WHAT IS A JEW? (+ 9 MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT GAZA)

A guest post by Simon Elmer (from Architects for Social Housing)

Hey Gang,

What you are about to read was written by Simon Elmer, a retired professor, author and activist with the UK-based Architects for Social Housing. It was previously published by Off-Guardian under the title 10 Questions about Gaza.

To me, one of the most important questions that it poses is a simple one - What is a Jew?

This is a question which James Joyce hid in his magnum opus Ulysses. The protagonist of that novel, Leopold Bloom, is Jewish according to some definitions and not according to others.

Robert Anton Wilson was convinced that Joyce was making a deliberate point by doing so. I refer you to the following video if you’d like to hear his logic.

Over the course of the past few years, it is becoming increasingly common knowledge that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Eastern Europeans who converted to Judaism.

Since this story is controversial among Jews, many of whom seem reluctant to believe it, I’ll point you to a Jewish historian telling the story of the Khazarian Conversion.

In other words, Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites and are not directly descended from the ancient Israelites, who may not have even existed.

Some people, most notably Zionists, act as if Jews are a race, and that Jewishness is immutably conferred by genetics. Ethnography is complicated, and at the end of the day a certain amount of subjectivity is involved in applying labels. Although racial differences certainly do have a basis in genetics, it remains true that RACE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT.

(Then again, what isn’t a social construct?)

I guess my interest is in trying to understand why so many Jews feel so strongly about being Jewish, even when they're not religious. Why are people so attached to Jewish identity? Could it be that even people who don’t really believe in God derive some sort of pride from believing that Jews are God’s chosen people? Is the sense of belonging to a special club part of the appeal of Jewish identity?

But what about people who happen to have a Jewish parent but who don’t choose to identify as Jewish? Should the world insist that they are Jewish even if they don’t feel they are? To what extent is Jewishness a choice?

I know that there are many people out there with complicated feelings related to their Jewish identity.

I have one friend, who grew up in Belarus, who told me that when she was told that she was Jewish by her mother as a girl, there was nothing positive about it whatsoever. She was basically told that she was Jewish, that there was nothing she could do about it, and that if the Nazis ever came back, they’d be coming for her. Pretty brutal stuff.

The author Daniel Pinchbeck, who I’m a big fan of, probably speaks for a lot of Jews when he speaks about his confused feelings about what being Jewish means to him.

I am Jewish by birth. My mother’s mother, Rosalind Glassman, was a Polish Jew. My grandfather, Daniel Glassman, was an English Jew. My great grandmother and two of my great aunts came to New York from Poland around 1910, escaping the tragic sequence of events destined to culminate in the Nazi Holocaust. By the time I came into the picture, my small family was secular, assimilated. I was never asked if I wanted a Bar Mitzvah. We barely celebrated Passover. I learned no prayers, did nothing ceremonial…

I always felt cut off from the religious aspects of Judaism. The part of the Jewish tradition I identify with is the cultural, artistic, socially radical, and philosophical side. Through my mother, I knew Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Grace Paley (a bit obscure now, a wonderful writer of short stories), growing up. I love the writings of Proust, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Georges Perec, Alfred Kazin, Henry Miller, and so on. I identify with the radical, anarchist edge of Jewish thinkers and activists such as Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman, Noam Chomsky, even Karl Marx (under-appreciated for his rhetorical artistry) — not to forget Dylan, Lou Reed, and Leonard Cohen.

Now, I might mention that I also love many of these artists and intellectuals Pinchbeck lists, and I’m not really sure that how much it really matters that they were Jewish. I didn’t even know that Henry Miller was Jewish!

I suppose my point is this - ultimately, identity is an illusion produced by identification with the cravings of the ego. I don’t reject the use of identity-terms as labels, but I ultimately believe that one also shouldn’t take them too seriously. We are all unique manifestations of creation, bestowed with consciousness by some mysterious force, and we are really are swimming in a sea of unfathomable mystery.

Now that Jewish ethno-nationalism has reached a truly fascist fever pitch, I suspect that there will be a need for Jews who are opposed to Israel’s crimes against humanity to create a counter-identity of sorts, one based on the elements of the Jewish tradition that are resonant with their values.

At the end of a day, Judaism is a social construct, just as much as whiteness is.

If you feel strongly that you are a Jew, then who am I to tell you otherwise?

At the end of the day, however, I believe that identity is ultimately an illusion, and that human beings should be free to define themselves as they please.

Personally, I believe that we should not base our sense of belongingness on ancient history, but on real affinity between real human beings in the real world.

The fact is that Jewish identitarianism has morphed into something very sinister. Where is all this heading? It’s hard to say, but it looks to me like things are heading towards disaster. Can Israel survive indefinitely surrounded by enemies? Time will tell…

By the way, I would like to offer to debate anyone who claims that the Jews are God’s chosen people. This belief is held by millions of people, but it is simply not intellectually defensible.

Human beings are part of one universal life force, which I call divinity, and we are all equally divine, for the simple reason that there is nothing in the universe except for divinity. Our true identity, therefore, is God. This is the meaning of the Hindu axiom THOU ART THAT. I maintain that the Jewish notion that Jews are “God’s chosen people” is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of metaphysics, and I believe that this can be demonstrated logically through the use of the Socratic method.

From my perspective, the idea that Jews alone are God’s chosen people is simply absurd, but I like to enter debates with an open mind, and am willing to be convinced otherwise.

For now, I hope that you enjoy this very informative piece by the brilliant Simon Elmer!

Love & Solidarity,

Crow Qu’appelle

10 QUESTIONS ABOUT GAZA

by Simon Elmer

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

— W. H. Auden

1. What is a Jew?

‘Their barbaric acts are acts of evil. There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. I stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. The United Kingdom stands with Israel against this terrorism today, tomorrow, and always.’

— Rishi Sunak, UK Prime Minister (9 October, 2023)

Being a Jew is not the same as being a follower of Judaism, since many Jews are secular. And like all religions, Judaism itself is radically divided between different factions, beliefs, practices and political goals. It isn’t a language, as not all Jews speak Hebrew, which like Arabic is a Semitic language; and fewer still speak Yiddish, the German dialect developed by the Ashkenazi Jews. For a lot of people, Jews are a race, although there’s no biological basis to that claim; perhaps a culture, although how that encompasses, say, Ethiopian Jews and the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe is unclear; or a set of practices, although whether these extend beyond religious rituals is also in question. Nor is it a nation. The State of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1947 from the British Mandate of Palestine, and the current population, excluding the occupied Palestinians territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is 21 per cent Arab and 17 per cent Muslim. And of the 15.2 million people worldwide who identified as Jewish in 2022, 7.18 million live in Israel, less than the 7.3 million that live in the USA.

Despite this lack of a clear identity, being a Jew is officially passed down through the mother, which qualifies the child as a ‘womb-Jew’; but it is also possible to convert to the practices and beliefs of Judaism, which also qualifies the converted as a Jew, whatever their parentage, ethnicity, race, nationality, culture or languages they do and don’t speak. It is also, however, the terrible history of the oppression of Jews. Indeed, perhaps it is this that is at the core of Jewish Identity, certainly since the genocide of the Jews leading up to and during the Second World War the Jews call the Shoah, the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’. On 14 November 1935, the first supplemental decree to the Reich Citizenship Law defined ‘Jews’ not as members of a religious or cultural community but as a race defined by hereditary. It was by this criteria that those falling within the power of the Third Reich were progressively stripped of their rights as citizens and, eventually, selected for extermination. It’s one of history’s stranger outcomes that this definition of a Jew is retained today by both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the racially apartheid State of Israel.

Being a Jew, consequently, is now defined less by what it is and more by the threats to its largely manufactured identity, which is to say, by the definition of anti-Semitism. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance formulated a definition of anti-Semitism that has since been adopted by 43 countries, including the UK and the USA but not Palestine, and is supported by the United Nations and the European Union. This definition of anti-Semitism includes the following examples:

• The targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.

  • Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

  • Claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

  • Antisemitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law (e.g. denial of the Holocaust or display of a swastika in Germany).

  • Criminal acts are antisemitic when the target of attacks, whether they are people or property, are selected because they are Jewish.

  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis.

I’d like to think that any lawyer worth his fee would pull these definitions to pieces. Does ‘targeting’, for instance, mean with rockets fired from the ruins of Gaza, or in a report by Amnesty International that accuses Israel of presiding over a ‘cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity’? Where does the conception of Israel as a ‘Jewish collectivity’ leave the 1 in 5 of the population that is Arab? And in this age of mass immigration, why does loyalty to a homeland — even if it is an imaginary one — constitute a crime? Is the British child of Pakistani ethnicity who supports the Pakistani cricket team now to be considered a terrorist threat to the security of the UK? Is the journalist who observes and even celebrates this support now to be condemned as ‘anti-Asian’? As for the racism with which the State of Israel was brought so violently into existence, it has demonstrated this continuously and with increasing openness through the 75 years of its occupation, starting, most violently, with the Nakba, the Arabic word for ‘catastrophe’.

Finally, the possession of history and its symbols has always been a defining characteristic of fascist and totalitarian regimes, and the State of Israel has repeatedly used anything other than obedient adherence to its accounts of history — not only of the history of the ‘Holocaust’ but of its own history — to accuse the non-compliant of anti-Semitism. As an example of which outside Israel, the author and political satirist, C. J. Hopkins, has been found guilty by the German courts for displaying a swastika on his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, which even the most COVID-compliant judge couldn’t mistake for a promotion of fascist ideology. Unfortunately, in its justification for such crude acts of censorship as in so many other aspects of policy — not least of which is its reduction of the Palestinian people to its very own Untermenschen — the policies of the State of Israel and its supporters have drawn and will continue to draw comparison with those of the Nazis.

Despite these and other flaws, the IHRA definition laid the ground on which Zionists today can and do denounce any criticism of Israel and its genocidal attack on Gaza as ‘anti-Semitism’. We saw the same trope deployed by Matt Hancock, the UK Secretary of State for Health during the first 15 months of lockdown, in January of this year, when he publicly denounced Andrew Bridgen MP for raising the dangers of Pfizer’s mRNA gene therapy as ‘anti-semitic, anti-vaxx conspiracy theories’ that ‘have no place in this House or our society’. And in March of this year, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, employed the same trope when he denounced those opposed to his Ultra Low Emission Zone scheme as aligned with the ‘far-right’, ‘COVID-deniers’, and ‘vaccine-deniers’, to which he later added ‘conspiracy theorists and Nazis’.

