On 10 October, following two years of Israeli genocide that have turned Gaza into the new benchmark of total destruction, after Israel has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and inflicted on all the people in Gaza “severe bodily or mental harm,” to quote from the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Trump administration imposed a ceasefire, giving rise to the idea that the Gaza war has ended.

The ceasefire, however, seems to be designed mostly to move forward with the business deals of the mega rich in the Middle East, and the fire has never ceased: the Israeli government has continued its assault, killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians since 10 October, destroying thousands of homes and buildings, and blocking the entry of sufficient aid.

The genocidal rhetoric, furthermore, has not ended. Take, for instance, Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) for the Religious Zionist Party, who spoke on 28 October in an international summit in Hungary organized in support of Israel. “If we want to destroy the idea of genocide,” he said, “if we want to destroy [it] and we should destroy the idea of Muslim Brotherhood that takes over the entire west, the Middle East, but after that, the entire world, the entire western civilization, we have to define it as the enemy.” “The enemy in Gaza,” he continued, “are not the terror tunnels, the enemy in Gaza are not the missiles, the enemy in Gaza are not even the terrible people who took the hostages; the enemy in Gaza is the idea of a genocide, the same idea that echoes in mosques all around Europe, the same idea that echoes in mosques in the US, in campuses, in encampments, the same idea, this is the enemy.”

This portrayal of Gaza as “the idea of a genocide,” a genocide against Jews, and against Jews as foundational in “western civilization,” figures within a long history of perpetrators of very real genocides who perceived themselves as acting in defense of “barbarians” threatening “western civilization.” The war in Gaza, then, has not ended, according to Rothman, because it was never a war in Gaza, but a war on Gaza.

“A war that is not only between Israel and Hamas,” as Israeli President Isaac Herzog admitted openly already in December 2023. “It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization.” Rothman is a far-right religious politician, Herzog once stood at the head of the left-wing Labor Party, but they share the same vision: Israel’s attack on Gaza is “not only between Israel and Hamas,” but a contemporary crusade. It is, to quote one of the hundreds of videos by Israeli soldiers and officers – the Israeli crusaders – a “real war of the people of Israel,” in which “moral is to understand that every Arab is a suspect. Maybe he is good, maybe he is a bomb, but he is suspect. Moral is to execute all the terrorists after interrogating them. Moral is to conquer and settle all of the Land of Israel, and every place we will leave a wasps’........

© The Guardian