A nation that was born as a rebuke to genocide is now guilty of committing genocide to preserve its own existence.
That is a broad-strokes painting of where Israel finds itself today. But between today and the end of World War II — during which Nazi Germany tried to extirpate Europe’s Jews — lies a tormented and bloodstained narrative of colonial highhandedness, ineptitude and bankrupt assumptions; betrayals; usurpations; religious and secular warfare; deep hatreds; land grabs; displacements; massacres; terroristic murder; apartheid; and so much else, all for control of what the American author Aaron David Miller has called “the much too promised land.”
This is how the United Nations defines genocide: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
And the U.N. lists acts that constitute genocide:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
With the exception of the final item in the list, I think all of the conditions for genocide exist in the Gaza Strip. But what is the proximate context and background to what is happening in Gaza?
On Oct. 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, led a shock assault out of Gaza into southern Israel, attacking multiple small civilian communities, Israeli military posts and a music festival underway in the desert near the Israel-Gaza frontier. The assault force included fighters representing multiple groups that are pretty much universally committed to the eradication of the state of Israel: Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades; the Popular Resistance Committees’ al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades; and, of course, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades among a handful of other militant anti-Israel groups.
The assault was a horror. About 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, were slaughtered in civilian settings and at military posts. The terrorists butchered people in unspeakable ways, and about 250 people, also mostly Israelis, were kidnapped and hauled across the frontier into Gaza to be held hostage for bargaining purposes. Israel responded with a furious assault on Gaza to destroy Hamas and its allied forces and to free the hostages.
Today, about 50 of the hostages are thought still to be in Gaza, but it is now feared that most of those are corpses. To minimize its own troop losses, Israel has taken the sledgehammer approach to killing militants. And so Gaza lies in absolute ruin because of the pounding that it has taken from Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes, Israel’s preferred method of attack.
More important, an estimated over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the bombardments. How many of those are non-combatants is unclear, because the Hamas authorities in Gaza obviously will not issue numbers distinguishing between fighters and civilians. But there is no doubt that the vast majority of the victims of the war have been Palestinian civilians, people trapped in Gaza with no way to escape the fighting between Israel and the Hamas coalition.
Remind yourself that the Gaza Strip is, indeed, a strip of land, just 25 miles deep and about seven miles at its widest point, bounded to the south by Egypt’s North Sinai Governorate, to the west by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the east and north by Israeli territory. Israel holds the sea and the surrounding land except for that south of Gaza, which is Egypt’s.
Gaza is, in effect, a prison holding about 2 million suffering people. Most of them have been displaced multiple times, chased from their homes by fighting or directly ordered by Israeli forces to leave parts of Gaza to make way for military operations.
As Israel has pressed its campaign, its military has repeatedly targeted journalists working in Gaza, killing scores so far, no doubt to cut off the outward flow of information about the atrocious spectacle unfolding in Gaza. And with the repeated killings of aid workers, medical rescue personnel and civilians just trying to get food at aid distribution points, no one should doubt that the Israeli military is acting with naked malice toward Palestinians in Gaza.
Palestinian civilians have repeatedly been herded in every direction within that tiny territory. Their homes have been leveled. All the normal structures of civic life have been shattered. Their hospitals have been repeatedly attacked and are mostly out of use — and not just because Israel has wanted to destroy them: Hamas does embed itself in civilian facilities, as the Israeli forces say, because Hamas cares nothing about how many Palestinian civilians it causes to be slaughtered as it pursues its own interests. If it cared at all, the conflict would not have come to this.
And what it has come to is famine.
A single dry sentence just issued in a United Nations report should shock us all: “As of 15 August 2025, Famine (IPC Phase 5)—with reasonable evidence—is confirmed in Gaza Governorate.”
Those words are the essence of a “snapshot report” on the hunger situation in the Gaza Strip, whose lifelines have been exclusively in Israeli hands for many months now. The next two sentences of the snapshot are no less grim: “After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death. Another 1.07 million people (54 percent) are in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20 percent) are in Crisis (IPC Phase 3).”
The Israeli government declares that there is no starvation in Gaza.
But that is a lie.
Israel has repeatedly cut off or sharply restricted the entry of food and medicines into Gaza in order to force Hamas to give up the remaining hostages, employing the illegal tactic of collective punishment. But we also know that Israel has another design on Gaza. It wants to possess all of that land, but without Palestinians on it. And the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busily scheming with the barbarian Donald Trump to cleanse the Gaza Strip of its people and turn the place into a gleaming Mediterranean resort for the world’s unscrupulous rich. They are planning ethnic cleansing, lest anyone be confused about what is in the works.
And it is because Donald Trump, the chief executive of the United States, is a part of this dirty plan that the U.S. government is silent on the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. How did the great United States of America sink to such infamy? When your nation is led by a thug, thuggish things will be done in your nation’s name.
But what about Congress, our independent legislature and a check on the executive branch of government led by Trump as president? Ah, poor Congress. So cowardly, so feckless. It is in the hands of Republicans, and almost to a person, they are moral midgets. They remain silent in the face of multiple outrages being committed by the Trump administration.
Why will members of the Republican majority that controls Congress not rouse themselves to say something about the enormous crime being committed in Gaza? They have an obligation to do so, because we, the United States, are the ultimate guarantors of Israel’s security. As such, the Israeli government’s crimes are our crimes. Israel’s infamy is our infamy.
The genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza is being armed and underwritten by us. This is intolerable.
Clarification: The assertion that fighters from Gaza who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, committed rapes is a highly disputed issue, and an assertion that rapes were committed that day has been removed from this post. It is to be noted, however, that on Aug. 14, 2025, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict issued a news release that includes the following passage:
With respect to the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Hamas is listed in the annex of the report on the basis of information verified by the United Nations in 2024, indicating reasonable grounds to believe that some hostages taken to Gaza were subjected to different forms of sexual violence during their time in captivity, and clear and convincing information that sexual violence also occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in at least six locations.
The actual report can be seen here.
Democracy Warrior 