If the ceasefire lasts, it is at best a temporary and palliative solution.
With the ceasefire that went into effect on Sunday, January 18, 2025, the people of Gaza—cold, hungry, battered, homeless, but steadfast in life—experienced their first quiet night in over fifteen months. Israel’s genocide has stopped, at least for now, despite the fact that Israel failed to accomplish a single one of its declared objectives in Gaza. The scheme to expel Palestinians to Egypt, or to somehow spirit them away to the Gulf or to Canada, failed. So did the so-called “generals’ plan” to ethnically cleanse all of northern Gaza by systematically exterminating anyone who had survived the preceding months of bombardment and methodical destruction of life-support systems. So did the pledge to destroy Hamas and the armed resistance in Gaza. So did the use of force to free the Israeli prisoners held in Gaza. If Israel has prevented another attack like the one on October 7 from taking place so far—the last of its declared objectives—it has nevertheless made such attacks more likely by revealing, both in Gaza and in southern Lebanon, the utter incompetence of its undisciplined conscript army. That army excels at two things: the mass killing of civilians and the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure. Those two things represent the sum total of what Israel accomplished in the past 470 days.
The ceasefire terms are, after all, essentially the same as those agreed to by Israel and Hamas last May, which Netanyahu reneged on and Antony Blinken blamed on Hamas. They are similar to the terms of the first, short-lived ceasefire and prisoner exchange, in November 2023. They are, in fact, largely the same as the terms that could have been arranged on October 8, 2023. Despite repeatedly vowing nothing less than “total victory” in Gaza, Netanyahu ended up making concessions that could have been made months ago. What was the point of the carnage, then? The only answer is that the deliberate unleashing of catastrophic harm on a trapped population of more than two million people—half of them children, all of them subject to the occupying power legally responsible for their welfare—was in fact the main, undeclared objective: a gratuitous exercise in mass cruelty with few counterparts even in the darkest annals of history.
The Israelis have leveled not just individual homes but entire neighborhoods, often with the push of a single button. Life is more important than property, and concrete doesn’t scream with pain when doused in pyrophoric white phosphorus, so we rarely paused to dwell on those shattered buildings and blasted streets. All those hollowed-out squares of ruin, to which traumatized Palestinian refugees are now stumbling back, were once living homes where families raised their children, where people cooked and played and read and wrote and drew and talked and laughed and cried; where busy mothers once took a few minutes out of their hectic days to brew a bittersweet Arabic coffee laced—Gaza style—with cardamom, to sip on balconies in the spring sunshine of days that no longer exist. According to a UN estimate already six months out of date, it could take fifteen years just to clear the rubble that Israel left behind.
In the end, much of the destruction in Gaza was not the result of Israel’s dystopian and widely discussed AI-assisted bombing algorithms, but of the demolition charges carefully placed by Israeli engineering units in areas that posed no immediate military threat. Grinning for TikTok or Instagram selfies, Israeli soldiers gleefully demolished entire residential districts, schools, universities, and hospitals. This is to say nothing of the checkpoints where they prodded, humiliated, and lazily groped terrified civilians (including physicians forced at gunpoint from the ruins of ransacked hospitals); of their looting family homes; their posing for photos in Palestinian women’s underwear, with which they seem to have an Orientalist fascination; their smashing of stores, burning of food stocks, parading of naked prisoners, and all the other pointless sadism Israeli soldiers shared on their social media and dating profiles.
Will any of them be held to account? Not in Israel. For the past fifteen months, the Israeli government and Israeli society stood solidly behind their soldiers, not despite the inhumanity of their actions in Gaza but because of it. As a statement by the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide recently put it, “Israel is a genocidal state supported by a genocidal society.”
The rest of the world is a different story. In the shadow of the ceasefire, some Israeli soldiers have already begun to publicly repent, saying “they saw or did things that crossed ethical lines.” It may be dawning on them that impunity doesn’t extend beyond national borders; that once this is over, they can’t just jet off to Brazil or Bali for a vacation worry-free, as if they didn’t burn wounded civilians in tents alive, didn’t spray hundreds of bullets into civilian cars as they tried to evacuate, didn’t shoot toddlers in the head as a matter of course, didn’t detonate entire city blocks, and all with smiles on their faces. War crimes fall under universal jurisdiction, and those who commit them, from the lowest private all the way to the prime minister, risk arrest on foreign soil.
As the smoke over Gaza gradually clears, it will reveal the stark outcome of Israel’s resort to spectacular violence. Measured in explosive force and area of devastation, Israel’s bombardment went from being the most destructive in a week to the most destructive in a year to the most destructive this century to among the most destructive in history, matching then exceeding the intensity of damage in Hamburg, London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Grozny, Sarajevo, Aleppo, and other cities that were once the grim pacesetters for urban devastation.1 It is the work of madness, religious drunkenness, racial delusion; of ancient desert gods cross-bred with cyclonite and hexogen and tritonal. It is Krishna crossed with Raytheon, Yahweh with Boeing. God taking form in a GBU-28.
