Western leaders and media are helping bolster a propaganda narrative about the Israeli captives that makes the resumption of Israel’s slaughter all but inevitable

Israel sustained the West’s support for its slaughter in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.

It invented particularly heinous Hamas war crimes, such baby beheadings and mass rape, for which no evidence has ever been produced. Conversely, it played down its own, even graver war crimes in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel.

With Hamas’ October 2023 crimes ever-more distant in the rear-view mirror, and Israeli crimes still all too visible in Gaza’s complete destruction – amounting to a “plausible” genocide, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground.

They need a new set of lies to justify resuming the slaughter. And as ever, the western establishment media are actively assisting.

Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire’s first phase to seize the moral high ground.

Israel once again has all the cards, care of rock-solid western support, and yet once again it is failing to win the public relations war.

Which explains why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw another of his temper tantrums at the weekend, this time blaming Hamas for stage-managing the release of Israelis in what he called “demeaning” and “humiliating ceremonies”.

Israel and its supporters were particularly incensed, it seems, by one of the captives, released on Saturday, beaming on stage as he warmly kissed two of his captors on the forehead.

On his walk to the handover with Red Cross staff, he put his arm around one of the captors’ shoulders in another moment of apparent affection.

Two other Israelis – up for release in the next round – were filmed watching from a car nearby, excited at the prospect of freedom and pleading with Netanyahu not to sabotage their release.

Blow up ceasefire

Predictably, western media, including the BBC, echoed Israel in suggesting these were somehow far more serious violations than Israel killing over 130 Palestinians since 19 January, when the ceasefire began, in hundreds of attacks on Gaza.

The media have similarly given fleeting coverage to Israel’s new wave of destruction, this time in the Occupied West Bank. Thousands of homes have been demolished, ethnically cleansing entire communities.

Western outlets have signally failed to note that these war crimes are also gross violations of the ceasefire agreement.

Now Netanyahu has exploited the apparent cosy relations between some of the Israeli captives and Hamas as a pretext to blow up the ceasefire before the second phase can begin next week. That is when Israel is expected to fully withdraw from Gaza and allow its reconstruction.

Buses carrying hundreds of Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday were forced to turn back, returning them to their prisons. Even according to Israel’s own assessments, the vast majority of these Palestinians have not been “involved in combat“.

Many, including medical personnel, were seized off Gaza’s streets following the 7 October Hamas attack. They have been held without charge, tortured and subjected to barbaric conditions that Israeli human rights groups have compared to “hell”.

Genocidal slogans

It would be nice to imagine that Israel and its supporters were genuinely concerned that, in parading its captives in public, Hamas had violated their rights to dignity under international humanitarian law. But don’t be fooled – or foolish.

Even before Israel reneged on the hostage exchange, it had vowed that Palestinians would be subjected to their own forms of degrading treatment. They would be forced to wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans supporting Israel’s genocidal actions against the people of Gaza.

And Israel’s supporters appeared none too concerned about the sensitivities of the 600 Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday whose buses returned them to their torture camps in Israel just as they could scent freedom.

But in any case, Israel’s own hostages have been a low priority for Netanyahu from the outset.

If Israel really cared so much about them, it would not have carpet-bombed Gaza for 15 months.

Instead it would have grabbed the chance for a ceasefire and prisoner swap not last month – as it was forced to do under heavy pressure from incoming US President Donald Trump – but last May, when it was offered a deal on exactly the same terms.

If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have used US-supplied, 2,000lb bunker-buster bombs that not only destroyed huge swaths of Gaza indiscriminately but flooded the tunnels where many of the Israelis were being held with toxic gases.

If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have set up undeclared “kill zones” across Gaza, where Israeli soldiers shot anyone and anything that moved.

Trump’s innovation is not the threat to ‘clean out’ Gaza. It is dropping a long-standing aim to dress up Palestinian expulsion as a peace plan

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention from day one of his “revenge” attack on Gaza, launched 16 months ago, was either ethnic cleansing or genocide in Gaza.

His ally in genocide for the next 15 months was former US President Joe Biden. His ally in ethnic cleansing is current US President Donald Trump.

Biden provided the 2,000lb bombs for the genocide. Trump is reportedly providing an even larger munition – the 11-ton MOAB, or massive ordnance air blast bomb, with a mile-wide radius – to further incentivise the population’s exodus.

Biden claimed that Israel was helping the people of Gaza by “carpet bombing” the enclave – in his words – to “eradicate” Hamas. Trump claims he is helping the people of Gaza by “cleaning them out” – in his words – from the resulting “demolition site”.

