Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Palestinians under Israel’s 24/7 aerial bombings and food, fuel, medicine, and water obstructions after the Hamas attacks on settlers of October 7, 2023, are also victims of relentless propaganda. It targets their humanity, portraying them as unworthy victims, via distortion or omission. In contrast, Israelis are worthy victims. Case in point is the mainstream press coverage of released Israeli hostages in the recent ceasefire that hides Palestinian prisoners’ stories. This ideological campaign reflects the American two-party consensus empowering Israel’s military machine that gets support from billionaires such as Larry Ellison, head of the Oracle Corporation and the world’s second-wealthiest man, to maim and murder Palestinians daily with impunity.

In Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro (Verso 2025), Palestinian writers deliver a counter narrative. It humanizes their personal and political lives during Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza and military aggression in South Lebanon and the occupied West Bank. Readers will find a corrective to the Israel First ideology and policy that Uncle Sam and ruling classes in Western countries such as Germany facilitate despite growing opposition from the American and global public watching the carnage on their cell phones.

The ideology of Zionism driving Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians comes into sharper focus in the book’s second-longest essay by Mary Turfah. She quotes Frantz Fanon on how Israeli settler-colonial ideology justifies massacres of the natives: “a systemized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity.” The parallels to the American genocide of native peoples are relevant, e.g., depicting the indigenous people as so-called savages to justify Europeans’ murder of them and subsequent land theft.

Mariam Barghouti fleshes out Israel’s annexation campaign in the West Bank, in part a relentless series of attacks from the settler state’s military technology, such as the “quadcopter.” It’s a networked attack device that operates autonomously and in concert with other units in drone swarms. The colonial corporate involvement in Palestinian displacement, dismemberment, and extinguishment is for-profit barbarity, a capital investment in punishment, and a feature of the Israel-U.S. military-industrial complex. Barghouti describes how........

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