There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Michael West Media reports on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.

Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

“I’m offended by crocs,” says man apprehended by many police & special ops for wearing “F… Israel” t-shirt

The footage #andrewbrown #legend #auspol pic.twitter.com/fc1p3f911d

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.

The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with.

A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.

It never does.

More than 72,000 people killed so far. More than 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.

Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck.

Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by 18 months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.

Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.

They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.

Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force.

And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.

Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.

The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

The pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue

without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.

That fiction is now dead.

The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months.

None of that is over there.

The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it.

Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.

Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.

Complicity is not passive.

When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.

The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.

Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.

The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for 18 months.

But a 40 percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.

The people who protested over Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.

Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.

And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.

That shelf life has expired.

Several small Pacific countries regularly vote in support of Israel at the United Nations in spite of overwhelming opposition for the Zionist state in the Middle East over its genocide in Gaza.

Why?

In this AJ+ video short, senior presenter/producer Dena Takruri sets out to explain the Pacific backing for Tel Aviv, including from Fiji which is understood to be supplying peacekeepers for US President Donald Trump’s International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza due to be announced this week.

• WATCH: The AJ+ shorts video How Israel won the Pacific
• READ MORE: 600 Australians, 50 Kiwis fighting for Israeli military during Gaza genocide
• Indonesian protesters slam Prabowo over ‘peacekeeping’ troops for Gaza

Israel has been building religious and diplomatic connections with the Pacific Islands, as six nations voted with it on the Gaza ceasefire issue.

“Israel is left standing alone with the backing of the US . . . and the South Pacific,” says Takruri.

“As Israeli’s biggest financial and military backer, the US makes sense.

“But why is a region in the Global South, on nearly the complete opposite side of the globe, co-signing genocide and apartheid?

Evangelical identity
“To understand the Pacific Islands countries, you have to understand the region’s identity. And that’s mostly Christian, like 90 percent Christian.

“And that’s because European missionaries in the 19th century focused on proselytising tribal leaders. Once their chiefs were swayed, their tribes would go with them.”

Christians in the Pacific took a very literal reading of the Bible, a feature of evangelicism.

For example, in Fiji, which has just opened an embassy in Jerusalem, one in four people identify as evangelicals – Christian Zionists.

To take advantage of this, Israel has deployed a special identity-based diplomatic “mythmaking” task force presenting Jews in Israel as being “indigenous” people returning to their “homeland”.

This notion clashes with the reality that Zionists settled in Palestine and expelled 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba –  “the catastrophe” – at the founding of the state of Israel.

“It’s the latest example of the Global North using the Global South for its own gain,” concludes Takruri.

COMMENTARY: By Ramzy Baroud

A shock and awe. The phrase is apt in describing what Israel has done in the occupied West Bank almost immediately following the events of 7 October 2023 and the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein defines “shock and awe” not merely as a military tactic, but as a political and economic strategy that exploits moments of collective trauma — whether caused by war, natural disaster, or economic collapse — to impose radical policies that would otherwise be resisted.

According to Klein, societies in a state of shock are rendered disoriented and vulnerable, allowing those in power to push through sweeping transformations while opposition is fragmented or overwhelmed.

• READ MORE: Trump’s ‘board of peace’ appears to seek wider mandate beyond Gaza
• Other Palestine reports

Though the policy is often discussed in the context of US foreign policy — from Iraq to Haiti — Israel has employed shock-and-awe tactics with greater frequency, consistency, and refinement.

Unlike the US, which has applied the doctrine episodically across distant theatres, Israel has used it continuously against a captive population living under its direct military control.

Indeed, the Israeli version of shock and awe has long been a default policy for suppressing Palestinians. It has been applied across decades in the occupied Palestinian territory and extended to neighboring Arab countries whenever it suited Israeli strategic objectives.

In Lebanon, this approach became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut that was systematically destroyed by Israel during its 2006 war on Lebanon.

Disproportionate force
The doctrine advocates the use of disproportionate force against civilian areas, the deliberate targeting of infrastructure, and the transformation of entire neighborhoods into rubble in order to deter resistance through collective punishment.