It will also be remembered as a crime—genocide, the crime of crimes—committed with the full and unwavering support of the United States. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, John Kirby, Jake Sullivan, Matt Miller, and Karine Jean-Pierre are all as complicit as Netanyahu and his cabinet. The rest of us can’t just let ourselves off the hook, either. We’ve supplied every bomb, every JDAM, every GBU-24. We’ve supplied all the missiles. We’ve supplied every aircraft and all the spare parts. We’ve supplied the Apache helicopters and the Hellfire missiles and cannon rounds they spew. We’ve supplied the artillery, and we’ve supplied the 155mm high explosive and fragmentation shells. We’ve supplied the white phosphorus. We’ve supplied the justifications. Our institutions and universities and retirement funds invest in and profit from the American companies—Honeywell, Raytheon, Boeing, Caterpillar—that have gorged on Palestinian and Lebanese life. We’ve supplied the political and diplomatic cover. We’ve supplied the UN veto. Even our scholarly associations—most recently the American Historical Association and Modern Language Association—have lent assistance by refusing to condemn Israel’s mass destruction of universities in Gaza, not one of which remains standing. The American Medical Association hasn’t uttered a word about Israel’s methodical demolition of hospitals and slaughter of doctors and nurses, and PEN America remained silent on the destruction of libraries and murder of writers. Israel may be playing the role of an omnipotent settler-colonial god smiting the unworthy people of Amalek, an image Netanyahu aims to conjure every time he stares at the camera and orders a new group of people to flee for their lives. But it’s performing on a stage we built for it, that we wired for sound and light. We are the directors, the producers, the writers; we supply the financing, the costumes, the props and stage sets. We facilitate the whole show. At any point we could flip the switch and plunge the stage into darkness. But we didn’t.
Even as it’s done most of the work and sent most of the bombs, the US hasn’t acted alone. This is the first anticolonial struggle in history in which an occupied people have been up against not one colonial power, but the entire Western colonial order. Israel regards itself as omnipotent and above all law, but it is merely a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from the spare parts and archaic leftovers of Western colonialism. Western racism is its DNA, Western support lights up its nervous system, Western funding animates its limbs, Western technologies are its tools, the accumulated horror of centuries of Western colonial violence is the lingua franca it sputters. The US, the UK, France, and Germany still rush weapons and fuel to Israel; Germany took over from Britain in engaging in political shenanigans to undermine the International Criminal Court, blocking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister as long as possible. The leaders of minor powers like Canada and Australia, normally ignored, have stood on tip-toe to voice their support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. Civilization and barbarism are invoked as if it were the 19th century and not the 21st. Even organizations like FIFA have chimed in to turn down desperate and repeated Palestinian requests for boycotts and sanctions, as hundreds of Palestinian footballers and other athletes have been killed. Against the protests of hundreds of thousands of people across the Western world—including in the US, where a solid majority of Americans have supported a ceasefire for most of the past fifteen months of carnage—the official West remained a united front. With its unique combination of petulance and arrogance, whining self-pity and apocalyptic bluster, Israel is a husk, a shell casing, utterly dependent on the endless coddling and permissiveness granted by an indulgent West.
