By Elliot Crossan
One year of genocide. One year of Palestinian men, women and children being systematically slaughtered in Gaza. One year of journalists and aid workers being murdered; one year of international institutions failing to stop the bloodshed. There are no words for this horror we have been witnessing unfold live on our screens.
This did not start on October 7 last year. Israeli ethnic cleansing and apartheid has been taking place for decades, since the Nakba of 1948. It has been 76 years of Palestinians being violently separated from their land by Israel, this colonial regime that denies basic human rights to millions of Arabs under its occupation.
The impunity with which Israel has acted for the past year has been terrifying to behold. The official Gaza death toll has remained stagnant at around 40,000 for months, as it has become increasingly hard to count — meaning the real numbers are likely to be far higher. A Lancet study published in July gave a conservative estimate of the actual death toll — 186,000. Three months have passed since, and the genocide has continued.
742 people have been killed in the occupied West Bank. The West Bank is not run by Hamas, the organisation Israel claims to be fighting. No further proof is needed: the war Israel claims to be fighting against Hamas is, in reality, a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.
Now Israel has invaded Lebanon. Netanyahu and his Cabinet of war criminals are desperate to start a regional war in order both to stay in power, and to avoid international prosecution for crimes against humanity. They have been trying for months to provoke Iran into further conflict. The genocide that has occurred over the last year has been unspeakable; the consequences of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran are unimaginable.
Yet still, after a year of bloodshed, the United States and its allies continue to allow Israel to commit atrocities without challenge. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), between 2019 and 2023 the United States accounted for 69% of arms exported to Israel, and Germany 30%. Israel is utterly reliant on these weapons to continue its military operations. If the US and Germany told Israel to halt its genocide under threat of an arms embargo, the Netanyahu regime would be forced to agree to a ceasefire deal in a matter of days.
Hamas has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire for months. Iran and Lebanon do not want an all-out war. The international community, especially the global south, overwhelmingly supports a ceasefire. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, hardly a dissenter from the western imperialist consensus, has now called for an arms embargo on Israel. Even so, the US, Germany, the UK and other western imperialist powers continue to act as rogue states, arming and funding the world’s leading rogue state as it lashes out, gripped with genocidal mania.
Western hypocrisy has been laid bare for all the world to see. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, NATO leaders basked in their moral superiority over Vladimir Putin, condemning his regime and its war crimes. Many saw the hypocrisy even then — the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are not easily forgotten, nor was western complicity in the ongoing war in Yemen.
But western backing for Israel has provided the ultimate contrast between the words of western leaders and their actions. Nobody in their right mind can look at fiery condemnations of Putin for bombing a hospital or a school and not immediately think — how many schools and hospitals has Israel bombed in the last year? How many teachers, nurses, students and patients have been butchered?
The west continues to throw money at both Ukraine and Israel. One is defending itself against an imperialist war of aggression, whilst the other is on a genocidal rampage. Western “values” have been exposed as meaningless — NATO support for Ukraine has nothing to do with democracy, liberal values, international law, or human rights. Every single one of these values would compel NATO countries to fund the Palestinian resistance against apartheid and genocide.
The west has no values, no principles, no limits — all it knows is bloody imperialist self-interest. Israel is its outpost in the Middle East. Ukraine is a bulwark against Russia, the west’s (much weaker) imperialist rival. Self-interest prevails above all else, and thus the west supports Ukraine in its defensive struggle and, in the very same breath, Israel in its hyper-aggression.
Ordinary citizens of western countries are not to blame for these crimes. Polling in country after country shows that there is majority support for a ceasefire, that a majority believes that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, and that either a majority or plurality of people believe Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes. Even the heavily-propagandised citizens of the United States disapprove of Israel’s actions. It is the ruling classes of the west who are responsible for their countries’ complicity in genocide. Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, his predecessor Rishi Sunak, and many more — they have blood on their hands.
We may not be directly complicit, but we all have a moral duty to resist. Silence is a form of complicity. We have a duty to take to the streets in solidarity with the Palestinian people; we have a duty to post about Palestine, write about Palestine, keep Palestine in our hearts. We have a duty to honour the decades-long Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel. We must support the right of Palestine and Lebanon to defend themselves.
In Aotearoa, the Palestine solidarity movement is calling for an immediate ceasefire, for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, and for diplomatic and economic sanctions on Israel. Christopher Luxon and his Coalition’s belated calls for a ceasefire are empty without action. It is our duty to take action to force the Government to apply sanctions in order to replace empty words with concrete action.
International solidarity, including through a targeted campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, was crucial to aiding the South African struggle against Apartheid. It is no coincidence that it was the South African government that took a case against Israel’s genocide to the International Court of Justice. If it had any shred of moral dignity, our government would have joined South Africa in this case.
The demise of Apartheid South Africa may provide a prescient lesson for the future of Israel. In its final years, the Apartheid state grew more violent, launching wars of aggression against its neighbours in an attempt to hold on to power. It was desperation. By the early 90s, thanks to overwhelming internal and external pressure, the Apartheid regime was finally ended.
There is a grim hope in the notion that Israel is flailing violently from one conflict to the next because this regime too is in its death throes. Perhaps this appalling, obscene violence could mark the end of Israeli Apartheid once and for all.
But there is no guarantee that this will be the case. The pressure across the world to end the genocide and win Palestinian liberation must be overwhelming. Every day that passes means more lives lost in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon; and every day that passes allows the situation in the wider region to grow more tense and more dangerous.
We must not stop fighting for Palestine. Our actions may feel small, and we may feel powerless and dispirited in the face of the greatest horror of our age — but every act of resistance adds up. We have a moral duty to keep protesting, writing, spreading the message to everyone we know that the genocide must end.
Just as Apartheid collapsed in South Africa, so too the genocidal Israeli state will one day come crashing down. Then, and only then, will the people of Palestine be free. That day cannot come soon enough.
Elliot Crossan is an ecosocialist writer and activist from Auckland. He is the Chair of System Change Aotearoa.