Gaza has been the epicenter of Israel’s application of this tactic. In the years preceding the genocide, Israeli officials increasingly framed their assaults on Gaza as limited, “managed” wars designed to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance.

These operations were rationalised through the concept of “mowing the lawn,” a phrase used by Israeli military strategists to describe the periodic use of overwhelming violence to “reestablish deterrence”. The logic was that Gaza could not be politically resolved, only indefinitely managed through recurrent destruction.

What unfolded in the West Bank shortly after the start of the Gaza genocide followed a strikingly similar pattern.

Beginning in October 2023, Israel launched an unprecedented campaign of violence across the West Bank. This included large-scale military raids in cities and refugee camps, the routine use of airstrikes — previously rare in the West Bank — the widespread deployment of armoured vehicles, and a surge in settler violence carried out with the backing or direct participation of the Israeli army.

The death toll rose sharply, with hundreds of Palestinians killed in a matter of months, including children. Entire refugee camps, such as Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarm, were subjected to systematic destruction: roads were torn up, homes demolished, water and electricity networks destroyed, and medical access severely restricted.

Israeli forces repeatedly laid siege to communities, preventing the movement of ambulances, journalists, and humanitarian workers.

Accelerated the ethnic cleansing
At the same time, Israel accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities, particularly in Area C. Dozens of Bedouin and rural villages were forcibly emptied through a combination of military orders, settler attacks, home demolitions, and the denial of access to land and water.

Families were driven out through sustained terror designed to make daily life impossible.

Yet the most violent period of Israeli aggression in the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000–2005) has been largely overlooked, in part because of the sheer scale and horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The annihilation of Gaza has rendered the violence in the West Bank seemingly secondary in the global imagination, despite the fact that its long-term consequences may prove just as devastating.

At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition succeeded in presenting themselves to the world as reckless, unrestrained, and ideologically drive — willing and able to expand the cycle of destruction far beyond Gaza, into the West Bank and across Israel’s borders into neighboring Arab countries.

This performance of extremism functioned as a political strategy.

The consequences are now unmistakable. Large areas of the West Bank lie in ruins. Entire communities have been shattered, their social and physical fabric deliberately dismantled.

12,000 displaced children
According to UNRWA, more than 12,000 Palestinian children remain displaced, increasingly suggesting a displacement that may become permanent rather than temporary.

History, however, offers a critical lesson. The Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism has repeatedly demonstrated that Palestinians do not remain passive indefinitely.

Despite the paralysis and fragmentation of their political leadership, Palestinian society has consistently regenerated its capacity for resistance.

Israel understands this reality as well. It knows that shock is not infinite, that fear eventually gives way to defiance, and that once the immediate trauma begins to fade, Palestinians will reorganise and push back against imposed conditions of domination.

What is underway, therefore, is a race against time. Israel is working to consolidate what it hopes will become an irreversible new reality on the ground — one that enables formal annexation, normalises permanent military rule, and completes the ethnic cleansing of large segments of the Palestinian population.

For this reason, a deeper and more sustained understanding of current events in the West Bank is essential.

Without confronting this reality directly, Israeli plans will proceed largely unchallenged. To expose, resist, and ultimately defeat these designs is not only a matter of political analysis but a moral imperative inseparable from supporting the Palestinian people in restoring their dignity and achieving their long-denied freedom.

A temporary ceasefire and release of some Palestinians in a prisoner exchange is not a “peace agreement” and it is far from what is needed — ending colonisation; freedom for the >10,000 political prisoners still in Israeli gulags (also tortured, nearly 100 have died under torture in the last two years); return of the millions of refugees; and accountability for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

That is why this global uprising (intifada) will not stop until freedom, justice, and equality are attained.

• READ MORE: Tens of thousands return to shattered Gaza homes after ceasefire
• How Palestine fights ecocide with biodiversity and sustainability resistance

Here are brief answers I gave to questions about the agreement for Gaza:

1. How has life in the West Bank changed for you and your community during the past two years of conflict?
The West Bank has been illegally occupied since 1967 (ICJ ruling) but it was not merely an occupation but intensive colonisation and ethnic cleansing. The attacks on our people accelerated in the last two years with over 60,000 made homeless in the West Bank and denial of freedom of movement (including hundreds of new gates installed in these two years separating the remaining concentration camps/ghettos of the West Bank ).

