Israel’s top human rights group B’Tselem has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide, as has the Israel-based Physicians for Human Rights. The Israeli organizations join Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide in their conclusion.
The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.
Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.
MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”, featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign. The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.
As western pundits, politicians, and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.
People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?
Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.
Burning children alive wasn’t enough.
Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.
Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars, plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.
The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.
IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.
Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.
The US president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.
Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.
Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration, trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings, wasn’t enough.
Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.
Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.
Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.
The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins,” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces, wasn’t enough.
IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.
The IDF flying drones, which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them, wasn’t enough.
IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.
Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc — wasn’t enough.
Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.
Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a US/Israeli op where aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.
Using siege warfare to starve Gaza for the previous 22 months deliberately wasn’t enough.
But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.
That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.
And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023, like it should have, we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.
I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.
But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.
We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.
We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.
We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.
The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government, and our world was clearly false.
We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.
The lessons will repeat until they are learned.
We had better start learning them.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.