The beginning of the end of Israel
A photo released by the Israeli military on 3 December 2023 shows Israeli troops conducting military operations in the Gaza Strip
Craig Mokhiber writes in Mondoweiss on 8 October 2024:
We have reached a grim milestone. A full year of gruesome Israeli mass murder. A year of epic Palestinian suffering.
A year of direct Western complicity. A year of continuous media incitement. A year of shameful inaction by international institutions.
For twelve months, we have seen relentless persecution of human rights defenders across the West, solely for peacefully opposing genocide and apartheid.
And fifty-two weeks of a horrified global public helplessly witnessing on their screens the first live-streamed genocide in history. The carnage of this past year is unprecedented. The destruction is almost unimaginable.
Still, this genocide will end. The Palestinian people and their besieged nation will undoubtedly emerge from the ashes of genocide, recover, and reassert their inalienable rights in their ancient homeland.
But international institutions and the global human rights system will be left bruised and battered.
The political capital expended by the US empire and the broader West in defense of the slaughter, as well as their global standing and reputation, will never be recouped. And, almost certainly, this year of cruelty and lawlessness will mark the beginning of the end for the Zionist project in Palestine and, therefore, of the state of Israel as we know it.
A formula for disaster
Of course, neither the genocide nor the current wave of slaughter of Palestinians started in October of 2023. The systematic massacre, purging, and erasure of the indigenous Palestinian people began in earnest with the Nakba of 1947-48, and it has not ceased since that bloody beginning.
And the genocidal threat was always obvious. Any thinking person could see, even prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, that the Zionist project of the West was a formula for disaster.
First, at the very historic moment when colonialism was being dismantled around the world, and global human rights rules were being adopted at the United Nations, the West carved out an exception for Palestine.
It was at this moment that Zionist forces chose to attack Palestine, murder and terrorize its population, chase many survivors away in terror, and begin the erasure of the indigenous people, and their replacement with a European settler colony founded by foreign invaders and radicalized by a deeply racist and fundamentally violent political ideology.
The colony was to be sustained at the barrel of a gun, by waging constant war both against the indigenous people and against the neighboring states. A colonial education system and a media ecosystem were built to dehumanize the indigenous and neighboring peoples and to instill a supremacist ideology into the settler population.
The settler state, its economy, and its society were thoroughly militarized, enlisting all adults in the project of state violence, arming it to the teeth including with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and even integrating the field-testing of new weapons on captive civilian populations as part of the business model of the colony’s arms industry.