Now, in anticipation of the practised outrage of Zionists ready to denounce me as ‘anti-Semitic’ for this brief review of history, my point in saying this is not to deny the existence of a Jewish people or even the right to existence of the State of Israel, catastrophic as that existence has been for the Palestinian people on whose land it has been constructed at such a high cost in death and suffering. The State of Israel exists, and given their genocidal treatment of the Arabs — both Palestinians and Bedouin — with whom they more or less peacefully shared the land for millennia, it is likely to be catastrophic for the Israeli people if it ceased to exist — as catastrophic, indeed, as the erasure of Palestine has been for the Palestinians. Perhaps, given the terror of its existence, many would say the Israelis deserve such a catastrophe; but only the fundamentally religious and the politically fascist entertain such realities.

Any policy for the future of Israel that will stop the killing, suffering and brutal treatment of the Palestinians and Bedouin while not condoning furthers catastrophes must begin from the fact of the existence of the State of Israel — most obviously in the formation of two states, and not a state and its occupied territories. How that will come about and succeed is, hopefully, a problem that will be resolved by diplomacy and not by military means. But it’s hard, if not impossible, to negotiate with a state that is in military occupation of your land, is killing, imprisoning and torturing your people, murdering your new-born children, starving your communities, destroying your farms and businesses, and is intent on reducing the survivors to inmates of a concentration camp. The collaboration of the West in allowing this criminal situation to continue and escalate for 75 years amounts to complicity in the current genocide, which is the inevitable outcome of the apartheid policies pursued with increasing violence, brutality and inhumanity by the State of Israel.

My point in starting with this question — What is a Jew? — is that any solution to the historical reality of Israel and the crimes committed to establish and maintain its existence over 75 years of military occupation will never come from the mystical claims of a Jewish homeland based, as Gore Vidal once said, on the sacred books of a Bronze-age nomadic tribe from the Southern Levant. These are fundamentalist religious beliefs that are employed by the cynical practitioners of Western imperialism to justify the occupation of Palestine and the brutal and increasingly genocidal treatment of the Palestinian and Bedouin peoples. As the coverage and response to 7 October have amply demonstrated, both these beliefs and the politics they serve seek to reduce the terms in which a solution between two polities could ever be arrived at to imperious demands to condemn Hamas ‘barbarism’, to shrill denunciations of criticism of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza as ‘antisemitism’, to condemnation of the violent acts of desperate people — who, in Israel, are treated as citizens without rights, in the West Bank as a colonised people, and, in Gaza, as inmates of a concentration camp — to ‘terrorism’.

Before lending our voices to this Zionist discourse that has silenced all other voices in the Middle East for 75 years, we should reflect that the terminology used to describe the killing of Israel civilians and soldiers on 7 October by Hamas militants, compared to the many times greater numbers of Palestinian civilians and Hamas militants killed by the Israel Defence Forces both before and since then is deliberate, strategic and in the service of the geopolitical goals of the State of Israel, the United States of America and the West in general.

This is not a conflict between Arabs and Jews, or between Islam and Judaism, and the respective claims of their adherents to that thin strip of land on the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea that has borne the names of Canaan, Palaestina, Judaea, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Mamluk Sultanate, a part of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate for Palestine. As anyone who has studied the history of the State of Israel knows, it is a conflict whose least murmur reverberates around the world, not only in our Cabinets and Parliaments but on our streets. Those who reduce it to imaginary racial, ethnic or religious identities and their ancestral rights to ancient tribal lands granted to them by their God do so because it ignores the political realities of the present and the history that created them. Any opinion on what has been happening in the Gaza Strip since 7 October that does not simply mouth the discourses of Zionism, Islamic fundamentalism or Western imperialism must begin, therefore, with an understanding of these political realities.

2. What is Gaza?

‘We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly.’

— Yoav Gallant, Israel Minister for Defence (9 October, 2023)

In 1948, Palestinians fleeing the Nakba fled to the Gaza Strip, whose borders were fixed by the armistice between Israel and Egypt in 1949. Initially administered as a protectorate of Egypt, Gaza was subsequently occupied by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War. To encourage Palestinians to emigrate, Israel began to consider and perhaps impose restrictions on Gaza’s access to water. Between 1967 and 2005, Israel established 21 settlements in Gaza that together occupied 20 per cent of its already limited territory. In 1987, on the 20th anniversary of the occupation, the First Intifada launched a series of protests, civil disobedience, strikes against Israeli employers, boycotts of Israeli institutions and the withholding of taxes. In 1994, following the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Gaza’s administration was taken over by the State of Palestine, which also exercised partial authority over areas in the West Bank. However, Israel retained control over Gaza’s borders, airspace and territorial waters, which it began to enclose in a militarised border barrier.

In 2000, the Second Intifada marked the beginning of rocket attacks on Israel by Palestinian guerrilla fighters and the tearing down of the Gaza barrier, which Israel began to rebuild the following year. In 2004, the barrier was extended to the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. In 2005, Israel formally declared an end to its military occupation of Gaza and withdrew 9,000 Israeli settlers from the settlements. In 2006, Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist political party, won the Palestinian legislative elections and expelled Fatah, the social democratic party founded by Yasser Arafat, from the Gaza Strip. In response, Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip that continues to this day.

Although Israel describes Gaza as a de facto independent state, it maintains direct external control over the Strip and indirect control over life within it. In addition to Gaza’s air and maritime space, Israel also controls six of Gaza’s seven border crossings, only one of which was still open in October 2023, and it reserves and exercises the right for its military, the Israel Defense Forces, to enter Gaza at will. Israel maintains a buffer zone within the already limited territory of Gaza, which in 2010 it expanded to 300 meters, and on which newly-built Palestinian homes are regularly bulldozed. Farmers who try to cultivate the land are gunned down by Israeli Defence Forces. Palestinians, who are effectively imprisoned in the Gaza Strip, are dependent on the State of Israel for water, electricity, gas, telecommunications and other utilities, and the population is not free to leave or enter, or to import or export goods freely. As a result of this blockade, the Gaza Strip, with a population of 2.3 million people on 365 square kilometres of land in which 17 per cent is off limits to Palestinians, is the third most densely populated political authority in the world, and 70 per cent of its inhabitants live below the poverty line.

In December 2021, Israel announced the completion of the enhanced militarised barrier by which its blockade of Gaza is maintained. This runs 65 kilometres (40 miles) around the Gaza Strip and out into the Mediterranean Sea. The double-walled barrier cost US$1.1 billion to construct, extends 6 metres above ground and an undeclared number of metres below ground to block tunnels, and is armed with antennas, cameras, radars and a sea barrier. Watchtowers every 2 kilometres are equipped with remote-controlled machine guns, and motion sensors are inserted into the fence and the ground beyond. As a result of the buffer zone on the Gazan side of this barrier, 35 per cent of arable land and 85 per cent of fishing waters along the Gaza coast are off-limits to Palestinians. Under rules of engagement for Israeli soldiers, any Palestinian in this buffer zone, whether on land or sea, is shot on sight.

After 15 years of maintained blockade — but before the current attacks, which are exponentially worsening the living conditions — 52 per cent of Gaza’s population were unemployed, 80 per cent were dependent on international assistance, and 97 per cent of the drinking water was contaminated. 39 per cent of pregnant women in Gaza and 50 per cent of Gaza’s children were anaemic, and 17.5 percent of children suffered from chronic malnutrition. This is primarily because Israel only allows food imports that are vital for the survival of the civilian population. This threshold of survival is determined using a mathematical equation that calculates the minimum level of calories necessary to sustain Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians at a level just above the United Nations’ definition of hunger.

In February 2022, Amnesty International made a submission to the United Nation’s Human Rights Committee that was based on its 2022 report, ‘Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crimes against Humanity’. Among its many condemnations of human rights abuses, it stated:

‘All governments and regional actors, particularly those that enjoy close diplomatic relations with Israel such as the USA, the European Union and its member states and the UK, but also those states that are in the process of strengthening their ties — such as some Arab and African states — must not support the system of apartheid or render aid or assistance to maintaining such a regime, and cooperate to bring an end to this unlawful situation. As a first step, they must recognize that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid and other international crimes, and use all political and diplomatic tools to ensure Israeli authorities implement the recommendations outlined in this report and review any cooperation and activities with Israel to ensure that these do not contribute to maintaining the system of apartheid. Amnesty International is also reiterating its long-standing call on states to immediately suspend the direct and indirect supply, sale or transfer of all weapons, munitions and other military and security equipment, including the provision of training and other military and security assistance.’

This detailed and rigorously documented 280-page report on the human rights abuses committed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people under its power was immediately condemned by Zionist organisations around the world as an ‘anti-Semitic’ attack on the State of Israel. This condemnation and dismissal of the Amnesty International report was echoed by government ministers in the USA, UK, Germany, France, Austria, the Czech Republic and Australia.

Even before the current attack, the United Nations estimated that, since January 2008, 5,365 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, 1,206 of them children, 586 women; and 62,998 had been injured. Respectively, that’s 1 in 382 of the population that had been killed and 1 in 19 injured in just 16 years. These figures don’t include the arrests, beatings, imprisonment and torture inflicted upon the Gazans by the Israel Defense Forces.

Prior to 7 October, there were about 5,200 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons. Within 3 weeks of the attack on Israel, this figure has risen to over 10,000 prisoners, around 4,000 of whom were labourers from Gaza working in Israel, plus a further 1,070 Palestinians arrested in overnight raids in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most are being held in the military base at Be’er Sheva, the capital city of the Negev, where, like the population of Gaza, they have been denied medical attention and water, and are subjected to beatings of their handcuffed and naked bodies, resulting in broken limbs. Much like the prisoners held by the USA in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, the Palestinians are being held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, which means they are detained indefinitely and without access to judicial review. To qualify as an ‘unlawful combatant’, one only has to participate, ‘directly or indirectly’, in so-called ‘hostile’ acts against the State of Israel.

