We Need to Talk About the Ceasefire: Part 1 – The Killing Hasn’t Stopped

“The ceasefire isn’t peace. It’s just a pause, and pauses don’t heal wounds, they just give you time to feel them.”

Mohammed Marwish – “Reflections on the Ceasefire in Gaza”

A ceasefire in Gaza does not mean the end of genocide and it does not mean the end of mass killing. The ceasefire is bringing in a new phase. In truth, Israel itself needed this. There have been growing morale problems and economic pressures, and there is also pressure on supporting governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end that support. We must therefore be careful not to mistake the fatigue of a butcher whose arm is tired for a lessening in bloodlust. There was an apparent decision in the US to time the ceasefire with the change of Presidential administration.  Israel also seems to have had some foreknowledge of this and passed legislation to ban UNRWA so as to cause the greatest possible harm and suffering with the least possible coverage and reaction. This is a foretaste of the way genocide will continue under the “ceasefire”.

Historically Israel does not honour ceasefires. This is a deliberate strategy to normalise its violations of ceasefires and establish a de facto claim to have a routine right to use armed violence outside of their recognised borders. 

Israel continues murdering people. 80 inhabitants of the Gaza strip were killed by Israel in the first 12 days of what is called a “ceasefire”.  In the meantime the military violence in the West Bank keeps increasing, especially in and around Jenin, while settler violence increases and looks ever more ominous. Israeli leaders have openly talked of applying lessons learned in Gaza to Jenin, where 14 people have been killed in this one week of “ceasefire”. Hundreds of residents have been forced to move after being given Gaza-style “evacuation orders”. Meanwhile Israel, which is thought to have violated the “ceasefire” in Lebanon around 100 times in its first week, has not removed its forces and at last count as I write has massacred 22 Lebanese civilians trying to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.

Israel’s mockery of the concept of a ceasefire, of power parity, and of reciprocity itself extends to their treatment of released prisoners. As they have in the past, they increase the numbers of Palestinians they take from the occupied territories even as they release an agreed amount. One day after they released 90 prisoners they took another 64 into custody. Since then they have raided Jenin on multiple days taking significant numbers into custody. 

The state of Israel has created new norms wherein their extraterritorial and extralegal murder of people is treated as a regular and accepted part of life. The events of the last 15 months have created a new watershed at which a higher level of violence is rendered invisible to editors, politicians and pundits. Actual deaths of Palestinians will be reduced in value far below potential Israeli deaths, let alone actual Israeli deaths. Footage, column inches, gigabytes and megapixels will all be focussed once more on the plight of Israelis who must live in the fear that the people their government kills every day might find ways of striking back. In the name of security Israel will keep killing and killing and killing; one here, another here, four more here, just a small family over there. Nothing that would mean anything to a Western news gatekeeper. Yet this horrible unspoken killing will likely be only the tip of the iceberg, while the Israeli siege kills far more people through deprivation than it does through armed violence. 

It is always possible that Israel may resume the full onslaught if they have enough domestic support, but if a ceasefire beds in Israel will find it difficult to restart the Holocaust with the same level of violence. Nonetheless history suggests that they will push the boundaries of the term “ceasefire”. In all Palestinian territories the higher levels of armed violence that have taken hold will continue. More to the point, however, having reduced the people of the Gaza Strip to a condition of extreme vulnerability, Israel will use deliberate acts of deprivation to kill people just a surely as with force of arms. If Israel is not stopped the next few years will come to feel like the second phase of the Gaza Holocaust, and like the first phase it will seem inexplicable to the people in Gaza that the world is letting this happen.

If Israel does not keep killing as many people in Gaza with bombs and bullets and missiles and drones, it does not mean they will be killing fewer people over time. Even drastic drops in deaths through traumatic injury and starvation will not translate into a correspondingly drastic drop in excess mortality. 

The current condition of the people in Gaza is so reduced that they are vulnerable to deaths from disease, deprivation, exposure, despair and malnutrition. The genocide is going into stealth mode, cloaking itself in the passive voice even more thoroughly than it has previously managed. This has happened before. By preventing the necessities of life from entering the Gaza strip Israel can kill more people with far less attention and without the pressure to end the killing. The killing will be slower, but not necessarily much slower. 

