“A huge massacre awaits”

We are at a pivotal stage of the genocide. Although formally somewhere in the range of 66 thousand bodies have been registered in hospital morgues, the real death toll is estimated to be much higher—in the range of 320 thousand, if we use the same method of calculation  that the highly regarded medical journal The Lancet used when it published its figure of 186 thousand in July 2024, when there were 38 thousand bodies. This means that 13 or 14 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population has been killed —an astonishing figure that is already more than the level of death suffered by Germany in World War II and the equivalent to that of the Soviet Union in that war. But it took five years to get to those levels in World War II, while in Gaza they have been achieved in less than two. Let’s not forget that this slaughter is the result of a nuclear, advanced capitalist, industrial, and post-industrial state attacking a de-developed territory populated primarily by multiple generations of refugees who have been living in camps for seven decades and living off United Nations handouts. This is a disgrace of unconscionable proportions. With this said, it is not over yet—far from it.

Formally, negotiations have entirely broken down and Israel has declared that it is preparing “a definitive, game-changing maneuver” to take over Gaza City, which entails forcing out more than a million people from the city. (The Israeli army announced the start of the ground assault on the evening of September 16.) Israel claims that, through this operation, it will be able to definitively uproot and destroy Hamas as a resistance actor and political player, preparing the ground for the “release of the captives,” the nominal objectives of the Israeli campaign.

Israel’s goals in Gaza

Of course, these are only the pretexts for what Israel has really set its sights on. In leveling Gaza City and attempting to definitively crush Hamas, Israel is attempting to remove the Gaza Strip from the historical and political equation of the “Israel-Palestine conflict.”

As a territory, the Gaza Strip currently represents a free-standing Palestinian entity along the Mediterranean coastline that is part of the international framework seeking a “two-state solution.” Israel prefers to remove this entity from existence and to secure exclusive control over the eastern Mediterranean’s southern shoreline, particularly in this continental corner of the globe where Asia meets Africa. In that regard, the Gaza Strip as a Palestinian territory has always been an unacceptable presence from Israel’s perspective.

As for the Gaza Strip population and the political causes it represents, Israel is also keen to eliminate the way this territory has acted as an incubator to the Palestinian national movement, particularly in its refugee dimensions. Gaza has persistently been the seat of the most determined, and indeed militant, expression of Palestinian nationalism. Its very existence acts as a continual reminder of the ethnic cleansing that gave birth to the state of Israel, and by association, the claim of the refugees who survived that campaign to return to their historical lands. Recall, of course, that 80 percent of the Gaza Strip’s residents descend from families of 250 Palestinian villages and towns in southern and coastal Palestine who were forced from their lands in 1948.

Since its creation, the Gaza Strip has acted as the most significant Palestinian bone stuck in the throat of the Zionist project that Israel has been  able neither to swallow nor to throw up.

From its Communists and Pan-Arabists in the 1950s and 1960s, to PLO factions in the 1970s and 1980s, to Hamas today, the Gaza Strip has acted as an incubator of resistant, militant nationalism. This dynamic arose because of how this territory was created and has evolved over the years when Israel repeatedly waged massacres on a restricted and isolated population, resulting in the acute accumulation of political, social, and economic grievances that have percolated there as all these matters were ignored by the international community.

Israel now seeks to definitively end this cycle by destroying the crucible itself that generates these dynamics. It also seeks to eliminate any actors who would resist this fate and forcibly remove the Palestinians from the territory.

The “destruction of Hamas” and the “release of captives” thus become the pretexts for this much larger historical and political gambit. Israel is structurally attempting to change the equation of the conflict and to eliminate the possibility of any future Palestinian national claims arising from the territory and its population. Israel cannot accept the territory itself as a part of the two-state solution, or to have it act as a territorial platform from which larger claims can be made for refugee homelands in historical Palestine.

Israel hopes that in removing this potent symbolic, political, and social basis for the national movement, it will achieve an important accomplishment in the historic struggle that will affect the rest of the national movement in the West Bank and beyond.

We already see Israel heading in this direction with its acceleration of settlement construction in the West Bank and particularly the E1 area east of East Jerusalem. This area is located in the narrowest section of the West Bank. If Israel builds there, linking settlements in the Jordan Valley to those in East Jerusalem, it will bifurcate the West Bank into northern and southern sections, ending the pretense of a two-state solution. For years the U.S. opposed construction in this area to maintain the two-state charade, with the issue being particularly sensitive for the E.U. states who were paying for Palestinian statebuilding. But now Israel and the U.S. are clearly working to do away with it.

