This brutal war on Palestinians has not just unleashed Israel’s demons. It has unmasked our own regimes, as they crack down on humanitarian activism

There is a horrifying lesson here, one that applies equally to Israel and its western patrons. A genocide takes place – and is permitted to take place – only when a profound sickness has entered the collective soul of the perpetrators.

Two years in, what should have been obvious from the start is becoming ever-harder to ignore: the genocide had nothing to do with Hamas’s one-day attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The genocide was never about “self-defence”. It was preordained by the ideological imperatives of Zionism.

Hamas’s break-out from Gaza – a prison camp into which Palestinians had been herded decades earlier, after their expulsion from their homeland – provided the pretext. It all too readily unleashed demons long lurking in the soul of the Israeli body politic.

And more importantly, it released similar demons – though better concealed – in the western ruling class, as well as parts of their societies heavily conditioned to believe that the interests of the ruling class coincide with their own.

Two years into the genocide, the West is still deep in its self-generated bubble of denial about what is going on in Gaza – and its role in it.

History repeats itself,” as the saying goes, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Now, US President Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” offers the farce: unapologetic gangsterism masquerading as a “solution” to the Gaza genocide. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair – a war criminal who, alongside his US counterpart George W Bush, destroyed Iraq more than two decades ago – will issue diktats to the people of Gaza on Israel’s behalf.

Surrender document

Gaza, not just Hamas, faces an ultimatum:

Take the deal, or we will put you in concrete boots and sink you in the Mediterranean.

Barely veiled by the threat is the likelihood that, even if Hamas feels compelled to sign up to this surrender document, Gaza’s people will end up in concrete boots all the same.

Gaza’s population is so desperate for a respite from the slaughter that it will accept almost anything. But it is pure delusion for the rest of us to believe a state that has spent two years carrying out a genocide can be trusted either to respect a ceasefire or to honour the terms of a peace plan, even one so heavily skewed in its favour.

The farce of Trump’s peace plan – his “deal of the millennium” – is evident from the first of its 20 points: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.”

The document’s authors no more wonder what might have “radicalised” Gaza than western capitals did when Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, broke out of the prison enclave with great violence on 7 October 2023.

Were the people of Gaza simply born radical, or did events turn them radical? Were they “radicalised” when Israel ethnically cleansed them from their original lands, in what is now the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, and dumped them in the tiny holding pen of Gaza?

Were they “radicalised” by being surveilled and oppressed in a dystopian, open-air prison, decade upon decade? Was it the experience of living for 17 years under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade that denied them the right to travel or trade, and forced their children on to a diet that left them malnourished?

Or maybe they were radicalised by the silence from Israel’s western patrons, who supplied the weaponry and lapped up the rewards: the latest confinement technologies, field-tested by Israel on the people of Gaza.

The truth ignored in the opening point of Trump’s “peace plan” is that it is entirely normal to be “radicalised” when you live in an extreme situation. And there are no places on the planet more extreme than Gaza.

Already, as our leaders normalise their crimes abroad, they are normalising related crimes at home. The first signs are in the designation of opposition to genocide as “hate”, and of practical efforts to stop the genocide as “terrorism”.

The intensifying campaign of demonisation will grow, as will the crackdown on fundamental and long-cherished rights.

Israel has declared war on the Palestinian people. And our leaders are slowly declaring war on us, whether it be those protesting the Gaza genocide, or those opposed to a consumption-driven West’s genocide of the planet.

We are being isolated, smeared and threatened. Now is the time to stand together before it is too late. Now is the time to find your voice.

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Source: summary of Jonathan Cook  Blog October 8 2025. Jonathan Cook is a journalist and the author of various book: Israel ad the Clash of Civilisations : Iraq, Iran and the to Remake the Middle East  (Pluto Press) and  Disappearing Palestine : Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books).

In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. The judges’ citation reads: “Jonathan Cook’s work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East.