There is no middle ground on Gaza genocide
Israel's war of genocide is not about October 7; it is not about freeing Israeli captives. It is, first and foremost, about preserving a racist Jewish governing coalition and seizing a historic opportunity while a submissive administration in Washington looks the other way. The aim is to advance a biblical expansionist project and create the conditions for "self" ethnic cleansing, as part of the permanent erasure of the Palestinian people from their homeland.
As the United Nations officially declared a famine in Gaza City, Israel rejected a ceasefire and threatened to flatten Gaza City "like Beit Hanoun." On July 11, Israel Katz, Israeli war Minister, openly flaunted an aerial image of the razed cities of Rafah in the south and Beit Hanoun in the north, vowing that Gaza City would suffer the same fate.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Intoxicated by international impunity, Israel plans to force one million civilians from the north into a concentration camp, euphemistically called a "humanitarian (tent) city" in the south. Stripped of homes, starved and bombed, Palestinians are being herded into cages to prepare for the "voluntary" expulsion from their country. In this regard, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the Israeli military chief, Eyal Zamir, "Whoever doesn't evacuate... No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger…"
In the occupied West Bank, Smotrich has dusted off the old Israeli blueprint to further carve Palestine into disconnected fragments. His plan dismembers any supposed "future Palestinian state" into three broken pieces: two sealed-off ghettos in the West Bank and another in Gaza. The aim is to undermine the geographical contiguity of any future Palestinian state, while cementing the Israeli "Jewish-only" colonial project of "from the river to the sea" as a permanent reality.
Europe knows this well. It condemns these illegal colonies, urges Israel not to expand them, and pretends to show indignation. And then? Nothing. Worse than nothing, Europe continues granting Israel privileged trade status, even importing goods produced in the very "Jewish-only" colonies it labels "illegal." By financing Israel's war economy while issuing toothless statements, Europe is complicit in the machinery of Jewish apartheid and war.
Across the Atlantic, the Donald Trump administration does more than enable Israel; it emboldens it. Washington has written Israel a blank cheque to flatten Gaza and strangle the West Bank, and even the killing of US citizens along the way.
As children in Gaza starve, Trump, building on Joe Biden's and Antony Blinken's Israel-first diplomacy, is pushing to reward Tel Aviv with normalisation deals with Arab regimes. In Paris, American mediator Tom Barak brokered a meeting between the Syrian foreign minister and Israel's strategic affairs minister, while simultaneously pressuring Lebanon to disarm the resistance. All the while, Washington sanctions Israel's occupation of strategic areas in southern Lebanon and its expansion deep into Syria in flagrant violation of ceasefire agreements.
Israel's grip on Washington runs deeper than mere politics. The pro-Israel Zionist lobby, AIPAC, maintains bipartisan obedience through an "equal-opportunity" campaign financing. Beyond money, Israel has long wielded leverage through kompromat, media manipulation and extortion. Its power is so pervasive that it can even override the US justice system, enabling Israeli citizens, or American Jews, to evade accountability for crimes committed on US soil. Tom Alexandrovich is just one recent case, arrested in a sting operation for luring American children for sex. He was released from a Las Vegas prison after posting a $10,000 bail and allowed to leave the country.
But he is not an exception. From financial fraud and organ trafficking to sexual offences, Alexandrovich was but one of many who escaped US justice system. He joins a long list of offenders who found refuge in Israel, or what has become the global sanctuary for foreign Jewish paedophiles.
Furthermore, through potential Mossad sayanim from Jeffrey Epstein's blackmail networks to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Israel has been suspected of exploiting political weaknesses to bend American and world leaders to its will. Through bribes, sex, threats and relentless lobbying, they steer US foreign policy to serve Tel Aviv over the interests of the US citizens.
Trump, like his predecessors, appears to be entangled in the same AIPAC web of influence and corruption.
The cost of all this is measured in Palestinian lives. Gaza lies in ruins, and its residents are victims of a UN-declared, Israeli-made famine. The starved are forced to line up for food under drones and sniper scopes at the misnomer "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." In the West Bank, daily life is a gauntlet of checkpoints, Jewish-only roads, home demolitions and marauding Zionist youth mobs emboldened by the state.
Ironically, Israel has never hidden its goals: ethnic cleansing, no Palestinian sovereignty, no right of return and Jewish apartheid imposed on the indigenous people of the land. Gaza is being emptied, and the West Bank is being fragmented into Bantustans. The so-called international communities, including Europe, the US and Arab regimes foremost among them, are complicit through cover-up, silence and betrayal.
We have been here before. South African apartheid did not collapse because it grew a conscience. It collapsed because the world forced it down, through boycotts, sanctions and the moral power of global grassroots solidarity. The same must happen now. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every burned olive tree, every acre stolen to build Jewish-only homes in the West Bank, carries not just Israel's fingerprints but also those of the governments and institutions that finance, directly and indirectly, these racist policies.
Palestinians will not survive on hollow statements or empty promises. Europe's recognition of Palestine means nothing without concrete action: sanctions, divestment and an end to trade with Israel and its illegal Jewish-only colonies. Meanwhile, Trump, a master of hypocrisy, urges Russia and Ukraine to stop the killing, while he backs Israel's resumption of genocide and prods it to finish its murdering job. Arab dictators must stop hiding behind so-called "international obligations" when those obligations translate to mass starvation and genocide.
Until then, Israel will press on with its war of genocide, shielded by Trump's unconditional support and Europe's double standards. Its arrogance and apartheid are fuelled not only by bombs and bulldozers, but by the absence of accountability, Western collusion and Arab paralysis.
Just as with the Holocaust, there is no middle ground on the Palestinian genocide: you're either with it or against it.
Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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