{"id":54329,"date":"2025-07-28T07:01:33","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T15:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=54329"},"modified":"2025-07-28T07:01:33","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T15:01:33","slug":"no-piers-it-was-a-genocide-in-gaza-from-day-one-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/28\/no-piers-it-was-a-genocide-in-gaza-from-day-one-heres-why\/","title":{"rendered":"No, Piers. It was a genocide in Gaza from day one. Here’s why"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are too many pundits, like the interminably\u00a0dim-witted Piers Morgan<\/a>, who are slowly, oh-so-slowly coming round to the idea that Israel might be committing a genocide in Gaza. But of course, they are still dismissing as \u201cantisemites\u201d those of us who pointed out from the start that it was a genocide.<\/p>\n

They hope to get away with this face-saving ploy only because the establishment media continues to ignore what happened before 7 October 2023, events that over many years had made clear Israel was readying to commit genocide \u2013 and would grasp a pretext when it arrived.<\/p>\n

Here is a brief outline of some of the most pertinent factors:<\/p>\n

1. In early 2008 \u2013 that is, 17 years ago \u2013 deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general,\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0that Gaza would face a “Shoah” \u2013 a word until then,\u00a0strictly reserved<\/a>\u00a0for the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits, and bombed its only airport. From then on, food was tightly rationed, or what Israeli leaders called \u201cputting Gaza on a diet<\/a>\u201d, while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called \u201cmowing the lawn\u201d. Gaza was effectively turned into a\u00a0concentration camp<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3. The siege was complemented by Israel’s gradual destruction of Gaza’s\u00a0means of self-sufficiency<\/a>: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave\u2019s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza’s industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza’s electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.<\/p>\n

4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel’s goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started\u00a0waging a deceitful campaign<\/a>\u00a0claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas “terror” in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with\u00a0great ferocity<\/a>\u00a0since 7 October 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-US front group, the \u201cGaza Humanitarian Foundation\u201d.<\/p>\n

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5. With this as the background, the United Nations\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire. In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting \u201c42 knees in one day<\/a>\u201d. Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has\u00a0warned<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let us note too that Israel\u2019s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza \u2013 and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave\u2019s desperate plight \u2013 was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on 7 October 2023.<\/p>\n

5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the US to join it in a\u00a0pressure campaign<\/a>\u00a0on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave\u2019s people would flood into Sinai \u2013 an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before 7 October 2023, and has continued to do so since.<\/p>\n

In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide \u2013 all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza\u2019s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what\u2019s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world. Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped \u2013 now.<\/p>\n

It is cold comfort indeed that, in the very final stages of Israel\u2019s genocide, media pundits like Piers Morgan are ready to concede that a genocide may be about to happen. None of that should obscure or excuse their 21 months of complicity in the genocide that unfolded before all our eyes. They did not know because they did not want to know.<\/p>\n

Responsibility for every dead child in Gaza, every maimed child in Gaza, every orphaned child in Gaza, every starving child in Gaza, irreversibly damaged by malnutrition, rests firmly on their shoulders.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at\u00a0www.jonathan-cook.net<\/a>. This originally appeared in\u00a0Declassified UK<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are too many pundits, like the interminably\u00a0dim-witted Piers Morgan, who are slowly, oh-so-slowly coming round to the idea that Israel might be committing a genocide in Gaza. But of course, they are still dismissing as \u201cantisemites\u201d those of us who pointed out from the start that it was a genocide. They hope to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1061],"class_list":["post-54329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Some 17 years ago an Israeli general and government minister threatened Gaza with a \"Shoah\" \u2013 a word until then reserved for the Holocaust. The trajectory in Gaza has been unwavering ever since"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54329"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54334,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54329\/revisions\/54334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54329"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=54329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}