Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As the world watches, one of history’s greatest crimes has taken form. Inaction, complicity and silence in the face of genocide have caused profound suffering to the Palestinian people. No final reckoning or redress would be equivalent to the scale and magnitude of Israel’s depraved criminality.

Inevitably there will be a final accounting for those who advanced an environment in which a member of the Israeli parliament felt emboldened enough to boast: “Everyone got used to the idea that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night … And nobody in the world cares.”

The time is past due to state unequivocally that Israel has, since it declared statehood in 1948, been terrorizing the Palestinian people and that the U.S. and its Western allies have, because of their overwhelming support for Israel, been active participants in that terror.

Israeli violence clearly fits America’s own definition of “domestic terrorism.”

Washington’s leading law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, defines it as: “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups [regimes] to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences such as political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”

Palestinians have suffered incomprehensible horrors because U.S. politicians, political influencers, public and corporate media have failed to provide the historical context that gave rise to the insurrection of 7 October 2023. Absent that history and discussion of Palestinian resistance grounded in international law, they have made Israel’s indefensible response appear warranted.

The failure to inform has essentially given Israel license to commit genocide and all manner of atrocities in Gaza and has enabled U.S. authorities to suppress opposition to the war on American college campuses.

The media, for example, has accepted without question, the government’s illegitimate designation of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as “terrorism” and national liberation groups like Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) as terrorist organizations.

In so doing, by........

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