It is cold comfort that, in the very final stages of Israel’s genocide, media pundits such as Piers Morgan are finally ready to concede that a genocide may be about to happen.
Gaza under Israeli bombardment on Oct. 7, 2023. (Ali Hamad of
APAimages for WAFA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Too many pundits, such as the interminably dim-witted Piers Morgan, are slowly, oh-so-slowly coming round to the idea that Israel might be committing a genocide in Gaza.
But of course, they are still dismissing as “anti-Semites” those of us who pointed out from the start that it was a genocide.
They hope to get away with this face-saving ploy only because the establishment media continues to ignore what happened before Oct. 7, 2023 — events that over many years had made clear Israel was readying to commit genocide — and would grasp a pretext when it arrived.
Here is a brief outline of some of the most pertinent factors:
1. In early 2008 — that is, 17 years ago — Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general, threatened that Gaza would face a “Shoah” — a word until then, strictly reserved for the Holocaust.
2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits and bombed its only airport.
From then on, food was tightly rationed, in what Israeli leaders called “putting Gaza on a diet,” while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called “mowing the lawn.” Gaza was effectively turned into a concentration camp.
Displaced Palestinians gather at a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip after fleeing their homes in an area under heavy Israeli aerial bombardment in the besieged Palestinian territory, Aug. 26, 2014. (UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan)
3. The siege was complemented by Israel’s gradual destruction of Gaza’s means of self-sufficiency: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave’s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza’s industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza’s electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.
Smoke and flames rise from a power plant in Gaza that was hit by missile strikes, July 29, 2014. (UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel’s goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming U.N. aid organisations were linked to Hamas “terror” in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity since Oct. 7, 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-U.S. front group, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.”
The “No Man’s Land” in what Israel calls the buffer zone along the Gaza-Israel border, 2008. (Kashfi Halford, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
5. With this as the background, the United Nations warned a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire.
In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting “42 knees in one day.” Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has warned.
New York City rally May 18, 2018, protests 70 years of Nakba and supports the Great Return March in Gaza. (Joe Catron/Flickr/ CC BY-NC 2.0)
Let us note too that Israel’s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza — and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave’s desperate plight — was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on Oct. 7, 2023.
5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the U.S. to join it in a pressure campaign on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave’s people would flood into Sinai — an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before Oct. 7, 2023, and has continued to do so since.
In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide — all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.
Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza’s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what’s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world. Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped — now.
It is cold comfort indeed that, in the very final stages of Israel’s genocide, media pundits like Piers Morgan are ready to concede that a genocide may be about to happen. None of that should obscure or excuse their 21 months of complicity in the genocide that unfolded before all our eyes. They did not know because they did not want to know.
Responsibility for every dead child in Gaza, every maimed child in Gaza, every orphaned child in Gaza, every starving child in Gaza, irreversibly damaged by malnutrition, rests firmly on their shoulders.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Your voice along with the authentic Jewish Voice for Peace
reveals how infested established media propaganda for
deception remains, keeping military-industrial complex
corporate ruling elites in power.
So all the more important to keep the distinction between
Jewish belief in a coming kingdom of peace and social justice
for all mankind and the Zionist maniacal messianism for a
militarized Israeli nation-state in Palestine and beyond.
Thanks again and again Jon.
As always, cogent, brilliant, succinct. Thank you. Would that your words could reverse this horror. Or, for that matter, gin up courage and backbone in America’s Congress and/or Britain’s Parliament sufficient to stop the “lawyers, guns and money” that have greased the wheels of genocide.
The blast shown in the top photo is of a uranium-based bomb (apparently some form of the 900-kilo Mk 84). The brilliant orange flash is an indisputable give-away, the black smoke is the uranium particles rising on the updraft as the uranium burns at up to 5,000° C. The white / pale gray smoke in the foreground is what fire-fighters call “urban smoke”, to wit the result of the burning of anything that might be in an urban construction. The sparks are tiny bits of the uranium warhead burning. It is designed to shatter in order to expose as much as possible of the uranium to the air so that it can burn at maximum temperatures.
According to a report from Reuters on 30 June 2024, the U.S. had shipped 10,000 of these (apparently even before 7 October) then another 4,000 in the first half of last year (2024) with an additional 4,000 scheduled for delivery for the second half of 2024. The latter shipment was put on hold for fear of negative publicity in the context of the election campaign. When Trump acceded to the presidency, he had them sent.
The number of them using uranium as the explosive charge (which constitutes 429 kilos of the total weight) is unknown but reckoned to be well over half of the total sent. The uranium particles are radioactive for 22 billion years. Difficult to see how the entire coastal region, from the Sinai up to Turkey, is not contaminated by now.
Last I heard, there is a bill pending in both houses of Congress to authorize the shipment of another 35,000. They are big money makers for the manufacturers, for when the uranium is depleted uranium, it is given and delivered free of charge as nuclear waste.