{"id":305025,"date":"2025-10-20T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=305025"},"modified":"2025-10-14T07:21:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T06:21:27","slug":"genocide-two-years-on-it-is-the-west-not-gaza-that-must-be-deradicalised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/10\/genocide-two-years-on-it-is-the-west-not-gaza-that-must-be-deradicalised\/","title":{"rendered":"Genocide Two Years On: It Is the West, Not Gaza, That Must Be Deradicalised"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This brutal war on Palestinians has not just unleashed Israel\u2019s demons. It has unmasked our own regimes, as they crack down on humanitarian activism.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

8 Oct 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Anniversaries are often a cause for celebration. But who could have imagined back in October 2023 that we would now be marking the two-year anniversary of a genocide<\/a>, documented in the minutest detail on our phones every day for 24 months? A genocide that could have been stopped at any point, had the US and its allies made the call.<\/p>\n

This is an anniversary so shameful that no one in power wants it remembered. Rather, they are actively encouraging us to forget the genocide is happening, even at its very height. Israel\u2019s relentless crimes against the people of Gaza barely register in our news any longer.<\/p>\n

There is a horrifying lesson here, one that applies equally to Israel and its western patrons. A genocide takes place \u2013 and is permitted to take place \u2013 only when a profound sickness has entered the collective soul of the perpetrators.<\/p>\n

For the past 80 years, western societies have grappled with \u2013 or, at least, thought they did \u2013 the roots of that sickness.<\/p>\n

They wondered how a Holocaust could have taken place in their midst, in a Germany that was central to the modern, supposedly \u201ccivilised\u201d, western world.<\/p>\n

They imagined \u2013 or pretended to \u2013 that their wickedness had been extirpated, their guilt cleansed, through the sponsorship of a \u201cJewish state\u201d. That state, violently established in 1948 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, served as a European protectorate on the ruins of the Palestinian people\u2019s homeland.<\/p>\n

The Middle East, let us note, just happened to be a region that the West was desperate to keep controlling, despite growing Arab demands to end more than a century of brutal western colonialism. Why? Because the region had recently emerged as the world\u2019s oil spigot.<\/p>\n

Tragedy, then farce<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Israel\u2019s very purpose \u2013 enshrined in the ideology of Zionism, or Jewish supremacism in the Middle East \u2013 was to act as a proxy for western colonialism. It was a client state planted there to keep order on the West\u2019s behalf, while the West pretended to withdraw from the region.<\/p>\n

This big picture \u2013 the one western politicians and media refuse to acknowledge \u2013 has been the context for events there ever since, including Israel\u2019s current, genocidal endgame in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Two years in, what should have been obvious from the start is becoming ever-harder to ignore: the genocide had nothing to do with Hamas\u2019s one-day attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The genocide was never about \u201cself-defence\u201d. It was preordained by the ideological imperatives of Zionism.<\/p>\n

Hamas\u2019s break-out from Gaza \u2013 a prison camp into which Palestinians had been herded decades earlier, after their expulsion from their homeland \u2013 provided the pretext. It all too readily unleashed demons long lurking in the soul of the Israeli body politic.<\/p>\n

And more importantly, it released similar demons \u2013 though better concealed \u2013 in the western ruling class, as well as parts of their societies heavily conditioned to believe that the interests of the ruling class coincide with their own.<\/p>\n

Two years into the genocide, the West is still deep in its self-generated bubble of denial about what is going on in Gaza \u2013 and its role in it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory repeats itself,\u201d as the saying goes, \u201cfirst as tragedy, then as farce.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same could be said of \u201cpeace processes\u201d. Thirty years ago, the West force-fed Palestinians the Oslo Accords<\/a> with the promise of eventual statehood.<\/p>\n

Oslo was the tragedy. It led to an ideological rupture in the Palestinian national movement; to a deepening geographic split between an imprisoned population in the occupied West Bank and an even more harshly imprisoned population in Gaza; to Israel\u2019s increasing use of new technologies to confine, surveil and oppress both sets of Palestinians; and finally, to Hamas\u2019s brief break-out from the Gaza prison camp, and Israel\u2019s genocidal \u201cresponse\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, US President Donald Trump\u2019s 20-point \u201cpeace plan\u201d<\/a> offers the farce: unapologetic gangsterism masquerading as a \u201csolution\u201d to the Gaza genocide. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair \u2013 a war criminal who, alongside his US counterpart George W Bush, destroyed Iraq more than two decades ago \u2013 will issue diktats to the people of Gaza on Israel\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n

