Israel's genocide must be stopped by military force.
Who will take up arms to stop the horror?
Every day I look at the news, and I discover a new atrocity in Palestine, and I watch world powers conspire to ignore it or minimize it. Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people. The Israeli military has undertaken an intentional campaign of starvation and extermination.
Israel’s government is planning full reoccupation of Gaza, with the entirety of the two million Palestinians living there either being removed or killed, and Jewish Israelis re-establishing settler colonies.
None of us can claim we don’t know what Israel is doing. No matter where you live around the globe, if you have access to social media or a free press, the evidence is right in front of you. Everyone knows what Israel is doing, and everyone providing them assistance is fully complicit in the genocide.
The complicity of the United States of America is well-established, as Israel’s primary sponsor. It would be convenient for Democrats to claim that support for Israel’s genocide is a Trump policy, but the Biden administration was happy to send billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, despite outright admitting to aid groups they knew about Israel’s genocidal plan.
France, in addition to modern military support, played a vital role decades ago in helping Israel acquire nuclear weapons, and Israel’s modern nuclear arsenal now provides them impunity against their neighbours. Israel’s recent conflict with Iran can plainly be described as an attempt to prevent a rival nuclear power from challenging their monopoly.
In the United Kingdom, where Israel obtains many of the parts required for their F-35 fighter jets, the courts have recently rejected a legal challenge against their sale to Israel. While the court fully accepts the reality that these weapons may be used to violate humanitarian law in Gaza, the court also decided they don’t care. Grim.
And in my own country of Canada, where bad-faith actors repeatedly claim that Israel’s actions aren’t our problem because we’re supposedly not responsible? It becomes transparent that both Foreign Minister Anita Anand and her predecessor Mélanie Joly blatantly lied to us, claiming we have an “arms embargo” while selling Israel the mortars they use to blow apart Palestinian children.
All of us, as citizens of our nations, bear responsibility for what our elected governments do in our names. Canada is directly complicit in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people; while I may be personally opposed, as a citizen of Canada I am still complicit and must reckon with what my country does to the Palestinian people.
Even now, while Western leaders claim to care about the starvation in Gaza, their efforts are to reduce pressure on Israel. Canada has participated in Israel’s farcical “air drop” program for aid, which dropped aid into the sea, or directly on top of Palestinians heads, killing them.
Prime Minister Mark Carney proposes that Canada will extend “recognition” of the State of Palestine, but with the extremely large caveat that Palestine must be fully demilitarized.
Let us be very clear about what this means, in the context of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians: Canada says that Palestine will be recognized on paper, if they lay down on the ground and allow Israel to kill all of them. This is absurd.
The truth is, it is Israel which must be demilitarized, due to their repeated perpetuation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in service of an apartheid regime. Israel is not willing to stop the genocide, so the world must stop them.
In 1999, NATO conducted a bombing campaign in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the goal of forcing an end to the genocide of Kosovars, and bringing about the end of Slobodan Milošević’s regime, so that he might be tried at The Hague.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a wanted man, pursued by The Hague on very similar charges to the crimes against humanity for which Milošević was indicted. What NATO did in Yugoslavia was justified, and it is justified again today.
A Coalition of Willing Nations must join together to forcibly remove the Israeli military from Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria, which Israel also invaded while none of you were paying attention. The Coalition must conduct a bombing campaign which will disable Israel’s capacity to wage violence against their neighbours, until Israel has no choice but to end their hostilities against their neighbours.
A long-term peacekeeping force must be established in both Israel and Palestine, to ensure that the Palestinians are protected not just in the current moment but also in the coming decades from the threat of genocide.
In an incredibly disturbing poll of the Israeli public, 82% of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza. Without a strong military force to protect the Palestinians, there would be a genuine fear that Israel could attempt the genocide again.
We as the nations of the world must ensure that Israel’s genocidal project cannot be completed. We must demilitarize Israel, including the dismantlement of weapons manufacturing as well as the end of forced conscription.
If we do not do so, the genocide of the Palestinian people will continue, and future generations will look at our complicity in Israel’s actions with horror and shame. And even if we act now?
They will still be ashamed, that we waited so long to stop what we all knew was wrong.