cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4944204
May 15 marks a new anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine perpetrated by the nascent State of Israel in 1948. Seventy-seven years after that original “catastrophe,” a crime prolonged by colonial occupation, the situation of the Palestinian people is desperate. After a brief and fragile ceasefire on March 2, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resumed its brutal offensive in Gaza, a veritable genocide broadcast live, and carried out with the military and financial means and diplomatic cover of the Zionist state’s main allies: the United States and the European powers. In 18 months, the Israeli army has murdered more than 52,000 Gazans — including some 18,000 children. The Lancet, a journal that tracks the situation in Gaza, estimates that that figure could actually be at least double.
The genocidal war on the Palestinians has also spread to the West Bank, with tens of thousands of people displaced and under attack by both the Israeli army and armed settler gangs. As can be seen in No Other Land (the Oscar-winning documentary) or in the more recent film, The Settlers, the violent attacks against the Palestinian population, their homes, and lands, which accompany the expansion of settler settlements, have been ongoing since long before October 2023 and are part of a plan, openly discussed by Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, to annex the territory. But with the latest war in Gaza, those plans have taken a leap forward, with the scandalous collaboration of the Palestinian Authority. According to a report by journalists from The New York Times, the streets of the West Bank — Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — are increasingly resembling Gaza: homes reduced to rubble, walls riddled with bullet holes, and bulldozers everywhere. One of the hardest-hit targets was Jenin, from which 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced — the largest population transfer since 1967, when Israel took control of the territory. This does not include the approximately 9,500 Palestinian prisoners held in harsh conditions by the IDF, many of them subjected to torture.
If the genocide was financed and sponsored by former President Joe Biden (one of the factors explaining the Democratic Party’s defeat), it received a strong boost from the White House when President Donald Trump, flanked by Netanyahu, announced his “proposal” to transform Gaza into a luxury resort once the Israeli army finished the dirty work of displacing the two million Gazans to Egypt or Jordan. Although Trump soon abandoned his real estate project in the face of rejection from the United States’ Arab allies and the bewilderment of military analysts and strategists, his announcement was read by the promoters of Greater Israel as a green light to annex all of Gaza.