On the one year anniversary since the assault on Southern Israel the body count has continued to pile up as Israeli credibility has reached rock bottom. The Gaza war has now spread to the wider region as Israel senses the opportunity, with impunity, to fulfil its many long-held desires. Israel is now at war on multiple fronts with the US unable to say no. After 12 months of war there are 12 lessons we have learnt.
Israel’s Propaganda War Has Been a Failure – Israel has spent billions over the decades in propaganda, lobbying and influence to create a favourable opinion about its settler colonial agenda. In the West it supported politicians, think tanks, influential personalities and other causes to ensure it dominated public opinion about the occupation. Mainstream media has for long been dominated by pro-Zionist voices that silenced any alternatives. But with many now viewing mainstream media as fake news and no longer referring to them as a source, many now use social and alternative media which has shown the world what Israel has really been up to.
Israeli officials, communication specialists and personalities came out in force after October 7th. One by one, every argument was exposed from the events of October 7th being discredited to the Israeli military machines targeting of hospitals, civilians, places of worship and the massacring children and women. This one issue has seen Israel’s decades of propaganda work go down the drain. What Israeli propagandists have been telling the world, is not what the world is seeing. Many around the world saw the large discrepancy between what they were hearing and seeing. What everyone saw was the complete destruction and collective punishment of Gaza. As a result, the self-defence narrative and the “do you condemn Hamas” narrative failed to take hold. The fundamental issue for Israel has been the fact that it’s trying to defend the indefensible and it doesn’t help when Israeli officials keep making genocidal calls and then try to deny that was what they meant.
What Israeli propagandists have been telling the world, is not what the world is seeing. Many around the world saw the large discrepancy between what they were hearing and seeing
Israel’s 7th October Claims Have Been Discredited – Israel’s propaganda machine went into full gear after the events of 7th October. Numerous shocking and wild claims were made that were adopted by the global media. From Hamas deliberately targeting civilians to sexual violence, mutilation and the most infamous 40 beheaded babies!
The Bituah Leumi, Israel’s social security agency, provided a list of the dead from October 7th. Nearly 400 of the dead were security personnel. In a 16-page report titled “Our Narrative” published on the 21st of January 2024 by Hamas’s political wing it explained it was targeting Israeli security personnel in order to take them hostage and use them to free Palestinian prisoners.
The claims of sexual violence were based on accounts by survivors and by the first responders who found dead bodies. In December 2023 the New York Times did an in-depth investigation and published their findings in a piece ‘Scream without words: How Hamas weaponized sexual violence.’ They accused Hamas of using rape as a weapon. It was subsequently brought to light that one of the authors of the piece – Anat Schwartz, not only shared a tweet saying Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.” But she had no reporting experience and had been a spy for Israel. To make matters worse, no forensic evidence was used to corroborate any of the claims.
A lot of the sexual assault claims came from Zaka which is a religious organisation of volunteers that acts as first responders and deal with the dead bodies, meeting Jewish religious requirements. They were accused of handling the bodies incorrectly, moving them around and contaminating them. The organisation was also in trouble before October 7th as it was on the verge of insolvency and one of its founders had resigned due to allegations of rape and paedophilia.
The allegations of mutilations were spread by ZAKA and Israeli officials. It also needs to be taken in account that Israel resorted to the Hannibal directive, and this is why there was serious structural damage to property and vehicles which was beyond the light weapons used by the Gaza groups.
The 40 beheaded babies’ allegation was traced back to Israeli settler and soldier David Ben Zion, who had previously incited violent riots against Palestinians and called for a West Bank town to be wiped out. No evidence has ever been produced to support the claims of beheaded babies.
Muslim Rulers Abandon Palestine – The Muslim rulers in the Middle East and beyond have been exposed for being all talk and no action. For years they verbally supported Palestine but in their time of need Erdogan in Türkiye and the rulers in Tehran abandoned the people of Gaza. The Muslim rulers in Egypt and Jordan were worried for months about the sentiments of their people and resorted to arrests and clamp downs as their people came out in support of the people of Gaza.
Both Erdogan and the Iranian clerics built their reputation on supporting the Palestinian cause. For years they offered fighting talk on what they would one day do to Israel in support of the Palestinians. When it came to delivering, they continued with their fighting talk when they needed to deliver on such colourful language.
