How Does the Genocide End

After the IOF's recovery of the bodies of 6 hostages in Gaza on Saturday, including the high-profile US-Israeli dual citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents spoke at the DNC only a few weeks previously, Israeli streets have once again erupted in protest. These protests, the largest within settler society since the anti-Netenyahu Judicial Reform movement earlier in 2023, are expressed as calls to return the hostages and (implicitly, though less publicly stated) to end the war that the IOF is losing to the resistance in Gaza.

Though the Israeli state estimates they have lost 700 personnel since October 7th, at least in English accounts, there have been serious and consistent discrepancies between video footage, physical evidence, Palestinian resistance accounts and IOF statements. This is to be expected as a result of both fog of war and propaganda. Competition over information and death counts is a common part of military conflict and armed forces morale management: but even so, the Israeli state is one of the least reliable and most prodigious liars on the world stage. We don't know how many soldiers they've lost, but we can bet it's well over 700.

And yet the genocide rolls on. While the IOF attempts to expand and hold down both the Philadelphi corridor (the Gazan border with Egypt) and the Netzarim Corridor, which splits the Strip in two, thereby creating two new checkpoints for even more brutal post-war management of Gaza, the Israeli state is turning its attention to the West Bank. If they "achieved" their aims of genocide in Gaza, without losing access to Western weapons and without facing a more formal conflict with Iran and Lebanon, why shouldn't they ethnically cleanse the West Bank too? Tanks have rolled into Jenin, as the early stages of full brutal invasion, bombing and civilian infrastructure destruction unfold.

This is, of course, a nightmare. It is also the flailing violence of a collapsing state, an army and regime with nowhere to turn. As long as the war continues, Netanyahu and his goons face few consequences, but as soon as the state of emergency ends, they will have to face the music. More capable or cunning colonial managers might have been able to turn the events of October 7th into a rationale of victimhood and terrorism that could've increased the regime's legitimacy around the globe. Instead, they will go down in history as defeated by Al-Aqsa Flood, an operation that revealed not only security flaws but a fundamental political weakness and moral rot at the heart of the Zionist state. They will be remembered as villains on a global scale perpetuating one of the worst crimes ever witnessed on this planet, and have retroactively undermined the legitimacy of the Zionist project they hoped to protect.

But this is what fascists do, they drown as much of the world as they can in blood and despair, to demonstrate that they were right all along, that people are fundamentally bad, shameful, and deserve nothing but domination. They live lives of annihilatory violence as a symbolic demonstration that this, indeed, is human nature. Whether they're lone-wolf school-shooters or the world's most moral school-bombers, they look to project and spread the terrible fear and loneliness they experience in their own mortal frailty, to dispel the disgust with their own weakness and once and for all extinguish their own desire for pleasure, life and joy.

They never win this final victory, because their thesis is fundamentally wrong, to say nothing of how cowardly and pathetic it is. But when you are fully devoted to the destruction of everything that doesn't make you feel like a big man, and when the thing that ultimately makes you feel that way is yourself, then your project can only end with your destruction. And so the Israeli state hurtles towards its own destruction, reducing the strip to rubble and ash and filling the hearts of good people the world over with despair, hoping to change the world forever in their miserable image. And there is clearly no strategic goal, no end game, nothing to be won except further ethnic cleansing.

So how, as we approach almost a full year of this horror, does the current violence end? Here are some scenarios:

• The assassination or otherwise death of Netanyahu: At this point it is incredibly obvious that Bibi is the person sabotaging cease-fire talks and rejecting proposals for change. His government is doomed, and he is likely headed for prison as soon as the dust settles, so as long as he lives and has power he will not let it settle. His death is one way to bring an end to this impasse. The scenario seems unlikely to me, but if it were to happen, it would probably be an extreme-right settler or a member of the Palestinian resistance, or perhaps the Houthis. I doubt any state or semi-state actor would pursue this course of action: state leaders hate when the assassination of other state leaders proves to be a viable path to change, they feel it sets a bad precedent for their own safety and wellbeing, and will go out of their way to prevent it. Still, his ticker could go or a stroke could take him out. But even if he were to die suddenly, the chaos this would cause in Tel Aviv hardly guarantees the end of the current campaign, although I believe it makes it quite likely.
• Uprising of the Israeli Settler-Society: Despite the hundreds of thousands in the streets the last few days, and the (6 hour long) general strike, popular demands for a ceasefire and return of the hostages seems unlikely to force the end to the conflict. Netanyahu is hardly renowned for his principled democratic stances or his love of the people. The vast majority of settlers are not fighting for justice, or crying out for Palestinian liberation, but only a return to the slow-genocidal status quo ante. The right in Israel has spent decades now not only controlling Israeli information and education, but pulling off a purging of left, liberal and even centrist forces in the country. The consolidation of public opinion after October 7th has fractured a bit, but only over the effectiveness of the current campaign, not its morality. Furthermore, many of those most likely to resist have instead left the country. Still, if a movement could overthrow the Israeli government--or even just get close--it could spell the end to the current engagement.
• The Withdrawal of US Support: It appears quite clear that Kamala Harris has successfully contained and redirected liberal attention and outrage around Gaza, in the classic manner of presidential election depoliticization. Despite all the comparisons to the DNC at Chicago '68, the protests last month were smaller than anticipated, and were largely controlled, defanged, and marshaled to the point of irrelevance by the orgs leading them (despite a hopeful moment where protestors willing to do more than just walk in circles to stop a genocide breached a DNC security fence). The one autonomously organized demo got crushed so quickly and totally by police it would shock a J20 defendant. The direction of the Dems is visible in the humiliation of the Uncommitted Delegates at the DNC: the Harris campaign didn't even allow a Palestinian American on stage to deliver a pre-vetted speech, despite the fact that their action was one of the main reasons Biden stepped down in the first place. Forget '68, this is much more akin to the 1964 DNC, where Fanie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) were refused status as delegates, and the Democrats upheld the Jim Crow electoral law. Plus ca change. This genocide is the Democrats' genocide, and they are just as soaked in blood and disgrace as Likkud. That said, the solidarity movement has already more or less unseated one president, so if the movement explodes onto the streets again we might see Harris forced to shift her policy proclamations. Still, that wouldn't take effect until, at the earliest, January of next year. An even more total social upheaval would be required to force the Dems' bloodstained hands.

