Caitlin Johnstone on the Gaza genocide

The Gaza holocaust will be a litmus test for high-profile figures for decades.  Everyone’s comments or lack thereof on Israel’s genocidal atrocities will be looked up and amplified whenever their name rises to public attention.  It will be the first step in determining whether anyone deserves to be listened to, taken seriously, or voted for.  Their comments on Gaza in the mid-2020s will be the first gate through which they must pass to be considered worthy of attention by normal people. 

Someone asked me, “Why do you care so much about Palestine?” 

I told them ultimately it’s not even especially about Palestine.  I care about humanity.  I don’t want my kids and grandkids living in the kind of world that would watch civilians get ripped to shreds in full view of the entire planet with the support of my government and its allies.  I think that’s pretty reasonable.

~ Caitlin Johnstone, "They Seriously Expected Parades and Trophies For Pausing a Genocide," LewRockwell.com, October 14, 2025

 

Jeremy Hammond on Donald Trump's plans to rebuild Gaza

If Trump believed that the Palestinians would agree to be dislocated from Gaza because of Israel’s destruction, and that Israel’s Arab neighbors would be delighted to assist in the plan to complete the ethnic cleansing that Israel started in 1948, he sorely miscalculated.

~ Jeremy R. Hammond, "David Hearst Explains Trump's Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza," Jeremy R. Hammond, February 10, 2025

Peter Ford on Israel and UNRWA

The Israelis love to make up any propaganda they can about UNRWA, and they try to limit UNRWA funding. They use any method to try to stymie, block, or make more difficult the operations of UNRWA. They really do want to bring an end to this agency.

 

In a way, you can understand it because the agency is synonymous with Palestinian rights and in particular with the right of return. This implies the Palestinians have a right to return to those towns and villages from which their forebears were expelled back in 1948. 

So this is why UNRWA is a thorn in the side of Israel and one they would love to destroy completely. Their ambition has no limit. And we’ve seen this during the Gaza crisis. They have used this to try to exclude UNRWA, make propaganda against UNRWA, and create substitutes for UNRWA. Creating a substitute is the latest strategy. The organization that had some of its staff killed by the Israelis is one of these. In fact, that organization was particularly friendly to the Israelis and the Israelis facilitated its entry to Gaza. And it was a tragic irony that the Israelis ended up killing employees of this agency, World Central Kitchen. The Israelis aim to replace UNRWA with organizations they can control like this. That’s part of the plan with the port to be created by the Americans and the British in northern Gaza. It would be serviced by organizations other than UNRWA.

~ Peter Ford, Special Representative to the Commissioner General of UNRWA, "The Future of UNRWA and Hamas in Gaza" by Rick Sterling, LewRockwell.com, June 6, 2024

Caitline Johnstone on Israel's targeting of hospitals in Gaza

Why would Israel want to destroy Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure?  The answer to that question has been clear for months: to make the land uninhabitable for the Palestinians.  The same reason they’re deliberately starving Gazans, destroying their homes, continually moving them from place to place and bombing every “safe zone” they create. 

This is naturally giving rise to a situation in which the inhabitants of Gaza will either die or flee to some other country — which just so happens to be exactly what Israel wants them to do. 

It’s so obvious what’s happening here.  Painfully obvious.  Poke-you-in-the-eyeballs obvious.  But we’re still subjected to a western political-media class who keeps forcefully telling us that this blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is not what it looks like.  Telling us that all this starvation and destruction and elimination of healthcare services and the way it directly places pressure on the Palestinians to leave their homeland is just a series of coincidences arising from Israel’s “war” of “defense,”  That only by pure happenstance does it look exactly the same as the advancement of an agenda that Israelis have sought to advance for generations. 

Well I personally am through with having my intelligence insulted, and I hope you are too.  The sky is blue, a spade’s a spade, the emperor has no clothes, and Israel is conducting a very obvious ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

~ Caitline Johnstone, "Israel's Savage Destruction Of Gaza's Healthcare System Is Exactly What It Looks Like," Caitline's Newsletter, April 1, 2024

Ilana Mercer on the "seething snake pit that is Gaza"

In 2005, with great enthusiasm from the Israeli Left, Gaza was given over to the dogs of war, Hamas and their avid constituents.  Despite the fertile, coastal land they were handed, the precious ground water they sit on, and generous international assistance, the place soon went to the dogs.  Egypt, Jordan and Israel are all terrified to open their borders to the seething snake pit that is Gaza.

