No, Piers. It was a genocide in Gaza from day one. Here's why
Some 17 years ago an Israeli general and government minister threatened Gaza with a "Shoah" – a word until then reserved for the Holocaust. The trajectory in Gaza has been unwavering ever since
There are too many pundits, like the interminably dim-witted Piers Morgan, who are slowly, oh-so-slowly coming round to the idea that Israel might be committing a genocide in Gaza. But of course, they are still dismissing as “antisemites” those of us who pointed out from the start that it was a genocide.
They hope to get away with this face-saving ploy only because the establishment media continues to ignore what happened before 7 October 2023, events that over many years had made clear Israel was readying to commit genocide – and would grasp a pretext when it arrived.
Here is a brief outline of some of the most pertinent factors:
1. In early 2008 – that is, 17 years ago – deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general, threatened that Gaza would face a "Shoah" – a word until then, strictly reserved for the Holocaust.
2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits, and bombed its only airport. From then on, food was tightly rationed, or what Israeli leaders called “putting Gaza on a diet”, while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called “mowing the lawn”. Gaza was effectively turned into a concentration camp.
3. The siege was complemented by Israel's gradual destruction of Gaza's means of self-sufficiency: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave’s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza's industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza's electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.
4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel's goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas "terror" in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity since 7 October 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-US front group, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.
5. With this as the background, the United Nations warned a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire. In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting “42 knees in one day”. Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has warned.
Let us note too that Israel’s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza – and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave’s desperate plight – was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on 7 October 2023.
5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the US to join it in a pressure campaign on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave’s people would flood into Sinai – an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before 7 October 2023, and has continued to do so since.
In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide – all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.
Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza’s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what’s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world. Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped – now.
It is cold comfort indeed that, in the very final stages of Israel’s genocide, media pundits like Piers Morgan are ready to concede that a genocide may be about to happen. None of that should obscure or excuse their 21 months of complicity in the genocide that unfolded before all our eyes. They did not know because they did not want to know.
Responsibility for every dead child in Gaza, every maimed child in Gaza, every orphaned child in Gaza, every starving child in Gaza, irreversibly damaged by malnutrition, rests firmly on their shoulders.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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From day one, from hour one.... this genocide was premeditated. Thank you, again, Jonathan, for your truth and clarity
Well said, Jonathan, and it bears repeating loudly every time one of these erstwhile apologists for Israel’s crimes belatedly starts to wring their hands because some images of emaciated children have trickled into the mainstream media. Their complicity must never be forgotten or forgiven.