Biden called the destruction of 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings “self defence”. Trump calls the imminent destruction of the remaining 30 percent “all hell breaking loose”.

Biden claimed to be “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” while encouraging Israel to continue the murder of children month after month.

Trump claims to have negotiated a ceasefire, even as he has turned a blind eye to Israel violating the terms of that ceasefire: by continuing to fire on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; by refusing entry into Gaza of vital aid trucks; by allowing in almost none of the promised tents or mobile homes; by denying many hundreds of maimed Palestinians treatment abroad; by blocking the return of Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza; and by failing to engage with the second phase of the ceasefire negotiations.

Those Israeli violations, although widely reported by the media as Hamas “claims”, were confirmed to the New York Times by three Israeli officials and two mediators.

In other words, Israel has broken the agreement on every count – and Trump has stood foursquare behind this most favoured client state every bit as much as Biden did before him.

‘Hell breaking loose’

As Israel knew only too well in breaching the ceasefire, Hamas only ever had one point of leverage to try to enforce the agreement: to refuse to release more hostages. Which is precisely what the Palestinian group announced last Monday it would do until Israel began honouring the agreement.

In a familiar double act, Israel and Washington then put on a show of mock outrage.

Trump lost no time escalating the stakes dramatically. He gave Israel – or maybe the US, he was unclear – the green light to “let hell break out”, presumably meaning the resumption of the genocide.

This will happen not only if Hamas refuses to free the three scheduled hostages by the deadline of noon this Saturday. Trump has insisted that Hamas is now expected to release all of the hostages.

The US president said he would no longer accept “dribs and drabs” being released over the course of the six-week, first phase of the ceasefire. In other words, Trump is violating the very terms of the initial ceasefire his own team negotiated.

Clearly, neither Netanyahu nor Trump have been trying to save the agreement. They are working tirelessly to blow it up.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported as much last weekend. Israeli sources revealed that Netanyahu’s goal was to “derail” the ceasefire before it could reach the second stage when Israeli troops are supposed to fully withdraw from the enclave and reconstruction begin.

“Once Hamas realizes there won’t be a second stage, they may not complete the first,” a source told the paper.

Hamas insisted on a gradual release of hostages precisely to buy time, knowing that Israel would be keen to restart the slaughter as soon as it got the hostages home.

The Palestinians of Gaza are back to square one.

Either accept that they will be ethnically cleansed so that Trump and his billionaire friends can cash in on reinventing the enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East”, paid for by stealing the revenues from Gaza’s gas fields, or face a return to the genocide.

Quiet part out loud

As should have been clear, Netanyahu only agreed to Washington’s “ceasefire” because it was never real. It was a pause so the US could recalibrate from a Biden genocide narrative rooted in the language of “humanitarianism” and “security” to Trump’s far more straightforward tough-guy act.

Now it’s all about the “art of the deal” and real-estate development opportunities.

But of course Trump’s plan to “own” Gaza and then “clean it out” has left his allies in Europe – in truth, his satraps – squirming in their seats.

As ever, Trump has a disturbing habit of saying the quiet part out loud. Of tearing away the already-battered veneer of western respectability. Of making everyone look bad.

The truth is that over 15 months Israel failed to achieve either of its stated objectives in Gaza – eradicating Hamas and securing the return of the hostages – because neither was ever really the goal.

Even Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had to concede that Israel’s mass slaughter had served only to recruit as many fighters to Hamas as it had killed.

And Israeli military whistleblowers revealed to the website +972 last week that Israel had killed many of its hostages by using indiscriminate US-supplied bunker-buster bombs.

These bombs had not only generated huge blast areas but also served effectively as chemical weapons, flooding Hamas’ tunnels with carbon monoxide, asphyxiating the hostages.

The indifference of the Israeli leadership to the hostages’ fate was confirmed by Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in an interview with Israeli TV Channel 12.

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During Netanyahu’s visit, Trump dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s 15-month genocidal destruction of Gaza. This was always about ethnic cleansing

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week tore the mask off 16 months of gaslighting by western leaders and by the entirety of the western establishment media.

United States President Donald Trump finally dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.

This was always, he told us, a slaughter made in the US. In his words, Washington will now “take over” Gaza and be the one to develop it.

And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians, he said, would be “settled” in a place where they would not have to be “worried about dying every day” – that is, being murdered by Israel using US-supplied bombs.

Gaza, meanwhile, would become the “Riviera of the Middle East”, with the “world’s people” – he meant rich white people like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties in their stead.

