World / January 15, 2025
The widely reported agreement must hold. We haven’t begun to understand the full scope of the horrors Israel wrought. And Palestine is still not free.
People celebrate while watching a television along a street in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 15, 2025.
(Bashar Taleb / AFP via Getty Images)
Three weeks into the Israeli onslaught on Gaza that followed the October 7th attack, the Palestinian American intellectual Saree Makdisi wrote something that has stayed with me for the last 15 months: “What we are witnessing…is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, packaged and wrapped up in language that harks back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples.”
Makdisi was writing before the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza had begun. But the horror he and the world were witnessing was already beyond comprehension. We were all watching Israel’s supersonic fighter jets pulverizing American-made 2,000-pound missiles into Gaza’s skyline, annihilating its crammed refugee camps, fusing tin-roofed cinder block houses with the flesh and bones of those inside, and exterminating thousands of people it had exiled from their ancestral homes—many of them located just on the other side of the fence that was breached on October 7th.
At the time, the hope was that Makdisi’s words would be a kind of epitaph. Perhaps this one final spasm of shocking brutality would force the world to confront the reality of Israel’s apartheid regime and history of ethnic cleansing. Instead, the live-streamed butchery of children and their families continued for more than a year, live and direct, straight into our feeds.
I thought again of Makdisi’s words amid the widespread reports (which cited officials on all sides of the conflict, including Donald Trump), that Hamas and Israel had agreed to a ceasefire, hopefully—finally—bringing the last 15 months of genocide to an end. This time, they read as a possible prologue. What Israel has done to Gaza may herald a new era of state violence with no rules and no crimes. Everything is permitted, and nothing will be prosecuted. No child is off limits to the snipers. Missiles are programmed to home in on hospitals and doctors. Drones will bomb your home, then burn you alive in the tent you set up to protect your family from the cold. An army will arrive and declare where you live to be a kill zone. And if you are killed, why were you in the kill zone? You must have been a terrorist. Israel did all of these things to the people of Gaza while the leaders of the world looked on, and it did them with the full political and military support of the United States. Other states will have taken note.
Any decent person should hope that the ceasefire holds, but even if it does, the end of the genocide is not the end of the story. Palestine is still not free, and we have not even begun to come to terms with what Israel has wrought on Gaza. It may take years for us to know the true death toll, though it will be much, much higher than the official figures. We will never be able to fully quantify how deeply Gaza’s population has been scarred by these atrocities.
According to the world’s top human rights organizations, this has been the crime of crimes. It has been a genocide. To carry this out, Israel needed two things. It needed a ceaseless supply of weaponry, which was happily provided by the United States in violation of its own laws. And it needed the Biden administration to take a sledgehammer to even the merest pretense that international law and the so-called liberal order underpinned by the United States since the end of World War II has any meaning.
The United Nations, set up in the wake of that war to prevent such horrors, was rendered impotent by the raised arm of Robert Wood and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as they defied the will of almost every other nation on earth to stop the slaughter.
International aid and medical organizations, built by design to be apolitical in the service of aiding those in the most dire conditions, were routinely shot at, bombed, banned, and maligned.
The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, ostensibly founded to align the world with the rule of law instead of the laws of the jungle, have been targeted for sanction primarily by the esteemed members of the United States Congress. Even as polling showed that the majority of Americans consistently wanted a ceasefire in Gaza, their representatives showed appalling deference to a foreign country that was killing children at a faster rate than any other in recent history.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. When he arrived to speak in front of Congress last summer, he was given a minute-long standing ovation, and then clapped dozens more times. At the time, the official death toll was nearly 38,000. Netanyahu and Biden and everyone who backed them will likely continue to lead lives of comfort and security. They will be fine. There is no justice in any of this.
Yet amidst this collapse in morality, proportionality, and the very tenets of international law, Hamas—the supposed target of the hell Joe Biden and Netanyahu unleashed on Gaza—has not caved.
In one of his self-congratulatory valedictory speeches this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken—who bypassed even this grotesquely pro-Israel Congress multiple times to get more weapons to Netanyahu— admitted that, despite the scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the US assesses that Hamas has been able to replenish its ranks. Maybe one day the United States will be blessed with decision-makers who will be able to connect those dots.
Hamas and its allies continued to battle and inflict losses on Israeli forces until the last day before the ceasefire was announced. And as a result, its negotiators were able to hold firm to many of the conditions they had laid out for a ceasefire—namely that Israeli captives would only be released in exchange for Palestinians held by Israel, and that Israeli forces would withdraw from Gaza rather than permanently reoccupy it.
This is effectively the same deal that Biden touted last May, which Hamas officially adopted in June and was ratified by the UN Security Council before Netanyahu torpedoed it with demands that Israeli forces be allowed to remain on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Biden followed Netanyahu’s lead, falsely blaming Hamas for not accepting a deal it had publicly agreed to, and shipping more weapons to Israel even as that government was putting together a plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza. (In a sign of the depths of the fealty that Biden and his allies showed, a diplomat told the Washington Post that it was only after Donald Trump involved himself in negotiations that there was “real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.”) In that time, thousands more Palestinians were killed, and tens of thousands more were made homeless. It’s unclear how many more Israeli captives have died since.
The Palestinians who have survived will somehow have to begin putting together some kind of life for themselves, maybe once they’ve finished digging their loved ones out from under the rubble. There is a long, painful, uncertain road ahead. But in the end, this “twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st” has failed to destroy the Palestinians or their resistance to Israeli oppression. The struggle for liberation continues. The people of the world are on Palestine’s side. Our collective task is now to ensure that this ceasefire endures and that the Gaza genocide looks like our past instead of our future.