It matters not whether you think the cauldron of cruelty that is Gaza created its inhabitants or whether it’s the obverse.  The reality is that every nation in the region fears the Gazans.  Nobody in the region wants immigrants from Gaza...

~ Ilana Mercer, "Hamas, Israel and the Anatomy of State Treason," The Unz Review, October 12, 2023

Eric Margolis on life in Gaza

I have been watching and writing about the agony of Palestine for some 70 years.   I’ve watched what was to have been a small Jewish enclave grow into a powerful Sparta with some 200 nuclear weapons and unprecedented control of the US Congress and media. 

Gaza, this miserable, squalid human garbage dump, is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948.  Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders.  Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore.  Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt.

[...]

Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation.  Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation.  Chemicals to treat water are banned.  Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s US-supplied air force.  Hospitals have almost no medicines.  In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison.  Even the wretched animals in Gaza Zoo are starving.  Hamas fighters have reportedly even killed cats and dogs.

The intensive punishment of Gaza, a crime under international law, began after its people voted in a free election for the Hamas movement over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which is more or less run by Israel and the United States.  Israel helped found Hamas in 1987 to split the PLO, but then sought, with the US, to destroy the organization, branding it ‘terrorist.’

~ Eric Margolis, "How Much Longer Will Palestinians Be Martyr People?," LewRockwell.com, October 14, 2023

Amnesty International on the killing of Palestinian demonstrators in the Great March of Return (2018)

According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, since the start of the protests, over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations.  At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists.  Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition.  According to Israeli media, one soldier was moderately injured due to shrapnel from a grenade thrown by a Palestinian from inside Gaza and one Israeli soldier was killed by Palestinian sniper fire near the fence that separates Gaza and Israel outside of the context of the protests. 

Why are Palestinians demonstrating? 

This year has marked 11 years since Israel imposed a land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip.  The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), among others, have characterized Israel’s closure policy as “collective punishment” and called for Israel to lift its closure.  Under Israel’s illegal blockade, movement of people and goods is severely restricted and the majority of exports and imports of raw materials have been banned.  Travel through the Erez Crossing, Gaza’s passenger crossing to Israel, the West Bank, and the outside world, is limited to what the Israeli military calls “exceptional humanitarian cases”, meaning mainly those with significant health issues and their companions, and prominent businesspeople.  Meanwhile, since 2013, Egypt has imposed tight restrictions on the Rafah crossing, keeping it closed most of this time. 

Over the last 11 years, civilians in the Gaza Strip, 70% of whom are registered refugees from areas that now constitute Israel, have suffered the devastating consequences of Israel’s illegal blockade in addition to three wars that have also taken a heavy toll on essential infrastructure and further debilitated Gaza’s health system and economy.  As a result, Gaza’s economy has sharply declined, leaving its population almost entirely dependent on international aid.  Gaza now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world at 44%.  Four years after the 2014 conflict, some 22,000 people remain internally displaced, and thousands suffer from significant health problems that require urgent medical treatment outside of the Gaza Strip.  However, Israel often denies or delays issuing permits to those seeking vital medical care outside Gaza, while hospitals inside the Strip lack adequate resources and face chronic shortages of fuel, electricity and medical supplies caused mainly by Israel’s illegal blockade. 

The protests were launched to demand the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees to their villages and towns in what is now Israel, and to call for an end to Israel’s blockade.  They culminated on 14 May, on the day of the US embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when Palestinians commemorate the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands in 1948-9 during the conflict following the creation of the state of Israel.  On that day alone, Israeli forces killed 59 Palestinians, in a horrifying example of use of excessive force and live ammunition against protesters who did not pose an imminent threat to life.

The organizers of the “Great March of Return” have repeatedly stated that the protests are intended to be peaceful, and they have largely involved demonstrators protesting near the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel. Despite this, the Israeli army reinforced its forces – deploying tanks, military vehicles and soldiers, including snipers, along the Gaza/Israel fence – and gave orders to shoot anyone within several hundred metres of the fence.