Of course, neither Israel nor the U.S. pretends that building in E1 arises from any pretext to “eliminate Hamas” or to “free captives.” From their perspective, now is the time to see how far they can reset the entire equation in the context of the calculus of regional power. Indeed, we see this goal clearly in Israel’s policies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

The current assault on Gaza City clearly aims to prepare the ground for the transfer of the Gaza population beyond the borders of the Strip, and indeed, beyond historical Palestine—be this to Egypt or a third country. The details of these plans are yet to be fully worked out.

Israel is currently focusing on asserting full control over the Gaza Strip as a territory, which, it should be noted, effectively reverses how Israel has been acting toward it over the past 30 years. Ever since the first Intifada, Israel has tried to divest itself from the Gaza Strip and the population there, recognizing it as an intractable, unwinnable quicksand when it comes to governance.

This partially explains how and why it accepted the Oslo accords as it did and why Gaza was the first territory Israel withdrew from in 1994.

The first Intifada exposed how Gaza was Israel’s biggest headache that sapped social and army morale and damaged the Israeli state’s international standing. The Oslo redeployment resulted in the establishment of the Palestinian Authority to disentangle Israel from the conundrum of administering the eight massive refugee camps that comprise Gaza and which were created as a result of Israel’s establishment.

In 2006, Israel also withdrew its military positions from the Strip together with the Jewish settler presence. Then-Israeli-prime-minister Ariel Sharon undertook this step because he understood that maintaining any Israeli presence within the Strip was too costly for Israel, inefficient and unsustainable in the long term.

So, both tactical withdrawals were implemented to extract Israel from the burden of direct entanglement with the Gaza population and aimed to establish remote control via the establishment of a proxy force (the PA), and later, by establishing a high-tech regime of control through border walls, sophisticated surveillance, and sensors, etc. But both tactics failed miserably.

In response to these failures, Israel is now attempting to establish what can only be described as a push to transform Gaza into a kind of “blank slate.” By enacting “total war” against its people, urban spaces, municipal facilities, and services, it aims to eliminate the entity in its totality—as a polity, as a community capable of making any claims, and as a territory that can sustain life itself.

Israeli army officers and the political leadership now speak openly of “not leaving one building standing in Gaza City” and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population there. The U.S. under Trump echoes this while both parties cynically frame this destruction as though it is the first phase of a real estate project that will eventually result in the creation of a “Riviera.”

What we are really witnessing though is genocide and ethnic cleansing meeting vulture capitalism at the dead end of Israeli and U.S. failures to control or vanquish Palestinian resistance and national claims.

Displacement and starvation

For the time being, Israel has yet to solve the question of where to push the Gazan population. The interim solution is to displace them from their current homes and corral them in what, for lack of a better term, are best described as concentration camps, where food and water will be located. Of course, Gaza has always functioned as a kind of open-air prison that already was among the densest populated places in the world. But now we are talking about concentrating the population on a far smaller area and downgrading their abodes from concrete structures and refugee shelters to makeshift tents. By depriving Gaza’s population of elementary standards of living and ensuring their utmost precarity, Israel believes it can reset the equation of control by leveraging survival itself.

Here it is also significant to highlight the perversity of these strategies and how the U.S. and Israel attempt to sugarcoat the weaponisation of starvation.

Even before October 7, 80 percent of the Gaza Strip population was food-dependent on the United Nations. Palestinians in Gaza used to receive their food aid through the UN Relief and Works Association (UNRWA), a particular UN body set up to provide basic services to the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war. However, the continued existence of this international body more than 70 years later is a legal and institutional reminder to the international community of the ethnic cleansing that accompanied Israel’s founding, and hence of the basic rights and entitlements Palestinians hold as refugees.

As a result, Israel and the U.S. now work in concert to destroy this agency even though it has absolutely no role in representing Palestinian political rights and was engaged exclusively in humanitarian and social assistance work. This yet again demonstrates the U.S. and Israel’s race to restructure the conflict beneath the pretext of the October 7 attacks and to pocket as many “victories” as they can from these circumstances.

Instead of UNRWA, the U.S. and Israel have now established the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) to control food disbursement, precisely because they do not want the UN or any other “neutral” body to undertake this role. By using starvation as a tool to control the population, they aim to cultivate desperation and entice people to move.

