DaysofPal – The West as a whole, led by the United States, is busy reviving Israel while Gaza struggles to breathe and faces unimaginable loss, devastation, and uncertainty. The state, sustained by unrelenting external support, continues its genocidal campaign in Gaza by other means, while carving up more land in the West Bank and defying every principle of international law with absolute impunity.
Only a flimsy layer of legitimacy is provided by the so-called ceasefire. The horror that has unfolded, and continues still, is staggering. While Israelis express outrage over delays in the repatriation of a dozen bodies, Palestinians are forced to hold mass burials for unidentified corpses returned by Israel.
Many of these bodies bear clear signs of torture and summary execution: fingers severed, organs removed, and hands bound behind their backs.
Israel continues to prohibit the entry of DNA testing kits that could help families identify their mutilated relatives.
In his 1950 masterpiece Discourse on Colonialism, Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire summoned the philosopher Descartes, who affirmed that “reason… is found whole in each man.”
This universalist idea, that humanity transcends race and ethnicity, is now under systematic assault in Gaza.
What we are witnessing is not only mass destruction but also an attempt to fracture the very core of what it means to be human. Through propaganda and dehumanization, the universal empathy that would normally recognize such atrocities as intolerable is being deliberately unhinged.
Systematic Torture and the Machinery of Impunity
The extreme asymmetry of Israel’s violence against Palestinians has long served a dual purpose: to terrorize and to normalize the systematic violation of international law.
Overwhelming force is presented as self-defense; its victims are cast as “terrorists,” even though the majority are civilians, with children deliberately targeted.
The contrast extends to the treatment of prisoners. While Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinian fighters were treated according to the conditions possible under bombardment, Palestinian detainees describe returning from a living “inferno”: torture, starvation, and psychological annihilation in prisons like Sde Teiman, Ketziot, and the Moscobiyya detention center.
Names such as Tazmamart, Tadmor, and Abu Ghraib have long been synonymous with state brutality. When the full record of Israel’s carceral system is revealed, its depths of cruelty will take their place among those infamous chapters of human depravity.
The Architecture of Control
The Israeli carceral regime, built on detention without charge, secret military courts, and institutionalized torture, forms a central pillar of the occupation.
Physical abuse, sexual violence, medical neglect, and starvation are routine, forming part of a wider system of domination.
Alongside land confiscation and settlement expansion, this legal machinery ensures that more and more dimensions of Palestinian existence are rendered “illegal.”
Every aspect of Palestinian life, from access to water and food to the right to move, work, or breathe, is controlled, measured, and weaponized.
Harvard scholar Sara Roy relayed a message from a friend in Gaza:
“If they could take the air from us, they would.”
Since the blockade began in 2007, Israel has literally measured Palestinians’ caloric intake, calibrating it just above starvation levels, a bureaucratic form of cruelty designed to prepare for famine when the moment demands.
None of Israel’s mechanisms of domination function in isolation. They depend on the participation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis, from conscripts to doctors, journalists, and contractors, and on the unwavering backing of Western powers.
The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and several Arab states, including the UAE, continue to arm and finance Israel’s military machine, ensuring its impunity.
From the Italian general strike to the mass arrests of activists in the UK and the charged political shifts in US cities, movements around the world are beginning to connect the dots of global complicity. The challenge now is to sustain and expand this momentum, to build alliances, disrupt the institutions that profit from genocide, and ensure that those responsible for these crimes face justice.
The ongoing attempt to resuscitate and rehabilitate Israel as the sharp edge of US imperial power threatens to suffocate what remains of our shared humanity.
If unchecked, it will signal to every government that impunity has no limit.
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