Gaza and the West: The Genocide We Built

By Kenneth L. Brown (1936–2025) and Daniel Brown.

An article rejected by several major and minor media outlets.

In some parts of the West, this article will be called offensive. It will be branded antisemitic or inked in by two self-hating Jews. But what it seeks is an unflinching reckoning with a cataclysm not simply unfolding before our eyes. It is actively abetted by our Western governments. Unlike the genocides of the 20^th century, this has become the most documented mass atrocity in contemporary history, where modern technology [1] allows a helpless global audience to witness the criminal activity in real time. Aid trickles in, but experts warn this is a drop in the ocean (Israel allowed around 35 UN and Egyptian fuel and food trucks over the past week). The machinery of annihilation remains intact, and the slight lull may only be temporary, a pause before a new round of terror once the cameras turn away. It is sustained by Western governments, so-called liberal democracies which continue to ply billions into Israel, billions which are directly or indirectly used in this genocide and the illegal occupations of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is the endpoint of a world order in which "human rights" are selectively invoked and systematically ignored. We trace back the tragedy to the origins of the Israeli state.

As of August 4, 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reports over 60,400 Palestinians killed, including at least 18,800 children, with almost 150,000 injured, according to the latest UN-OCHA casualty snapshot - many critically [2]. This includes over 8,970 deaths and 34,228 injuries that occurred after the March re-escalation of hostilities. Indeed, since the semi-truce in late July, re-escalation of hostilities continues: 18 more deaths and starvation-related fatalities, per local accounts, even as aid lines form under fire [3]. There were at least six new starvation-related deaths reported in the past 24 hours alone and 33 people shot dead at aid lines in a single day. The UN and World Food Programme warn that hundreds of thousands are experiencing catastrophic hunger, with mass starvation no longer hypothetical but visible. Mothers are fainting over food lines, toddlers are dying from untreated infections, and families are boiling weeds for nourishment.

What Western Complicity Looks Like

The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. But the violence in Gaza transcends the scope of one reprobate regime or militia. It is a genocide funded, normalized, and protected by Western powers. It is built on decades of military aid, diplomatic shielding, and ideological double standards. Holocaust scholar Raz Segal has called it a “textbook case of genocide”[4].

The Israeli military receives $3.8 billion annually from the U.S. taxpayer, not counting emergency packages like the $14.1 billion allocated in April 2025. German arms, UK-made drone components, and French intelligence cooperation make this a transatlantic endeavor. Western powers have repeatedly blocked UN ceasefire resolutions, vetoed international investigations, and stonewalled humanitarian corridors. Even now, the fragile trickle of aid into Gaza, mostly coordinated through Egypt and Kerem Shalom, is a drop in the ocean, limited in scope, and dangerously temporary. The UN warns that this brief window is not a turning point but an interlude before the siege resumes - once media attention fades.

Lopsided 1947 U.N. Plan

The roots of this system run deep. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan granted 55% of historic Palestine to the Jewish population, then one-third of the residents who owned less than 7% of the land. This was not partition. It was colonial expropriation, imposed with the blessing of imperial powers. As French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu writes in Un historien à Gaza (2025), Zionist settlement was from the outset perceived across the Arab world not as post-Holocaust refuge, but as European colonial intrusion [5]. The settler-colonial logic never disappeared. It evolved, hardened, and found cover in Western guilt, indifference and opportunism. It had moments of acceleration, like the Six Day War, and now Gaza, but its stated objectives were molded from the start: “A land without a people, for a people without a land”. (Interestingly, this phrased was first coined by Christian authors of the 19^th century and not, as the great Palestinian writer Edward Said claimed, by British author Israel Zangwill [6]).

Today, Israel’s Law of Return privileges any Jew, anywhere, with immediate citizenship. Nearly three million Jews from the U.S., Russia, and Europe have migrated since 1950, with state-subsidized housing and military integration. They displace Palestinian families denied return under the same legal framework. As Jewish-American writer Peter Beinart argues in Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, “Israel is not just a country with Jews-it is a country for Jews. (my emphasis)” Its laws, army, and borders are structured to ensure permanent ethno-national domination [7].

Educating Nationalism: from Toddlers to Teenagers

Inside Israel, the occupation is not a political controversy-it is a national consensus. Schools teach militarism as duty. The documentary Izkor: Slaves of Memory 1990, by Eyal Sivan reveals a curriculum for kindergarten to 12^th grade that glorifies conquest, erases Palestinians, and sacralizes the IDF. And the results are clear: A May 2025 survey by Penn State, reported in Haaretz, showed that 82% of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Gaza’s population [8]. Almost half also endorsed biblical-style retribution, including the total destruction of Rafah and Jericho. This is not fringe sentiment. It is the norm.

