Last week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, put out an AI-generated video that showed a conveyor belt of overweight Palestinian prisoners – dreaming of food and education – entering one of his prisons; he pops the dream bubbles above their heads and they come out emaciated and crying. Ben-Gvir is building an execution site for Palestinian prisoners with spectator booths, and he recently showed up at Damon prison in northern Israel and taunted female prisoners who complained about the poor conditions. He is digging a moat around a new high-security jail and planning to introduce crocodiles to patrol it. In all this, he has the approval of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while the law that he championed mandating the death penalty for Palestinians deemed terrorists by military courts and convicted for lethal attacks is built on public support.
Sometime around 2017, many Palestinians and their supporters in the global media felt a change. Articles about Palestine no longer drew the hate mail we’d been accustomed to and events in support of Palestinian rights were hardly heckled. It seemed that people were less and less convinced by the image long cultivated by Israel and its supporters – the bearer of “western values” in the Middle East, the home to the “most moral army in the world”, a country acting only in self-defence – while it regularly assaulted Gaza and continued to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank.
It had been a widely held tenet that if enough people in the democratic western world knew the reality of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, they would pressure their governments, and Israel would be made to observe the norms of international law. Eventually, a reality would be born in which Jews, Muslims and Christians would live as equals within some political system that would be as good – and as flawed – as others. South Africa was always cited as the example, where rising international pressure over the decades was decisive.
But what looked like the winning of the moral, rational argument was offset by an acceleration of the processes of occupation, an increase in the frequency and blatancy of settler attacks in the West Bank, and of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacks on Gaza. The past three years have been the logical development of this. In the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks, Israel escalated its killing, maiming and displacement of the Palestinians to the level of certifiable genocide. The defence minister, Israel Katz, says he is committed to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, while a West Bank settler proudly tells the BBC that one Jewish life is worth 10 million Palestinian lives. Social media is awash with Israelis – from pundits on TV news debates to IDF soldiers – stating and performing the outrages necessary to achieve the objective of a Palestinian-free Palestine.
And while people across the world now know the truth of what is happening in Palestine and repeatedly and full-heartedly reject it, many democracies across the west continue to send arms and provide intelligence to Israel – even in a time of genocide. The US president’s Board of Peace makes a mockery of Palestinians, while hundreds of Israeli trucks clear the rubble from Gaza – and, with it, evidence of war crimes. The US attacks international institutions, such as the international criminal court, that seek to offer some semblance of justice for Palestinians. And to repress the constant protests of hundreds of thousands of their citizens, western democracies compromise their justice systems, attack their educational institutions and undermine their own democratic freedoms. Some have belatedly announced sanctions limited to Israeli settlements – illegal settlements that have should have been sanctioned years ago.
In 2014, I served on the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. In the preface to the report, which came after Israel’s third war on Gaza in six years, I wrote: “If not genocide, then genocide is not far behind.” Today I wonder if the genocide is not also a trailer for something more to come.
If the genocide was not a surprise, neither is the fact that the old colonial masters have no particular aversion to it. In a line of continuity with their own history, western countries have for decades partnered with Israel on weapons production and intelligence and surveillance technology. The west has sought Israeli advice and training in counter-terrorism, interrogation and civilian population-control techniques. A selling point for Israeli weapons has always been that they have been tried and tested.
And now, as Israel’s genocide is livestreamed, the establishment watches, enables, protects and helps tidy up. We may be watching a research and development exercise, a blueprint, a template, an example being created. We are already in a world where – it has been argued – some populations are surplus to requirements. Some of them live in areas that are a property developer’s dream.
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This war is not only about Palestinians and Israelis, but about ideologies of supremacy and domination that threaten the people of the world, its civil societies and what is left of its international organisations. For the moment, it is the Palestinians who are on the frontline, the Palestinians who are being killed and maimed and tortured and displaced. But the Palestinians are also standing between all of us and a world remade in Israel’s image.
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Ahdaf Soueif is the author of Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground
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