If the US “owns” Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there just happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new “owner”. Palestinians have, of course, never been allowed to develop their gas fields.

Trump may even have let slip inadvertently the true death toll inflicted by Israel’s rampage. He referred to “all of them – there’s 1.7 million or maybe 1.8 million people” being forced out of Gaza.

The population count before 7 October 2023 was between 2.2 and 2.3 million. Where are the other half a million Palestinians? Under the rubble? In unmarked graves? Eaten by feral dogs? Vaporised by 2,000lb US bombs?

Wrecking spree

Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart. As if he was saving them from a disaster-prone earthquake zone, not from a genocidal neighbour he counts as Washington’s closest ally.

His comments were greeted with shock and horror in western and Arab capitals. Everyone is distancing themselves from his blatant backing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.

But these are the same leaders who kept silent through 15 months of Israel’s levelling of Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Then, they spoke of Israel’s right to “defend itself” even as Israel caused so much damage the United Nations warned it would take up to 80 years to rebuild the territory – that is, four generations.

What did they think would happen at the end of the wrecking spree they armed and fully supported? Did they imagine the people of Gaza could survive for years without homes, or hospitals, or schools, or water systems, or electricity?

They knew this was the outcome: destitute Palestinians would either risk death in the ruins or be forced to move out.

And western politicians not only let it happen, they told us it was “proportionate”, it was necessary. They smeared anyone who dissented, anyone who called for a ceasefire, anyone who went on a protest march as an antisemite and a Jew hater.

In the US and elsewhere, students – many of them Jewish – staged mass protests on their campuses. In response, university administrations sent in the riot police, beating them. Afterwards, the universities expelled the student organisers and denied them their degrees.

And yet western politicians and media outlets think now is the time to express shock at Trump’s statements?

Still dying

Trump’s appalling, savage honesty simply highlights the depths of mendacity over the preceding 16 months. After all, who did not understand that the three-phase Gaza ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January, was a lie too.

It was a lie even before the ink dried on the page.

It was a lie because the ceasefire was officially intended not just to create a pause in the bloodshed. It was also supposed to allow for the mitigation of harm to the civilian population, bring the hostilities to an end, and lead to the reconstruction of Gaza.

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None of that will happen – at least not for the Palestinians, as Trump has made clear.

Despite its claims, Israel has clearly not ceased firing munitions into Gaza. It has continued killing and maiming Palestinians, including children, even if the carpet bombing has ended for the time being.

In media coverage, these deaths and injuries are never referred to as what they are: violations of the ceasefire.

Israeli snipers may no longer be shooting Palestinian children in the head, as happened routinely for 15 months. But the young are still dying.

Without homes, without access to properly functioning hospitals and with only limited access to food and water, Gaza’s children are perishing – mostly out of view, mostly uncounted – from the cold, from disease, from starvation.

Even Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, says it will likely take 10-15 years to rebuild Gaza.

But the people of Gaza don’t have that much time.

This month Israel instituted a ban on the activities of the United Nation’s aid agency, Unrwa, in all of the Palestinian territories it occupies illegally.

Unrwa is the only agency capable of alleviating the worst excesses of the hellscape Israel has created in Gaza. Without it, the recovery process will be further hampered – and more of Gaza’s people will die waiting for help.

A blind eye

But in truth, Netanyahu has no intention of maintaining the “ceasefire” beyond the first stage, the exchange of hostages. Afterwards, he has all but promised to restart the slaughter.

The story: Did you believe it 30 years ago when they told you that the Oslo Accords would bring peace to the Middle East? That Israel would finally withdraw from the Palestinian territories it had illegally occupied for decades, end its brutal repression of the Palestinian people, and allow a Palestinian state to be created there? That the longest runing sore for the Arab and Muslim worlds would finally be brought to an end?

The reality: In fact, during the Oslo period, Israel stole more Palestinian land and expanded the building of illegal Jewish settlements at the fastest rate ever. Israel became even more repressive, building prison walls around Gaza and the West Bank while continuing to aggressively occupy both. Ehud Barak, Israeli prime minister of the time, “blew up” – in the words of one of his own main advisers – the US-backed negotiations at Camp David in 2000.

Weeks later, with the occupied Palestinian territories seething, opposition leader Ariel Sharon, backed by 1,000 armed Israeli troops, invaded occupied Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque – one of the holiest places for Muslims in the world. It was the final straw, triggering an uprising by Palestinians that Israel would crush with devastating military force and thereby tip the scales of popular support from the secular Fatah leadership to the Islamic resistance group Hamas.

