By Jeremy Salt
Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide in full view—massacres, starvation, and forced displacement while the west looks away.
Back in the 1960s, Bernard Lewis coined the phrase ‘clash of civilizations.’ Some time later Samuel Huntington took it up. It was a hokey argument. Governments ‘clashed’ over tangibles, money, territory, power, domination, control, not something as fuzzy as ‘civilization’ but it was a convenient let-out clause for predatory imperialist powers bent on bringing the world under their control.
In any case, what was ‘western’ civilization but a schizoid Janus-faced beast listening to Bach and Mozart while enslaving millions of peoples around the world, massacring them, taking their land, and plundering their resources?
This is the ugly face of the civilization we are seeing again right now. Sitting on its hands and talking about everything but the Gaza genocide.
The seed the European powers planted in Palestine has grown into what is shaping up as the greatest threat to world peace since the Nazis. And that can’t be a coincidence, given the ideological affinities between Nazism and Zionism, the racism, the supremacism, the contempt for international law, and the contempt for human life now on full display in Gaza and Lebanon.
Not forgetting the equivalent of lebensraum, expansionism,and territorial maximalism to make way for Jewish settlers to replace the Palestinian “human animals.” Only a small notch above the Nazis, who described their Jewish and other victims as sub-human.
And such a grotesque irony, Nazis figuring out ways to get rid of the Jews in the 1930s and Jews figuring out how to get rid of the Palestinians in 2025. They are Jews of course, not just Zionists, but vicious Jews, just as there are vicious Muslims, Christians, and atheists, to make that clear. They are a stain on Jewish history that will never be removed and are now indelibly etched into that history.
Emigration and finally death camps were the choices of both the Nazi government and the Israeli government except that ‘emigration’ is far too tame a word for what Israel has in mind for the Palestinians. No one knows the true number of Palestinians already massacred but it is clearly much higher than the Hamas figure, close to 200,000, the Lancet medical journal has suggested, but it could be much higher than that.
The Palestinians have taken advantage of the ceasefire to dig bodies out of the ruins but there is no ceasefire now because Netanyahu has broken it. As of the time of writing 9.38 am on March 18, Israel had just massacred 235 Palestinians in missile strikes. Many of them children of course – of course – seeing that so many thousands have already been murdered.
Fathers holding up the bodies of their torn-apart children is a sight now familiar in Gaza. Once just one of these images would have made headlines around the world. Now there are so many of them they rarely make the news at all. That is how low the western world in particular has sunk.
Unable so far to find takers for the population ‘transfer’ Trump also wants, Israel is going for extermination. The ‘choice’ given to the Palestinians weeks ago is to get out or stay and die. Get out where to? There is nowhere to go. The Palestinians in Gaza are struck, trapped, at the mercy of these killers – and they have no mercy.
‘If you don’t die because there’s no food or water we will kill you.’ That is the message passed on. An old Palestinian, a young Palestinian, a disabled Palestinian, a teacher, a professor, a laborer, a musician, a farmer, a journalist, doesn’t make any difference. Israel’s most moral army in the universe will kill them all.
Not in their homes because there are none left but in their fields, in their tents, on their beaches, on the streets of their ruined cities, killed with bombs, missiles, drones, and snipers’ bullets, killed by cutting off all the necessities of life, food, water, medicine, and electricity for heating and cooking.
This is what is happening right now. ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ cried Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and that is what is playing out in the Gaza death camp, this time run by Jews, an unsavoury truth but still a truth. Of course, it was Kurtz, the agent of civilization, who was the brute.
Israel should never have been created on someone else’s land. It is a usurper, thieving state, one of many in history but this is the 21st century not the 17th or 18th. Israel has never shown any remorse and neither has the world learned not to repeat or allow to be repeated the horrors of the past. There are few horrors of the past as bad as Gaza and perhaps even none.
Israel is the contradiction of the colonial settler state established at the very end of settler-colonial history. It was birthed by the UN, the mother it now hates because it keeps trying to correct its vile behavior.
It is full of hate. Venom pours out of its social media. It hates the UN. Its chief delegate tore up the charter on the podium in the General Assembly. Hate spills out of its government, its parliament, its media, its religious institutions, hatred not just of the Palestinians or the Arabs or the UN or anyone who doesn’t appreciate genocide but hatred of each other. Maybe that is what might eventually bring this venture to an end. It will end up consuming itself.
Its tantrums and theatrical outrage are a matter of record but it is indulged every time. The politicians run scared, in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and within the EU. They don’t call genocide genocide because Israel and its lobbyists won’t like it.
They don’t mention the massacred 17000 children because Israel and its lobbyists won’t like it. They are free to criticize as long as they check with Israel and its lobbyists first. Anyway, their criticism is coded so that Israel understands that “we share your democratic values and are really on your side whatever we say.” They must keep expressing support for a two-state solution, knowing it is never going to happen. Israel knows they know, so everything’s cool.
They express concern at Gaza but not anger. After all, people with brown skin have been genocided by people with white skin for hundreds of years. It’s happening again but really it’s quite normal, the whites killing and the browns and blacks being killed.
It would be totally abnormal only if those skins were white. Can anyone imagine more than two million white-skinned people, trapped in a small patch of land, with no means of escape, being butchered and starved by mass murderers without the ‘west’ intervening immediately to stop it?
This draws the line not just under Israel’s racist inhumanity but the racism implicit in western inaction, or rather the action in allowing the genocide to continue in full view for 18 months so far.
Israel is fully backed by the US, whose institutions it has thoroughly infiltrated, and is fully supported by it whatever it does, is given whatever it wants. The combination of the two is a standing threat to global peace.
Israel obeys no laws but its own. It sucks its ‘allies’ dry and at the same time betrays them. This is what the Zionist militias did to Britain in the 1940s when Britain had no more to give. They murdered its policemen and assassinated its senior officials.
In the 1960s think of the USS Liberty and plutonium smuggled out of the US. More recently, think of Rachel Corrie, James Miller, Tom Hurndall, activists and journalists, from the US and the UK, all murdered in Gaza. Think of the young Turkish American murdered on the Mavi Marmara, Furkan Dogan. Dozens of other stories round out the picture of a state that does not even respect its allies but is still supported by them in this destructive masochistic way.
By his actions, Netanyahu has emphasized that Israel is not going to change. To survive it has to keep killing, just as it believed in 1948. Not just the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians but anyone who gets in its way.
If and when, both likely, Israel is finally backed into a corner with no escape, the message it has passed on for decades is that it has the weapons to take everyone down with it, so don’t be surprised if it does. And who provided it with the weapons and the technical know-how to lead the world closer every day to the edge of this precipice? No prizes for the right answer.
11.59 am right now and the Guardian reports more than 320 ‘dead’ in Gaza. Mass-murdered, actually, and no doubt in the coming hours the number will increase. 2.08 pm, more than 400.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Israel is the biggest terrorist and threat to human life o this planet we call home. They need to be sent to moon to settle.
It’s no wonder people hate the Jews. They don’t care about anyone: even their fellow Israelis living in Gaza…if all the ZioNazis die tomorrow, the world will be a better place. But the Israeli Jews are just as guilty because they don’t stop it. Actually, they could learn something from the Palestinians and Gazans who refuse to back down, and are some of the most resilient people in the world. Tomorrow, they’ll still be there. Wasrael will fail and fade away.