Widespread Censorship – but Social Media Livestreams

The media landscape reinforces this perception. The Israeli Military Censor has banned more articles in the past nine months than at any point since 1967. International journalists are barred from Gaza. CNN and the BBC repeat IDF talking points as if they were neutral data. The New York Times published 23 front-page headlines about Israeli hostages in one month, yet none about the starvation of Gazawi children. Meanwhile, one of the most horrific massacres since October 7, 2023, the bombing of Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, continues to be misreported by the Washington Post, BBC and AP, which repeat uncritically the disputed IDF claims of it being a Palestinian rocket. And they ignore detailed research by Forensic Architecture [9] or Earshot concluding the munition was likely fired from the direction of Israel.

This is the first genocide ever livestreamed, with millions witnessing it via TikTok, Telegram, and Gazawi journalists risking death to upload footage on dwindling battery life. Citizen accounts like Motaz Azaiza’s have more reach than BBC’s global feed. Yet this visibility has not stopped the slaughter. At the Oscars, Hamdan Ballal, Gazawi co-director of No Other Land, dedicated his award to the dead - and was promptly harassed and assaulted weeks later. Even in exile, Gaza’s voice is unsafe. There is no escape.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s July 2025 statement-recognizing Palestinian statehood and calling for an arms embargo-is a symbolic shift, cautiously joined by the U.K. government. But arms still flow from both nations. And France, like others, has yet to sanction Israel or expel its ambassadors.

Symbolism without action is complicity. In the U.S., the 2024 and now 2025 presidential race is a study in bipartisan complicity. Both Biden and Trump have refused to criticize Israel’s conduct. Biden calls for “restraint,” while authorizing record weapons shipments. Trump, backed by Christian Zionists, has doubled down on anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

Christian Zionists Outstrip Pro-Israel Supporters in U.S.

Groups like CUFI (Christians United for Israel), with over 10 million members, wield more power than AIPAC, mobilizing biblical prophecy to justify ethnic cleansing. Action Fund, operating as a policy-driven affiliate, regularly mobilizes thousands of members to lobby Congress for aggressive sanctions on Iran, continued military support for Israel, and legislation curtailing BDS and anti-Israel speech on campuses. At its July 2025 Washington summit, CUFI convened record numbers, including the Speaker of the House, to showcase its legislative clout. Critics within interfaith and progressive Jewish networks now describe CUFI as a right-wing force enabling genocide through biblical propaganda, political lobbying, and cultural mobilization, even as public opinion increasingly turns against the ongoing destruction in Gaza. This is theocratic imperialism disguised as freedom.

Meanwhile, Jewish diasporas remain divided. In 2023, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) reported that 80% of U.S. Jews saw “caring about Israel” as core to their identity. By 2025, Pew Research found that number had dropped to 72% - but even now, large majorities remain tied to a state that openly commits war crimes [10]. Writer Anthony Loewenstein posed a question in The Guardian Australia: “What does it mean to be Jewish in the 21st century?” His answer: “It means reckoning with Israel’s destruction, or risking the loss of all moral integrity.”

“Mowing the Grass”

What we are witnessing is not a war. It is mowing the grass, a term the Israeli military coined to describe repeated assaults to prevent Palestinian resistance from flourishing. But the mower now leaves nothing behind. This is not deterrence, it is extermination. And the only new phenomenon is the scale: 42 years ago, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in Deux régimes de fous, described Israeli policy bluntly: “It is a genocide, but one where physical extermination is subordinate to geographic evacuation: since they are merely Arabs in general, the surviving Palestinians must dissolve into other Arabs. Physical extermination - whether entrusted to mercenaries or not - is entirely present. But it is not genocide, they say, because it is not the ‘final goal’: in fact, it is a means among others.” [11]

In 2001, during the Second Intifada, I wrote in the International Herald Tribune an article the editors titled “A Jewish Lament.” I asked: “What happens when the nation founded to protect the persecuted becomes itself the perpetrator of dispossession?” Today, the silence I feared has calcified into structural violence. And as the bodies pile up, it becomes harder to look away and easier to pretend we see nothing at all.

To be clear: criticizing Israel is not antisemitic. Naming a genocide does not desecrate the Holocaust. Refusing to name it does. Gaza is not a tragedy. It is not a conflict. It is a deliberate, televised, bureaucratically managed genocide. It is Western-enabled. And it is not over.

References:

1. Access Now, October 2024: https://www.accessnow.org/gaza-genocide-big-tech/
2. Gaza Health Ministry, via Al Jazeera (July 27, 2025): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/live/gaza-latest-updates
3. UN OCHA, July 2025 humanitarian update: https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory
4. Raz Segal, Jewish Currents, "A Textbook Case of Genocide": https://jewishcurrents.org
5. Jean-Pierre Filiu, Un historien à Gaza (Les Arènes, 2025)
6. Diane Muir, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land”, The Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2008: https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/muir/Muir%20A%20Land%20Without%20a%20People.pdf
7. Peter Beinart, "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza," YouTube Interview, 2025
8. Haaretz, “82% of Jewish Israelis Support Expelling Gazans,” May 2025: https://www.haaretz.com
9. Forensic Architecture, February 2024: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disinformation-al-ahli-hospital
10. Pew Research Center, U.S. Jewish Views on Israel, Feb 2025: https://www.pewresearch.org
11. Gilles Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous, Éditions de Minuit (1983)