~ "Six Months On: Gaza's Great March of Return," Amnesty International, October 19, 2018

Former IDF solider on collective guilt applied to Palestinians in Gaza

I think as we dominate Palestinians more, especially in this way in which we do it in Gaza, I think as a people, as society, we become much more tolerant to death of civilians.  And it's coming to a point where people actually claim that there's no such thing as an innocent person in Gaza.  This is a gradual process that's reaching a peak, I hope, because if this isn't the peak, I don't want to know what the peak is.

[...]

If you only believe that "It's either us or them," then war is the only option.  It's very fertile land for war and dehumanization.

~ Ariel Bernstein, former IDF combat soldier, "This Israeli Soldier Fought in Gaza," Owen Jones, 21:00, 28:25 mark, December 15, 2023

Clarissa Ward on the killing of journalists in Gaza

This was our first time being able gain access into Gaza, but the journalists in Gaza have been doing heroic work, extraordinary work.  They have paid such a high price for that.  This is the deadliest conflict for journalists that we have seen in decades.  More than 60 journalists in Gaza alone have been killed in the last two and a half months.  That is according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.  So you have a perfect storm here with massive bombardment, and inability to create safe zones, an inability to get humanitarian access where it's needed, and incredibly brave journalists who are doing everything they can to tell the stories and bring the reality to the world.  But [also] the frustration of international journalists who can't get in to try to complement and supplement their efforts.

~ Clarissa Ward, "CNN visited a Gaza hospital.  This is what we saw," CNN, 10:45 mark, December 14, 2023

Clarissa Ward on the death toll in Gaza

Now the death toll in Gaza as a result of Israel's frenzied bombardment currently hovers at roughly 18,000.  If you do the math, extrapolating as the U.N. says, that two-thirds of the casualties are civilians, that is about 11,800 civilians who have been killed in just over two months.  To give you a comparison, in the first year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to an independent research organization, some 7,700 civilians were killed by U.S. forces.  In 20 years in Afghanistan... some 12,000 civilians were killed.

~ Clarissa Ward, "CNN visited a Gaza hospital.  This is what we saw," CNN, 7:30 mark, December 14, 2023

Avi Shlaim on how the Six-Day War transformed the IDF

Israeli generals speak about their operations in Gaza as "mowing the lawn."  This is a very grim metaphor and in any case a very curious way of bringing about peace with the Palestinians.  I served in the IDF in the mid-1960s and I served loyally and proudly because in my time the IDF was true to its name.  It was the Israel Defense Forces.  But as a result of the occupation, the IDF was transformed into the brutal police force of a brutal colonial power.

~ Professor Avi Shlaim, "Prof. Avi Shlaim - Hamas is Not a Greater Obstacle to Peace Than Israel," OxfordUnion, 8:40 mark, April 29, 2015

Dylan Saba on racist assumptions about Palestinians living in Gaza

It is precisely anti-Palestinian racism that allows people to say that there is no distinction between Palestinians living in Gaza and Hamas, which is exactly the messaging of the Israeli government.  They're saying it openly.  They're saying that they're not treating them differently and they're saying that Gaza is full of terrorists.  That distinction is based on racist assumptions about Palestinians.  It's based on the abiliy to paint Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians with a broad brush, that is to paint them as a threat to Israeli safety and Jewish safety.  So that is what is behind the smears and what allows the naked genocidal rhetoric on the Israeli side and on the U.S. side in supporting these actions.

~ Dylan Saba, "Zionist anti-Palestine censorship is surging," The Chris Hedges Report, 16:25 mark, November 24, 2023

The Economist: "Only America can save Israel and Gaza from greater catastrophe"

How rapidly things fall apart.  The deadly blast in Gaza at Ahli Arab hospital on the evening of October 17th killed many Palestinians who were taking shelter.  Despite strong evidence that their deaths were caused by the failure of a Palestinian rocket laden with fuel, Arab countries rushed to condemn Israel.  Hizbullah, a heavily armed Lebanese militia, is lurching closer to outright war with Israel.  Bridges built painstakingly between Israel and its Arab neighbours lie in ruins. 

How fragile are the forces trying to hold things together.  Fifteen hours after the blast, President Joe Biden landed in Israel, an old man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.  Mr Biden’s diplomacy is a geopolitical moment.  As well as signalling grief and support for Israel, it brings into focus how much this crisis matters to the Middle East and to America.

~ "Only America can save Israel and Gaza from greater catastrophe; Iran, Russia and China are profiting from the mayhem," The Economist, October 21, 2023