The readiness with which Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, describe the Palestinians as ‘savages’ reflects the brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and demonstrates how maintaining and justifying its ‘cruel system of domination and crimes against humanity’ for 75 years has inured them to treating Palestinians as they were once treated themselves. We should bare these facts in mind, and the history of apartheid and genocide to which they testify, before describing Palestinians as ‘terrorists’, ‘barbarians’, ‘human animals’, and all the other dehumanising epithets we’re being encouraged to use in response to the highly unlikely attack on Israel by the militant wing of Hamas.

3. How Did Hamas Escape?

‘As a Brit, our sense of justice transcends all of this. People who go out and do this sort of thing aren’t somehow freedom fighters or militants. They’re pure and simple terrorists. They are murdering people for the sake of murdering civilians in a hateful, disgraceful, disgusting way. And I say that as a Brit and as a human being as well as a Jew.’

— Grant Shapps, UK Minister for Defence, (11 October, 2023)

Given these circumstances, there would appear to be no chance that Hamas, in the early hours of 7 October, could have breached the security barrier around the Gaza Strip at six separate points and gone on a killing spree for 8-26 hours before the Israel Defense Forces arrived. This has led people to speculate that Israel let them through, and therefore to conclude that the USA must have known they would, which means everything that has happened since was planned. Perhaps the strongest support for these speculations is that the Israel Government has refused to explain why the Israel Defense Forces, with 173,000 active personnel, 193 fighter jets, 38 attack helicopters and 1,760 tanks on standby, and with numerous advance warnings of an attack, took 8 hours to arrive at the Re’im music festival that reportedly had been moved to a location 4 kilometres from the Gaza barrier two days before; a further 30 minutes to reach the Nir Oz kibbutz, just 2 kilometres from the barrier; more than 13 hours to reach the Be’eri kibbutz, about 4 kilometres away; and 20 hours to reach the Kfar Aza kibbutz, also 2 kilometres from the barrier. None of these locations are more than 35 kilometres from the military bases of the IDF’s Southern Command and its two infantry and two armoured divisions stationed in and around the city of Be’er Sheva; and yet it took almost 3 days for the Israel Defence Forces to reach the Gaza Strip barrier.

The second strongest support for the veracity of these speculations is that Western media has either refused to ask how this miraculous assault could have penetrated the most secure border barrier in the world or proposed unlikely excuses about the ‘unprecedented’ speed, surprise and coordination of the attack combined with urgings to look forward to Israel’s response rather than how this catastrophic failure of security and military response could have occurred.

In response to this apparent miracle, the National Unity Government hastily convened by Benjamin Netanyahu has described the Hamas attack as Israel’s ‘9/11’, referring to the terrorist attacks on the US homeland on 11 September, 2001. And, I suppose, if you believe that, half an hour after two passenger planes struck the World Trade Center, causing three towers to collapse on their own footprint, a third was allowed to strike the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defence and one of the most defended buildings in the world, then you probably do believe that the inmates of the world’s largest concentration camp can escape its high-tech security barrier, and this is your 9/11 moment.

Back in the real world outside the phantasmagoria of US foreign policy, Efrat Fenigson, an Israeli journalist who served in the intelligence service of the Israel Defense Forces for 25 years, gave her opinion about the likelihood of Hamas launching this attack.

‘A year ago, there was a military operation in Gaza to prepare for such events. And ongoingly, there are trainings for these kinds of scenarios. This raises serious questions — for me, anyway — about Israeli intelligence. What happened? Two years ago, there was a successful deployment of underground barriers with sensors to alert exactly on these kinds of terrorist breaches. Israel has one of the most advanced and high-tech armies. How come there was zero response to the border and fence breaches? I cannot understand that. There is no way, in my view, that Israel did not know what [was] coming. A cat moving alongside the fence is triggering all forces. So this? What happened to the “strongest army in the world”? How come border crossing were wide open? Something is very wrong here. Something is very strange. This chain of events is very unusual and not typical for the Israeli defence system. So, to me, this “surprise attack” seems like a planned operation on all fronts.’

Needless to say, anyone questioning the official account of the Hamas attack is now accused of anti-Semitism. The fact Western media is not addressing it with anything more than the by now familiar round of ‘fact checks’ and ‘debunking’ indicates that this is the question that has been ruled out of bounds; but this is the question every politician and Zionist justifying the genocide in Gaza must be asked.

Sitting at our laptops in the UK or USA or other countries that have refused to call for a ceasefire, we should recall the size of the Gaza Strip over which the Israel Defence Forces — which this year was ranked the fourth strongest military in the world — have complete control. For those in London, this superimposition (below) shows how it fits inside the UK capital. This is worth bearing in mind when estimating the likelihood of Hamas militants breaking out and attacking Israel.

Also of consideration is the benefits both Israel and the USA derive from this unlikely attack. By starting another war in the Middle East, most immediately with Iran (‘All roads lead to Iran’, as the former US Secretary of Defence, Mark Esper, was quick to place in the public’s mind), the US has the means to economically destabilise the Arab nations threatening the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world, which is what BRICS represents. Formed in 2010 by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, in 2024 BRICS is set to welcome Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Argentina. This would bring 46 per cent of the population of the globe within its orbit, 29 per cent of global GDP and — of most concern to the West — 43 per cent of oil production. Worst still for the hegemony of the West, numerous other states have applied for membership of BRICS, including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal, Congo, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.

In confirmation of just how seriously the West takes this threat to its hegemony and, I would suggest, its real interest in Gaza, the USA has sent a second carrier strike group, led by USS Dwight D. Eisenhower with 9 aircraft squadrons, two destroyers and a cruiser, to join the first group, led by the largest carrier in the world, USS Gerald R. Ford, off the coast of Gaza. Clearly, this vast reserve of firepower hasn’t been deployed to help the fourth strongest military in the world kill even more Gazans than it already has.

There is also the strange circumstances recorded in the footage apparently released by Hamas militants of their break-out from the Gaza Strip. I don’t know the provenance of this footage, which claims to show Hamas forces passing through the unarmed Gaza security barrier in the early morning of Saturday, 7 October; but we might ask who is the fair-haired white man in the Ray-Ban sunglasses carrying an assault rifle and directing the motorcyclists in the Hamas headscarves? One thing’s certain, he isn’t Palestinian. By his black uniform, he could be Israeli police. Or is he CIA? Where do we recognise that buzz-cut, gum-chewing strut from? Why is he walking past ‘terrorists’ towards Gaza? Why did he wave at them? What’s he doing there? And where’s the Israel Defence Forces as these militant civilians struggle to get their motorcycles over the ramps laid over the pre-cut fences?

Let’s break this footage, which is taken from the head camera of the Hamas motorcyclist, down into stills. At 0:41, a white man waves at the Hamas militant struggling to get his bike over the ramp (top left). At 0:53, the white man gestures to the motorcyclist and shouts something — perhaps ‘Here’ (top right). At 0:54, the white man passes by the motorcyclist (bottom left). And at 0:59, the white man continues to help other motorcyclists passing through the fence (bottom right).

Here are stills from more footage. At 1:43, in the foreground of the first still (above left), motorcyclists cross into the 300-yard ‘no-man’s land’ on the Gaza side of the barrier. The border fence bottom left of the image is open. Beyond it is the second fence, which is equipped with motion sensors. On the hill beyond is a watchtower armed with antennae, radar, cameras and remote-control machine guns. In the footage, none appear to be operating. At 1:45, in the next still (above right), the motorcyclists pass through a hole cut in what looks like the second fence. Either side of the gap stand men who, in contrast to the motorcyclists, appear to be dressed in military uniforms and flak jackets similar to those worn by the Israel Defense Forces (below right).

In contrast, at 0:44 this still (above left) from the previous footage, shows what the so-called ‘elite’ Hamas militants were wearing: flak jackets over short-sleeved white shirts, combat trousers and trainers, with distinctive, bright-green Hamas scarves wrapped around their heads. Interestingly, we can see in this another still of the White man at 0:54 (below left) that he does have one of the Hamas headscarves, but it’s wrapped around his left wrist. It looks like he’s taken it off someone. Perhaps it was from the man lying injured but still moving on the Gaza side of the barrier (0:32 below right), who appears by his clothes — flak jacket over a white shirt — to be a member of Hamas. But then, who killed this man, if the Israel Defence Forces were not present? And if they were, where are they now? Perhaps the Hamas scarf the White man has picked up is a memento for the folks back in Texas. Or perhaps it’s to identify himself to the Hamas militants. Either way, I can’t see this man living in the Gaza Strip. Can you?

Admittedly, it’s always difficult to derive conclusions from footage whose provenance is unknown and whose quality is relatively poor; but who thinks that the men standing at the gaps cut into the Gaza security barrier are Palestinians or members of Hamas? And if they aren’t, then who are they? It would help if speakers of Arabic or Hebrew could tell us what is being said, what is written on the White man’s uniform, and whether he is speaking either language. But if he does say ‘Here!’, we might ask ourselves what nationality speaks English no matter where they are in the world, even on the Gaza border? I know what my answer would be.

4. What is a Free Palestine?

‘With God and the IDF’s help, after we turn Khan Younis too into a football field, I’m sure there will be international pressure at some point — hopefully after we finish the job — to rehabilitate Gaza. We need to take advantage of that — to take advantage of the destruction that we will wreak upon them — to tell the countries of the world that each one of them should take a quota — it can be 20,000 or 50,000 — to say that they too should shoulder the burden.’

— Ayelet Shaked, former Israel Minister of Interior (23 November, 2023)

The birth of the State of Israel is typically traced back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British Government declared its support for the creation of a ‘nation home for the Jewish People’ in Palestine. However, at the time of the declaration, Palestine was a region in the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire with only a small minority Jewish population. The real basis for its establishment was the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that was agreed in secret between the British and French governments, and which, in anticipation of the defeat of Turkey in the First World War, carved up the lands now known as the Middle East into states whose borders took little or no account of the ethnic and religious distinctions between the Arab people. At the time, however, it was the Suez Canal running through Egypt between the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea and the quick access it granted to its Indian and Asian colonies that was Britain’s primary interest, not oil. But the First World War had indicated the importance of oil to the future of the Empire, and it’s within the context of its discovery that the history of the State of Israel must be situated if we are to understand current events.