The Jordanian monarchy went a step further and took part in defending Israel when Iran launched missiles against the Zionist entity. The Jordanian authorities faced a deluge of criticism after the government confirmed that its forces downed Iranian missiles targeting Israel in early October. Mohammed al-Absi, a member of the Democratic Unity Party (Wehda) explained: “What we witnessed yesterday was a contradiction in positions. There was popular sentiment that rejoiced at the Iranian missiles striking the Zionist entity. However, shooting down Iranian missiles does not align with the popular position supporting the resistance in Palestine and Lebanon.”[1]
the Jordanian authorities faced a deluge of criticism after the government confirmed that its forces downed Iranian missiles targeting Israel in early October
Hezbollah’s Syria Curse – On the 17th of September 2024, Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers after years of painstaking intelligence gathering. More than 3,500 people were injured and 12 people were killed. A week later Israel assassinated Hezbollah General-Secretary Hassan Nasrallah after tracking him to an underground bunker. Hezbollah has been in disarray ever since.
Hezbollah has spent the last decade defending Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Hezbollah deployed in large numbers and carried out massacres to break the back of the uprising that began in 2014 as the Arab Spring swept the region. The success in Syria in the end turned out to be Hezbollah’s curse.
In a Financial Times analysis: “…a former high-ranking Lebanese politician in Beirut said the penetration of Hizbollah by Israel or US intelligence was the price of their support for Assad. They had to reveal themselves in Syria, where the secretive group suddenly had to stay in touch and share information with the notoriously corrupt Syrian intelligence service, or with Russian intelligence services, who were regularly monitored by the Americans.”[2] As Hezbollah expanded into Syria this weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration. Israel was able to collect a vast amount of data about Hezbollah’s membership, senior commanders and then kept them under surveillance. Which they put to devastating effect giving a severe blow to the group. Hezbollah’s Syria foray has now come to haunt the group.
Iran: Between Escalation and De-escalation – Whilst Iran has gained significant media attention and with Israel constantly blaming the country for tensions in the Middle East, Tehran has been trying to de-escalate and has shown little appetite for any escalation. In a November 2023 meeting, Iran’s supreme leader reportedly criticised Hamas for providing no warning of the October 7th attack, and stated that Tehran would not enter the war on their behalf, underscoring its reluctance to be drawn into the conflict.[3]
Iran only moved, when after seven months of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, its consulate was attacked in Syria by Israel. This was when Iran telegraphed its response against Israel by informing the regional nations and the US of its attack. Similarly, Iran once again informed the regional leaders and the US of its aim to target Israel after the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrullah. The attack was extremely targeted and damaged little and killed one Palestinian civilian who was hit by falling shrapnel. This indicates Iran has no appetite to escalate. In fact, Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran was prepared to de-escalate tensions with Israel as long as it sees the same level of commitment on the other side.[4]
The same week that most of Hezbollah’s leadership was assassinated, the Iranian president was in New York for the annual UN General Assembly summit. The Iranian president called for nuclear talks to resume. As bombs fell on Lebanon and Iran’s premier proxy, the Iranian president was clear where Iran’s priorities lay. Alex Vatanka, the director of the Iran Program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute explained Iran’s position: “The Iranian leadership is prepared to accept a humiliating retreat in the face of Israeli strikes in the short term to safeguard the regime in the long run, and this explains Tehran’s lack of retaliation so far.”[5]
The same week that most of Hezbollah’s leadership was assassinated, the Iranian president was in New York for the annual UN General Assembly summit. As bombs fell on Lebanon and Iran’s premier proxy, the Iranian president was clear where Iran’s priorities lay
The Houthi War Effort – The Houthis in Yemen made headlines in 2023 when they boarded the Galaxy Leader, an Israeli linked sea vessel, leading to the expansion of the war in Gaza to the Red Sea. The Houthis’ targeting of Israel with ballistic missiles has seen them shoot to fame across the world and put the Axis of Resistance – Iran’s informal political and military coalition in the Middle East – on the map. The West was forced to launch Operation Prosperity Guardian, which was a coalition of western allies, carrying out airstrikes against the Houthis in order to stop the impact they were having on global shipping and global trade.
The Houthis have been engaged in a multi-decade battle with the government and in 2015 they were able to overthrow the national government. Ever since the Houthis took power they have struggled to rule effectively as the decades long war has destroyed the economy and the Saudi intervention made things even worse.
It was in this context, the Houthi leadership increased popular mobilisation as a means of reducing resistance to its misrule. It undertook a risky strategy externally by escalating attacks on Israel through missile strikes and targeting Israeli linked shipping, despite turmoil domestically. The Houthis gained considerable global coverage with bombastic statements. But the reality is they have had no impact on the on-going war and in fact this deflects from the dire situation the Houthis face domestically.