• Economic Collapse: The Israeli economy is heavily reliant on arms, tech, and tourism. Much like military services, the tech sector, heavily focused in security and surveillance, used Gaza and the West Bank as case studies in their tools' effectiveness. The capacity of Al-Aqsa Flood to disable and overwhelm IOF security, take apart the wall and catch them by surprise, combined with the long slow defeat of the IOF through Guerilla warfare, despite reducing the Strip to rubble, has made their military and tech products much less attractive to potential buyers. As a tech demo, the last months have been a disaster for Israeli industry. Obviously tourism is kaput. And that's to say nothing of the huge loss of laborers represented by the shutting down of the West Bank and Gaza, the economic damage of having 100,000 reservists called up to the frontlines, the Houthi trade attacks on the Red Sea, the permanent relocation (and hotel-housing) of Israeli citizens from "The Gaza Envelope" and the northern border with Lebanon, and the over half-a-million Israelis who fled the country after October 7 (see link above), a number which has likely only grown. Economically speaking, Israel is facing a series of cascading crises which cash injections from the US can only put off for so long.
• A Coup: A coup is the most likely way that the above two crises would resolve in the end of the war. Netanyahu's government is deeply fractured. The extreme-settler-right, led by Ben-Gvir, constantly demands more blood and the total annexation of the West Bank while fascists on the ground are threatening a military coup if Netanyahu even thinks about demobilizing. Meanwhile, figures like minister Benny Gantz have tried to position themselves as "moderating" voices within the party and the government in appeals to the US state department. It seems quite possible that Gantz was positioning himself as the face of a US-backed coup, and that the increasing threat of overthrow led to Netanyahu's dissolution of the War Cabinet back in June, likely only delaying his fall from power.
• The Exhaustion of the Israeli Military: Despite IOF propaganda to the contrary, this is a very real and ever present possibility. As the IOF looks to expand activities into the West Bank, the logic of Netanyahu and the war leaders seems to be that either drawing the world into a broader formal war or ethnically cleansing as much of Palestinian land and life as possible are the only strategic goals. Thus the continued effectiveness of the Palestinian Resistance, and an uptick in Hizbollah activity, could reveal just how thinly spread the military is. The vulnerabilities of militaries amass slowly, then collapse quickly, only retroactively inevitable. With the tight control of information into and out of the IOF, it is quite hard to know what morale is like, but it's pretty hard to imagine it's anything other than dismal as they march, again and again, over the same strips of rubble, each time more comrades falling to sniper bullets and IEDs. Losing a violent counter-insurgency sucks shit, and I hope each and every one of those soldiers is as miserable as humanly possible. The threat of a wider regional war seems to have abated slightly, but it is never far off. Such a conflict would result in the absolute destruction of the IOF, but if it were to draw in the US, Iran, NATO and/or Russia the genocide would likely accelerate under the cover of the global calamity.

All of these scenarios, however, point to the fact that the Palestinian Resistance has managed to defeat the IOF and reveal the evil at the heart of the settler project. Despite the full support of the US and Europe and the cowardice of the rest of the global community, Israel will fail at its objectives. It is a doomed state. Everyday it extends its genocide it hastens the end of the Zionist project. That is cold and small comfort indeed. But while the above scenarios might end the current situation, the genocide itself can only end with the collapse of the settler-colonial project. Just as indigenous genocide continues as long as the US, Canadian and Australian states dominate and control their territories, so does the genocide continue as long as the Israeli state functions as such.

May we hasten the collapse of the Zionist state, by any means necessary, toward the dissolution of all settler-colonial logics the world over. May we soon rebuild a Jewish ethics and community in diaspora that rejects the logic of whiteness and settler-colonialism. May the defeat of the IOF and the Zionist project be one major step on the road to our total liberation.