebanon- were wounded after an Israeli tank fired at an observation tower at Unifil’s coastal headquarters in Naquora.
In another incident last Sunday, two Israeli tanks broke down the gates of a Unifil post in Ramyah. Shortly afterwards, Israeli forces fired smoke canisters that provoked skin irritations and gastrointestinal reactions in 15 peacekeepers.
Netanyahu has sought to justify these and other attacks with a familiar canard. He has claimed that UN peacekeepers are serving as a “human shield to Hezbollah terrorists”, just as his administration earlier justified the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and its wider infrastructure on the grounds that Hamas had built “command and control centres” under them.
In a clue as to how such strategies might be viewed by some in Washington, Matthew Brodsky, a former White House adviser, recently called for Israel to drop napalm on Irish peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
Operating in the shadows
There are clear reasons - both immediate and more long-term - why Israel is targeting Unifil. The peacekeepers are there to observe and record violations of the laws of war between Israel and armed Lebanese groups, such as Hezbollah.
One of Israel’s early tasks in Gaza was to keep out foreign journalists and assassinate local Palestinian journalists to hamper the reporting of its war crimes in the enclave.
In Lebanon, Israel faces a bigger problem. The UN - a body whose humanitarian remit is to bring pressure on state parties to abide by international law - has not just eyes on the ground. It has experienced soldiers in fortified positions to observe proceedings on the battlefield Israel has made of southern Lebanon.
Its peacekeeping force is drawn from 50 countries, making all of them direct witnesses to Israel’s crimes against humanity. Unifil reports are sent to the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, and a network of UN human rights bodies.
That’s why the force needs the very watchtowers Israel is intent on destroying.
Israel wants to be able to operate in the shadows, off the radar, as it has done in Gaza, when it carries out its programme of war crimes in southern Lebanon. On Wednesday, for example, Israel dynamited the village of Mhaibib.
Having already forced residents in dozens of villages in southern Lebanon to flee their homes, Israel likely wants to now deluge these areas with cluster munitions, effectively small land mines, as it has done previously. This could make it impossible for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people to return home.
Unifil’s presence in the south would make that crime much harder to achieve.
'Mowing the lawn'
There is a wider goal, too. Netanyahu has suggested not only that Unifil is in the way of its military operations, but that peacekeepers are colluding with Hezbollah fighters - just as earlier, Israel claimed Gaza’s doctors had to be killed or dragged off to torture camps because they were sheltering Hamas fighters in their hospitals.
This week Israel set about bolstering its preposterous allegation with supposed “confessions” from captured Hezbollah fighters that they had bribed Unifil to let them use its posts and surveillance cameras.
But all Israel is proving is that its horrifying torture regime can get prisoners – whether Hezbollah and Hamas fighters or doctors abducted off the streets of Gaza – to say whatever Israel needs saying to justify its crimes.
Israel’s one-size-fits-all story is so egregiously self-serving, it doesn’t even begin to pass the smell test - unless you are a western politician or media “professional”.
Israel’s latest physical assault on the UN has not come out of nowhere. For decades, Tel Aviv has been crafting a narrative of the UN as a hotbed of antisemitism. That is because the international legal order places at the top of its hierarchy of crimes those that Israel pursues most vigorously.
International law opposes any state that enforces apartheid, as Israel has done for decades in its rule over Palestinians; or any state that engages in ethnic cleansing, as Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for more than three-quarters of a century; or any state that carries out genocide, as Israel is doing right now in Gaza.
All these crimes are defined in international law, and Israel now commits every one of them.
Before 7 October, Israel had tempered its actions somewhat, if only to avoid embarrassing its patron, the US.
Instead, Israel worked to gradually reinterpret and undermine the rules of occupation and war, particularly through its siege and repeated attacks on Gaza over the past 15 years. It intermittently “mowed the lawn”, killing many hundreds of civilians, while putting the wider population “on a diet” for 17 years, tightly restricting their caloric intake.
But Israel understood the current erasure of Gaza could never be accommodated by international law, even with the looser interpretations it had been championing.
Something had to give. And Israel was determined that would not be its programme of genocide.
'House of darkness'
Israel’s long-running campaign against the UN has dramatically stepped up a gear over the past year.
That is why Israel has declared Guterres “persona non grata” and banned him from entering the country. Israel’s foreign minister has accused Guterres of backing “terrorists, rapists, and murderers”, and called him “a stain on the history of the UN”.
It is why Netanyahu has described the UN General Assembly as a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
It is why the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN responded to the General Assembly’s vote to back Palestine as a member by publicly shredding the UN Charter.
It is why Israeli officials have repeatedly smeared the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court staffed by expert judges in international law, as antisemitic, supposedly seeking “the persecution of the Jewish people”. The ICJ’s crime is to have ruled that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
It is why Netanyahu has denounced Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as one of the “great antisemites in modern times”. Khan has been seeking arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
One of the pro-Israel groups in Britain, UK Lawyers for Israel, is trying to get Khan disbarred, supposedly for “professional misconduct”.