Oil was first discovered in what we now call the Middle East in the following countries in the following years: in Egypt in 1886, in Iran in 1908, in Iraq in 1927, in Bahrain in 1929, in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1938, and in Qatar in 1940. These were all, at the time of the discoveries, formal or de facto protectorates of the British Empire, which in 1947 carved the State of Israel out of its Mandate for Palestine. But oil continued to be discovered in the Middle East after the Second World War: in Syria in 1956, in the United Arab Emirates in 1958, in Oman in 1964, and in Jordan and Yemen in 1984; but by then Britain had withdrawn from all these former colonies, and the baton of colonialism has been passed to the USA.

Most recently, in 2000, oil was discovered in the territorial waters of Gaza. As Israel has declared its intention to ‘manage the security’ of the Gaza Strip indefinitely once it has been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, the Ben Gurion Canal project, joining the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, has been revived. Locating the latter point in a Gaza Strip razed to the ground and cleared of living inhabitants would considerably reduce the length and cost of the canal, increase its security and offer an alternative to the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s new alliance with the BRICS nations threatens.

These considerations seem to me to be crucial to any discussion of what a ‘Free Palestine’ might look like, and what is meant by this phrase that has become a cry heard not only in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank but across the world since 7 October. Two weeks later, I was asked what I meant by this phrase — which I have not used — by David Scott, a former editor of UK Column who has interviewed me several times previously, and which produced the following conversation on Twitter. David somewhat selectively cited some of these in a news report aired by UK Column on 23 October, so I am reproducing them here in full.

David Scott
I have been asking several politicians today what they mean, exactly, by ‘Free Palestine’. So far, I have not received a single answer from any politician and only incoherent ones from their fans. Which is odd, don’t you think?

Simon Elmer
It might begin with opening the borders to the Gaza Strip, freeing the Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s jails, removing the Israeli settler towns in the West Bank, rebuilding the Bedouin villages destroyed in the Negev, returning Palestine to the Palestinians and compensating them for 75 years of military occupation.

David Scott
Immediately there are problems. On 7 October, the borders to the Gaza Strip were open. It did not go well for humanity on that day. What makes you think it will be different next time? Secondly, ‘returning Palestine to the Palestinians’, who do you mean and what land do you mean?

Simon Elmer
If you include Palestinians in humanity — which I do — it hasn’t been going well since 1948 when the State of Israel was created at the point of a gun. But if you mean that Palestine was created by a mandate of the British and its borders are no more real than those claimed in the religious books of a Bronze-age Levantine tribe, I agree. But even if we accept the absurdity that Jews have a divine right to land granted them by the God of Abraham, the historical reality is that Israel is an outpost of US imperialism that allows it to destablise every country in the Middle East that threatens to withhold its oil from the West. If you’re arguing that, after 75 years of occupation, the idea of Israelis and Palestinians living together as they once did is a pipe dream, I agree, and that two states (not one state and a concentration camp) is the solution. But that won’t solve the problem of US imperialism.

David Scott
Why then did the proposition fail on Arab refusal to countenance the idea in 1937 and again in 1947? And, of course, this is not 75 years of anything, it is 103 years. Why do so many miss out an entire generation of the story? Is it because it shows that their narrative is false?

Simon Elmer
I’d imagine because, after 400 years under the Ottoman Empire and then being arbitrarily carved up by the British and French governments, the Arab tribes wanted to rule themselves, and suspected — accurately — that an Israel State would be a colony from which the West would control the Middle-East. But that’s 100 years ago, since when a lot of blood has been spilled and continues to be — on both sides, admittedly, but not equally. There is no defence for the treatment of Palestinians by the State of Israel, or for US intervention in the Middle East, or for what is happening now in Gaza.

David Scott
Not 1948, 1920. Why miss 28 years of the story? Anyway, none of this is addressing my questions. None of this is more than hand-wringing and virtue signalling, as it does not equate to a meaningful, practical way forward. So my question remains: what is meant by ‘Free Palestine’?

Simon Elmer
The British expressed similar exasperation when people talked of a free Egypt, or India, or Iraq, or Jamaica, or Kenya, or Libya, or Burma, or Britain’s other former colonies. Calling for an end to the brutality of occupation isn’t ‘virtue-signalling’. How it’s done is another question. As the hawks in Washington like to repeat: if Israel didn’t exist they would have had to invent it. And, of course, they did invent it, and for their own ends. The ‘way forward’ for Palestine and Israel isn’t two states: it’s addressing the threat of US imperialism to the rest of the world.

David Scott
We are not talking about a colony or outpost of Empire, we are talking about a specific problem. If you mischaracterise the problem then any prospect of progress is lost. Those who consider that there is a better solution need to step up and discuss the realities.

Simon Elmer
If you don’t characterise the State of Israel as an outpost of the US Empire, how do you characterise it? But whatever the solution to the problem of 75 years of occupation is, none of it has bearing on what’s happening right now in Gaza, which under both the Hague and Geneva Conventions is a war crime.

David Scott
It is a unique situation. Like the Western world as a whole, Israel depends on US support at present, but that can (and will) change. That is not the core of the problem. And once again it is 103 years, dropping 28 years down the memory hole is deception.

Beyond the reference to the British mandate for Palestine being created in 1920 and the refusal of the Arabs to accept the creation of an Israel State — which history has shown to be more than justified — I still don’t understand what David meant by referring to the 28 years between 1920 and 1948, so I cannot respond to his accusation that I was dropping some part of history down a ‘memory hole’.

However, the argument that, since the Arab inhabitants of the Southern Levant didn’t have a country until the British Mandate, and that even then it wasn’t a sovereign state, the Palestinian therefore people don’t exist, is a familiar one no less genocidal in intent for being repeated throughout history. There were no Welsh until the Saxons called them ‘foreigners [Welisc]’; but that doesn’t mean Brythonic tribes weren’t cultivating these isles before the invading Romans named it Britannia. Nomenclature has always been the tool of colonialists. You might ask why Cymri nationalists want their own nation, and not a Principality of the British Royal Family, when the country now called ‘Wales’ has only existed as a subject nation. In terms of invasion and occupation, the Ottomans were the equivalent of our Romans, the British of the Anglo-Saxons, and the Israelis of the Normans; but living under them all were the people who call themselves Palestinians.

We should recall that the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ — which refers to the Jordan River on the Eastern border of Palestine and the Mediterranean Sea on its Western edge — and whose utterance has been made a crime in, of all places, Germany, which the UK Government is considering designating as ‘hate speech’, and which Twitter (now ‘X’) has concluded implies genocide and promised to censor under its terms of service, is a platform of the Likud Party of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and appeared in the Original Party Platform of 1977, which states:

‘The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable. Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israel sovereignty.’

None of us, of course, expect the Likud Party to be declared a terrorist organisation by the UK Government, as Hamas — or, to give it it’s full name, the Islamic Resistance Movement — has been; or for Benjamin Netanyahu to be declared a terrorist, which under international law he undoubtedly is; or for assertions of Israel sovereignty over the Gaza Strip to be declared in violation of international law or even of the terms of service for Twitter.

On the contrary, despite committing some of the worst war crimes and violations of human rights of any member states of the United Nations since the Second World War, the State of Israel attracts none of the condemnation or concerted sanctions the UN and EU currently imposes on Afghanistan, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Burundi, the Central African Republic, China, North Korea, Congo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Moldova, Montenegro, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Niger, Russia, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

It is within the context of this vastly unequal and incommensurable access to speech, to the law and its enforcement, to the threat and use of military force, to means of defence, to human rights, to means of subsistence, to medical care, and to the unconditional political, financial and military support of the West that any discussion of what a ‘Free Palestine’ means should take place if it is to go beyond the impasse reached by David Scott and myself, and formulate what he rightly called a ‘practical way forward’. As the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, said two days after the Hamas attack was launched: ‘there is no question of balance’ between these two polities that are not at war, but in a conflict in which one state, that of Israel, exerts its vast, illegal and unchecked power over the population of another.

5. What is the Alliance between the UK and Israel?

‘Today I’ve seen a glimpse of what millions experience every day. The threat of Hamas rockets lingers over every Israeli man, woman and child. This is why we are standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel.’

— James Cleverly, UK Foreign Secretary (11 October, 2023)

In May 2021, the Israel Defense Forces, which included 160 fighter jets, bombed the Gaza Strip with high-explosive weapons dropped on heavily populated areas for 11 days. The planes dropped their loads from high altitude, which facilitated them gaining the velocity required to penetrate the surface of the ground. A delayed fuse meant their one tonne payload of explosives detonated underground, destroying the cellars, bunkers and tunnels in which not only Hamas militants but also Gazan civilians took cover from the bombardment. In one half-hour period, the IDF dropped 450 such bombs, the largest in their arsenal, at a rate of one every five seconds into the subsoil of Gaza, sending shockwaves through the earth.

The result was 259 Palestinians killed, including 66 children and 41 women, and 2,211 injured. In addition, 6 hospitals and 11 medical clinics were destroyed, 53 schools, a bookshop that held an estimated 100,000 books, as well as 1,042 homes and commercial units in 258 buildings, including 4 residential tower blocks. The Israeli Government claimed these towers were being used by Hamas for military purposes. However, Human Rights Watch has challenged the truth of this claim, declaring that the air strikes ‘violated the laws of war and may amount to war crimes’. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that, as a result of these strikes, 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza were displaced.

During the Israeli offensive, social media posts by Palestinian activists documenting the effects of the bombing on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were censored or removed and their accounts suspended. Meta subsequently issued a statement that there had been a ‘technical glitch’ at the time. At the end of the month, Israeli police arrested 348 Palestinians. In August 2021, in mass protests along the Gaza barrier, 40 Palestinians were injured, including a 12-year-old boy who was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. Omar Hasan Abu al-Nil later died from his wounds. The protests continued into September, when more Palestinians were killed by the Israel Defense Forces. During the last days of the air strikes on Gaza, the foreign ministers of Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia visited the State of Israel to express their countries’ support for its actions.

