Life and Politics in the Time of Genocide
Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera
“No child should be resilient to slaughter, genocide, and massacre. Being resilient is used to justify what is happening before our eyes and later we will call them survivors.”Pradeep Samanjeeva, Project Medical Referent, MSF on his experience in Gaza (12.10.2025)
Has the Gaza genocide ended or is the ceasefire a mere interregnum? What will happen to the ceasefire once Hamas returns the remains of dead Israeli hostages? If the ceasefire survives beyond that benchmark, will it lead to a basic normalisation of Gazan life and eventually a durable political solution? The answers are unknowable. Even so, the ceasefire is welcome because it provides a modicum of relief to a populace that has known nothing other than death, displacement, pain, grief and loss in the last two years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants war (if not with Palestinians then with some country) in order to avoid incarceration for corruption. Qatar, Hamas’s patron, has received a public apology from Netanyahu and the US promise to come to its aid in case of future attacks (in the form of a defence pact). It also gets set up an air force facility in Idaho. Consequently, Qatar is unlikely to protest too much if Israel recommences the Gaza genocide at some point, on some excuse.
US President Donald Trump’s situation is more complicated (quite apart from his yearning for a Nobel Peace Prize). The Republican voters and his own MAGA base, once pro-Israeli/Netanyahu monoliths, are changing, appalled by the mass killing of children (including babies) in Gaza and the US’s own complicity in the carnage.
Take, for instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, arch conservative, MAGA firebrand and Trump fan who in October 2023 filed a censure resolution against Democratic congresswoman (and Palestinian American) Rashida Tlaib for her tweets criticising Israel. Today, Congresswoman Greene is an outspoken critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and wants the US to end its backing for the genocide: “If America was being bombed day and night because of something horrific our government did, and many innocent Americans and American children were being killed and traumatically injured, and we begged for mercy, but the rest of the world said, “Americans voted for their government so they deserve it…’ And our cities and homes were bombed and turned into rubble. And our infrastructure was destroyed, no farms, no grocery stores, no organised society. And no one helped our injured and hungry children. How would you feel?… I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people in a foreign war that I had nothing to do with”.
Ms. Greene is among a growing number of Republican/MAGA leaders, pundits and influencers who are openly criticising Israel for its conduct in Gaza (plus its bombing of Iran), demanding an end to AIPAC influence in US politics and insisting that Washington stop engaging in/funding foreign wars and focus on improving American lives in America. The list reads like the Who’s Who of Republican opinion makers – Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Dave Smith and even the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk (newly publicised text messages from Charlie Kirk reveal him being pressured by Jewish American donors to support Israel unconditionally and how a refusal lost him a donation of $2million).
This growing anti-Israeli chorus on the American right is reflective of a sea change in US public opinion on Israel/Palestine. The Economist carried an in depth analysis of this unprecedented development in its September 18, 2025 issue. In her introduction, chief editor Zanny Minton Beddos wrote, “On recent trips to America I have heard far more overt criticism of Israel’s policies and growing concern that public support for Israel among ordinary Americans (and in particular young ones) is eroding fast. Our cover looks in detail at whether this is the case. The answer is striking and sobering. Our polling shows the mood is shifting sharply in America, not just among Democrats but also Republicans. If this loss of popular American support continues it will be catastrophic for a small country of 10million people in a hostile neighbourhood. Right now America is all that stands between Israel and pariah status. Optimists will call all of this scaremongering. We believe that view is dangerously complacent.”
Hasbara vs Reality
Benny is an IDF soldier, a sniper deployed for long periods in Gaza. In September 2025, he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz how he killed civilians including children who were trying to get aid in Gaza. “I’ve stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I’ve killed, a lot. Children.” Another soldier, Yoni, recalled, “I saw the bodies of two children maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea. There was lots of blood everywhere… I knew it was on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn’t a human being, ‘they entered an extermination zone, it is their fault. This is what war is like.’”
Hasbara, a Hebrew word meaning explain, is a less morally compromised synonym for propaganda. Its originator was Nahum Sokolow, a Zionist leader, who defined it as “a communication strategy that ‘seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified’…aimed at obtaining and maintaining international support for Israeli policy” (The Jerusalem Post, 19.1.2024).
As US and global support for Israel sinks to a new and all time low due to the Gaza genocide, Israel is intensifying its Hasbara campaign to portray a war of extermination as a necessary, just, and moral war of defence. For instance, in mid 2025, Israeli foreign ministry organised a fully funded Israeli tour for 16 young MAGA influencers. In September 2025, US journalist and research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Nick Cleveland Stout, revealed that Israel is paying $7,000 per post to social media influencers to counter young American’s growing antipathy to Israel. Incidentally, 16 seems to have some significance in the Hasbara universe for that is the number of Sri Lankan journalists and You Tubers invited by Israel for a fully funded study tour of Israel in September 2025.
But no amount of Hasbara can counter images of dead, injured or orphaned children or the sound of six year-old Hind Rajab’s voice asking someone to come and save her. So opposition to Israeli actions has grown not only among Americans but also among Jewish Americans. According to a recent Washington Post poll, almost 40% of Jewish Americans think that Israel is committing genocide while an overwhelming 60% believe that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.