America Schizophrenic Approach – In times of chaos the global superpower would be expected to bring warring parties together and get them to agree to a ceasefire or a peace deal. But the US and the US president seems to be suffering from Schizophrenia. For almost a year now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has persistently rebuffed the US, while the US has been unwilling to use its leverage over Israel. Each time the US has called for de-escalation or to stop civilian deaths Israel has not only escalated but explained itself to US officials who came around to seeing Israeli logic and agreeing with it.
America’s schizophrenic approach has been caused by the fact that not all institutions of the US are on the same page and have not been working on the same policy. While President Biden and his staff have consistently sought to apply pressure on Netanyahu and his government to get it to align its course with the US, others in the US Deep State have followed a different path, a path of consistent unconditional support for the Zionist program.[6]
American duplicity is due to the fact that the tools of leverage are simply not available to the US president, because not all influential people in key positions of the broader US state and beyond are following their own policy preferences rather than one policy, which in this particular case is the Zionist program. The various reports of political infighting inside the State Department are evidence of this.[7]
The Death-Nail of the Global Rules Based Order – The global rules based order that the US and the West promoted for decades was already struggling before October 7th, but the actions of the West have now completely exposed that the order is not worth the paper its rules are written on. The US had already undermined the global order with its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan when it openly trampled over it by creating a global torture network, abandoned the rule of law as well as international law.
But with Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and South Africa taking the case to the ICJ, the West is now acting like the mafia against the very order it created and for long promoted. The US House of Representatives has voted to pass legislation that will sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) after its prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Israeli officials. A group of Republican US senators even sent a letter to International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan threatening his family! Whether it is the UN, the ICC or even the ICJ they are now labelled as antisemitic and are being threatened for investigating and carrying out their job of investigating crimes against humanity. The West supported the court when it issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, but the US has done the most to destroy and undermine the global order than any other person ever could.
One Year On: Israel is Neither Safe, Stable or Secure – The events of October 7th have seen Israeli military and security superiority take a major hit as armed groups from Gaza ran riot and took hostages. Since then, Israel has been working to collectively punish the Palestinians. Israel has made use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to trawl through large amounts of data to identify and select bombing targets. The pager campaign that saw the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkie’s leading to untold injuries came on the back of a decade’s long intelligence program. Alongside this the Israeli war machine has seen the deployment of state of the art tanks, precision missiles and the use of 2000 pound bombs.
On the anniversary of October 7th Israel has turned Gaza into rubble, it’s been targeting Iran in Syria, its assassinated the leadership of Hezbollah and it regularly launches strikes on Yemen. Israel is at war on multiple fronts, and it could be argued that Israel’s obsession with security is finally in sight. Israel, however, has continued to escalate and cannot deescalate because despite all these achievements, the truth is after a year of war it still is not safe, stable or secure. With its enemies on the run Israel is not safe and will likely never be stable or secure as it has lost the hearts and minds of the region who will always see it as an occupier. Despite its battlefield success, Israel is more a pariah today than ever before.
Israel Has Created a Man-Made Famine – Israel now stands accused by almost everyone of triggering a man-made famine by deliberately obstructing the entry of aid into Gaza. Due to Israel’s long-term occupation of Gaza the strip has long relied on over 200 trucks bringing in food and aid on a daily basis. Two days after October 7th Israel announced it was blocking the entry of food and water into Gaza. As Gaza was already reliant on food aid, the repercussions were felt immediately. By the end of October, Cindy McCain, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, stated people were “…literally starving to death as we speak.”[8] Aid trucks, today remain parked up on the Gaza-Egypt border and are refused entry into Gaza by Israeli security personnel and on many occasions the aid has been ransacked by Israeli settlers as many in Gaza look on.
