By Jeremy Salt

Gaza has been turned into a death zone by Israel, with deliberate, mass-scale violence and complicity from its civilian population, while the international community remains largely indifferent.

War crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in Gaza on a scale we have never seen before, not in the lifetime of almost all of us. They have been committed every day for more than 18 months now. No one escapes. Not the young and not the old, not the disabled and not the patient in the hospital. 

There is no sanctuary, no safe place. The Palestinians are burned to death in tents. They are terrorized into flight from one part of Gaza to another. They are lured into ‘safe places’ and then bombed. They are being starved to death, deliberately denied food, water and electricity, thereby condemning hospital patients to death. 

The genocide is comprehensive, deliberate, mass murder planned in advance and carried out with great attention to detail. There is no mercy, no compassion, no common humanity. The whole of Gaza has been turned into a death zone. The cruelty is hard to comprehend. 

This is not just the government or the military command or the ‘soldiers’ sniping at children and blowing up hospitals, but Israel’s civilian Jewish population. 

Israelis march against Netanyahu, but not once have they marched against genocide. Not once have they marched against the killing of 19-20,000 Palestinian children by their army and air force. The polls since late 2023 have been consistent in recording the complicity of the majority of the Israeli Jewish population. 

A poll carried out by a Tel Aviv university research institute in late 2023, when hospitals had already been bombed and thousands of civilians killed, revealed that only two percent of those polled thought too much firepower was being used in Gaza. 

Nearly 58 percent thought it was too little. A poll carried out by the Viterbi Family Centre for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israeli Democracy Institute, also in late 2023, revealed that more than 80 percent of those polled believed the suffering of the civilian population should be taken into account only “to a very small extent” or “a fairly small extent.” 

A Pew Research Centre poll released on May 30, 2024, found that 19 percent of those polled thought the military had gone too far, 39 percent that it had got it “about right,” and 34 percent “not far enough.” So 73 percent “about right” or “not far enough,” at a time more than 35,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed, a high proportion of them (about 70 percent) women and children. 

An Israeli Democracy Institute poll of October 2024 found 53 percent favoured ending the way not because of the mass killing of Palestinians but because of “damage to the hostages.” Sixty-two percent thought bringing back the hostages should be the primary goal of the war. 

Only three percent thought the war should be ended because of the cost in human life and the desire for peace and quiet, ‘for whom?’ not specified. Eighty-six percent of Jews graded the role of the military as “excellent,” and 61 percent opposed the investigation of soldiers accused of abusing Palestinian prisoners. 

At the same time, 48 percent were pessimistic about the future of the country. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of Israelis have voted with their feet by leaving the country, the reason for which is not to be misinterpreted in any way as sympathy for the Palestinians. 

Not one poll has been based on attitudes towards the slow extermination of the Palestinian population. Israelis are not asked whether they think it is right, even in war, for families to be burnt alive in their tents or paramedics and aid workers murdered on the road. 

Not one question is asked about the mass killing of the totally innocent children. This world-historic crime does not even register in the daily Israeli news cycle. In May 2024, UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini described Gaza as “a war on children.” No one should be surprised. Israel’s wars always involve a high casualty rate among women and children. 

Neither were children excepted from the threats by Israeli politicians and military commanders to annihilate Gaza. The remark by the intelligence officer Eliyahu Yossian that “There are no innocents in Gaza. There are 2.5 million terrorists” comes out of a culture in which Palestinians have been dehumanized over decades as insects and snakes and children as terrorists in the making. 

Vox pop street questions usually get the answer that it’s all Hamas’ fault. This echoes Golda Meir’s remark: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” 

The “excellent behavior” of the soldiers breaks every convention ever written on the conduct of an army in wartime. The soldiers send videos back to their families and friends as they humiliate prisoners, blow up universities, mock children in their shattered classrooms and prance around in women’s underwear in the homes they have destroyed. 

They deliberately kill children. They fired hundreds of bullets into the car where a five-year-old child, Hind Rajab, was pleading for someone to come and save her. They had previously killed six members of her family and they killed the two paramedics coming to her rescue. 

They killed all six of a father’s sons, leaving him to bury them. They killed photojournalist Fatima Hassouna and six of her brothers and sisters. They murder paramedics and bury them with their ambulances. 

They have wiped out entire extended families, 60,70, 80 or more people, so that even the name no longer only exists except on a death register. These are abominable crimes and there are thousands of them. 

The argument that Israelis don’t know any better because the media filters out what the government doesn’t want them to know doesn’t wash in the 21st century. They either do know or they could easily find out. 