These dynamics have transformed the situation in Gaza into a kind of 21st-century “hunger games.” Every day dozens of people are killed as starving people who wait for food are penned in for hours. More than two thousand people have been killed at these food distribution stations since February 2025. Israeli soldiers also monitor the cameras set up at these sites and use facial recognition technology to develop datasets on who uses them. The entire outfit functions as an instrument of domination and intelligence gathering. It recently came to light that the GHF extensively recruits members of Islamophobic, Christian nationalist biker gangs in the U.S. You couldn’t make this stuff up. The situation is sick and dystopian, where truth is not just stranger than fiction, but far more obscene.

Once Israel creates its concentration camps, everywhere outside of these areas will be turned into open killing zones. Here we need to appreciate the timeline of Israel’s actions throughout the past 23 months.

Since it unilaterally ended the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel has focused its actions on physically molding the terrain where Gazans are located. This was the purpose of what Israel dubbed “Operation Gideon’s Chariot”—demolishing all of Rafah, all East Khan Younis and pretty much all of north Gaza including Jabalia town and Camp, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun. These maneuvers concentrated the population closer to the middle of the Strip and toward the shore with most of the population now located on roughly 25 percent of the territory. It also has been targeting actors and institutions—hospitals and schools—that enable Gazan society to remain steadfast. Now it is aiming to further concentrate the Gaza population on even smaller areas to sweep the total population continually southward.

Eventually, the aim is to isolate the entire population within a desolate section of Rafah and to call this area a “humanitarian city.” In pushing the population as far south as possible, Gazans become increasingly exposed, isolated, and dependent, while the prospect for pushing Gazans into Egypt becomes much more realizable if circumstances arise permitting that.

The Gaza Strip today

The intention and practice of destroying the Gaza Strip and crushing its people has long qualified as genocidal when it comes to international humanitarian legal standards. All major human rights institutions, the UN, and the global community of genocide scholars all agree that this is what Israel has been doing. What is less evident, though, is that Israel also appears to be preparing to establish zones of extermination by inversely defining the areas outside the concentration camps as combat zones and those who still stay in them as “combatants.”

Many of Israel’s major military engagements over the years have included large massacres as a means to induce population flight and to “teach a lesson” to the survivors and witness—from the Dawayma massacre in 1948, to the Khan Yunis massacre in 1956, to the mass killing of Egyptian soldiers in 1967. There is every reason to believe that such a scenario is possible in Gaza City, and, indeed, we have already seen this in the mass grave found outside Al Shifa hospital where almost 400 bodies were discovered.

Too many people think that genocide is simply killing everybody in sight. It’s not, although the act of killing members of the group being targeted for genocide does constitute one of the criteria regarding the crime of genocide. But Israel has preferred at this stage and in general since October 7 to keep the Palestinian people in Gaza alive, albeit in a state of such extreme precarity, terror, and hardship that it becomes easy to induce their expulsion. This is why the U.S. and Israel continue to flirt with the term “voluntary relocation” as though the choice to survive and escape such terror constitutes an act of free will. Instead, what we are really witnessing is an active unfolding genocide conducted for ethnic cleansing purposes with extermination also likely needed to ensure the success of these plans. In a nutshell, this amounts to a policy of keeping the population sufficiently alive so it can be forced to move out, although enough of them still need to be killed so they are terrorized into this fate and others learn the lesson to forever fear Israel.

We must thus warn that a huge massacre awaits Gaza City. The mass arrest of those remaining there is unlikely given the way this tactic does not definitively solve any of Israel’s problems. And given the symbolic capital of Gaza City as the heart of the resistance and the largest of Palestinian cities in historic Palestine today, we can be fairly certain that Israel is willing to massacre thousands, if not tens of thousands, to achieve this historic act.

If we are honest about it, every day for months on end, hundreds of Gazans are killed and maimed through aerial bombardment and increasingly now through land-based robotic or aerial drones. The latter tactic is also being waged to improve the conditions in which the attack on Gaza City takes place. Israel is systematically taking out multistory housing while sending in land-based robot bombs to level buildings, half-destroyed buildings and entire neighborhoods, to create lines of sight and access routes while aiming to concentrate the population and level the terrain. Israeli planes also drop leaflets urging the population to flee and promise massacres if they do not. Israel has also said that when it does commence its actual assault into the city, it will use artillery as well as sustained aerial bombardment, opening the “the gates of hell,” as Israeli Defense minister Israel Katz describes it. This is the perverse scenario emerging on the ground. It is openly discussed and not anything secret.