Genocide does not mean that a certain quantity of people must die, yet it is entirely possible that people in Gaza will continue to die prematurely at levels that will quickly reach hundreds of thousands within a few years. There is a clear precedent for this outside of Palestine. After the destruction of Desert Storm the US instituted a genocidal sanctions regime that is estimated to have caused one million Iraqis to die of preventable disease and malnutrition.

There are other precedents that I will outline in part 2 of this article. In these precedents a moment of crisis and shock in which massive deadly force is unleashed is followed by endless “low intensity” conflict, political and social fragmentation, and deadly structural violence. Armed violence persists, but at lower chronic level that seems strangely incurable. With the compliance of news media the structural violence is made invisible to people and the instability is made to seem endemic so that over time the deadly genocide appears as a normal state of affairs, even to the point where it seems that the victims themselves create the misery through their own deficiencies. This is predictable as part of the future in all occupied Palestinian territories, because it has already happened, because it was already happening. The Gaza Holocaust has ushered in a heightened level of violence beyond the Gaza Strip, but this is an intensification of existing processes. Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories face greater suffering in the coming years than the considerable suffering they faced before October 2023. 

Despite this some Palestine solidarity organisations seem determined to support this new phase of genocide by signaling to the public that the ceasefire changes everything, even when amongst themselves they clearly understand that this is not the case. Unconsciously they are letting the public misapprehension about the situation dictate their strategy rather that critically reflecting on it and reacting appropriately. It is very important that the public is kept awake despite the heavy sedative pressure that the media and political establishment will exert on them. That means that visible activism should be maintained as is for quite some time even as efforts shift in future months to outreach, education and BDS activities.

Far from being a time to pause this is a time to work towards increasing efforts. It may be that momentum is lost, but the less we lose now the less we need to regain later. We can no longer pretend that our role is to apply pressure so that the Powers That Be will finally recognise the injustice and act to re-establish the International Rules-Based Order. Legal avenues and formal political participation at various levels of government are important tools, but ultimately it will only work as expressions of wider democratic pressure coming from a public roused to action in very large numbers. It should be obvious by now that protecting Israel’s right to commit genocide is such a key strategic plank of US imperial power that it is willing to call in all favours and spend any amount of political, cultural and economic capital to maintain the Zionist outpost to control the oilfields of the Middle East. Throughout the West, leaders in politics, media and commerce have shown themselves to be slaves of an authoritarian obedience to power even at their own expense, and those chains can only be broken by the realistic threat that they will lose their positions, their money, and their power if they do not change. Many will simply have to be driven out of public life.

The fact is that all around the world Zionists have absolutely committed totally to their cause. They have left no room for compromise and we have no choice but to see this through to its completion. As Abby Martin told TRT World: “There is no way forward except for the total liberation of Palestine.” The Gaza Holocaust has been a mask-off moment and we now know that the Zionists thorughout the world have transitioned to full-fat fascism. They believe that controlling information creates reality in a literal sense and they cannot be reasoned with or debated. You cannot show them images of dead and mutilated children, cities turned to moonscapes, prisoners being tortured, or mass graves and cause any change in their beliefs. It is only when people lose their illusions and discard the myths that they regain their humanity. 

Consider the example of Piers Morgan who has tried to position himself from the beginning as some form of honest broker willing to criticise the Israeli government. In the last 16 months he has been made to confront some of the horrors of the genocide, though he manages to remain ignorant of some inconvenient facts to a remarkable degree. His schtick means that he cannot simply deny and gainsay everything he is confronted with otherwise he would serve no purpose. He would be another Eylon Levy or Danny Danon or Mark Regev. These people are useful for rabble-rousing among anti-Palestinian zealots, but they have become liabilities in the general public whilst there is an awareness of the mass deaths that Israel is causing among innocents. Morgan’s role is not to deny everything it is to cast doubt, throw shade and sow confusion, but as more atrocities are exposed and proven he is forced into extreme positions. In a conversation with Tucker Carlson he endorsed the deliberate killing of children as a moral act “if there is a world war and it threatens the entire world”. It is hard not to conclude that he is shifting his moral goalposts by changing the way he views the context so as to make room for defending the documented systematic killing of children that has been occurring. It is a reminder that although spreading emotive information about the human costs of genocide is important, it may be more important to challenge the one-sided framing of the causes of violence. Israel does not have a right to use armed violence and claim self-defence and Morgan should have been challenged on that from the first time he bullied guests into accepting that framework. If people can use foundational myths to legitimate one murder, they will simply increase the perceived stakes to justify one million murders.