In a speech made in the House of Commons during the air strikes, the UK Minister for the Middle East, who at the time was James Cleverly, declared that Israel had a ‘legitimate right to self-defence’. In response to questions about the UK’s arms deals to Israel and its complicity in the deaths, Cleverly added: ‘The UK has a robust arms export licensing regime and all export licences are assessed in accordance with it’.

In actual fact, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, between 2013 and October 2023 the UK Government has approved 1,223 Standard Individual Export Licenses for the sale of armed goods to the State of Israel amounting to the value of £496 million. This includes £184 million on technology; £125 million on aircraft, helicopters and drones; £49 million on training equipment; £39 million on other electronic equipment; £39 million on target acquisition, weapon control and countermeasure systems; £25 million on grenades, bombs and missiles; £11 million on directed energy weapons; £5.6 million on armoured vehicles and tanks; £4.7 million on small arms; £2.9 million on warships; £2.4 million on imaging equipment; £2.1 million on ammunition; and £1.2 million on armoured plate, body armour and helmets.

The vast size of these contracts is in keeping with the practices of UK arms dealers. Between 2011 and 2020, the UK licensed £16.8 billion of arms to countries criticised by Freedom House, some £11.8 billion worth to those on the Foreign Office’s own Human Rights Watch List. Of the 53 countries listed, the UK sold arms and military equipment to 39 of them. And far from having a robust licensing regime, the UK had also approved 71 open licences to Israel, which allow for unlimited exports, the contents of which is not published by the UK Government.

On top of this direct arming of the Israel Defense Forces, BAE Systems, the UK arms manufacturer and largest ‘defence’ contractor in Europe, produces 15 per cent of the value of every US F-35 fighter, the same model that was used in the bombing of Gaza in May 2021 and since October and November 2023. At a cost of $80 million each, Israel has ordered 50 of these stealth fighters for its ‘defence’. Of the six F-35 fighters delivered to Israel in 2022, the UK’s share has been estimated at £58 million, far higher than the value of Standard Individual Export Licenses. Since 2016, the total value of the parts provided by the UK for F-35 fighters amounts to some £336 million.

In December 2020, Israel and the UK announced a joint military agreement whose contents are classified, but which is thought to cover air, land, maritime, space, cyber and electromagnetic warfare. The British Armed Forces already deploys Israeli-manufactured drones over theatres of war. In November 2021, the UK signed a 10-year trade and defence deal with Israel, promising a closer alliance on cybersecurity and technology, the use of which is not confined to Hamas militants, dissident Palestinians or Gazan children. Israeli spyware has previously been used against journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders in the UK.

On 12 October, 2023, following a meeting with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that, to support the fourth strongest military in the world in its genocidal attack on the 2,375,000 civilians in the Gaza Strip, it was sending Royal Airforce reconnaissance aircraft, 2 Royal Navy ships to patrol the Eastern Mediterranean, 3 Merlin helicopters and a company of Royal Marines. In support of this decision, James Cleverly, who by then had been promoted to UK Secretary of State for Defence, declared: ‘The UK is clear and has been consistently clear that Israel has the right to self-defence.’

6. What is Collective Punishment?

‘Those who dare to accuse our soldiers of war crimes are people imbued with hypocrisy and lies, who do not have a single drop of morality. The Israel army is the most moral army in the world.’

— Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, 29 October, 2023

The Israel Minister for Defence, Yoav Gallant, a former commando in Israel’s special forces accused of war crimes committed during the 2008 assault on Gaza, has described the Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza Strip as ‘human animals’, and the UK and other states of the West have raised no objection to this dehumanising rhetoric. Even before the current crisis and the war crimes it has sanctioned, the Government of Israel, led by the former special forces captain, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been Prime Minister of Israel for 19 of the last 27 years, was the most Right-wing and religious in Israel’s history. But under the cover of the unlikely attack by Hamas, the three-man War Cabinet — which is completed by Benny Gantz, a former General in the Israel Defense Forces who also has a record of war crimes — and which has complete control over the operations of the Israel Defence Forces, is now waging what Adolf Hitler, when describing the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, called ‘Vernichtungskrieg’ — a war of extermination — against the 2,375,000 ‘human animals’ trapped in Gaza.

How did we get here? How did we get to this moment where the Jews setting policy for the State of Israel, many of whom are sons and daughters of survivors and victims of the Shoah, as well as their Zionist apologists in the UK, are now speaking and behaving exactly like the Nazis that killed so many of their own people, while at the same time describing their victims as themselves ‘Nazis’?

Let’s start with what is called ‘collective punishment’, which is, paradoxically, both a policy of war and a war crime. Under both Article 50 of the Hague Convention and Article 33 of the Geneva Convention (IV), collective punishment is a war crime. This hasn’t, however, stopped it being perpetrated by the signatories to both Conventions, which include Germany, the US, the UK and Israel.

To cite only a handful of examples from the Second World War, in October 1941, in retaliation for insurgent attacks in Serbia that killed 10 German soldiers, the German Army killed 2,794 civilians, mostly boys and men, in the city of Kragujevac.

In June 1942, in retaliation for the assassination of Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich in Prague by Czech and Slovak soldiers, the German Army killed around 5,000 Czech civilians, including 199 in the nearby town of Lidice, which they then burned to the ground.

In August 1943, in retaliation for armed operations by the Bielski Jewish partisans in the forests of Belorussia, the German Army burned down over 60 villages in Poland and Belarus and killed an estimated 4,280 civilians.

In October 1943, in retaliation for the uprising in the Sobibór concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, during which eleven SS guards were killed, the remaining SS, with the help of German soldiers, shot all 159 of the remaining Jewish prisoners.

In December 1943, in retaliation for resistance from Greek guerrilla fighters, the German army killed the entire male population of the town of Kalavryta, comprising 693 men and boys, and looted and burned over 1,000 homes to the ground.

Finally – although this doesn’t begin to exhaust the crimes of collective punishment committed during the Second World War — in August and September 1944, in retaliation for the Warsaw uprising, the German Airforce dropped over 1,580 tons of bombs on the city, which together with assaults by SS soldiers killed 15,200 Polish civilians, including women and children.

The first principle of collective punishment, therefore, is that is committed as an act of retaliation that is not necessarily inflicted against those who, in the perception of the perpetrators of this crime, initiated the cycle of violence; but may and typically does include people innocent of any violence, and in particular civilians, whose death and suffering is perceived, at least by those inflicting the punishment, as just punishment for the ‘initial’ violence. In many respects, therefore, collective punishment shares many of the characteristics of certain forms of religious sacrifice, in which the victim is a substitute or scapegoat whose death is understood to expiate a crime.

If we imagine this is not relevant to Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks, Netanyahu has called on the Israelis to remember the Biblical story of Amalek, a rival nation to Ancient Israel, which the prophet Samuel tells Saul, the first King of Israel, God has ordered him to destroy. ‘Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants.’ (1 Samuel 15:3). We should keep such rhetoric in mind when told by Zionists that Israel represent an outpost of Western humanism amid the religious fundamentalism and barbarity of the Middle East, a lighthouse of rationality in the dark sea of Islam. But the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine are both Semitic peoples; and although Benjamin Netanyahu, who spent much of his childhood in the USA, doubtless considers himself at home among the Ministers and arms dealers of the West, he is as ready as Yahya Sinwar, the Qatar-residing leader of Hamas, to appeal to fundamentalist religious dogma to justify his genocidal policies.

The second principle of collective punishment is that the number of deaths inflicted on the victims is many times greater than the deaths the crime was meant to expiate or avenge. This was a formula devised personally by Adolf Hitler, who ordered that, for every German soldier killed, 100 hostages would be killed, and for every soldier wounded 50 hostages killed. Implicit in this calculation is the perception, openly declared by the Third Reich, that the life of a German is worth many times more than the life of a Jew or Slav, and therefore must be — and indeed is justified morally and even legally in being — avenged by the deaths of a far greater number of victims.

And, of course, the crime of collective punishment didn’t stop with the Second World War, just as it isn’t restricted to the ideology of National Socialism. Again, to take only a handful of illustrative examples, between 1952 and 1960, in retaliation for the uprising in Kenya by Mau Mau militants, the British Army killed between 25,000 and 50,000 Kenyans, half of them children, many from being incarcerated in concentration camps.

In November 1956, during the Suez Canal crisis, the Israel Defense Forces occupied the Gaza Strip, where they killed 256 Palestinians in Khan Younis and 111 in Rafah. In total, during the 4-month occupation the IDF killed between 900 and 1,231 people, and an estimated 1 per cent of the Gazan population was either killed, wounded, imprisoned or tortured.

In March 1968, in retaliation for harbouring Viet Cong forces, the US Army killed between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai, raping women and children and mutilating their corpses.

And in November 2005, in retaliation for the killing of a US soldier in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq, US marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha.

Even before the current attacks on the Gaza Strip and West Bank, since January 2008 alone some 6,621 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and in Israel itself have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces, including 1,490 children and 627 women. 156,230 Palestinians have been wounded, including 69,719 by tear-gas inhalation, 23,950 by rubber bullets, 18,573 by live ammunition, 5,417 by physical assault, 4,918 hit by a tear gas cannister, and 4,652 by air-launched explosions. From the total Palestinian population of roughly 5.8 million in Israel and the Occupied Territories, that’s 1 in 880 that have been killed and an astonishing 1 in 37 that have been wounded or injured. As I wrote earlier, in the Gaza Strip the figures are roughly twice as high, with 1 in 382 of the population killed by the IDF and 1 in 19 injured. And as I said, that was before the current attacks, which have killed more Palestinian civilians than at any time since the Nakba. So what does international law on the rules of war say about this history of terror and murder?

Under Article 51 of the Protocol Additional to the Hague Convention it states: ‘The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.’

Under Article 40 of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Hague Convention it states: ‘It is prohibited to order that there shall be no survivors, to threaten an adversary therewith or to conduct hostilities on this basis.’

Under Article 16 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention it states: ‘It is prohibited to commit any acts of hostility directed against historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples.’

And under Article 57 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention it states: ‘Those who plan or decide upon an attack shall: (iii) refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.’