The battle for Gaza City

With all these things in flux, we can see how the battle for Gaza City is a pivotal moment. Although it retains overwhelming military superiority, especially from the air, folks should be aware that Israel’s power is by no means absolute, and many obstacles stand in the way of Israel achieving its goals.

Currently the Israeli military has serious problems regarding enlistment among its reserve troops, many of whom are also suffering from fatigue. Israel hides the true statistics regarding these matters, but there is plenty of indication that these problems are quite serious, in the form of increasing suicide rates and reservists’ and families’ petitions and warnings. This crisis exposes the longstanding sore point of who within Israeli society bears the task of combat roles and who doesn’t, with Netanyahu’s government allies from the ultra-orthodox—15 percent of the Israeli Jewish population—still retaining their privilege of being excepted from conscription.

Recruitment may also become increasingly affected by the fact that the genocidal nature of the campaign Israel wages means that many Israeli soldiers who hold joint nationality—which could be as high as 50 percent—are also exposing themselves to war crimes charges in their (other) home states.

The army is also struggling with supply concerns, with a third of its heavy machinery out of commission two years into its campaign. It has come to rely upon commercial enterprises to fill these gaps, which further says something about the role of the Israeli private sector in genocide.

While I don’t think Israel will have a problem fielding an army and can continue to do grave damage from the air and through its army of drones, the military brass is clearly extremely sensitive about how it deploys its precious human resources in situations of direct combat. Every casualty is sure to drip additional corrosive acid into the social and political fault lines within Israel, and the longer this lasts, the more severe these contradictions become. Let us not forget as well that the army is one of the main institutions that serves to unite Israelis under a national and cultural identity.

Israel of course was also seriously divided before the events of October 7. These divisions have only deepened over time, albeit only after a unified cathartic period calling for merciless acts of vengeance against the entirety of Gaza and its people. While this sentiment still remains high, with the impetus to ethnically cleanse Gazans supported by more than 80 percent of Israeli Jews, Israeli society has become significantly divided over how to realize this end when Israeli captives are still held in Gaza.

Two years into Israel’s genocidal campaign, most families of the captives believe that the Israeli government should take the deal that is on the table for a comprehensive prisoner exchange, asserting this as the best way for them to assure their return. But Netanyahu rejects this, and in so doing, exposes that he actually deprioritizes their release in favor of his larger strategic ambitions to reconfigure the conflict itself. However, the assault on Gaza City also clearly threatens more soldier and captive lives, while Hamas has clearly also been attempting to take more soldiers prisoner in Gaza to create an even larger crisis for the Israeli army, government, and society.

Netanyahu’s pursuit of the Gaza City campaign is motivated at least in part by the need to save his own political skin from his enduring legal cases. It is also meant to assert the particular neofascist, messianic, “Greater Israel” fantasy of his governmental allies. In these contexts, any added crises to the Israeli state and its army will pose serious threats.

Last but not least, Israel is also undergoing a serious and growing isolation regionally and internationally, which is getting more pronounced and beginning to really bite. Netanyahu recently spoke quite frankly about this, saying that the Israeli economy would have to engage in “autarkic” economic practices. For him to say this was to acknowledge that international efforts at BDS are working and that the Israeli economy has been sustained by the massive injections of arms and finance that have subsidized its genocide. It also points to the fact that many of the gains of the past thirty years regarding Israel’s ability to globalize its brand and markets have begun to be reversed, though clearly there is still a long way to go on these fronts.

The role of Hamas

While I don’t want to go into the prospects for the success of Israel’s plans, and what each of these matters hinge upon, I do want to stress two elements that are less evident.

First, the attempt to take Gaza City is a very large and complicated undertaking. We are talking about a city of over one million residents with a dense urban environment. Significant parts of the city have also already been transformed into complexes of half destroyed buildings and rubble. Israel has never attempted an assault of this kind in its history. Even the siege of West Beirut in 1982 found Israel facing a population roughly half the size of what Gaza is today, and in the end, Israel did not storm the city but preferred to besiege it, fearing casualties in a scenario of extended urban warfare.

Hamas has also been preparing for the battle of Gaza City for quite some time, and from what we can ascertain from its actions on the ground, has reorganized its structure and tactics in anticipation of Israel’s plans. We will have to see what this will entail in due course.

Below Gaza City there is also a very large city of tunnels that provides crucial infrastructure for the resistance. According to Israeli estimates, at least 75 percent of this network is still functional. Surely Hamas has also built new tunnels while renovating old ones. Hamas has also been able to resupply its military stocks thanks to unexploded Israeli ordnances—ten to fifteen percent of the 100 thousand tons—already dropped on Gaza. Israel and the U.S. also acknowledged back in March that Hamas was able to recruit and replenish its ranks.