Even inside Israel opponents of the war have grown more vocal, bolder. Famed Israeli orchestral conductor Ilan Volkov spoke outin September during BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall in London. “In my heart, there’s great pain now every day for months. I come from Israel. I live there. I love it. It’s my home. But what is happening now is atrocious – I know that many of us feel completely hopeless in front of this. Innocent Palestinians being killed in thousands, displaced again and again, without hospitals, without schools, not knowing when the next meal is. Israeli hostages are kept in inhuman conditions for two years. Political prisoners are languishing in Israeli jails. Israelis – Jews and Palestinians – we are not able to stop this alone. I ask you, I beg you to do whatever is in your power to stop this madness. Every little action counts. While governments hesitate and wait, we cannot let this go on for any longer.” Two weeks later, he was arrested at the Gaza border protesting against the genocide with hundreds of fellow Israelis. The night before he had participated in a musical protest at Tel Aviv’s Habima Square where several musicians simulated the sound of drones, which is an inescapable part of Gazan life .
Western governments are changing their stances on Palestine/Israel not because they want to but because of the unrelenting pressure from below, from their own people. That is why countries like the UK and France took the hitherto unimaginable step of granting Palestine full diplomatic recognition, something they didn’t do even at the height of Oslo Accords. Israel threatened punishment but could do nothing. It would be even less capable of doing anything, if the US changes its own stance at some point.
Political parties change. For most of its early history, Democratic Party was pro-slavery, identified itself as the “white man’s party” and attacked the Republicans for being “negro-dominated”. Over time roles became reversed. For decades, the Republican Party was seen as solidly pro-Israeli while the Democratic Party was more middle ground, more sympathetic to Palestinians. Are those divisions also gradually changing? Not immediately but in the next presidential election cycle and beyond. Will the change cause a broader realignment, bringing together actors from the right, left, and the middle of the political spectrum on a platform of a new economic order of increased direct taxation, less military spending and greater focus on ensuring a better, more affordable life for Americans? Is Zohran Mamdani a herald of such a change. After all, anything is possible in societies in a state of flux, when Ms Rachel, a You Tuber and an educator of small children publicly admonish Barak Obama for dehumanising Palestinians. In such times, Netanyahu and Ben Smotrich’s Israel has only one hope – Hamas.
Hamas to the rescue?
Israel is committing ethnic cleaning in Gaza (and the West Bank). It is committing religious cleansing in Jerusalem and Green Line Israel surreptitiously, targeting Christians.
In 2024, amidst the genocide, leaders of the three major churches in the Holy Land, the Latin Patriarchate, the Armenian Patriarchate and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, issued a joint statement “accusing Israeli authorities of launching a ‘coordinated attack’ on the Christian presence in the Holy Land by initiating tax proceedings against them”. In 2012, Israel introduced a new law according to which any religious properties not used for strictly religious purposes have to pay property taxes. Synagogues were fully exempted from this law. The churches went to court arguing that property tax exemptions granted to synagogues were discriminatory and lost because of the unofficially official credo of Israel being a Jewish state.
Since then Israel has been leveraging property taxes as a way to more land grabbing. In Jerusalem, authorities are already moving to seize some of the property belonging to the Armenian Patriarchate for non-payment of municipal taxes. This August, Israel froze the accounts of the Greek Orthodox church for non-payment.
This is the reality of Israel as a Jewish state. This reality makes Israel particularly vulnerable to a secular Palestinian resistance, which is why Netanyahu, the supposed arch enemy of Hamas, came up with a policy called Conception – using Hamas to divide, discredit and weaken Palestinians. A key component of this policy was allowing Qatar to fund Hamas. Addressing Likud party Knesset members in March 2019, he said, “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must approve the delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining the difference between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” He repeated this rationale again this year when confronted with the charge of aiding and abetting Hamas. As retired general Yair Golan pointed out, Netanyahu “created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the overall perception that the best thing to do was to annex West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas”. (The New Yorker, 28.10.2023).
Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya – Islamic Resistance Movement) rejects Israel’s right to existence and wants to install an Islamic Caliphate in all Palestinian lands, just as Israeli right wants to install a Jewish state in all current and former Palestinian lands. Netanyahu’s Jewish Greater Israel and Hamas’s Islamic Palestine are the perfect excuses for each other, opponents joined at the hip by their shared extremism.
So long as the right wing dominates Israeli politics and Palestinian politics is divided between extremist Hamas and venal Palestinian Authority, the chances of the ceasefire resulting in a durable peace are slim. It is precisely to prevent such a possibility that Israel did not include Marwan Barghouti among the released political prisoners. Qatar could have arranged his release through Trump, but the reappearance of the man The Economist called Palestine’s Mandela would be undesirable not just to Israel but also to Hamas and to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Some ceasefire is better than none even with Israel continuing to kill Palestinians on a much lower key as terrorists and Hamas recommencing killing Palestinians as traitors. A real change in the ground is impossible so long as the US continues to play by Israel’s rules, which include not allowing a Palestinian alternative to Hamas and the PA to emerge. But as a result of the genocide, the US’s role might undergo a transformation, if not immediately, then in the years ahead. Peace in Israel/Palestine may not be near but it might not be the impossibility it was before the genocide. That is how history moves.
