In fact, U.S. foreign policy has created a genocidal Israel. Without massive, unconditional U.S. military subsidies, Israel would have had to practice diplomacy with their neighbors years ago. As Gaza and Beirut burns under Israel’s bombs, it is obvious for anyone who is paying attention that America has long incubated the emergence of the worst possible version of Israel. Decades of U.S. foreign policy have rewarded and accelerated a downward trajectory of genocidal politics and actions in both Israeli society and government. And now, with the full backing of the US President, Israel is driving wave after wave of escalating violence in its ongoing push to eliminate any opposition to the continued expansion of a Jewish state in lands where millions of Palestinian, Lebanese, and other people already live.

The Israel that we see today is the worst of all potential outcomes, a chauvinist, racist, and genocidal country that perceives Christian and Muslim Arabs as bodies to be crushed and destroyed. This ugly reality is the direct result of decades of massive military subsidies and political support by the West essentially by the United States. Without this support, Israel would have had to compromise with their neighbors years ago. The history of occupied Palestine is a succession of betrayals of the Palestinian people orchestrated by the West in favor of the Zionists. We are all familiar with the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which was notable for its total absence of any reference to the Palestinians, who were simply described as “non-Jews”. The very terms of the Mandate over Palestine granted in 1922 by the League of Nations (League) to the United Kingdom show that all the arrangements for subsequent conquest are included, including an embryonic army, making the Zionist Organization the privileged interlocutor of the Mandatory Power. In 1947, when London handed over the baton to the United Nations Organization (UNO), which resulted in the famous partition plan that was highly unfavorable to the Palestinians, everything was ready for the military phase of the conquest, which began even before the formal establishment of the State of Israel. The second structuring moment in the conquest was the period 1947-1949. And if the Arab states declared war on Israel as soon as the state was proclaimed, it was in reaction to ethnic cleansing that had actually begun long before May 1948.

Starving, exhausted Palestinians forced to move by bullets and massive bombardments: these are the hellish conditions endured by the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Thousands of women and children murdered daily, with no reaction from certain Western countries, who are normalizing a genocide. More than a year after the start of the war on Gaza, the worst-case scenario seems to be taking shape in this isolated territory, now cut off from the rest of the world and deprived of all humanitarian aid. The population is trying to survive despite the total siege imposed by the Israeli army, a total siege imposed well before October 7, 2024. While the rest of occupied Palestine continues to be progressively colonized.

Paradoxically, the other defining moment in this long war came with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. This process, which for many at the time heralded the prospect of peace, had two key elements. The first, when the Madrid conference was convened in 1991, was the exclusion of the UN from the forthcoming talks. Since 1947, the international organization had been a central player in all attempts to find a solution. Henceforth, the United States and Israel decided that a settlement could only be reached through bilateral negotiations, under the aegis or otherwise of multilateral sponsors. The Oslo Accords are a perfect illustration of this. But in reality, under cover of these agreements, Israel set in motion an extraordinarily sophisticated process of appropriation of Palestinian land and took institutional control of the Palestinian territory. Since Oslo, and thanks to Oslo, the process has continued inexorably. The increasingly predictable defeat of Ukraine, Europe’s obvious weakness in the face of the United States and the West’s support for Israel’s genocidal war – the geopolitical upheavals of which we have yet to gauge – are isolating the West, which is seeing its hegemonic influence steadily diminish as the cards are redistributed in line with the new alliances of the emerging “Global South”, led by China and Russia.

In reality, what is happening and what we are seeing in Gaza is not a war between two armies, but rather genocide by a professional army against the women and children of the Gaza Strip. This war of extermination did not begin on October 7, 2023. It has been going on since the last century. It is a secular enterprise of colonization of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, punctuated by the massacre of Palestinians. We remember massacres such as Haifa 1937, Jerusalem 1937, Haifa 1938, Balad al-Sheikh and Haifa again in 1939, as well as the 1947 massacre in Haifa. Abbasiya in 1948 or Deir Yassin, which took place on April 9, 1948 during the capture of the village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, during the 1947-1948 war in Mandatory Palestine. It was perpetrated by terrorist members of the Irgun and the Lehi. And the Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra district and the Chatila Palestinian refugee camp in West Beirut, perpetrated by the Christian Phalangist militia supported by the Israeli army from September 16 to 18, 1982. Since 1967, the colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been illegal. The annexation of East Jerusalem is illegal. The blockade of Gaza is illegal. The war in Gaza is the latest example of Israel’s violation of international law on the recurring pretext that its existence is at stake.

Although the decision by the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Benyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former Defense Minister, may have given the impression that international justice was taking over the case, nothing has changed since then. War crimes and crimes against humanity have continued and intensified; genocide is underway. This inability to act effectively to stop the massacres is reflected at the UN, where, in the vast majority of cases, binding resolutions demanding action from Israel are systematically blocked by a US veto. Alongside the international courts, humanitarian NGOs have been busy denouncing « a death trap » for the Palestinians. An observation which, very quickly after the outbreak of war by Israel, became obvious as the dead and wounded piled up and famine gradually set in. It took months for the media to accept this reality, albeit timidly and without ever questioning the narrative they had been propagating since October 7, 2023. This one-sided approach to the direct destruction of the Palestinian population goes against the grain of the Russian-Ukrainian war in the discourse of most politicians and the media, where the aggressor is rightly singled out and vilified. On the other hand, the massacres perpetrated by the Israeli army are more often than not downplayed or justified by the argument that in every hospital razed to the ground, in every school bombed, in every house destroyed, Hamas « terrorists » have taken refuge. On January 18, 2024, Israeli President Isaac Herzog went out of his way to justify this at the Davos Forum: « Under every mattress in every house in Gaza, there’s a rocket. »