2. What is your assessment of the new peace deal that brought an end to the fighting in Gaza?
It is not a peace deal. It is an agreement to pause the genocide which will not work because the belligerent occupier — “Israel” — has not respected a single agreement it signed since its founding. Even the agreement to join the United Nations was conditional on respecting the UN Charter and UN resolutions issued before and after 1949.

This continued to even breaking the signed ceasefire agreement of last year. I have 0 percent confidence that this latest agreement would be respected even on the simple aspect of “pausing” the genocide and ethnic cleansing going on since 1948.

3. In your view, why did war drag on for two years despite multiple ceasefire attempts?
Simply put because colonisation can only be done with violence. And the war on our people has gone on not for two years but for 77 years without ending (sustained by Western government support). Israel as a colonisation entity is the active face of colonisation. The USA for example broke similar agreements for “pauses” in colonisation with natives in North America and broke every single one of them.

Israeli military occupation on the environment.        Video: Greenpeace

4. What kind of humanitarian and environmental toll has the conflict taken on Palestinian society?
It is now well documented from UN agencies, human rights groups (like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, even the Israeli group B’Tselem). In brief it is genocide, ecocide, scholasticide, medicide,
and veriticide. (More at: ongaza.org )

5. Why do you think it took the IDF so long to rescue all the hostages?
The terrorist organisation that deceptively calls itself “IDF” (Israeli Defence Forces) was not interested in rescuing their captives (not “hostages”) and they only got people back via exchange of prisoners (not rescue).

The IGF (Israeli Genocide Forces) actually killed many of their own soldiers and civilians
on 7 October 2023 by activating the Hannibal directive to prevent their capture. The resistance was aiming to capture colonisers (living on stolen Palestinian lands) to exchange for some of the more than 11,000 political prisoners illegally held in Israeli jails. (Again see ongaza.org )

6. How significant was international involvement — particularly from the US — in reaching the final agreement?
This is the first genocide in human history that is not executed by one government. It is executed by a number of governments directly supporting and aiding (participating). This includes the USA, UK, France, Egypt, Germany, Australia etc. Many of these countries have governments dominated or highly influenced by the Zionist agenda.

Under the influence of a growing popular protest against the genocide around the world, some of those countries are trying to wiggle out from pressure in an effort to save
“Israel” from growing global isolation. Trump was blackmailed via videos/files collected by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghiseline Maxwell (Mossad agents). He is simply a narcissistic collaborator with genocide!

7. What concrete steps do you think are necessary now to turn this peace deal into a sustainable, lasting solution?
Again not a “peace deal”. What needs to be done is apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) on this rogue state that violates the international conventions (Geneva Convention, Conventions against Apartheid and Genocide). BDS was used against apartheid South Africa and needs to be applied here also. (For more: bdsmovement.net )

8. How do you see the Palestine Museum of Natural History contributing to rebuilding and healing efforts in the aftermath of war?
Our institute (PIBS, palestinenature.org) which includes museums, a botanic garden, and many other sections is focused on “sustainable human and natural communities” Our motto is respect: for ourselves (empowerment), for others (regardless of religious or other background), and for nature.

Conflict, colonisations, oppression are obviously areas we challenge and work on in JOINT struggle with all people of various background.

9. Looking ahead, what gives you optimism—or concern—about the future relationship between Palestinians and Israelis?
What gives me optimism first and foremost is the heroic resilience and resistance (together making sumud) of our Palestinian people everywhere and the millions of other people mobilising for human rights and for justice (including the right of refugees to return and also environmental justice).

What gives me concern is the depth of depravity that greedy individuals in power go to destroying our planet and our people and profiting from colonisation and genocide.

About 8.5 million Palestinians are refugees and displaced people thanks to Zionism and Western collusion with it. A collusion intent on transforming Palestine from multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multireligious, and multilingual society to a racist Jewish state (monolithic).

Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Bedouin in cyberspace; a villager at home; professor, founder and (volunteer) director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, Occupied Palestine.