The mainstream media have been the stage assistants in this bloody drama. They mangle and torture the English language to craft headlines designed to veil the truth, and above all to draw agency away from Israel. In Ukraine, Russia bombs hospitals and kills people. In Gaza, people die as bombs fall from an undetermined source in the sky. The agony to which we’ve all borne witness—the destruction of hospitals, the slaughter of children, the extirpation of entire communities, the eradication of multigenerational families—is all routinely filed under “Israel-Gaza War” or “Israel-Hamas War,” as though this is a “war” between the armies of two sovereign states rather than an assault on an occupied people by the power occupying them. The distorting headlines and carefully selected words are all choices: CNN and the New York Times tell their reporters what words they can and cannot use to maintain a house style and a house politics.2
American media outlets have also shamelessly recycled Israeli talking points that even the Israeli media have ceased to bother with. Look at any story about Gaza in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or NPR and you’ll find an obligatory line saying everything that has unfolded since October 7, 2023, stems from the fact that “Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis” that day. To my knowledge, the first time a mainstream Western outlet ran a story acknowledging that some as yet undetermined number (dozens to hundreds, we will probably never know) of the Israeli civilians killed on October 7 were in fact killed by indiscriminate Israeli tank or helicopter gunship fire as part of the Hannibal Directive appeared in the national ABC News in Australia in September 2024 (though the Guardian at least covered one of the Ha’aretzstories on the matter earlier last summer).3 To this day, no reader who depends on the New York Times for their news would know what English-language readers of Ha’aretz and The Times of Israel, or Hebrew readers of Israel’s leading daily, Yediot Ahranot, knew months ago.4
My point here isn’t to rehash what happened on October 7. It is to demonstrate the lockstep rigidity of the mainstream US media when it comes to covering Palestine. There is a line, an almost mandated orthodoxy, that the media have maintained with a deference and dereliction of professional principles unthinkable in the covering of any other major issue. Shunning Palestinian voices is standard across the board. In December, the Nation reported that three of the four major morning news shows that help set the agenda for national conversations—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and CNN’s State of the Union—did not speak to a single Palestinian or Palestinian-American between October 2023 and December 2024.5 The fourth show, CBS’s Face the Nation, talked to exactly one Palestinian. In the same period, Israeli guests appeared twenty times and US government spokespeople almost sixty times on the same shows to talk about Gaza. Forty years later, Palestinians still await what Edward Said once called their “permission to narrate.”6
Meanwhile, after a year of student activism and principled protest against the genocide, American college campuses have been reduced to barricaded wastelands patrolled by riot police, where student voices have been criminalized and dissent punished.7 Faculty, too, have been arrested, banned from the library at Harvard, declared persona non grata at NYU, banished from other campuses, fired from tenured and untenured positions alike. My own university, like countless others, spent last summer figuring out how best to repress its students, who face disciplinary proceedings and possible criminal charges for having dared to protest a genocide in which we are all complicit. Rather than seeing what could be done to rehabilitate our campus in the fall, UCLA administrators recruited a Sacramento policeman (at a monthly salary of $52,000)8 to impose militarized order, placing campus under constant surveillance, hiring hundreds of security personnel (at a cost mounting into the millions that the university claims it doesn’t have for, say, PhD fellowships), and loading up on pepper spray, rifles, drones, tear gas, and 40mm projectile launchers to fire rubber bullets at their own students.9 This, we are told, is to maintain a “safe learning environment.”
Lawmakers, corporations, and individual citizens have also proved willing participants in the muzzling of protest against genocide. In the name of combatting “antisemitism,” state and federal legislators mobilized to suppress student protest on campuses across the country and threatened to withhold federal funding for universities that tolerate such protests at all. Pursuant to their campaign to redefine criticism of Israel and Zionism as “antisemitic,” Zionist lobbying groups like the Anti-Defamation League have worked with internet streaming companies, social media platforms, and search engines to preemptively limit or censor what they refer to as “hate speech,” which of course includes speech critical of Israel, apartheid, and genocide. Netflix dropped essentially its entire archive of Palestinian films from its streaming library.10 Microsoft fired employees for holding a vigil for the victims of the genocide.11 Apple has fired employees for wearing scarves, pins, or bracelets expressing sympathy with Palestinians. AIPAC handlers shepherded members of Congress to vote for the TikTok ban because the platform’s unfiltered coverage of Israeli atrocities in Gaza had gained such influence among young Americans—influence which the paid agents of a foreign power decided was inappropriate in the United States. When a Zionist passenger complained about a Delta Airlines cabin crew member wearing a Palestinian flag pin, the airline’s official channel replied on X, “I hear you, I’d be terrified as well.” The airline changed its uniform policy overnight to banish any such expressions of sympathy or solidarity.12 Anti-Arab racism has broken all records, to the point where a US Senator felt emboldened to tell Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab-American Institute, to “put a bag over your head” at a public hearing on hate crime. And for what? To suppress protest and silence dissent about a genocide in which every American taxpayer finds themselves implicated.