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, in the 49 successive days of attacks on the Gaza Strip between 7 October and the temporary ceasefire on 23 November, the Israel Defence Forces, in retaliation for the killing of a reduced estimate of 1,200 people in Israel by Hamas militants, have killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, including 8,176 children and 4,112 women, and injured 36,350. In addition, they have completely destroyed 59,240 homes and partially destroyed a further 165,300; destroyed 1,040 industrial facilities, damaged or destroyed 266 schools, 140 press headquarters, 124 health facilities and 91 mosques; and displaced 1.73 million people, some three quarters of the population of the Gaza Strip.

This devastation cannot be justified or dismissed as the collateral damage of a war on Hamas, but must be seen for what it is, the intended goal of this collective punishment of the Palestinian people by a military organisation pursuing a programme of genocide. On 11 October, Yoav Gallant told reporters: ‘We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.’

7. Is Israel Guilty of Genocide?

In another year there will be nothing there,
And we will safely return to our homes.
Within a year we will annihilate everyone,
And then return to plough our fields.

— Song broadcast by Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation (November 2023)

The United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which came into effect in 1951, confirms that genocide, under Article I, whether committed in time of peace or war, is a crime under international law which signatory states undertake to prevent and to punish. Under Article II of the Convention, genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;

   • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

   • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

   • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

The crime of genocide, moreover, isn’t limited to its immediate perpetrators. Under Article III of the Convention, the following acts shall be punishable:

1. Genocide;

   • Conspiracy to commit genocide;

   • Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

   • Attempt to commit genocide;

   • Complicity in genocide.

Under Article IV of the Convention, persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. And under Article V of the Convention, the Contracting Parties undertake to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III.

As of April 2022, 153 states have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, including the United Kingdom, the United States of America, the State of Israel and the State of Palestine.

Between 1 January 2008 and 30 November 2023, the Israel Defence Forces have killed 25,396 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including 9,382 of their children, and injured a further 99,348. That’s 1 in 93 of its population killed in 16 years, an appalling 1 in 126 of Gaza’s children, and a barely credible 1 in 24 that have been wounded or injured by attacks by the Israel Army.

In one of the more contemptuous applications of the so-called Rules-Based International Order dictated to the world by the USA, the Israel Defense Forces have designated each and every one the 1.1 million Palestinian civilians who previously lived in the northern part of the Gaza Strip and who do not leave what’s left of their homes, schools, businesses and hospitals as ‘accomplices in a terrorist organisation’ and therefore as a ‘legitimate target’ for their war crimes.

Eighty years ago, on 4 and 6 October, 1943, in the town of Posen in German-occupied Poland, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Final Solution, delivered two speeches to an audience of SS officers and Third Reich officials. The transcripts to these speeches were later submitted to the Nuremberg Trials as proof of both the intention and commission of what was later designated as the Holocaust. Among his justifications for the crime of genocide, Himmler said:

‘Most of you here know what it’s like to see 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or 1,000 corpses. To have endured this — except for cases of human weakness — and at the same time to have remained decent has made us hard. This is a glorious chapter in our history that has not and never will be written. We know how difficult it would be for us today if — under bombing raids and the hardships and deprivations of war — we still had secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators among us. . . . We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us.

‘We, who are the only people in the world with a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thereby causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time dealing with them.’

‘We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution to this problem. I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men — in other words, killing them or having them killed — and then allowing their children to grow up and avenge themselves on our own sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation that had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had.’

Given that Heinrich Himmler was responsible for the death of more Jews than anyone in a long history of pogroms against their people, I would suggest that, far from representing a homeland for Jews founded on the principles of Zionism, the State of Israel, as many Jews around the world have protested, is not only antithetical to the values of Judaism but, by its criminal actions against the Palestinian people, endangers the lives of Jews both inside and outside its borders. Indeed, one might speculate that this is one of the aims of Zionism, which depends on opposition to its genocidal policies voiced by peoples around the world to draw Jews to Israel, vote its ideologues and soldiers into power and fund its war machine, Tzahal, which like the Wehrmacht before it must be regarded as a criminal and genocidal organisation.

What many in the West don’t realise is that — with the exemption, until 2014, of the Haredim, who on religious grounds refuse to serve — every Israeli Jewish citizen, male and female, must serve between two and three years in the Israel Defence Forces. A little like the UK soldiers who served in Northern Ireland during its occupation, over this period the citizens of Israel learn to humiliate, herd, brutalise, beat, imprison, torture, shoot, attack, injure, wound, kill and dehumanise the Palestinians who live all their lives under their military power. The Israel Defence Forces, therefore, are not only a criminal organisation guilty of crimes against the Palestinian people; they are also a means of indoctrinating the Israeli people into the brutality, cruelty and criminality required to maintain the illegal occupation of Palestine. Even beyond this process of indoctrination, however, compulsory service in the IDF has made the whole of Israeli society, and almost every one of its Jewish members, complicit in a crime they have committed in common, and for which, therefore, it is impossible for their police forces, judiciary or government to arrest, indict and find them guilty.

Given the unconditional support the State of Israel receives from the West, one can only hope that, when the racist and genocidal ideology of Zionism has been defeated as the ideology of National Socialism was before it, and the Rules-Based International Order that supports, funds and arms it is dismantled as thoroughly as was the military-industrial complex of the Third Reich, equivalent statements to those made 80 years ago by Heinrich Himmler that have been made by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, former Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked and others justifying the war crimes in Gaza — including those Zionists in the Government and Parliament of the UK — will be submitted to a similar legal process, undertaken by the signatory states to the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to establish whether they, too, are guilty of committing, conspiring, attempting, inciting or complicity in the crime of genocide against the people of Gaza.

8. What is the October Declaration?

‘If you see images of people chanting “Jihad”, flying flags, chanting “From the river to the sea”, which is a call to arms used by terrorists, celebrating the largest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, glorifying acts of terrorism, I don’t think there’s any other way but to call them hate marches.’

— Suella Braverman, former UK Home Secretary (5 November, 2023)

On 23 October, a group calling itself the British Friends of Israel published The October Declaration. It was organised by the journalists Laura Dodsworth, Allison Pearson and Toby Young; Ian Ron and Emma Webb, the President and Director, respectively, of the ludicrously named ‘Free Speech Union’ and ‘Common Sense Society’; Toby Guise, a PR consultant, and the barrister Francis Hoar. The declaration has since been signed by over 81,000 people, including many members of Parliament, UK academia and the British establishment, both Jewish and Gentile. I am not one of them. Instead, I wrote a line-by-line response to the declaration’s deliberately inaccurate and manipulative description of the situation and circumstances in the Gaza Strip and its attempt to suborn the UK Parliament and media to its Zionist agenda. With some additions, I reproduce this response here.

We are a group of concerned British citizens and residents from a wide range of backgrounds and professions who stand in solidarity with British Jews and condemn all forms of antisemitism, whether in Britain or elsewhere.

The ongoing events in Gaza and Israel that have occasioned this declaration cannot and should not be reduced to the accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ by which the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its signatories have attempted to criminalise any criticism of the criminal acts of the State of Israel.

We unequivocally condemn all acts of terrorism against civilians in Israel, especially the massacre on 7 October 2023. 

The 1937 Geneva Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism defines it as ‘criminal acts directed against a State or intended to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public.’ But although the attacks by Hamas militants on 7 October were, under this definition, ‘acts of terrorism’, given the 75 years of the occupation of Palestine and the brutal conditions imposed on the people of Gaza since the 2005 blockade, condemnation of them cannot be ‘unequivocal’ and must, to the contrary, be contextual.

On 7 October 2023 the State of Israel and her citizens, both Jews and non-Jews, were subjected to a brutal terrorist attack, which resulted in the murder, torture, rape and kidnapping of over 1,500 people.

Apart from the unlikely circumstances under which this attack was launched through the most secure border barrier in the world, until these accusations have been verified they must be treated as a product of Israel propaganda, which in the past has been shown to be unreliable. As an example of which, the accusation that Hamas beheaded Israeli babies has been exposed as such, and the cause of the deaths in the Re’im music festival has been partially attributed to the response of the heavily-armed Israel Defense Forces which left the trail of devastation the lightly-armed Hamas militants couldn’t possibly have caused.

More Jews were killed on that day than on any other day since the Holocaust.

Since its founding in 1947, the State of Israel has been justified as compensation for what the West calls the ‘Holocaust’. Even if it were the burden of the Palestinian people to pay the price for the crimes of Europe — which it is not — the attempt to relate these events to the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe is historically inaccurate, emotive and manipulative.

We are aware that Jews are not the only victims of this tragedy. Hamas knew that there would be consequences to 7 October, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas.

Indeed they must have known, which raises the question of why this attack was launched, to what ends, and with whose collaboration. But equally, the State of Israel also knew there would be consequences for imprisoning 2,375,000 Palestinians in a concentration camp in which 80 per cent are dependent on international assistance for survival, 97 per cent of the drinking water is contaminated, 39 per cent of pregnant women and 50 per cent of children are anaemic, and 17.5 per cent of children suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Its ongoing terrorist operation is calculated to cause maximum fear and distress. The people of Israel have been subjected to a near constant bombardment of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. Civilians of all kinds — including the elderly, disabled, women, children and babies — have been targeted in a direct breach of the rules of war. 

Even before the current crisis, since 2008 alone, 1 in 382 of the population of Gaza have been killed and 1 in 19 injured in less than 16 years. The siege of Gaza is an ongoing terrorist operation calculated to cause maximum fear and distress in a direct breach of the rules of war laid out in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Since 7 October, in commission of the war crime of collective punishment, the people of Gaza have been subjected to near constant bombardment for 49 days and nights.

We share the shock and distress of Israelis, British Jews and compassionate people around the world at the unfolding horror and its consequences.

On the contrary, the vast majority of the world, even in Western nations, have come out in vast numbers to protest against the ongoing horror of the genocide being perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip, and have called for an immediate stop to their war crimes.

We call for all the hostages taken on 7 October to be released immediately. It is an essential step on the path to peace and the cessation of hostilities.

The Emergency Israel Unity Government has not made the return of the hostages taken by Hamas a condition of stopping its attack on the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the Israel Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, in violation of Article 40 of the Geneva Convention, has vowed to ‘wipe Gaza off the face of the earth.’