Notes:
World Court Findings on Israeli Apartheid a Wake-Up Call: International Court of Justice Makes Clear Call for Reparations

The 7 October 2023 reminded us of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

7 October 1944! Prisoner Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize as before was not given to the any of the hundreds of deserving nominees but given instead to rightwing pro-genocide María Corina Machado. She dedicated her prize to Donald Trump and had previously aligned with the worst rightwing parties throughout Latin America as well as the genocidal regime of Netanyahu (and even asked them for help to topple her own elected government).

New Zealand advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has “cautiously welcomed” the Gaza ceasefire and proposed exchange of hostages between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas.

At least 7000 Palestinians are being held in detention without trial by Israel while about 20 Israeli soldiers are held by Hamas.

PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said the deal was a reprieve from Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Trump announces Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal: What we know and what’s next
• Netanyahu claims ceasefire ‘success’ but Israeli public sees him as obstacle
• Trump says Israel and Hamas sign off on first phase of Gaza ceasefire plan
• Two years after October 7: Israel’s war, Gaza’s ashes, and the collapse of moral authority

“It’s been two years of mass bombing and starvation. It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century,” he said in a statement.

“The real tragedy is that the main elements of this ceasefire deal were already agreed to nine months ago in January. Israel was forced to let Palestinians return to Gaza City, and lower the intensity of its attacks.

“Within a few weeks, the Israelis scuttled the agreement, shut off all food and intensified their attacks and are now ethnically re-cleansing Gaza City.

“Expulsion is still the Israeli government’s aim. Netanyahu must be disappointed that Trump is no longer advocating for removal of Palestinians from Gaza, but Netanyahu usually gets his way with Trump in the end.”

Called on support
Nazal said PSNA especially noted that the Hamas acceptance statement called on countries supporting the deal — New Zealand included — to make sure Israel abided by the few specific conditions imposed on the Zionist state in the agreement.

“Israel has broken every peace deal it has ever signed on Palestine, right from occupying more than half of what was allocated by the United Nations as a Palestinian state in 1948,” Nazzal said.

“In the 1993 Oslo peace deal, which the US also brokered, there was meant to be a Palestinian state within five years. Israel made sure this never happened.

“This time, there is no mention of the Occupied West Bank. Nothing about return of refugees. There is no commitment in the Trump deal for a Palestinian state, for Winston Peters to eventually recognise.

“There’s just a vague pathway with no timelines and it’s all conditional on Israeli approval,” Nazzal said.

“So we have a message for Winston Peters, who is demanding PSNA and other protesters applaud the Trump deal as ‘case solved’.

“Ceasefire or not, our campaign to isolate the apartheid state of Israel will continue to grow until all Palestinians are liberated.”

“It is among the strongest language the New Zealand leader has used against Netanyahu and comes amid reports of intense aerial attacks on Gaza after Israel’s decision to launch a fresh military operation.”

These are the opening two paragraphs of The New Zealand Herald coverage by political reporter Jamie Ensor of Prime Minister Luxon’s public declaration that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lost the plot.

His comment was in the context of the Israeli government’ genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and their increasing persecution on the Israeli occupied West Bank (August 13): Netanyahu lost the plot says Luxon.

Spectrum of NZ government’s response to genocide
The New Zealand government’s response to this ethnic cleansing by genocide strategy in Gaza has ranged on a spectrum between pathetically weak to callous disregard.

Previously I’ve described this spectrum as between limp and deplorable; both have their own validity.

Consequently, the many New Zealanders who were appalled by this response might have been somewhat relieved by Luxon’s frankness.

Perhaps a long overdue change of direction towards humanitarianism? In the interests of confusion avoidance this is a rhetorical question.

However, there is a big problem with Luxon’s conclusion. Quite simply, he is wrong; there is a plot and it is based on a perverse biblical origin.

Why NZ Prime Minister Luxon got it wrong.        Video: RNZ

Just over three weeks from the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack across the border in the Israeli occupied former Palestinian land, Netanyahu made the following broadcast,  including on You Tube (October 30): Netanyahu’s biblical justification.

The ‘”war criminal” is explicit that there is a plot behind the ethnic cleansing through genocide strategy in Gaza. It is a dogmatically blood thirsty and historically inaccurate biblical centred plot.