Germans in the 1940s only had a totally controlled press and radio. They had some kind of credible argument for not knowing, but with the internet and social media these days, Israelis have no excuse. 

The Gaza genocide is not just the outcome of a handful of psychopaths at the top. This is an entire people, divided amongst themselves, but broadly united in their support of state terror and complicit in genocide. 

They were hardly brought to this point overnight. Lifelong indoctrination across generations prepared the way. The state Israelis have is the one the early Zionists knew they would need if they were to succeed. 

They looked on ‘diaspora’ Jews with contempt. Their model was the state of the Bible, powerful, vengeful, ruthless and successful in establishing its dominance in the land of Canaan. Its enemies were not just to be defeated but eliminated, wiped off the face of the earth.

This is the Amalek Netanyahu invoked when opening the campaign against the Gaza civilian population. He was summoning up the image of an ancient genocidal state to justify genocide and the great majority of Israelis went along with it. 

Less than 80 kms from Gaza, Tel Aviv is as remote from death by missile and starvation as Rudolf Hoss and his family were from the slaughter on the other side of the wall separating their villa from the Auschwitz death camp. 

In the film Zone of Interest, Frau Hoss picks flowers and shows visitors around the garden. In Tel Aviv, only a short drive from Israel’s own death camp, Israelis play netball on the beach, bronze their bodies, or sip a latte in the nearest café. 

They don’t care, they are indifferen,t or they justify. Before she died in 2023, Brigitte Hoss said she was sure her mother knew what was going on over the garden wall, and Israelis know just as well what is going on over the Gaza fence. 

As for the killing of Israeli civilians, apart from the fact that many if not most were killed on October 7 2023 by their own military, there is no resistance movement in history that has not involved the killing of ‘innocent’ civilians – but by whose standards are they innocent, the occupier or the occupied? 

Who is truly ‘innocent’? Was the British settler in Kenya, the French settler in Algeria, wholly ‘innocent’? The German civilian in occupied France or Poland? The Israeli settler on the other side of the Gaza fence, living on land stripped of its native population? The settler on the West Bank? The Australian or American living on land seized from the native population? 

Are they absolved by the fact that these crimes were committed a few centuries ago? If there is a difference, surely it is that we are supposed to know by now that such behaviour cannot be tolerated in a ‘civilized’ world. 

Finally, to go back to the opening phase of the Gazan stage of the Palestinian genocide, there is strong evidence that the Hamas attack of October 7 was allowed to go ahead. Netanyahu knew for weeks, if not months, that it was coming, knew it had been planned for a long time, and knew it would be a major attack. 

He had all the information it needed, from human intelligence on the ground, including the warnings of its own soldiers, to sensors and cameras built all around Gaza and surveillance footage from drones and satellites.

Yet he did nothing and even waited several hours before reacting with the armed forces. 

This cannot be interpreted in any other way than Netanyahu allowing the attack to go ahead, wanting it to go ahead as an investment promising a high return: 1000 Israeli lives invested, Gaza annihilated. 

Would he be capable of such perfidy? Of course. He is a pathological liar, hardened, heartless, corrupt, unprincipled, a “vile messiah leading a cult of lies and death,” as a newspaper described him, and that is just Jewish opinion inside Israel.

Gaza was evidently the first step in an orchestrated campaign worked out with the US to clean up the Middle East once and for all. The next step was Lebanon,  where thousands of civilians were killed in Beirut and the south, and Hezbollah’s leadership wiped out. The third step was Syria, whose destruction handed Israel its greatest victory since 1948, possibly even greater than 1967. 

Now there’s the prospect of a war with Iran if only Trump can be convinced. If Yemen can be broken by mass aerial attacks, with rumours even of plans for a ground invasion, and if Iran can be collapsed as well, all the Middle East will belong to Israel. 

It will be surrounded by scorched earth, and finally it will feel ‘safe.’ There will no longer be an ‘Arab world’, only fragmentation and intimidated states living under the thumb of Israel and its all-powerful American protector. This is what Israel and its US benefactor are driving towards. 

In fact, the future Israel has created for itself has never seemed less certain. Over 80 years, it has completely failed to integrate into the Middle East. Instead, it chose to force itself upon the region. 

The consequences have been catastrophic. Israel remains what it was at the start, a violent western outpost in West Asia. Without western arms, money, and political protection, it cannot survive. It has nothing else to fall back on, and these gifts will not continue indefinitely.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.