Further afield, Israel’s ever-more abusive treatment of the Palestinians and its gradual takeover of al-Aqsa – backed by the West – served only to further radicalise the jihadist group al-Qaeda, providing the public rationale for attacking New York’s Twin Towers in 2001.

The story: Did you believe it in 2001, after the 9/11 attack, when they told you that the only way to stop the Taliban harbouring al-Qaeda in Afghanistan would be for the US and UK to invade and “smoke them out” of their caves? And that in the process the West would save Afghanistan’s girls and women from oppression?

The reality: As soon as the first US bombs fell, the Taliban expressed readiness to surrender power to the US puppet Hamid Karzai, stay out of Afghan politics and hand Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader, over to an agreed third country.

The US invaded anyway, occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, killing at least 240,000 Afghans, most of them civilians, and spending some $2 trillion on propping up its detested occupation there. The Taliban grew stronger than ever, and in 2021 forced the US army out.

The story: Did you believe it in 2003 when they told you that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that could destroy Europe in minutes? That Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was the new Hitler, and that he had allied with al-Qaeda to destroy the Twin Towers? And that for those reasons the US and UK had no choice but to invade Iraq pre-emptively, even if the United Nations refused to authorise the attack.

The reality: For years, Iraq had been under severe sanctions following Saddam Hussein’s foolhardy decision to invade Kuwait, and upset the regional order in the Gulf designed to keep the oil flowing to the West. The US responded with its own show of military force, decimating the Iraqi army. The policy through the 1990s had been one of containment, including a sanctions regime estimated to have killed at least half a million Iraqi children – a price the then-US secretary of state Madeline Albright famously said was “worth it”.

Saddam Hussein had also to submit to a programme of rolling weapons inspections by UN experts. The inspectors had concluded with a high degree of certainty that there were no usable WMD in Iraq. The report that Saddam Hussein could fire on Europe, hitting it in 30 minutes, was a hoax, it eventually emerged, cooked up by the UK intelligence services. And the claim that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda not only lacked any evidence but was patently nonsensical. Saddam’s highly secular, if brutal, regime was deeply opposed to, and feared, the religious zealotry of al-Qaeda.

The US-UK invasion and occupation, and the vicious sectarian civil war it unleashed between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, would kill – on the best estimates – more than 1 million Iraqis and drive from their homes a further 4 million. Iraq became a recruiting ground for Islamic extremism and led to the formation of a new, far more nihilistic, Sunni competitor to al-Qaeda called Islamic State. It also bolstered the power of the Shi’a majority in Iraq, who took power from the Sunnis and forged a closer alliance with Iran.

The story: Did you believe it in 2011 when they told you that the West was backing the Arab Spring to bring democracy to the Middle East, and that Egypt – the largest Arab state – was at the vanguard of change in removing its authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak?

The reality: Mubarak had been propped up by the West as Egypt’s tyrant for three decades, and received billions in “foreign aid” each year from Washington – effectively a bribe to abandon the Palestinians and maintain peace with Israel under the terms of the 1979 Camp David agreement. But the US reluctantly turned its back on Mubarak after assessing that he could not withstand mounting protests sweeping the country from revolutionary forces released by the Arab Spring – a mix of secular liberals and Islamic groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood. With the army holding back, the protesters emerged victorious. The Brotherhood won elections to run the new democratic government.

Behind the scenes, however, the Pentagon was tightening ties to the remnants of Mubarak’s old regime and a new aspirant to the crown, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Reassured that there was no danger of US reprisals, el-Sisi finally launched a coup to return Egypt to military dictatorship in 2013. Israel lobbied to make sure el-Sisi’s military dictatorship would continue to receive its billions in annual US aid. In power, Sisi instituted the same repressive powers as Mubarak, ruthlessly crushed the Brotherhood and joined Israel in choking Gaza with a blockade to isolate Hamas, Palestine’s own version of the Brotherhood. In doing so, he gave a further shot in the arm to Islamic extremism, with the Islamic State establishing a presence in Sinai. Meanwhile, the US further confirmed that its commitment to the Arab Spring and democratic movements in the Middle East was non-existent.

The story: Did you believe it when, also in 2011, they told you that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi posed a terrible threat to his own population and had even given his soldiers Viagra to commit mass rape? That the only way to protect ordinary Libyans was for Nato, led by the US, UK and France, to bomb the country, and directly aid opposition groups to overthrow Gaddafi?

The ghosts of thousands of Palestinian children crushed by Israeli bombs loomed over this year’s Auschwitz commemorations

An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.