In his own words:

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — and we do remember. And we are fighting — our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza, or around Gaza, and in all other regions in Israel, are joining this chain of Jewish heroes — a chain that started 3000 years ago, from Joshua until the heroes of the Six-Day War in 1948 [sic], the 1973 October War, and all other wars in this country.

“Our heroic troops — they have only one supreme goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country.”

Netanyahu was referring to the Book of 1 Samuel (Chapter 15, Verse 3) which states:

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Samuel was a prophet through who the Jewish God Yahweh commanded one Saul to conduct a total war of annihilation against the Amalekites.

The Amalekites were a biblical nation who, so biblical history goes, had attacked the Israelites during their “Exodus” from Egypt.

From apartheid to ethnic cleansing to recognition of Palestine
Previously I have published four posts on the Gaza genocide. The first (March 15) discussed it in the context of the apartheid in the South Africa of the past and apartheid as continuing defining feature in Israel since its creation in 1948: When apartheid met Zionism.

The second (May 28) discussed what underpins the Zionist support for ethnic cleansing through genocide: Reasons for supporting ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

This theme was followed through in the third (June 4) in the context of recognising the state of Palestine: Ethnic cleansing, genocide and Palestine recognition.

From Netanyahu to Zelda
In the context of the truer number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, my fourth previous post (July 2) was more directly closer to the theme of this post: How to biblically justify 400,000 Palestinian deaths.

I quoted a genocide supporter going by the name of “Zelda” justifying Israel’s war in similar vein to Bejamin Netanyahu:

“Gaza belongs to Israel! This is not just a political claim; it is a sacred, unbreakable decree from Almighty God Himself. If any government from around the world recognises Palestine, the United States needs to declare it part of the Axis of Evil

“The land was promised by divine covenant to the people of Israel, chosen by God to be His light in the darkness. No enemy, no terrorist, no foreign power can wrest it away. Those who reject this truth stand against God’s will and will face His judgment.

“If Palestinians want aid and peace, they must recognise Israel’s God-given right and leave Gaza forever. Only under God’s blessing can this land flourish, and all who defy His plan will be cast down.”

From Zelda to Alfred
On July 4, I received the following email from a reader called Alfred. In his words (be warned, at the very least this is a mind-boggling read):

“Accidentally I came across your blog on ‘How To Justify 400,000 Palestinian Deaths In Gaza: Ask ‘Zelda’ (Thursday, 3 July 2025). It was an interesting read.
With all due respect, I would like to place before you my ‘two cents’
Consider this history Mr Ian:
1) Before the modern state of Israel there was the British mandate, Not a Palestinian state.
2) Before the British mandate there was the Ottoman empire, Not a Palestinian state.
3) Before the Ottoman empire there was the Islamic mamluk sultanate of Egypt, Not a Palestinian state.
4)Before the Islamic mamluk sultanate of Egypt there was the Ayyubid dynasty, Not a Palestinian state. Godfrey of Bouillon conquered it in 1099.
5) Before the Ayyubid dynasty there was the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, Not a Palestinian state.
6) Before the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem there was the Fatimid caliphate, Not a Palestinian state.
7) Before the Fatimid caliphate there was the byzantine empire, Not a Palestinian state. 8. Before the Byzantine empire there was the Roman empire, Not a Palestinian state.
9) Before the Roman empire there was the Hasmonaean dynasty, Not a Palestinian state. 10) Before the Hasmonean dynasty there was the Seleucid empire, Not a Palestinian state.
11) Before the Seleucid empire there was the empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon, Not a Palestinian state.
12) Before the empire of Alexander, the 3rd of Macedon there was the Persian empire, Not a Palestinian state.
13) Before the Persian empire there was the Babylonian empire, Not a Palestinian state.
14) Before the Babylonian empire there was the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, Not a Palestinian state.
15) Before the kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the kingdom of Israel, Not a Palestinian state.
16) Before the kingdom of Israel there was the theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel, Not a Palestinian state.
17) Before the theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel there was the individual state of Canaan, Not a Palestinian state.
In fact, in that corner of the earth there was everything but a Palestinian state!
Interesting history isn’t it?
Yes, I agree with Zelda’s statement that …
‘The land was promised by divine covenant to the people of Israel, chosen by God to be His light in the darkness.’
Mr Ian, if you go back to the Bible to read the Old Testament history, we see that God declares time and again that they (Israelites) are His chosen people, and He will bring them back to land of Israel. (Which has started to happen, as you observe world events). He also condemns His own chosen that if they turn away from Him, he will turn away His face. And that was what He did to the 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel. They were wiped out. And the sort of genocide that we see today in Gaza, was prevalent in that time, when Gentile nations were even wiped out if they stood between the Israelites and the ‘promised land’ (Israel). Even the lives of His own chosen people were not valuable to Him, and was at stake (holocaust recently) when they turned away from Him, as those many of their enemies (or opponents)!

