By Sheerpost- Chris Hedges-February 2, 2025

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.

Israel’s banning of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — which estimates that clearing Gaza of the rubble left behind will take 15 years — ensures that Palestinians in Gaza will never have access to basic humanitarian supplies, adequate food and services.

The United Nations Development Programme estimates that it will cost between $40 billion and $50 billion to rebuild Gaza and will take, if the funds are made available, until 2040. It would be the largest post-war reconstruction effort since the end of World War Two.

Israel, supplied with billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. Germany, Italy and the U.K., created this hell. It intends to maintain it. Gaza is to remain under siege. After an initial burst of aid deliveries at the start of the ceasefire, Israel has once again severely cut back the trucked-in assistance.

Gaza’s infrastructure will not be restored. Its basic services, including water treatment plants, electricity and sewer lines, will not be repaired. Its destroyed roads, bridges and farms will not be rebuilt. Desperate Palestinians will be forced to choose between living like cave dwellers, camped out amid jagged chunks of concrete, dying from disease, famine, bombs and bullets, or permanent exile. These are the only options Israel offers.

Israel is convinced, probably correctly, that eventually life in the coastal strip will become so onerous and difficult, especially as Israel finds excuses to violate the ceasefire and resume armed assaults on the Palestinian population, a mass exodus will be inevitable. It has refused, even with the ceasefire in place, to permit foreign press into Gaza, a ban designed to blunt coverage of the horrendous suffering and death.

Stage Two of Israel’s genocide and the expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of more Syrian territory in the Golan Heights (as well as calls for expansion to Damascus), southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank — is being cemented into place.

Israeli organizations, including the far right Nachala organization, have held conferences to prepare for Jewish colonization of Gaza once Palestinians are ethnically-cleansed. Jewish-only colonies existed in Gaza for 38 years until they were dismantled in 2005.

Washington and its allies in Europe do nothing to halt the live-streamed mass slaughter. They will do nothing to halt the wasting away of Palestinians in Gaza from hunger and disease and their eventual depopulation. They are partners in this genocide. They will remain partners until the genocide reaches its grim conclusion.

But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, the terrifying machine of industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.

These assaults will be committed, as they are in Gaza, in the name of progress, Western civilization and our supposed “virtues” to crush the aspirations of those, mostly poor people of color, who have been dehumanized and dismissed as human animals.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law.

The message this sends is clear: You, and the rules that you thought might protect you, do not matter. We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes in “Rise and Kill First” has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” uses the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass murder and Zionist version of Lebensraum.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

The people are blind and have lost their feelings of humanity.

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in “Discourse on Colonialism”, appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

The German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.” As Hannah Arendt understood, antisemitism alone did not lead to the Shoah. It needed the innate genocidal potential of the modern bureaucratic state.

“In America,” the poet Langston Huges said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

We dominate the globe not because of our superior virtues, but because we are the most efficient killers on the planet. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimised or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.

“These events which took place in living memory undermined the basic assumption of both religious traditions and the secular Enlightenment: that human beings have a fundamentally ‘moral’ nature,” Pankaj Mishra writes in his book “The World After Gaza.”

“The corrosive suspicion that they don’t is now widespread. Many more people have closely witnessed death and mutilation, under regimes of callousness, timidity and censorship; they recognise with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.”

Mass slaughter is as integral to western imperialism as the Shoah. They are fed by the same disease of white supremacy and the conviction that a better world is built upon the subjugation and eradication of the “lower” races.

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right in the U.S. and Europe dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists, including Christian nationalists, because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants.

Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

What is lacking is not knowledge — our perfidy and Israel’s is part of the historical record — but the courage to name our darkness and repent. This willful blindness and historical amnesia, this refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, this belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by the Global North against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: 

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Trump: ‘US Will Take Over the Gaza Strip’ to Rebuild

By Epoch-Dan M. Berger/Emel Akan2:2/5/2025

WASHINGTON—After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump suggested the United States could “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild it. President Donald Trump made the remarks after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump doubled down on his previous idea that today’s Gazans need a chance to live safely and securely somewhere else, like Egypt or Jordan. He then said, “Instead of having to go back and do it again, the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too.”

