There is no attempt here to suppress genocidal intent

OWEN JONES, BATTLELINES, FEB 22, 2025

Calling this chilling is quite the understatement: neither does calling it “disturbing” do it justice. You may ask reasonably if it’s possible to still be disturbed by anything that Israel does to the Palestinian people.

Well, I would implore you to never stop being shocked, because otherwise we unwittingly normalise the depravity unleashed by Israel, all facilitated by Western governments.

The Israeli army has often dropped leaflets on to Gaza, as part of its campaign of psychological warfare. Well, some new leaflets have just been dropped. They feature a picture of US President Donald Trump, alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted man, who has an arrest warrant against him, issued by the International Criminal Court, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

BattleLines with Owen Jones is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It has been translated by Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian writer. Brace yourself:

To the honorable people of Gaza,

After the events that have taken place, the temporary ceasefire, and before the implementation of Trump’s mandatory plan—which will impose forced displacement upon you whether you accept it or not—we have decided to make one final appeal to those who wish to receive aid in exchange for cooperating with us. We will not hesitate for a moment to provide assistance.

Reconsider your position. The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you. You have been left alone to face your inevitable fate. Iran cannot even protect itself, let alone protect you, and you have seen with your own eyes what has happened. Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza in any way. Even your Arab countries, which are now our allies, provide us with money and weapons while sending you only shrouds.

There is little time left—the game is almost over. Whoever wishes to save themselves before it is too late, we are here, remaining until the end of time.

Let me refer back to what was said by Raz Segal, the brilliant Israeli-American associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, on 13th October 2023, right at the very beginning of this genocidal mayhem. He wrote:

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions.

Share

Normally states committing criminal acts, indeed genocide, go to great lengths to cover up what they are doing. Not so with the Israeli state, whose leaders, officials, soldiers, media outlets, journalists, ordinary citizens who have relentlessly and shamelessly articulated their genocidal intent from day one.

This leaflet is itself a confession of grave war crimes. In this leaflet, the Israeli state tries to terrify Palestinian citizens into collaborating with an Israeli state which has wiped Gaza out, slaughtered and maimed their loved ones, inflicted grave injury and trauma on them, starved them – well, we could go on.

It states – “The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you.”

This is not even subtle in its genocidal intent. It discusses the total extermination of the people of Gaza, and states that if they are all exterminated, then they will all be forgotten. We are told to resist comparisons between Israel and the behaviour of the Nazis, which I have always done. And yet who can read those lines and not recall, if they were aware of those words, what was said about Adolf Hitler in 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Could somebody explain the difference between what that leaflet says, and what said by the Nazi leader 86 years ago?

The leaflet refers to “Trump’s mandatory plan, which will imposed forced displacement upon you whether you accept it or not.”

Well, here Israel’s sense of impunity is clearly overwhelmingly. Forced displacement is a war crime. It is an objective war crime. No one can argue it is anything other than a war crime, from a factual perspective. It is also a war crime which can only take place with hideous levels of violence and death.

The people of Gaza do not want to leave their land. The vast majority of them are the relatives of those who were forced to flee what is now Israel when it was founded over three quarters of a century ago. They were forced to flee and were never allowed to return.

The Israeli army will only be able to drive people out of Gaza by using violence far more intense than the violence already unleashed, which you may struggle to even imagine. Note that as Antony Blinken, former US Secretary of State, conceded last month before Donald Trump assumed the presidency: 

“We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost,” adding: “That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”

An attempt to forcibly remove the Palestinian people from their homeland will trigger mass armed resistance, which Israel will respond to with even more depraved violence. And based on their past behaviour, that will be combined with a total siege on the means of life – food, energy, fuel, water, shelter, we could go on.

Even in the here and now – with a ceasefire and least some humanitarian aid being allowed into Gaza – the brilliant Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat tweets:

Beit Hanoun village is completely destroyed They did not receive the slightest humanitarian aid and the families live in tents in difficult humanitarian conditions amidst the destruction, defying all displacement projects. Drinking water is not available, whether it is potable or not.

We do not know how many Palestinians have been directly killed by Israeli violence, and indirectly by being deprived of food, water, energy, shelter, medical attention, and so on, but some estimate it to be hundreds of thousands. Notably, Donald Trump keeps referring to how all the people of Gaza will be deported – which he says means “probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million.” But Gaza’s pre-war population was around 2.3 million, which suggests he has received intelligence estimates that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since the genocide began.

This violent deporting of an entire people would kill hundreds of thousands of people alone.

It is worth just returning to what was written in that leaflet. The leaflet tries to make Palestinians give up all hope by telling them that nobody cares about them, that they have been completely abandoned.

And it is true that the Arab dictatorships have done nothing meaningful to save the Palestinians from their fate. And it also true that Western states have armed and facilitated this genocide.

But to the people of Gaza: hundreds of millions, billions of people, do care about you The polling in countries like here in Britain is clear: the polling shows that the large majority think Israel is guilty of war crimes, think we should institute a total arms embargo on Israel, and that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested.

Millions of people have been changed forever, and we are not going to give up on the Palestinians. To the survivors of Israel’s genocide: never feel you are alone or abandoned, because so many of us in the West are determined to fight until our governments cease facilitating the hideous fate being imposed upon you.

That leaflet will one day be presented to the courts as just another piece of damning evidence about the criminal and genocidal intent of Israel. It will also be offered as yet more evidence that there was no excuses for not knowing what Israel’s intent was – and that therefore the Western politicians who armed and facilitated this abomination should also face accountability, too.

BattleLines with Owen Jones is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.