For now, Israel’s American-supplied bombs and shells have stopped falling on Gaza. Some of the thousands of men, women, and children as young as 15 whom Israel holds in its notorious prisons—where beatings, torture, rape, and sexual abuse are standard practice, and prisoner deaths common—are being released, staggering into the warm embrace of their families. Their faces are ashen, their eyes blinking in the sunshine. People in Gaza are returning in disbelief to the ruined wasteland of their former homes and lives. Where will they live? According to the UN, Israel has severely damaged or destroyed 436,000 housing units, about 92 percent of the family homes in Gaza.13
What, in fact, will life in Gaza look like now and for the foreseeable future? The official tally of those killed by Israel stands at 46,645, but a study in the British medical journal the Lancet estimates that this figure represents an undercount of about 40 percent, suggesting a total of 65,000 fatalities.14 Even that number includes only those Israel has killed outright. When you count those dying of preventable injuries; the premature babies, cancer patients, dialysis patients, HIV patients, and others unable to receive treatment; those dying from hunger, thirst, disease, and exposure, the death count will likely exceed 300,000—about 15 percent of Gaza’s population.15
The survivors left behind include what we are told is “the largest cohort of child amputees in history.”16 Who will rehabilitate these children? Israel killed countless medical specialists; it destroyed most of the medical facilities in which they used to work. (The WHO has documented 654 separate Israeli attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza. More than a thousand healthcare professionals have been killed. Barely a third of Gaza’s hospitals survived Israel’s ravages of the life support and medical sector.)17 Who will educate them? Israel damaged or destroyed 88 percent of the schools and all the universities in Gaza. It killed more than 12,000 students and hundreds of teachers and professors. Meanwhile, the UN estimates that almost the entire surviving population of Gaza is projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity. Half the people are already facing either emergency or catastrophic levels of food insecurity—in other words, outright starvation. Israel bulldozed two-thirds of the cropland and around half of the greenhouses in Gaza. It destroyed most of the fishing fleet as well.18
The Roman historian Tacitus once chronicled the last speech of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain rousing his troops to resist the foreign invaders of their land. “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire,” Calgacus said of the Romans; “they make a wasteland and call it peace (ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant).” Much the same might be said of the contemporary invaders of the former Roman province of Palaestina Prima. The Israelis spent 470 days feverishly trying to reduce the densely inhabited territory of Gaza to a barren wasteland, a solitude, a desert. They can call it whatever they want—the outcome is anything but peace.
If the ceasefire lasts, it is at best a temporary and palliative solution. It doesn’t free the remaining thousands of prisoners held by Israel. It doesn’t lift the Israeli siege on Gaza. It doesn’t remove the checkpoint and permit system suffocating Palestinian life in the West Bank. It doesn’t end Israeli home demolition in East Jerusalem. It doesn’t suspend the rampages and pogroms regularly conducted by fanatical Jewish settlers under the protection of the Israeli army in the West Bank. It doesn’t end the institutionalized and legalized subordination of anyone who isn’t Jewish between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The ceasefire may have suspended the active phase of genocide for an indefinite period, but it leaves the slow death sustaining Israel’s underlying system of apartheid intact—and the agony will continue until apartheid is dismantled and Palestine is free.
According to the Environmental Quality Authority of Palestine, Israel has dropped an estimated 85,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since October 7, 2023—more than four times the explosive force of the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Likely only the US air raids on Japan during World War II exceed it in fatalities, killing an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 people between the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ↩
In many cases these choices are endorsed by the reporters and editors themselves. “There was a massacre on October 7, there were atrocities committed. I think those are appropriate words to use,” said Jodi Rudoren, formerly of the New York Times and now editor of the Forward. “And the response was intense. It involved a lot of death, destruction, and displacement. But I’m not sure that ‘massacre,’ ‘barbaric’ and ‘atrocity’ are appropriate terms, certainly not for the full scale of the war. There are individual attacks within the war that may . . . um . . . there . . . where some of those words may be appropriate. So you’re talking about two very different things, and they deserve different adjectives.” She’s right, of course, but for exactly the wrong reasons. This is not a war; it is an act of genocide: a word you will not find in the New York Times, let alone the Forward. ↩
“Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the ‘Hannibal Directive’ during October 7 chaos,” ABC; “IDF used protocol that may have risked civilian lives in Hamas attack – report,” the Guardian. ↩
By comparison, independent outlets like the Electronic Intifada have covered the genocide with nuance, care and thorough documentation in three languages, providing a standard of journalism that their mainstream peers would do well to emulate. ↩
“How Sunday Morning News Shows Promote an Anti-Palestinian Agenda for Washington,” the Nation. ↩
“Permission to Narrate,” the London Review of Books. ↩
“Intense UCLA policing draws scrutiny as security chief speaks out on handling protests,” the Los Angeles Times. ↩
“UC police seek approval for more pepper balls, sponge rounds, launchers, drones,” the Los Angeles Times. ↩
“Netflix Wiped Most of Its “Palestinian Stories” Collection — and Erased the Whole Thing in Israel,” the Intercept. ↩
“Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza,” Associated Press. ↩
“US airline Delta changes uniform rules after Palestinian flag pin outcry,” Al Jazeera. ↩
“Reported impact snapshot | Gaza Strip (14 January 2025),” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. ↩
“Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis,” The Lancet. ↩
“Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza,” the Guardian. ↩
“The amputee crisis in the war on Gaza,” Al Jazeera. ↩
“‘Hospitals have become battlegrounds’: Gaza’s health system on brink of collapse,” UN News. ↩
“Reported impact snapshot | Gaza Strip (14 January 2025),” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. ↩