“We’ll own it, and will be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. We’ll level the site and get rid of all the destroyed buildings. Just level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.

“Do a real job. Do something different. [You] just can’t go back [to how it was]. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for a hundred years,” Trump said.

In response to a reporter’s question on future plans for Gaza, Trump said that Palestinians would be able to live there, as would Jews, Arabs, and others from the Middle East.

“This is for everybody,” he said.

“I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump said he’s floated the idea to other Middle Eastern leaders, “and they love the idea.”

“I have a feeling that despite them [Palestinians] saying no, I have a feeling that the King in Jordan and the president in Egypt will open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done and people can live in harmony and in peace,” he said.

Story continues below advertisementLeaders of Egypt and Jordan previously expressed opposition to Trump’s proposal for the two countries to take in more Palestinian refugees in order to “clean out” Gaza completely and ensure peace in the war-torn region.

In response to a question about the impact on a two-state peace solution, Trump said: “It doesn’t mean anything about a two-state or one state or any other state.”

“It means that we want to give people a chance at a life. They have never had a chance at life because the Gaza Strip has been a hell hole for people living there.

“It’s been horrible. Hamas has made it so bad, so bad, so dangerous, so unfair to people,” he said.

In answering another reporter’s question, Trump seemed to leave the door open to Jewish sovereignty over Samaria, the biblical and Israeli name for the northern part of the West Bank.

“We’re discussing that with many of your representatives ... and people do like the idea but we haven’t taken a position on it yet. But we will be.”

Trump said an announcement on the matter will be made in the next four weeks.

Trump and Netanyahu—the first foreign leader to visit Trump since his second inauguration 15 days ago–took questions after meeting for around an hour to discuss the ongoing cease-fire in Gaza, the hostage swap, Iran’s attempts to build a nuclear weapon, the normalization of Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia, and much more, after Israel’s 16 months of war on seven fronts with proxies of Iran’s Islamic regime.

Trump repeatedly referred to Gaza’s devastation, describing it as a place of “death and destruction” and “a demolition site” full of rubble, tottering buildings, and unexploded bombs.

Trump took other executive actions regarding the Middle East on Tuesday. He signed executive orders pulling the United States out of the United Nations Human Rights Council and UNRWA, the Palestinian relief agency that he accused of having funneled money to Hamas.

He renewed sanctions against Iran, which he instituted in his first term but the Biden administration reversed.

He spoke warmly of his relationship with Netanyahu, whom he referred to by his nickname of “Bibi,” plus his respect for what Israel has accomplished militarily, despite frequent opposition from the Biden administration.

Netanyahu, for his part, returned the warmth.

“I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: you are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House,” Netanyahu said.

He marveled at what Trump has accomplished in barely two weeks in office, and how he led the way to the historic Abraham Accords—in which four Arab nations made peace with and recognized Israel–in just four months in 2020.

“In your first term, you recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, you moved the American Embassy there. You recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. You withdrew from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. I remember when we spoke about it, you said, ‘This is the worst deal I’ve ever seen. I’m elected. I’m walking out of it.’ That’s exactly what you did.”

The meeting comes midway through a six-week cease-fire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group, featuring swaps of handfuls of Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, many of them terrorists serving life terms for murder.

Before the bilateral meeting, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff suggested that reconstruction of Gaza will take years.

“I think President Trump is looking at this from a humanitarian standpoint,” Waltz told reporters.

“You have these people that are sitting with literally thousands of unexploded ordnance in piles of rubble. At some point, we have to look realistically. How do you rebuild Gaza?” he asked. “We’re talking 10-15 years before people are able to go back.”

The Trump administration did not dictate the initial peace deal, Witkoff said, which contributed to the problem. Phase three, which involves the reconstruction of Gaza cannot proceed in the manner described in the deal agreed by the Biden administration, he said, which is a five-year schedule.

“It’s physically impossible,” Witkoff said.

The Epoch Times-Dan M. Berger/Emel Akan