Israel Is Dragging Us All to Hell

It has been two years since Hamas fighters broke through the Gaza siege, launching an attack on military sites, kibbutzim and a music festival within Israel’s borders. The group, alongside others, killed just over 800 Israeli civilians and nearly 400 members of the Israeli security forces. They also kidnapped some 250 civilian and soldier hostages, 148 of whom have been returned alive. It’s thought that there still remain around 20 living hostages in Gaza. 

That attack did not come out of nowhere. Nonetheless, all of it was a war crime; indeed, multiple war crimes. That was two years ago. And in the intervening period, that day of violence has been answered by an avalanche of sadism.

Israel has carried out widespread slaughter by bomb, bullet and building collapse; mass murder has taken place almost daily for 730 days, carried out by US bombs, Israeli drones and F-35 fighter jets held aloft by British-made parts; its military has snipered children in their heads, chests and abdomens, while its security forces have carried out grotesque sexual and physical abuse. 

Palestinians have been subject to mass and repeated displacement. They are executed at food allocation sites, their journalists and medical workers are programmatically eliminated, with those taken prisoner transported to, and sometimes disappeared from, torture sites on Israeli soil.

The world has witnessed the destruction of every kind of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, from hospitals to high rise buildings, from schools to sanitation plants. Its inhabitants have endured starvation, disease, anaesthesia-less amputations, their tents set alight and their inhabitants with them. Wounded Palestinian child after wounded Palestinian child, no surviving family, abound. 

And seared into the memories of billions of powerless global observers? The remnants of a seven-year-old on glistening display from the walls of Israel’s butcher shop. 

At least 67,000 Palestinians killed, 20,000 of them children. 170,000 injured, 40,000 in permanently life-altering ways. Millions displaced, often multiple times. Entire families wiped out. 

War crime? What’s a war crime these days? Ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, genocide? That’s any given Tuesday on your iPhone. 

There is a banality to hell, both for its observers and its creators. And make no mistake, Israel has created hell in Gaza. But Israel is also hellbound. There is no recovery for a state financed by ordinary western tax-payers so bent on destruction and revenge, so hungry for territory and so thirsty for death. It will take time, but Israel in its current form is not long for this world. Meanwhile, in its slow passage from this life to oblivion, it’s dragging us all to hell with it. 

States are like stars. When one collapses, it can tear a hole in political space-time so great that the path of every other within its gravity is permanently altered. And when that state is Israel, existing in a tightly-packed constellation of other enormous bodies, its implosion changes everything, potentially forever. 

This has occurred most obviously at the level of those institutions that are supposed to regulate the behaviour of states. They lie in tatters, their lofty moral and legal facades blown apart by the sudden evacuation of whatever authority they may (and it’s a big ‘may’) once have had. Not only has Israel ignored the three 2024 rulings of the International Court of Justice that, first and second, ordered it to prevent genocide and increase humanitarian aid, and, third, to stop settlements in the West Bank, it has accelerated its attacks. In the last few weeks alone, Gaza City has been further flattened, the Israeli military systematically demolishing densely-built residential tower blocks over the heads of those who once lived there. 

Likewise, the International Criminal Court has been rendered a global joke, not by those who work there, but by the states that ignore its injunctions. Lawyers can prepare all the briefs and arrest warrants they like, but they’re worthless without powerful states to enforce them. And amongst western states, very few have said they’d subject Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrest in their territories.

It could be argued that what the Gaza genocide shows is the worthlessness of those and other international institutions. But that depends on what you think their worth is. Not since the 1990s have many believed they served much purpose in preventing western state criminality. They serve another function, though, playing a role in upholding the mythology of lawfulness, morality and certainty that’s central to the conception citizens of western states have of their own countries and governments. But that too is failing.

Across Europe and the US, populations have reacted angrily to their governments’ tacit, and sometimes overt, support for Israel’s savagery. Protests for Palestinians have not shrunk, but grown in the last two years, despite repeated attempts by leaders to link them to antisemitism. They’ve had electoral effects too, with traditional Democratic voters’ disgust with then-president Joe Biden’s pro-Israel administration playing a part in the collapse of the Kamala Harris campaign last year. Likewise in Britain, where, amongst others, home secretary Shabana Mahmood, health secretary Wes Streeting and safeguarding minister Jess Phillips held their safe seats by the narrowest of margins against independents, while around them major Labour figures fell. Even prime minister Keir Starmer had the fight of his life to stay in the game. 

As the world is shown on the international stage that law is disposable in the face of political expediency, so the new governments of the US and UK have been quick to trash our hard-won rights at home to secure their own control over unruly populations. Britain has been treated to the sight of thousands of some of our mildest and most upstanding citizens, often elderly, being dragged away from peaceful protests by police across several months. Why? Because they silently hold up illegal signs reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”. That’s the domestic direct action group that then-home secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed, on the slimmest basis, as a terrorist organisation, meaning public expressions of support for it are now crimes under counter-terror law, carrying potentially hefty prison sentences and travel bans.  

That proscription will go down as amongst the daftest political acts by a government in recent British history, stretching the already selective notion of ‘terrorism’ – one that has also been used to harass British journalists and seize their devices – to breaking point. And the public is not stupid; it’s well aware that this was a desperate bid to secure the geopolitical status quo by banning a group whose actions had been effective in driving Israeli weapons companies out of the country. Which is where most people want them.

Cooper’s successor Mahmood plans to restrict anti-genocide protest and speech even further. Starmer has called such demonstrations “un-British”. That’s a blatant nod to the vocabulary of the far right, with the prime minister using it to describe protests in which British Muslims play a significant role. But the right hardly needs Starmer’s help. Since 7 October, the mass killing of Arabs has emboldened supremacists across the world, including those who own the largest platforms upon which we communicate. If Israelis can construct an ethno-state that gets away with mass ethnic cleansing, the thought might go, why can’t we? Tommy Robinson will soon visit Tel Aviv, perhaps to inquire further.

Having done more than any other to embrace and coddle the no-holds-barred approach to political violence unleashed by Israel, US president Donald Trump has also imported it for domestic audiences. A quarter of a million people have been arrested by immigration militias in less than a year, with thousands sent to concentration camps and off-grid black sites. In international waters, Trump has also taken advantage of the new global fad for turning a blind eye to lawlessness when expedient, ordering the summary executions of boatloads of people off the coast of Venezuela. Four times in a single month. According to the administration, they are targeting drug cartels, though no evidence has been provided. But Congress has been told America is in “non-international armed conflict” (aka regime change) with “narco-terrorists” and “unlawful combatants” in the region, efficiently inventing, a la Israel, a new category of extra-judicial killing with a bogeyman to match.

Israel is falling, and we in the West are all falling with it. And yet we refuse to untether ourselves from its descent into hell. Our governments’ instincts are not for peace or cooperation, nor for us who they purport to serve and our ways of life, but for power. 

And power is what they spy in the latest “peace” deal on the table, where negotiations involve the threat of Palestinian annihilation if Hamas refuses its terms. The 20-point “Trump Plan” would see hegemony re-established, Palestinians cowed for a decade or two if not expelled from the strip, and a fantasy two-state solution possibly involving luxury accommodation, economic free zones and high-tech manufacturing sites where a civilisation older than the Bible has – until now – persisted. Western leaders will also be breathing sighs of relief as their deep moral and legal debts are cancelled. Genocide? Complicity? Craven cowardice? Check out that view.

The price? Just one last demonic twist in this deeply satanic timeline. Tony Blair, slayer of men and sower of discord, deposited as the new dark duke of Gaza. Israel is dragging us all to hell. Perhaps, that’s exactly where we belong.