All of this points to Hamas still operating as a functional and capable military, political, and social actor across the Gaza Strip—no small feat more than 700 days into this campaign. Recall that three Arab armies were defeated in six days in 1967.

Although it is impossible to have a clearer picture of the movement’s popular support on the ground in the midst of the genocide, it’s evident that the barbarity of Israel’s campaign against the entirety of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and the fact that Israel is aiming to achieve far larger ends than just the “destruction of Hamas,” unite Gazans around broad self-defense, communal/humanitarian/survivalist national unity aims and principles. Within this environment, Hamas is able to provide key institutional scaffolding to these ends, which helps facilitate how needs are met, though surely needs in such circumstances are endless. Its military resistance operations—ambushing, sniping and mortaring Israeli troops and their positions—are also seen as important in deterring the Israeli military from achieving their ends or at least slowing them down.

Hamas’ institutional solvency and political leadership is clearly still powerful across the strip. This can partially be attributed to the movement’s experience as a social actor for decades, though it also has to do with how the movement worked to reconstitute Gaza’s political economy during the years of siege (post-2006). This is why Israel worked so relentlessly to eliminate entire families in Gaza, especially in the early period of the genocide: It sought to punish and destroy the social networks that supported Hamas.

For what it’s worth, Hamas has also played a role in preventing open anarchy emerging in Gaza. Again, it’s difficult to know how this works on the ground because any public discussion or manifestation of this activity renders clear targets for Israel. With that said, Hamas has also attempted to play a role in combating gangsterism and predation from money lenders and food hoarders. Here it is important to stress that Israel’s attempts to erect alternative institutional structures that could replace it have also completely failed, which Israel also admits.

Finally, the distribution of the Hamas political leadership across different regional states has also meant that Israel has so far been unable to crack the integrity of the organization as they would like. In the end, Israel would like to definitively remove Hamas as a political player like the Sri Lankan military crushed the Tamil Tigers when it stormed their headquarters bunker in May 2009. But a repeat of such a scenario is unlikely in so far as the tunnel network Hamas oversees remains robust with this key infrastructural asset a major reason why Hamas has been able to hold out. As Gaza is transformed into massive heaps of rubble, with a good portion of it mined, the resistance circulates both above and below ground, surfacing in small groups for select purposes, maintaining a kind of remote yet invisible oversight of the field. The situation resembles a kind of massive briar patch with a warren below it that Israel is trying to figure out how it can transverse and control without getting scratched. No wonder it has opted for the weapons of fire and starvation.

In addition, Hamas has multiple arenas where it operates and enjoys deep networks of support regionally and globally. So the movement is geographically diversified as well, even though it remains to be seen whether it can continue to have Gaza act as the movement’s political headquarters, as it has, since 2006.

All of this doesn’t of course mean that the movement could not or has not been severely weakened. It has been, with many of its political and military leaders killed, including most of the original military council of the Al-Qassam Brigades. With that said, Hamas built an institution that was not merely an assemblage of charismatic figures. It was a full-blown government that operated both above and below ground for 17 years. It was accepted as a legitimate player among several Muslim and Arab states, while it also enjoyed at least two years during the Arab revolutions (post-2011) when the Egyptian Morsi regime enabled mass armament and facilitation of the movement.

Reversing history and attempting to take that apart was never going to be easy and may in the end still prove elusive, although these matters remain in the balance.

It’s important to also not forget that Hamas’ brinkmanship has also written itself into Palestinian, Arab, and world history as a mirror to the international community that reflects its complacency, contradictions and complicity with a genocidal, apartheid state for generations. In the context of the horror show of the genocide, the events of October 7 are also becoming some kind of footnote to the troubling global (dis)order that permits it, which has not only stained Israel but also its Western allies.

Hamas now seems determined to wage a tenacious fight for Gaza City, while the Gaza population also seems determined to resist Israel’s plans for ethnic cleansing.

While Israeli tanks may be able to enter Gaza City, if significant numbers of people do not leave the city, the Israeli military will find itself in a situation whereby its very presence in Gaza City over time creates targets for the resistance, all the while massacres of horrific proportions will be taking place above ground to attempt to induce flight.

The question of the resolve, determination, and organization of the Palestinians in Gaza and of Hamas itself will thus be key factors in what is about to unfold.

