PI Briefing | A year of genocide

Liberation is the only path to peace.

One year ago, we wrote to you with a warning: “Israel is planning on carrying out a genocide in Gaza.”

Palestinians have said for 75 years that the Nakba of 1948 never ended. It has continued for 75 years, every single day. In the crowded refugee camps of Gaza, the alleyways of Jerusalem, the hills of Haifa, and the corners of Jenin.

But today feels different. As millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, ‘48, and across the diaspora watch their people in Gaza be expelled en masse while Israel destroys their homes and slaughters those who remain, the only words that people can muster, is “it’s happening again.”

A second Nakba.

One year later, we write again as witnesses of this second Nakba — 365 days in which Israel has announced, committed and celebrated a genocide against the Palestinian people.

In this Briefing we unpack these claims, and ask ourselves: Can our collective humanity not only withstand these horrors, but also resist them with the urgency, clarity, and conviction that will be necessary to dismantle the war machine — and found a new project for peace and liberation in its place?

To answer these questions, we put the year of genocide in review.

On year ago, Israel’s top officials announced their genocidal intentions. On 8 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Gazans to “leave now” - despite having nowhere to go, trapped inside an Israeli-controlled open-air prison - because Israel’s bombs would turn the strip into “rubble.” He was true to his word. Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza than London, Dresden and Hamburg combined suffered in the entirety of the Second World War. Over 160,000 buildings have been flattened. Gaza is now and will be for years to come a land of grey rubble: broken concrete mixed with the decaying corpses of the innocent.

On 9 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “total siege” of Gaza with “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” He said Israel was fighting “human animals” and would “act accordingly.” Starvation has been used as a weapon of war, leading to famine across Gaza and countless deaths from malnutrition, especially among children and the elderly. This deliberate starvation continues, with the World Food Programme announcing this week that no food aid has entered northern Gaza in the past month. The WFP was forced to pause the movement of its staff around the strip in August after one of their teams was fired upon by an Israeli checkpoint.

On 16 October, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog made clear that Gallant’s “human animals” meant all the people of Gaza and all Palestinians. He said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” So it should be no surprise that nearly 70 per cent of deaths confirmed by Gaza’s health ministry are women and children. The full estimates for deaths this year range much higher than the ministry has been able to document, with both a letter in the Lancet and a group of US American doctors who worked in Gaza estimated already well clear of 100,000.

After all this wreckage and destruction, Israel’s top officials have no intention of allowing Palestinian control over Gaza. They say this quite openly. For example, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said in a television interview on 17 January of this year, “We need to occupy Gaza and stay there” with a “plan of encouragement [for the Palestinians] to leave”. His call for effective annexation was echoed the next day by Netanyahu, who pronounced that “Israel has to control the entire area from the River to the Sea.”

With this expansionist policy, Israeli settlers are building more illegal settlements in the West Bank and property developers hold conferences about the potential luxury real estate boom after the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Yet Gaza is not enough. Israel today wants to go even further, according to finance minister Belazel Smotrich, who last year called Palestinians a “fiction”. In an interview as part of a documentary released this month, Smotrich was asked if Israel’s borders should extend beyond the Jordan River. He replied “Absolutely, but slowly … Our great religious elders used to say that the future of Jerusalem was to extend as far as Damascus.”

Israel’s violence already extends beyond the borders of historic Palestine, with Netanyahu warning the Lebanese people in a televised address that they will suffer the same fate as the Palestinians of Gaza. Already thousands of Lebanese have been killed in yet another Israeli invasion and bombing of their country.

One year into the genocide, Israel’s formula has become clear: Annexation is its goal; Ethnic cleansing is its method; Self-defence is its excuse. This formula is sanctioned outright by the United States, without whom it could not and does not act.

The formula must be broken. But how?

Last week, the Cabinet of the Progressive International published an urgent statement as the genocide escalates toward regional war. They wrote, “Liberation is the only path to peace. The task of progressive forces today is to internationalise the resistance to the Israeli regime, to break the chains of complicity that sustain it, and to accelerate the global struggle for Palestinian liberation. Nothing less can secure peace for all the peoples of the region.”

The Israeli regime’s recent actions, the Cabinet writes, are reminiscent of that of apartheid South Africa, which escalated its war against Angola, Mozambique and Namibia during the 1980s. Then, as now, international solidarity was critical to dismantling apartheid. It was with the support of Cuban soldiers — and Soviet weapons — that South Africa was defeated in Angola, hastening apartheid’s demise.

The demise of apartheid can happen again. Indeed, it must happen again. But it will take all of us — a historic, globe-spanning, courageous and committed movement — to bring about the end of this genocide, the end of this apartheid, and the complete decolonisation of our world.

In solidarity,

The Progressive International Secretariat

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After a year of genocide we reflect on the importance of creative resistance in the face of ongoing destruction. The artworks here are interpretations of Palestinian flags by Rosalind Nashashibi (a Palestinian-English artist) and Nicole Eisenman (a French-born American artist of German-Jewish decent) as seen at the The Freedom Boat, Readings for Palestine at the 60th Venice Biennale organised by Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun WAWOG and the Kamel Lazaar foundation.

This week the Progressive International hosted its first art fundraiser. Get in touch to see how you can support our work by purchasing artwork by emailing: [email protected]

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