The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the genocide of a people must “never again” be allowed to take place.

As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders – from Britain’s King Charles III, to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France – prominently in attendance at the main ceremony at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps, where more than a million Jews, Roma and other stigmatised groups were burned in ovens.

As a counterpoint, the BBC highlighted the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been excluded from the ceremony for ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Steve Rosenberg, the corporation’s Moscow correspondent, underscored the irony that Russia, so visibly absent, was responsible for liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 – the date that eventually came to be marked as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But hanging over the proceedings – and the coverage – was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of “never again”? Had media outlets like the BBC?

There was an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts.

Those ghosts included the children shredded by US-supplied bombs; the children who slowly suffocated under the rubble of their destroyed homes; the children whose bodies were left to rot, picked apart by feral dogs, because snipers shot at anyone who tried to retrieve them; the children who starved to death because they were seen as “human animals”, denied all food and water; the homeless babies who froze to death in plunging winter temperatures; and the premature babies left to die in their incubators after soldiers invaded hospitals and cut off the power.

Those ghosts were every bit as present at the ceremony as the mountains of shoes and suitcases – separated forever from their owners – lining the corridors of the Auschwitz museum.

Western leaders were determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but not to look at the crimes of the present – crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.

Wasteland of rubble

The BBC’s News at Ten, its main evening news programme, dedicated around 20 minutes of its half-hour schedule to the Auschwitz commemorations, and then immediately followed the segment – apparently with no sense of irony – with images from Gaza, now a wasteland of rubble.

Video footage, shot by a drone from high above, showed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – the survivors, if Israel does not restart the slaughter – picking their way along the coast northwards. They were heading towards the ruins that had once been their homes, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Seen from so far away, they were reduced to a mass of “human ants”, just as Israel’s leaders wish them to be seen.

After all, who needs to protect a people so dehumanised, so demonised? A people whose resistance to decades of brutal oppression and dispossession is categorised simply as “terrorism”?

It was entirely of a piece that US President Donald Trump, who at least stayed away from the orgy of western hypocrisy at Auschwitz, called at the weekend for a programme to “clean out” the destitute, the maimed, the scarred from Gaza – as if this was just a matter of good hygiene, of eradicating an ants’ nest.

Media like the BBC reported his comments with faint distaste. But it was precisely the media’s disengaged treatment of the horrors unfolding in Gaza for the past 15 months – as if Israel was simply carrying out a routine counter-terrorism operation, “mowing the lawn” again – that made the horrors possible.

It was the media’s refusal to identify those horrors for what they clearly were – an incipient genocide, recognised by every major human rights organisation and suspected by the International Court of Justice in a ruling a year ago – that made the slaughter possible.

It was the media’s embrace of the preposterous narrative that former US President Joe Biden had “worked tirelessly” to restrain Israel, at the same time as he shipped to its military the most powerful bombs in Washington’s armoury, that made the genocide possible.

At least Trump, in his vulgar transparency, exploded the pretence of decency, making it impossible to take as good-faith the professions of “never again” paraded by western leaders.

Ideological zeal

But the Auschwitz commemoration also highlighted a much older lie than the West’s current, self-serving, mendacious claim to have internalised the central lesson of the Holocaust while assisting a present-day genocide.

This year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day starkly exposed the chief beneficiary of that lie: Israel.

For decades, Israel has traded on its self-declared status as guardian of the Holocaust’s memory, and as the Jewish people’s supposed solitary sanctuary from global antisemitism.

But Israel was never a real sanctuary for Jews. It was always another ghetto, this one a self-created fortress state antagonising and oppressing its neighbours in the oil-rich Middle East.

Israel was never a bulwark against genocide either. It was the bastard child of genocide – bitter, traumatised and driven by an ideological zeal to do unto others what had been done to it.

And Israel was never an antidote to antisemitism. It was always antisemitism’s junkie, needing another hit to give it the illusion of purpose and meaning, to rationalise its crimes to itself and others.

Israel did not learn the lesson of “never again”. It learned to view the world as a giant extermination-camp-in-waiting, where no one and nothing could be trusted; where life was seen as a zero-sum battle for survival; where wielding the biggest stick eased its fears a little; and peace was unattainable, so the state of war had to be permanent.

Touting itself as the realisation of a dream for the Jewish people, Israel offered only a nightmarish hellscape for the Palestinians it has ruled for nearly eight decades.

The nadir of that long process was the 15 months of genocide in Gaza.

Litany of tyrants