The role of the solidarity movement

Here comes the key role of the international community and the solidarity movement in particular. The latter needs to understand the overall dynamics at play and decisively act to shut down the Israeli genocide machine. We are in a race against time to prevent Israel and the U.S. from achieving their vile ends. Who knows what Gazans can withstand in these circumstances? What we do know is that Israel cannot do what it wants without the Western umbrella, and that is our moral, political and legal duty to remove that.

As we elevate our activism, we should bear in mind that the ground beneath Israel’s feet is also slipping. Our work is more significant given the structural dilemmas Israel faces in its current circumstances, which are not resolvable by military means alone.

Israel’s plans to destroy Gaza City and to corral the population into concentration camps as a first step toward more comprehensive ethnic cleansing is riddled with dilemmas.

Notwithstanding the guerilla campaign Hamas is preparing and engaging in against it, and the determination of Gaza’s residents to resist their ethnic cleansing, the Israeli army itself is aware that the interim period carries the seeds for reproducing the same dilemmas that Israel has attempted to avoid all these years.

Administering concentration camps of two million Palestinians—even if framed as temporary–—is basically a recipe for reproducing a variant of the Civil Administration, the institution that ran Gazan and Palestinian lives before the first Intifada and from which Israel desperately attempted to escape. What I’m really pointing to is the fact that instead of being free from Gaza, Israel is becoming not only knee deep in it, but neck deep. Indeed, it risks becoming swallowed by Gaza in a maelstrom of infamy and opprobrium. This will only worsen every problem Israel already faces, from financing this situation, to the security of its troops and society, to the question of criminal probes brought against it.The army recognizes this, which partially explains its reticence to engage in ground operations for Gaza City. Indeed, a significant but under-reported clash has been taking place between the Israeli military and the Netanyahu government, as the former accuses the latter of being in the dark regarding Netanyahu’s political end game.In the earlier days of the genocide, Netanyahu framed opposition to his plans as an extension of his political struggles that pre-dated October 7. Similarly to Trump, Netanyahu accused the military, his political opposition, and parts of the state (particularly the judiciary) of acting as a kind of deep state that sought to undermine his “democratic reforms” and the ability of his constituency to take state power.But as the genocide progressed, Netanyahu pushed all naysayers from power and has hand selected a military chief of staff (Zamir) who was seen as loyal and compliant. But now Netanyahu encounters the same problem with Zamir, who is questioning Netanyahu about the direction he is taking the country and the army.

Zamir fears—correctly—that without a clear, convincing, and realizable end game at the end of the “battle of Gaza City,” the army’s sacrifices (which are likely to be significant—and indeed, already are) will be in vain. At the end of the day, the army may find itself stuck in a position of directly administrating two million excessively destitute, displaced, starving, traumatized Gazans. They will be unable to move these people beyond the borders of historical Palestine because everyone outside is horrified by what they have just witnessed; they recognize that any association with Israel’s plans is akin to political leprosy and direct association with the crime of genocide.

Zamir, together with the great majority of the military brass (past and present), also recognize this situation as creating more attrition for the military itself, Israeli society, and for Israel’s international standing, which is why they all prefer and press for taking the deal on the table. But Netanyahu’s adventurism remains in command, even though the political question of Gaza is not resolvable through military means alone. At some point, politics must play a role. The thing is, Israel may be so isolated politically that it does not have much rope to play with on that front. Trump may be a loyal ally, but the military wants out now and fears the unchartered territory Netanyahu is taking them collectively toward. While Israel is clearly powerful militarily, there’s also no question that its political standing is in freefall and that wars are not won by military means alone.

This is why the question of what the international solidarity movement does now is so important.

Activity that identifies, isolates and targets the supply chains that facilitate the genocide must be prioritized in a race to break the ability of Israel and its allies from carrying out their plans. How and where to do this is up to activists to answer themselves based on solid empirical research, their positionality, their resources, and the courage and willingness to struggle.

By all means—educate, organize, and use your voices to exhaust the democratic channels that might be able to end facilitation of the genocide and bring about accountability. But at the same time, because what we are witnessing is a genocide from which there are no do-overs, we have a moral, historic, and political duty to take decisive measures to prevent Israeli and U.S. plans from materializing. Activists must thus think and act outside the box, raising the stakes in their activism to prioritize direct action, strikes, and civil disobedience on a mass scale to create a people’s campaign that directly impedes the genocide machine from advancing. If progressive actors fail in this test, the precedents set by this defeat will shape future global and domestic political orders for generations to come.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Pixabay; modified by Tempest.