Israel’s actions, according to its government, aim to neutralise Hamas as a security threat, including preventing military resources from being smuggled under the guise of humanitarian aid. But Israeli officials have made clear, as the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich did, that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “…justified and moral…” even if it causes two million Gazans to die of starvation.[9]
The US has also acknowledged Israel is blocking even US aid in its starvation strategy. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken ignored US assessments that Israel was blocking aid to Gaza. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) told the State Department in an April report that Israel was subjecting US humanitarian aid destined for Gaza to “…arbitrary denial, restriction and impediments”. But in May, Blinken delivered a State Department report to Congress with a different conclusion that contradicted his own agencies findings.[10]
Between Collective Punishment and Genocide – A year since the October 7th assault, Israel’s Gaza strategy has 5 types of policies:
- ‘Domicide’ – The scale, extent, and pace of destruction of buildings in the Gaza Strip ranks among the most severe in modern history, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. The 29,000 munitions—shells and bombs—that Israel had dropped on Gaza in three months greatly exceeded the amount (3,678) dropped by the US between 2004 and 2010 after its invasion of Iraq. After seven months, Israel’s war left 37 million tonnes of rubble, much of it with unexploded bombs and averaging 300 kilograms of rubble per square metre of Gaza, with an estimated removal time of 14 years. The damage to buildings in northern Gaza reportedly exceeds that in Bakhmut and Mariupol in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Guardian reported that the scale of destruction has led international legal experts to raise the concept of ‘domicide,’ which it describes as “…the mass destruction of dwellings to make [a] territory uninhabitable.”[11]
- Starvation – Israeli officials are on record that they are using famine as a war tool in Gaza. Israel has not only blocked food and aid conveys but told its citizens to ransack trucks carrying aid for Gaza, aid that the strip relies upon. Israeli forces even carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 7th, even though aid groups had provided their coordinates to the Israeli authorities to ensure their protection. Israel’s attack on April 1st on the World Central Kitchen convoy, which killed seven workers, far from being an isolated “mistake,” is just one of at least eight incidents that Human Rights Watch highlight that UN agencies had communicated with Israeli authorities and provided the GPS coordinates of aid convoys and premises and yet Israeli forces attacked the convoy or shelter.[12]
- Targeting Hospitals – Israel specifically targeted the healthcare system of Gaza and destroyed it by carrying out attacks on hospitals and health facilities. By May 2024, the World Health Organisation documented 450 Israeli attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system.[13] Gaza hospitals began shutting down as they ran out of fuel. When hospitals lost power completely, multiple premature babies in NICUs died.[14] Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Doha-based Middle East Council on Global Affairs explained the reason why Israel targets hospitals is “It is a form of psychological warfare. Attacking hospitals tells the population that nowhere for [Palestinians] is safe.” He added that Israel acts with “total impunity”.[15]
- Forced Displacement – When Israel launched its war on Gaza at the end of October 2023 it told Gazans in North Gaza to move to South of Gaza. Then it told Gazans in South Gaza to shift to Rafah City on the Egyptian border area as Israel carried out its bombing campaign. In May 2024 Israel carried out a massacre in Rafah. Despite the fact that the people of Gaza are in the most densely populated strip in the world, Israel has used displacement as a war tool. A UK based Human Rights group – Restless Beings, concluded mass expulsion are “…identifiable strategies…” of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s intensification of its military assaults on the Gaza Strip’s shelter centres has been part of a declared effort to carry out its displacement plans against the Gazan people, in order to give them the impression that there is nowhere safe for them to live within the Strip and worsen their suffering.
- Targeting Civilians – Israel has been deliberately targeting civilians despite claiming its fighting against Hamas implementing a criminal policy of bombings. Analysis by Haaretz found the aerial bombing campaign by Israel in Gaza is the most indiscriminate in terms of civilian casualties in recent years. The civilian proportion of deaths is higher than the average in all world conflicts in the second half of the 20th century, according Haaretz data. A UN-backed independent commission reported in June 2024 the Israeli military’s “deliberate” use of heavy weapons in the Gaza Strip has been an “…intentional and direct attack on the civilian population.”[16]
From Genocide Victims to Genocide Perpetrators – To the shock of many around the world South Africa dropped a bombshell in December 2023 when it took a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest judicial body. It accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The ICJ ruled that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel should proceed due to the plausibility of a genocide taking place. Israel is now on trial.
This was an extraordinary moment as the nation that had come about due to being victims of a genocide were now being accused of committing one in the 21st century. There will be serious implications for Israel if it’s found to be perpetuating a genocide. As a result the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ. Israel has historically not participated in international tribunals in order to undermine them and present an image that it doesn’t recognise them and therefore they have no jurisdiction. But in the end the Israeli government decided to participate in the ICJ proceedings.
The ICJ court case in many ways sums up where the slaughter in Gaza is on the one-year anniversary of the events of October 7th. Whilst Israel had global sympathy after October 7th, the world now stands with Palestine and Israel has become a pariah state with global sympathy completely with the Palestinians as Israel is being accused of committing a genocide.
[1] Jordanian authorities face backlash over role in downing Iranian missiles | Middle East Eye
[2] How Israeli spies penetrated Hizbollah, ft.com, 29 September 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/6638813e-e246-4409-9a38-95bf60a220a8
[3] Insight: Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ against Israel faces trial by fire | Reuters
[4] Iran’s President Says He’s Prepared to Ease Tensions With Israel – Bloomberg
[6] The Deep State – Geopolitical Futures
[8] Small aid convoy reaches Gaza after Hamas releases two hostages
[11] Widespread destruction in Gaza puts concept of ‘domicide’ in focus | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian
[12] Gaza: Israelis Attacking Known Aid Worker Locations | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)
