The genocide has slowed down from a pace that saw 75,000 people killed by the IDF in 30 months, which included 20,000 children and turned an internment camp into something more like a cross between the Warsaw Ghetto and a lunar landscape, except this lunar landscape was not created by the Big Bang but by the big bangs of carpet bombing by the IDF. The Reich continues to kill civilians despite a ceasefire and continues to occupy 75% of Gaza. Now food is running out as winter approaches because aid funding has dried up. This leaves 500,000 Gazans without food, according to the World Food Programme. We, in which I include the US and Europe, have had our moral compass replaced by an empathy deficit. The BBC still refer to the deaths of 75,000 “as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry”, when Amnesty and ODCHR have reported that the very same numbers have been killed in Gaza, while many more thousands remain unaccounted for.
While Gaza has moved to the media back burner, settler terrorism supported by the Reich that includes Netanyahu, Katz, Sa’ar, Gvir and Smotrich has been on a relentless rise. So, settler terrorism relies on a crude “logic of elimination”, a foundational concept formulated by historian Patrick Wolfe. This involves utilising displacement, forced assimilation, reserves as created for native Americans or genocide to erase Indigenous governance, culture, and presence through mass migration and permanent occupation. This is what happened in the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and is now happening before our very eyes on the West Bank, with the destruction by Israeli settlers of Palestinian farms, infrastructure, houses, and the killing of innocent Palestinians and the building of new settlements with the blessing of the Israeli State. This is a form of ethnic cleansing now seemingly acceptable to the vast majority of the Israeli electorate, who also seem to have forgotten the plight of their forefathers during the dark days of Nazism. What this all means for a two-state solution is tragically obvious.
There is no doubt that the second intifada and, most recently, the October 7 massacre bolstered the settler movement, but they were waiting in the wings to capitalise on these moments and shape the conversation and policy of Israel and, in particular, of this Israeli regime. Today, the results are clear. The settlement agenda is no longer a fringe movement but now an intrinsic part and ethos of the Israeli State. This can be seen in the fact that this movement is deeply embedded as part of Israel’s raison d’être, as evidenced by the Israeli cabinet’s decision earlier this year to expand Israeli control in the West Bank. This is supported by the stormtroopers of the IDF, who simply stand by and observe the ethnic cleansing and murder of Palestinians. You could call this state collusion.
The West Bank is classified as occupied land under international law; however, there are now over 750,000 Israelis who have made Judea and Samaria (the West Bank ) their home, and we in the so-called democratic West stand by and wring our hands, still suffering from PHGS (Post Holocaust Guilt Syndrome).
Finally, the values of Rabbi Meir Kahane, killed in 1990, do not just live on but seem to be core to the Israeli State. He preached a toxic mixture of ethnonationalism and apocalyptic religious fundamentalism and a divine mandate to remove, by whatever means, Palestinians from the Promised Land. In addition, he claimed that violence and revenge were not just Jewish values but a divine commandment. He must have been referring to the 11th one.
Never Again
PS: let’s not focus on Jack Polansky
Suneil Sharma
20th October 2026
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