Surrender document<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Gaza, not just Hamas, faces an ultimatum: \u201cTake the deal, or we will put you in concrete boots and sink you in the Mediterranean.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barely veiled by the threat is the likelihood that, even if Hamas feels compelled to sign up to this surrender document, Gaza\u2019s people will end up in concrete boots all the same.<\/p>\n

Gaza\u2019s population is so desperate for a respite from the slaughter that it will accept almost anything. But it is pure delusion for the rest of us to believe a state that has spent two years carrying out a genocide can be trusted either to respect a ceasefire or to honour the terms of a peace plan, even one so heavily skewed in its favour.<\/p>\n

The farce of Trump\u2019s peace plan \u2013 his \u201cdeal of the millennium\u201d \u2013 is evident from the first<\/a>\u00a0of its 20 points: \u201cGaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.\u201d<\/p>\n

The document\u2019s authors no more wonder what might have \u201cradicalised\u201d Gaza than western capitals did when Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, broke out of the prison enclave with great violence on 7 October 2023.<\/p>\n

Were the people of Gaza simply born radical, or did events turn them radical? Were they \u201cradicalised\u201d when Israel ethnically cleansed them from their original lands, in what is now the self-declared \u201cJewish state\u201d of Israel, and dumped them in the tiny holding pen of Gaza?<\/p>\n

Were they \u201cradicalised\u201d by being surveilled and oppressed in a dystopian, open-air prison, decade upon decade? Was it the experience of living for 17 years under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade that denied them the right to travel or trade, and forced their children on to a diet that left them malnourished<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Or maybe they were radicalised by the silence from Israel\u2019s western patrons, who supplied the weaponry and lapped up the rewards: the latest confinement technologies, field-tested by Israel on the people of Gaza.<\/p>\n

The truth ignored in the opening point of Trump\u2019s \u201cpeace plan\u201d is that it is entirely normal to be \u201cradicalised\u201d when you live in an extreme situation. And there are no places on the planet more extreme than Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u2018Cockroaches\u2019 and \u2018snakes\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It is not Gaza that needs \u201cderadicalising\u201d. It is the West and its Israeli client state.<\/p>\n

The case for deradicalising Israel should hardly need stating. Poll after poll has shown Israelis are not just in favour of the annihilation their state is carrying out in Gaza; they believe their government needs to be even more aggressive, even more genocidal.<\/p>\n

This past May, as Palestinian babies were shrivelling into dry husks from Israel\u2019s blockade on food and aid, 64 percent of Israelis said they believed<\/a> \u201cthere are no innocents\u201d in Gaza, a place where around half of the population of two million people are children.<\/p>\n

The figure would be even higher were it reporting only the views of Israeli Jews. The survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinians \u2013 survivors of mass expulsions in 1948 during Israel\u2019s western-sponsored creation. This much-oppressed minority has been utterly ignored throughout these past two years.<\/p>\n

Another survey<\/a> conducted earlier this year found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews favoured the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. More than half, 56 percent, also supported the forced expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel \u2013 even though that minority has kept its head bowed throughout the genocide, for fear of reaping a whirlwind should it speak up.<\/p>\n

In addition, 47 percent of Israeli Jews approved of killing all the inhabitants of Gaza, even its children.<\/p>\n

The crimes overseen by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is so often held up by outsiders as some kind of aberration, are entirely representative of wider public sentiment in Israel.<\/p>\n

The genocidal fervour in Israeli society is an open secret. Soldiers flood social media<\/a>\u00a0platforms with videos celebrating their war crimes. Teenage Israelis make funny videos on TikTok<\/a> endorsing the starvation of babies in Gaza. Israeli state TV broadcasts<\/a> a child choir evangelising for Gaza\u2019s annihilation.<\/p>\n