We stand in support of British Jews and condemn acts of antisemitism.

The war crimes of the Israel Defence Forces are not those of a religion or ethnic identity but the direct consequence of the policies of the Government of Israel. Opposition to those policies is, therefore, not a form of anti-Semitism, and condemning it as such is indicative of how the State of Israel, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and other Zionist organisation cynically employ the accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ to silence, censor and criminalise criticism and opposition to the ongoing crimes of the Israel Defence Forces. Such language does not belong in any serious statement about the situation in Gaza.

Following the terrorist attack on Israel, antisemitism is surging in the UK. The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded at least 533 antisemitic incidents across the UK between 7-20 October 2023, representing an increase of 651% compared to the same period in 2022. 

Under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the UK, the categorisation of incidents as ‘anti-Semitic’ has, as consequence, been politicised and rendered almost legally meaningless. It is not anti-Semitic to denounce the perpetrators of war crimes against a people who — if the term is inaccurately extended to a race — are themselves ‘Semitic’, or to be critical of the apartheid State that permits and orders these crimes to be perpetrated against them.

Children have not been spared. Four Jewish schools in Britain felt compelled to close. One school was vandalised. It is abominable that British children should now live in fear just because they are Jews. All children should be able to attend school without fear. 

Given the cynicism with which the Government and State of Israel continues to manipulate perception of what Amnesty International calls its ‘cruel system of domination and crimes against humanity’, the claim that four Jewish schools in the UK have been closed because the schoolchildren ‘live in fear’ must be questioned as much as the UK Government’s declared reasons for closing UK schools under lockdown in order to protect schoolchildren from a disease to which they are statistically immune. Moreover, to cite the closure of UK schools as some sort of justification for the 266 schools that have been destroyed in the Gaza Strip by IDF air strikes conforms, in its estimation of the relevant worth of the disrupted lives of Jewish children in the UK to the destroyed lives of thousands of Gazan children, to the racist principles of ‘collective punishment’.

British Jews should not live in fear because of actions taken by the state of Israel to defend itself. The British state must do everything in its power to protect them. While we respect the right of all groups to engage in peaceful protest, we urge the police to enforce the law without fear or favour. 

Under new legislation, including the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, of which the lawyers who have signed this Declaration will be aware, it is now possible for the police to ban any protest in the UK. Behind its appeal to uphold the law, this is a cynical and undemocratic call to politicise the policing of protest in the UK.

We ask the media, members of all political parties and everyone in public life to call out Hamas for what it is: a terrorist organisation. 

Although long forgotten in the UK, the function of the media in a democracy is to report the news, not to propagate the views of well-connected pressure groups like British Friends of Israel. Equally, Members of Parliament are voted to represent the constituents who voted for them, not to mouth the words of Zionist organisations attempting to influence public opinion in favour of their agenda.

Hamas, whose actions have led directly and indirectly to the tragic deaths of many Palestinian civilians as well as Israelis, is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK as well as in many other states. The Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have identified Hamas as a terrorist organisation. Failure to use the correct language — describing Hamas as ‘militants’ or ‘fighters’, for instance — creates the false impression that Hamas and Israel’s armed forces are morally equivalent and is an affront to the group’s victims  — the dead, their families, and those currently being held hostage.

When it comes to the dead and their families, there can be no question of equality between the actions of Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces. Since 7 October, IDF strikes on the Gaza Strip have killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, including 8,176 children and 4,112 women, and injured 36,350. And the vast inequality between the suffering, imprisonment, brutalisation, torture, injury and killing of the Palestinian people and their Israeli occupiers goes back 75 years to the genocide referred to as the Nakba, during which Israeli forces destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages and took possession of 774, occupied 77 per cent of Palestine, killed around 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 separate massacres, and drove 800,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.4 million from their homeland and into what is now the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

So no, there is no lack of moral equivalence between the actions of Hamas militants on 7 October and those of the Israel Defence Forces since 1948; but there is a yawning gap between the numbers of their victims, the killed and injured, the imprisoned and tortured, their systematically impoverished, humiliated and brutalised families, and the imprisoned — including hundreds of Palestinian children — held in Israeli jails. Since 1967 alone, 800,000 Palestinians, a fifth of the population, have been arrested and imprisoned by the apartheid State of Israel, which systematically destroys Palestinian homes, agriculture, livestock, olive groves, woodlands and wells.

No one thought this would be necessary in the 21st Century but, sadly, it is.

On the contrary, any observer of the West’s unconditional support for the apartheid State of Israel and its genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people would expect a declaration such as this, which in the context in which it has been made is an apologia for the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and the illegal annexation of the Gaza Strip, both of which are in violation of the international laws the West purports to uphold.

For all these reasons, I did not sign the October Declaration. It isn’t Jews in London that have been given unlimited and overwhelmingly favourable coverage by the UK media that need protecting, but rather and obviously the tens of thousands of Palestinians being injured and killed in the Gaza Strip. Instead, on the grounds I have laid out here, I appeal to the organisers and signatories of the October Declaration to withdraw its support for the war crimes of the Israel Defense Forces and to replace this deliberately inaccurate account of the situation with one calling for their immediate cessation and for the arrest and trial of its perpetrators under the international laws and conventions to which this country is a legally-bound signatory.

On Tuesday, 24 October, the day after the October Declaration was published, 400 airstrikes launched by the Israel Defence Forces killed a further 756 people in the Gaza Strip, making it — until then — the deadliest 24-hour period since 7 October. This brought the death toll in Gaza to 6,546, including 2,360 children, with 17,439 injured. Terrible as they are, these figures and the crimes they only barely document have long since been surpassed.

9. Whatever Happened to the Freedom Movement?

‘The word “terrorism” doesn’t come as easily to my mouth as it does to others. It seems to me that the bombing of civilians with helicopter gunships and missiles is a far worse kind of terrorism than the acts of desperate, miserably destitute people with no horizon of hope, which is what Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have been reduced to by the deliberate policy of collective punishment.’

— Edward Said, in conversation with Christopher Hitchens (May 2001)

One of the consequences of the militarily impossible attack on the State of Israel and the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip is that the growing solidarity between those opposed to the Great Reset of Western capitalism has been shattered down the same old Left/Right fault line. It’s as if we’ve returned to January 2020, reeling from the largest Conservative Government majority since 1987; the Corbyn experiment ruined by the accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ from both the UK media establishment and his own Party; Left-wing governments in Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and across South America overthrown or threatened with military coups by the US Empire; Right-wing governments elected to power in Europe, the Middle East, India and the Americas; protests and uprisings in Hong Kong, Catalonia, Venezuela and Iran reported by the UK media, which rigorously ignored those in France, Algeria, Chile and Palestine; and the UK electorate still moaning about Brexit, promoting a ‘Green’ new deal for capitalism, and completely unaware of the globalist coup that was on the horizon. Four years of lies later and there’s been no advancement in either political consciousness of awareness of the mechanisms of power by which we are governed. We’re back with the same terrorist states triggering the same knee-jerk responses to the same ends; except this time the dividing lines are the old illusory ones: Left = pro-Palestine/Right = pro-Israel.

As a result of this rappel à l’ordre of the old and apparently unshakeable allegiances, many of those who for three years denounced Government lies about COVID-19, opposed censorship and were called ‘anti-Semitic’ for doing so, now believe everything the Government says about what happened on 7 October, want to criminalise protests against the genocide in Gaza as ‘hate crimes’, and denounce anyone calling for a free Palestine as ‘anti-Semitic’. The stupidity with which the Left unthinkingly aligned itself with lockdown restrictions, gene-therapy mandates and environmental fundamentalism has been matched by the stupidity with which the Right has unthinkingly aligned itself with collective punishment, genocide and Zionism. Both sides have reconfirmed that, when our politics and our ethics are determined by what we are shown and what we choose to look at, we are not rational citizens of a democracy but emotionally-manipulated subjects of the spectacle, which reaches its technological apotheosis in war. Just as the so-called ‘war on COVID’ was manufactured to justify the regulations, programmes and now technologies of the Great Reset, so too is the ‘war on anti-Semitism’, that is already being used to justify further restrictions on our freedoms of speech, movement, access, conscience.

As the signatories to the October Declaration have demonstrated, the weakness of those who opposed the illegal lockdown of the UK, the masking of children for two years and experimental gene therapy mandates for care workers on medical or legal grounds, or in defence of their personal freedoms, or merely out of a sense of moral outrage, is that, when confronted with the same tactics and accusations being deployed most immediately to further the geopolitical aspirations of Israel and the USA, they can respond with nothing more than compliance and, in the case of the signatories to the October Declaration, collaboration, whether willingly or unwittingly. All of which raises the question, which many members of what became known as the ‘Freedom Movement’ are asking: in reducing opposition to the war crimes of the State of Israel to ‘anti-Semitism’, in its call to ban protests against those crimes as ‘hate marches’, and in its description of those who resist as ‘terrorists’, is Gaza the new COVID?

To try and answer this, I want to offer some initial thoughts on why the Freedom Movement, in response to the genocide being committed in Gaza, has been betrayed by some of its most prominent spokesmen, and what this tells us about future forms of resistance to the Great Reset.

Firstly, there is no such thing as ‘Freedom’, only the freedoms we defend and try to protect with laws; and the idea that the last 40 years of neoliberalism under which we lived in the UK were ‘free’ shows the political naivety of those who have only recently become aware of the conditions of our freedoms. That’s okay and, indeed, to be welcomed, as never in my lifetime have so many people in the West become aware of how they are governed and by whom. What freedoms we have enjoyed were purchased at the cost of the lack of freedom of a far larger number of people across the world, and in almost every form extended no further than the freedom to believe the lies we were told, to buy what we were sold, and to obey what we were compelled by law to do. In this respect, the inequality in freedoms between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories is a microcosm of that between the West and much of the rest of the world.

Nonetheless, lockdown and the mandates on masking and gene therapy represented a quantitative leap in the erasure of our freedoms that was genuinely unprecedented, and caused many public figures that were otherwise quite content in their neoliberal paradise to rebel. But this rebellion, first and foremost, was against the restrictions on their freedom to continue to enjoy their status within Western capitalism. And since the unfailingly stupid Left was too busy complying and denouncing any who didn’t as ‘anti-Science’ (etc.), these unlikely figures from the libertarian Right emerged to fill the vacuum in leadership of what became the Freedom Movement, or at least elected themselves to be its spokesmen.