Zero evidence
Meanwhile, the last meaningful UN presence in Gaza, the UN’s refugee agency known as Unrwa, responsible for providing the population with essentials like food, is under relentless attack.
Without a shred of evidence, Israel persuaded western powers to freeze critical funding to the humanitarian body. Slowly, most European states have restored their funding, but the US continues to choke it with sanctions.
The Israeli parliament is in the midst of designating Unrwa a “terrorist organisation”, while the Israeli military bombs the agency’s warehouses, school-shelters and refugee camps, and kills its staff in unprecedented numbers.
Israel must wipe out Unrwa’s role in protecting the civilian population of Gaza, if it is to wipe out Gaza itself.
Exactly 50 years ago, the UN General Assembly withdrew its recognition of South Africa and refused to reinstate it for the next two decades. The assembly cited Pretoria’s apartheid rule and its illegal military occupation of Namibia.
It could do the same to Israel, an even bigger villain. But apparently it dares not. The West is even more committed to the rogue state of Israel than it once was to the rogue state of apartheid South Africa.
The UN has good reason to fear that Israel’s US-backed rampage through Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and then on to Iran, will end at its door.
The Generals' Plan
It is only because Israel knows it has left the international order in tatters, and that Washington is fully on board, that it dares to carry out its genocide in Gaza to the bitter end.
Barely mentioned in the western establishment media has been Israel’s so-called “Generals’ Plan”: turning an area Israel has declared as “northern Gaza” into an official, industrial-scale extermination camp.
The plan, published last month by a group of influential military reservists, involves giving some 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza a week to flee southwards. Anyone left will be starved to death or executed as a “Hamas terrorist”. Frustrated by Israel’s failure to defeat Hamas, these senior officers want to erase any last traces of protections for civilians.
In practice, Israel has been carrying out this plan incrementally almost from the start of its assault. Last October, it demanded Gaza’s population in the north flee to supposedly “safe zones” in the south, which it then bombed.
Aluf Benn, editor of Haaretz, explained at the time that Israel’s strategy was the expulsion of “the population of Gaza to the southern Gaza Strip and the destruction of [Gaza City]” - the main built-up area in the enclave.
Since then, Israel has built a fortified military zone, called the Netzarim Corridor, to isolate Gaza’s north.
The question left unanswered is what happens to southern Gaza after the north has been ethnically cleansed. All the evidence so far suggests that anything done to northern Gaza will arrive soon enough in the south.
If Israel thinks it can destroy Hamas in Gaza’s north only through a policy of extermination, what will stop it from claiming a need to carry out exactly the same policy in Gaza’s south later on?
The real goal, clearly visible, is to expel Palestinians from their entire historic homeland through terror and starvation, in what Israeli politicians deceitfully term a programme of “voluntary emigration”.
'Starve or surrender'
This week, Israeli reservists told Haaretz that the Generals’ Plan was indeed in effect, as the Israeli military exploits the shift of global attention away from Gaza towards Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and a potential war with Iran.
One said: “It doesn’t conform to any standard of international law. People sat and wrote a systematic order with charts and an operational concept, at the end of which you shoot whoever isn’t willing to leave.”
Netanyahu’s Likud Party is reportedly getting ready for a post-genocide Gaza, issuing invitations to an event this week entitled “Preparing to Settle Gaza”. Several government ministers were expected to attend.
The mastermind behind the Generals’ Plan is Giora Eiland, a reservist general and politically “centrist” figure in Israel familiar to anyone who has studied the evolution of Israeli military doctrine over the past two decades.
It was Eiland who pushed hardest early in Israel’s war on Gaza to block all aid and starve the civilian population, supposedly to encourage them to rise up against Hamas. He has also been keen to let epidemics rage through the enclave.
His thinking is entirely unrelated to the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas. Back in 2014, during one of Israel’s earlier rounds of bloodletting, Eiland proposed a “starve or surrender” policy towards Gaza’s population by cutting off all food and water.
Earlier still, in 2008, Eiland responded to Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war by promoting a plan even more demented than those of his colleagues. He proposed making the Lebanese state, its army and the civilian population the primary targets for Israel’s wrath, not Hezbollah.
His worldview appears to now be shaping Israel’s approach north of its border, just as it has in Gaza.
Time of monsters
Trying to keep in the shadows - while occasionally venturing into the light to throw up its hands in frustration, as it sends more weapons and aid to Israel - is Washington.
Make no mistake: none of this would be happening were the US really opposed to the war. Tiny Israel has neither the economy, nor the arsenal, to sustain a war against the Palestinian people, Lebanon and Iran.
The detonation of weaponry across the region equivalent to many atomic bombs is possible because of the Biden administration’s deep pockets and limitless indulgence.
We are entering a period not only of industrialised slaughter carried out in the name of a supposed western civilisation, but also of an earth-shaking geopolitical crisis.
In 1929, in the dark, chaotic period between the First and Second World Wars, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously wrote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
The old world is dying once again. It thinks it is in charge of the birth of the new; the remaking of the Middle East. But it is wrong. It is not fighting monsters. It is the monster.
And the new stands no chance of being born until these monsters are slain.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
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