By Jeremy Salt

With no peaceful options left, the pendulum swings back to the war already being fought by the ‘axis of resistance’ and likely to widen into a regional war at any moment.

There is no coming back from this. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians murdered, half of them children, thousands of uncounted dead under the rubble, tens of thousands maimed for life.

This is not a war on Hamas but a war on civilians, the military attack of October 7 the pretext used by a genocidal political and military command to wipe out Palestine once and for all.

Thousands of children have been killed. Thousands of others have been maimed life. Their damaged limbs are being cut off without anaesthesia in hospitals because there is none. Yet the next day even more are killed or maimed. There is no holding back. There is no public outrage at the mass murder of children.

On the contrary, the majority of Jewish Israelis support what their military is doing and many want it to go even further. The Palestinians are being starved to death but Israeli protestors are even blocking the small amounts of aid reaching Gaza from the Nitzana crossing. This is apart from the bombing of food and medical aid trucks reaching Gaza from Egypt.

This is not just Netanyahu or Gallant and the rest of the psychopaths/sociopaths in the political and military command but the people. They are all sharing in this blood festival.

They cannot say they don’t know what is going on because even if their media suppresses the daily reports of atrocities they only have to go to the internet or social media to find out.

The slaughter of children is so shocking, so vile that it will not be forgotten or forgiven in the next 2000 years. This is Netanyahu’s Amalek in action. A state that has sunk to such a depraved level is writing its own death warrant.

The heroes are the young Palestinian men fighting on despite the overwhelming odds against them. They are destroying tanks with RPGs or running up to them to clamp explosives on their sides.

Propaganda videos show the Israeli soldiers running across the sand or firing at nothing in particular from windows but mostly they are relying on missile strikes, as they did in southern Lebanon in 2006.

They don’t dare venture into the tunnels. Their military command claims victories yet Hamas and the other resistance groups are fighting back as strongly as they were four months ago.

The ‘Hamas prisoners’ are civilian men who have been rounded up and humiliated for propaganda purposes. Had the Israelis been killing Hamas or other fighters in large numbers they would be showing the bodies but we have yet to see any.

Atrocities are taken to a new level every day. Dozens of civilians are massacred, their hands bound behind their backs with Hebrew writing on the ties, their bodies stuffed into plastic garbage bags and dumped under rubble.

Snipers kill anyone who moves in what is no more than target practice. Murderers dressed up as doctors, nurses and patients kill three young men – one paralysed for months – as they sleep in their hospital beds. The accusation that they are planning a terrorist action is a grotesque lie.

Their camouflage is fourth rate high school play quality and unnecessary anyway as there’s nothing in the hospital, no arms or armed men, to stop them from going upstairs in their uniforms to do their killing.

Universities, schools and hospitals are destroyed. The ancient cultural heritage of Gaza has been wiped out in four months of missile strikes. While the people starve to death the Israeli soldiers mock the children whose classrooms they have destroyed and jeer and laugh as the buildings they have mined come tumbling down. On the West Bank as well they kill even children without compunction.

Gaza is not an aberration but totally consistent with the ideology of Zionism and the heinous crimes committed since 1948. The ‘start up nation’ has used science to turn itself into a techno-barbaric state. The mindset is tribal-primitive, the electronics the most advanced in the world, which is why Hamas’ penetration of the Gaza fence on October 7 caused the shock and murderous rage that could only be expunged with the shedding of Palestinian blood.

Gaza is further evidence – if any is needed – that Zionism is a catastrophically failed venture.  The idea of setting up a Jewish state in a part of the Middle East that was more than 90 per cent non-Jewish was wrong from the start and should never have been allowed to go ahead.

Zionism has ruined the lives Jews had in the Middle East for more than 2000 years.

It has ruined the lives of Palestinians and brought the Middle East to a permanent point of regional war.  It has ghettoized the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank and in the process turned itself into a Jewish ghetto. The

Libya is described as a failed state but it was not Libya that failed. It was the US, France and Britain whose air attacks turned a prosperous state into what they call a failed state but where does the failure really lie if not in the bandit behavior of these three states?  By comparison, Israel is wholly responsible for its global status as a pariah state obeying no laws but its own.   Further than this, it can only be what it wants to be because it lives outside international law.

Not only does Israel have no respect for international law, it has no respect for the institution that supported its creation in 1947, the UN. It has never complied with the conditions written into the partition plan and indeed regards the UN as a dangerous enemy.  We are now seeing this in its attempts to destroy UNRWA, the organization that has helped to keep the Palestinians alive since 1948.

Having murdered more than 150 UN staff and bombed UN schools, Israel accused a tiny handful of its staff of supporting the Hamas military attack of October 7.  Having done nothing to stop the mass murder being committed in Gaza every day, the US and its camp followers immediately suspended their aid to UNRWA.

Seeing that the population of Gaza is already close to starvation, these states now stand accused of complicity in genocide. When Belgium went in the other direction and actually increased its support for UNWRA, Israel bombed its Gaza office. Vindictively, it also destroyed UNRWA’s health centre in a missile strike.

There was a time when Israel had the support of the world, largely because the world did not know any better.  In the last 50 years, however, the world has caught up with the truth, that Israel was an imperial implant, a stake driven into the very heart of the Middle East to split it up and serve imperial interests.

Without British protection, the Zionists would not have been able to plant a foot on the ground in Palestine: to Jewish communities around the world they would have remained a fanatical splinter group with no future.

There are now no options for a peace acceptable to Israel, not two states and not one, unless it is a Jewish state.  The South African Zionist settler Abba Eban used to say the Palestinians never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity.  It was a slick line but an inversion of the truth, which was that it was the Zionists who wasted every opportunity that came their way.

The Palestinians in the 1960s were ready for one secular state for all.  Even Egypt’s President Nasser was ready to negotiate with Israel. In the decades to come the PLO, the US and the Arab states all came up with their own peace proposals, all generous to Israel, all falling into dust because Israel either ignored or played with them or set ‘peace’ conditions no Palestinian could accept.

The 1990s ‘peace process’ only bought time for Israel to consolidate its grip on the territories seized in 1967.  For the Palestinians it was the greatest disaster since 1948, leading straight to the wall and the catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza. In addition, whereas pogroms in the Russian Jewish pale of settlement in the 19^th century lasted for days at most, the West Bank pogrom at the hands of soldiers and settlers has been continuous for more than half a century.

With no peaceful options left, with the diplomatic track the Palestinians entered upon in good faith decades ago exhausted, the pendulum swings back to the war already being fought by the ‘axis of resistance’ and likely to widen into a regional war at any moment.

With its daily provocations, this seems to be what elements in the Israeli government want, subsuming the Gaza war in a much wider one and saving Netanyahu’s neck at the possible cost of millions of lives.

In 1917, Arthur Balfour saddled the Middle East with a problem from hell.  It has worsened year by year.  Gaza is horrifying but Gaza is far from the end of the story as this demented state has nuclear weapons, enabling it to take everyone else with it if it goes down.

Far from wanting to save the Palestinians, the US and its camp followers are lining up alongside their killers. The US provides the arms so the killing can continue. They are all helping to starve the Palestinians by cutting aid to UNRWA. They justify genocide with the ‘right’ of self -defense. They even say they share Israel’s values.  Their complicity should see them in the dock as well.