8000-year-old history is repeating itself now in Gaza, I believe.
Alfred

Mapping the success of Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The views of both Zelda and Alfred are not off the planet in terms of supporting Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through genocide.

They are thoroughly consistent with Netanyahu’s well-thought out plot. Both are part of his “echo chamber”.

Who has really lost the plot?
The genocide towards Palestinians will not end in Gaza. All the evidence is that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are next.

Gaza the precursor to West Bank Palestinians.

There the ethnic cleansing is continuing in the form of persecution and repression, including imprisonment (hostage-taking by another name).

But it is escalating and, unless there is a change in direction, it is only a matter of time before persecution and repression morph into genocide.

Benjamin Netanyahu has not lost the plot. However, Christopher Luxon has. His criticism of Netanyahu is a flimsy attempt to avoid doing what a humanitarian government with a “plot” should do. This includes:

1. Recognising the Palestinian Territories as an official independent state;
2. Sanctioning Israeli Defence Force (IDF) visitors;
3. Close the Israel Embassy;
4. Impose trade and bilateral sanctions; and
5. Suspend Israel from the United Nations.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

So here we are, 2025, and Israel has finally achieved what no terrorist group, no hostile neighbour, no antisemitic tyrant ever could: it has become the most dangerous country on earth — for its own people.

Not because of rockets or boycotts, but because its government has decided that the only way to secure the future is to annihilate everyone else’s.

The Zionist project — once sold as a miraculous refuge for a persecuted people — now stands revealed as a 70‑year experiment in ethnic cleansing, wrapped in biblical entitlement and armed with American money.

• READ MORE: No let-up in Israeli attacks as world condemns man-made famine in Gaza
• Rallies across NZ honour Gaza Strip journalists, condemn own news media
• Other war on Gaza reports

The current phase? Bulldozers in the West Bank, tanks in Gaza, and a prime minister whose personal survival depends on keeping his citizens permanently terrified and morally anesthetised.

Netanyahu and his coalition of zealots have at last clarified Israel’s mission statement: kill or expel two million Palestinians, and call it “security.”

Reduce Gaza to rubble, herd the survivors into tents, and then — here’s the punchline — offer them “resettlement packages” in Libya or South Sudan, as though genocide could be rebranded as humanitarian outsourcing.

And the world? Still dithering over whether to call this behaviour “problematic.” As if sanctions and isolation are reserved only for the unlucky states without lobbyists in Washington or friends in European parliaments.

Israel is begging to be treated as a pariah, but we keep dressing it up as a partner.

The most awkward truth of all: Jews in the diaspora now face a choice. Condemn this grotesque betrayal of Jewish history, or keep defending the indefensible until Israel itself becomes the nightmare prophecy it was meant to escape.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and mentor and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack.

Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.

I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.

Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.

• READ MORE: Gaza babies face starvation as Israel blocks entry of baby formula
• Other Chris Hedges Report articles

It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.

“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.

Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.

The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.

Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.

Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.

Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”

On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”

Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.

Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.

“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.

“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”

He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.

“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.

Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”

The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.

“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.

“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”

GHF is a Mossad-funded creation of Israel’s Defense Ministry that contracts with UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, run by former members of the CIA and US Special Forces. GHF is headed by Reverend Johnnie Moore, a far-right Christian Zionist with close ties to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.

As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”

Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.

Ha’aretz, in its article headlined “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid” reported that Israeli commanders order soldiers to open fire on crowds to keep them away from aid sites or disperse them.

“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”

“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.

Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.

There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.

The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.