The aim is to create solidarity between people who share the same assessments of the conflict, and to limit as far as possible the capacity for expression of those who oppose it or do not think as they do. This approach to the conflict is illustrated by Israel’s positioning as a claimed member of the West since its foundation in 1948, a choice confirmed by the unambiguous assertions of its current Prime Minister: « We are part of European culture… Europe ends in Israel », or again, in December 2024, during his greetings to the Christian communities in Israel: « Israel leads the world in the fight against the forces of evil and tyranny… ». A phraseology which, in the West, inevitably feeds Islamophobia and the famous “concept” of Islamo-leftism. A way of equating Islam with a terrorist threat, forbidding criticism of Israel « as a country that occupies a land that is not its own and represses in blood a people that does not want to submit, but becomes the leading edge of the war on terror ». The Israeli Prime Minister wants to give the impression and illusion that he is defending the West, but in reality he is contributing to the collapse of the West and its moral principles. And in the case of occupied Palestine, these humanist principles are variable geometry.

October 7, 2023 is not the starting point for what is happening in Gaza today. It’s not even the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To understand what’s happening now, we need to go back to May 15, 1948, the day the State of Israel was founded. This was the real starting point of a genocide that has been going on for 77 years. That day marked the beginning of the Nakba, the forced expulsion of the Palestinian people, and the first Arab-Israeli war. After the end of the war, according to international law, the Palestinians were supposed to be allowed to return home. This is one of the foundations of international law. This is how the international community legislated. But Israel, by not allowing the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after the Nakba, has flouted these fundamental rules. In reality, the Zionist project is based on Jewish domination of Palestine, which means that Israel, in order to impose what is known as a Jewish state, must by all means maintain a Jewish majority. Israel has therefore been committed, even since well before 1948, to maintaining a population balance that enables the Israelis to maintain total control and domination over this land.

Before October 7, 5 million Palestinians lived in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and there are around 2 million Palestinians within the occupied territory of Palestine. That’s 7 million, roughly the same as the number of Jews living in occupied Palestine. Between the river and the sea, there’s a demographic balance that could jeopardize the Zionist project. For decades, the State of Israel has been establishing laws to regulate or control the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To implement these laws, it systematically uses its army. The current genocide in Gaza is simply a continuation of this enterprise. Its aim is to empty the Palestinian territories of their inhabitants, and then to monopolize them. The introduction of martial law has enabled Israel to treat Palestinians, even though they are Israeli citizens, as a threat. Today, Palestinians living in Israel are Israeli citizens. They are supposedly equal to Israelis, yet they have no rights. They cannot vote, they are totally excluded from Israel’s so-called democratic process. They live under a military dictatorship and an apartheid regime.

 As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said, the Hamas attack on October 7 did not start in vain. It was preceded by a long history of colonization and oppression of the Palestinian people. The Zionist project, whose aim was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, has never taken the Palestinians into account, and has been ethnically cleansing the original territory of Palestine since the Nakba in 1948. This process is still ongoing. Palestinians who have not (yet) fled face daily violence from Israeli settlers, repeated offensives from an army of occupation, or find themselves locked in the « open-air prison » that is Gaza. In the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the role of the West is crucial. Israel’s colonization and oppression of the Palestinians has always been made possible by the support of the West, in particular the British before the Second World War and the United States and certain European countries afterwards. It is thanks to the support of the United States that Israel can continue its occupation and colonization unchallenged, despite repeated condemnations by the United Nations.

In Gaza, humanity is writing one of the darkest chapters in its history. Famished figures, seemingly from another century, wander through the rubble in search of survival. Men and women fall victim to bullets simply for trying to feed their children. Children are dying of hunger, while humanitarian aid remains blocked at the gates of the Palestinian enclave. It’s a horror without a name. It’s official: the war to “eradicate Hamas” was only intended to eradicate the Palestinian population. And all the while, the international community, and the West in particular, remains complicit. Complicit in its silence, its inaction, its indecent justifications. A genocide is underway, and it will leave an indelible mark on our collective conscience.

History will be harsh on those who remained silent in the face of the unspeakable. The bombardments continue in Gaza. Israel continues its offensives and killings, with impunity reinforced by general inaction. International law is trampled underfoot, the victims forgotten and starved. The powerlessness of international law to stop the war on Gaza is due to the complicity of Western countries and politicians, and the complacency of the mainstream media. Future history is unwritten, and the time has come to seek a solution that would spare both Palestinians and Israelis an even greater catastrophe than the one unfolding before our eyes. To remain passive in the face of this genocide is to join the ranks of the wilfully blind. The late repentant, those who belatedly realize that their “unconditional support for Israel” has plunged them into an abyss of moral insalubrity, will probably have to render an account here on earth or elsewhere. To those who refused the ceasefire. To those who have minimized or justified the unspeakable for months. To those who have vilified, stigmatized and harassed voices calling for peace, humanity and an immediate end to hostilities. To all those who, out of fear or calculation, have never dared to say « stop »… Look at what your silences, your compromises, your blindness have allowed: they have led to the genocide of the Palestinian people at the beginning of the 21st century. Humanity will remember.