Chris Hedges: Rebranding Genocide

Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and law presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is

First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself.

Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians. 

The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since Oct. 7, 2023.

Now, it is a “ceasefire.” 

Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons — 1,700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well asaround 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.

Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement — brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning Palestinians. 

Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.

The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.

The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes, 

“… was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”

The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. 

Hamas — along with other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”

The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenariesfrom the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops. 

Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. 

This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange. 

Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.

But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so many times in the past, be betrayed.

Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day before the “ceasefire.” 

Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three others were also apparently killed in the strike.

The genocide is not over. Yes, the pace has slowed. But the intent remains unchanged. It is slow motion killing. The daily numbers of dead and wounded — with increasing numbers falling sick and dying from the cold and rain — are not in the hundreds but the dozens.

December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under 5 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. 

Israel has opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement. 

Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantlyshifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown up — even if they are children.

Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to U.N. estimates. 

The Strip, only 25 miles long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including 9 million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. 

There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment. 

Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.

Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. 

Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July. 

The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.

The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights group Adalah explains. 

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enacted since Oct. 7.

The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.

This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions. 

Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons. 

Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs.

We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.

If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we deserve.

Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide. Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.

This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.

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 previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

This article is from Scheerpost.

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https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/18/chris-hedges-rebranding-genocide/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

NOT heard in Bibi’s bunker by a fly on the wall…..

BIBI: how did we not know in advance about the Bondi massacre?

Major General Roman GOFMAN — head of MOSSAD: Er…

BIBI: We had nothing to do with it, did we?

GOFMAN: Er….

BIBI: We have the best intelligence in the world, don’t we?

GOFMAN: Sure do….

BIBI: I heard the ASIO chief say that MOSSAD had warned him about “something was about to happen”, and…

GOFMAN: yes, we warned him… but we could not tell him what… He’s a pompous blabber….

BIBI: so we knew?

GOFMAN: sort of ….

BIBI: don’t we know precisely when someone is about to fart, with PALANTIR and all our secret spying tools around the world?

GOFMAN: Did we suggest to ASIO. to drop the surveillance on the father and son — and gave ASIO an incomplete cross-reference ALERT tool that would have rung alarm bells when the father went for his SIXTH gun licence?

BIBI: did we?

GOFMAN: Nor did we give the EXCELLENT cross-reference tool when the pair went to the Philippines to study “terrorism” with our… I MEAN a branch of ISIS… ASIO is too busy looking at dick-pics… and/or charging anti-genocide ordinary citizen… Good lads at ASIO...

BIBI: So I can blame the PRIME MINISTER of Australia… He’s got a Lebanese sounding name… Calbanosee or something like that?

GOFMAN: Sure… ALBANESE… and like all good LEBANESE his first name is ANTHONY…

BIBI: done…. Is there another terror attack, MOSSAD is planning soon… Iran? Qatar? Moscow? Paris? Berlin?

GOFMAN: Top secret… Bugger, what is this fly doing on the wall….

END OF TRANSMISSION.

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Israel has appointed Major General Roman Gofman, a career military commander with no background inside Mossad, as the next chief of the intelligence agency. His selection by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows a notable shift in Israel’s security leadership....