Some people never admitted that Adolf Hitler did anything wrong, and there was no way of making them do so. The answer to this problem was to ensure that a consensus existed among the general society that Hitler’s crimes were real and inexcusable. Zionist or Nazi, the only way to push fanatics out of the mainstream discourse in our decadent society will be to rouse the passion of the majority against them. Above all that means creating certainty. Currently the average person does not like what Israel has done in Gaza, but they are kept in a space of extreme ambivalence, if not confusion, by the constant repetition of Israeli hasbara in our media. The fact that polls show that the public mostly sides with Palestinians in simple binary terms, should not fool activists into thinking that the public really grasps what is going on. They are kept in a fog of uncertainty and made to feel that some aspects of the situation are very complicated and difficult. They are told repeatedly that the causes of violence in Palestine are ancient enmities and they are not given any reason to question that lie.

Hasbara can be thought of as propaganda, but the word means “explaining”. Western media has been very careful to always leave room for people to give credence to the hasbara – the Zionist explanation – often by simply leaving out the parts of the news that blatantly contradict said hasbara. We need to create education and awareness so that people understand that Israel’s explanations do not create the controversy that people are led to believe. There are no two sides to this and once a majority understand this the politics will have to shift. Once that motion starts it will create its own momentum as each new Israeli atrocity or attempt at diplomatic bullying is seen for what it actually is. At some point many of us crossed a line in our lives when our received notions of Arab savagery, Israeli nobility, Islamic fanaticism, and Jewish urbane humanism no longer persuade us that the victim is the murderer. As much as we need to end the distortions of emphasis and viewpoint and scale in our media, we also need to convince people to believe the evidence of their own eyes.

Israel is still killing people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and in Lebanon. It is not going to end. They will be committing even worse crimes by putting a genocidal stranglehold on goods entering the Gaza Strip. This has happened before and it has cost many lives already. The people who die from preventable and treatable diseases are just as precious. They and their loved ones must often endure the agony of knowing that they are being murdered through a system of detached cruelty and banal evil.

We must do our best to bring freedom to Palestine because the genocide will continue until this is over. The best way to understand deadliness of this phase is to look at the genocidal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990’s. The events show the power of the US empire to replace one mode of genocide with another as required. Imperial powers do not relent and they will not ever tire or recoil from the inhumane expedients that create their hegemony. The only way out of this is a full conscious movement of solidarity between the masses at the “core” and those at the “periphery”. The nature of imperial genocide is found beyond war and conquest and massacres, it is found in neocolonialism, neoliberalism, structural violence and the perpetual suffering that is inflicted as a matter of course by the implacable and fanatical mass-murderers that wield power in the Western world.

The “ceasefire” has left a situation in which misery and death will continue of it own accord, but which will be aggravated and accelerated by the structural violence brought to bear. Chris Hedges’ article “The Western Way of Genocide” opens:

Gaza is a wasteland of 50 million tons of rubble and debris. Rats and dogs scavenge amid the ruins and fetid pools of raw sewage. The putrid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rises from beneath the mountains of shattered concrete. There is no clean water. Little food. A severe shortage of medical services and hardly any habitable shelters. Palestinians risk death from unexploded ordnance, left behind after over 15 months of air strikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes and blasts from tank shells, and a variety of toxic substances, including pools of raw sewage and asbestos.

Hepatitis A, caused by drinking contaminated water, is rampant, as are respiratory ailments, scabies, malnutrition, starvation and the widespread nausea and vomiting caused by eating rancid food. The vulnerable, including infants and the elderly, along with the sick, face a death sentence. Some 1.9 million people have been displaced, amounting to 90 percent of the population. They live in makeshift tents, encamped amid slabs of concrete or the open air. Many have been forced to move over a dozen times. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed or damaged. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, universities — Israel blew up Israa University in Gaza City in a controlled demolition — cemeteries, shops and offices have been obliterated. The unemployment rate is 80 percent and the gross domestic product has been reduced by almost 85 percent, according to an October 2024 report issued by the International Labor Organization.

In Part 2, I will discuss the phase that comes after this intense destruction – a Sisyphean curse of slow genocide that the West inflicts on its former colonies and potential rivals.

Kieran Kelly researches and writes about genocide for his website ongenocide.com