Having no interest in UK society and its media gossip, I myself hadn’t heard of most of these individuals before 2020, but you probably know who I’m referring to: founder of the Academy of Ideas think-tank Claire Fox, formally known as the Baroness of Buckley; the founder of the Free Speech Union Toby Young; the journalists Allison Pearson and Laura Dodsworth; the GB News presenter Mark Dolan; the former actor and founder of the Reclaim political party Laurence Fox; the Spiked editor Tom Slater; the comedian and podcaster Konstantin Kisin; and the radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer. Despite themselves being vilified by the UK media for two years and more as ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’, none of these rather unlikely spokesmen for freedom hesitated to add their names to the signatories of the October Declaration.

This has caused some surprise and no little despair among members of the Freedom Movement, many of whom have been subjected to renewed accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ from their former comrades. I haven’t been among them., however. I’m speaking from my own experience of both UK politics and the media when I say that, as politicians and journalists, all these reluctant heroes — as is required by their trade — are liars, careerists and opportunists. I, for one, therefore — and I imagine I’m not alone — wasn’t in the least surprised that, when Gaza offered them the opportunity to returned to the embrace of the Establishment that had bred and raised them to their formerly exalted positions in British Society, they did so like so many prodigal sons and daughters.

However, among those denouncing any and all criticism of Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’, accepting everything the media says as gospel, calling for a police crackdown on protests against the genocide, and demanding new laws to silence dissent — and in every respect, therefore, behaving as the COVID-faithful, environmental fundamentalists, Zelenskyy worshippers and trans ideologues have behaved towards them over the past four years — are some good people.

Among these I include the barrister, Francis Hoar, who has represented many people, including myself, threatened by their opposition to lockdown, and the pathologist, Dr. Clare Craig, author of Expired: Covid the untold story. I know these two to be intelligent and moral people, and yet the former helped draft and organise the October Declaration, and the latter is one of its signatories. This has disturbed, confused and upset me, and for the past two months I’ve been trying to understand how people who, for the past four years, risked their reputations, careers and even their liberty to defend our freedoms, have so readily added their voices to the hatred, barbarity and stupidity of a racist and genocidal ideology. Zionism is an ideology, and as such it is founded not on rational argument or historical facts, some of which I have presented in this article, but on sentimentality towards oneself and hatred of others. Very much, in other words, the way the British were divided by lockdown into the virtuous compliant who obeyed and the diseased non-compliant who were ostracised.

My first question, therefore, is how intelligent people can put their names to such a document, which draws on every racist stereotype, every deep-seated hatred of Arabs and Islam bred into the British psyche and our institutions, and which would not look out of place among the lies and hate published by the UK Government, media, SAGE, MHRA, NHS and other public institutions in order to justify lockdown, mask mandates and the gene therapy programme. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the October Declaration is not that its signatories are using it to justify the genocide in Gaza; it’s most concerning aspect is that its contents are so utterly stupid, are so obviously lies, and that public figures who present themselves as intellectuals can be so easily manipulated by an ideology made for idiots.

My second question is how, in the face of the documented genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, moral people can both condone and deny its full extent (quibbling, for instance, over the source and accuracy of the reported death toll, as if 6,000 dead Palestinian children would be acceptable but 8,000 is Hamas propaganda) with the same justifications with which the COVID-compliant both justify and deny the number of ‘vaccine’ deaths.

With the ubiquity of smartphones, even in Gaza, never before, perhaps, have we seen in such detail what genocide means: not in Rwanda, not in Bosnia, not in Cambodia, not in Kenya or in World War Two. Its perpetrators, as I have said, have been dehumanised by 75 years of an increasingly brutal, apartheid and genocidal regime; but what is most confusing and appalling is that its apologists in the UK are so entirely without feeling or compassion for its victims and their suffering.

The short answer to my first question is that, when intelligent people are ‘triggered’ by ideology, they respond just as stupidly, obediently and viciously as the mass of the British population did in the first months of lockdown, when the gene therapy programme was rolled out, or the proxy war in the Ukraine was declared. Where formerly the British declared their ‘vaxxed’ status on their Twitter account and put a Ukrainian flag after their name, those who mocked such servile declarations of obedience haven’t hesitated to swap the once ubiquitous yellow-and-blue flag of the Ukraine for the white-and-blue of the flag of Israel; to declare to some imaginary audience that they ‘stand’ with Israel as dutifully as they did with Ukraine; and to denounce those who don’t as ‘terrorist-apologists’ as unthinkingly as they denounced ‘Putin-apologists’.

Different people, perhaps, but it’s the same slavish obedience to the technologies of their control. The bigger question, therefore, is what is it about this particular ‘crisis’ that has brought so many people, who for the past four years denounced everything the UK Government and media told us as a lie, into sudden and complete compliance with everything the same institutions are telling us now.

There’s a longer answer to this question, which includes the hatred of Islam inculcated by two decades of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, fear of the rising levels of immigration into the UK, and the equation of Muslims with terrorists that has returned with a familiar vengeance and hatred after the latter’s recent equation with ‘anti-vaxxers’.

But I think also that, among Christians — many of whom were repelled by the hatred and fear with which compliance with lockdown was manufactured — there is a sense of guilt and culpability for the Church’s complicity in what it has designated as the ‘Holocaust’. This is a Biblical term that turned the genocide of the Jews perpetrated during the Second World War into a sacrifice, a crime which, unconsciously or not, the Christian Church and most of the West have decided must be expiated by the suffering of Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular. In other words, the emotions being triggered to create allegiance to the UK’s criminal and indefensible support for the apartheid State of Israel and its genocidal attacks on the people of Gaza are a product of decades of indoctrination preparing us for just such a moment.

Part of that indoctrination, and more immediate to our current compliance, is the strategy of identity politics. Many Zionists have pointed to the fact that Israel shares Western policies on LGBT rights, as opposed to the policies of Hamas, which as a fundamentalist Islamic movement opposes those rights and the identities and sexual practices of those demanding them. Perhaps the most obscene demonstration of this apologia for genocide is the photograph of an Israeli soldier in Gaza posing with an LGBT flag in front of a landscape destroyed by 7 weeks of continuous air strikes. ‘Rainbow-washing’, one of my gay, Jewish friends called it. This is part of the facade that Israel presents to the world that it is a shining light of liberal democracy amid the creeping darkness of the Islamic Caliphate, just as Ukraine presents itself as a bastion of democracy defending Europe against Russian aggression. Both claims are lies.

In reality, both Israel and the Ukraine are testing grounds, to which the West has given its approval, funding and military support, for the transformation of the space of the biosecurity state into a digital camp monitored and controlled by Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency and a panopticon of surveillance technology. It’s a testimony to how fully identity politics has substituted itself for the politics of both emancipation and conservation that even those who continue to oppose the technologies, programmes and ideologies of the Global Biosecurity State have been suborned into supporting the wars through which the digital camp is being implemented and trialled.

What does this mean for the ongoing resistance to the Great Reset and the possibility of a future Freedom Movement, whose death, foreshadowed by the proxy-war in the Ukraine, can be precisely dated to 7 October, 2023? I can’t answer this here; but any hopes we have of resistance to the Great Reset must be formed in the context of the failure of the Freedom Movement to form itself into a social force capable of bringing about mass resistance and political change, and of the ease with which the dilettantes by which it was led and allowed to be its spokesmen have been brought to heel.

10. What Can History Teach Us?

‘Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. I have ordered an extensive mobilization of reserves and that we return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known. The enemy will pay an unprecedented price. We are at war and we will win it.’

— Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Prime Minister (7 October, 2023)

A much-needed voice of reason, historical recollection and moral clarity amid the violent and noisy condemnation of Palestinian ‘terrorists’ by UK politicians and political commentators is that of the late Labour MP, Gerald Kaufman, who was raised as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, and who from 1987-1992 was the Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. This didn’t stop him, in a speech delivered to the House of Commons in January 2009, three years after Hamas had been elected to power in Gaza, from saying what today, nearly 15 years later, would be condemned not only by his Party but also by his people as ‘anti-Semitism’:

‘The present Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswomen for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of — at that time — eight-hundred Palestinians. The total is now one thousand. She replied instantly: ‘Five hundred of them were militants’. That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

‘The Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas because they’re terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi who organised the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including 4 Jews. Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern Gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin.

‘Today, the present Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It’s too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. It’s because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death that Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our own Government, has been a culpable error from which dreadful consequences have followed. The great Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said you make peace by talking to your enemies. However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means.

‘Whenever, and however, the fighting ends, there will still be one-and-a-half million Palestinians in Gaza, and two-an-a-half million more Palestinians in the West Bank, who are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks, and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.

‘It’s time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that its conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israeli’s real goal, but which is impossible for them to achieve. They’re not simply war criminals, they’re fools.’

Israel’s current National Unity Government are fools too; but fools whose war crimes are reverberating around the world, with potentially catastrophic consequences. The First World War, from which the State of Israel was conceived, is a history lesson in how marginal conflicts can draw in the rest of the world.

On 28 June 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. On 23 July, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, which included stamping out all forms of Serbian nationalism across the Empire. These were rejected the following day. On 25 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, triggering the series of military alliances designed to keep peace in Europe. On 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia and France; and on 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany. By the time, four years later, the First World War was over, few remembered how it had started, only that around 20 million people had lost their lives. It is this that we should have been remembering on Armistice Day, instead of fanning the flames of a war which has no boundaries.

On 26 November 2023, seven weeks since the current crisis unfolded, it was reported that the US aircraft carrier strike group led by USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which had been sent to the Eastern Mediterranean on the justification of responding to the Hamas attack on 7 October, had passed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea and was now in the Persian Gulf that borders Iran. Today is 1 December, 2023, and after observing a week-long ceasefire, Israel has renewed its attack on the Gaza Strip.

Simon Elmer is the author of The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism. His recent books include The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022), as well as two volumes of articles on the UK biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, both published in 2023.