Gaza is an early warning. Will the world heed it? Submitted by Ammiel Alcalay on Mon, 12/29/2025 - 22:00 As Israel's genocide continues unchecked, we must examine how the destructive forces of imperialism are transforming the region A Palestinian woman cries as she carries the body of a baby killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza City, before a funeral procession outside al-Shifa hospital, on 4 September 2025 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP) On In recent days, 168 Palestinians were certified as medical doctors next to the ruins of Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital; 500 were celebrated at al-Shati camp for the extraordinary feat of memorising the Quran ; and thousands came to Khan Younis to watch more than 50 couples declare their marriage vows in a public ceremony. Meanwhile, in Haifa, Israeli police found time to beat and arrest a Palestinian dressed up as Santa Claus . Israeli TV - touting it as an accomplishment, and from a firing soldier’s point-of-view - broadcast the total devastation of Jabalia. A bill advocating the death penalty for “terrorists”, which would only be applied to Palestinians who kill Israeli Jews, advanced in parliament. Israeli occupation forces put Qabatiya and other West Bank towns and villages under siege, killing residents, taking captives to torture camps, seizing land, cutting down olive trees, killing livestock, and demolishing homes. Infants freeze to death because Israel continues to mock all terms of the supposed Gaza “ceasefire” agreement, with more than 400 Palestinians killed in hundreds of Israeli violations of the truce. Further testimonies have emerged from Palestinian civilians raped by dogs after being detained without charges by occupation forces. More than 700 family members of Palestinian journalists have reportedly been killed as part of Israel’s collective punishment policy. Muhammad al-Lahham of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said that in its “comprehensive war on the truth”, the Israeli occupation makes “no distinction between the camera and the child, nor between the pen and the home”. On the global front, Israel signs major gas and arms deals with Egypt , Germany and the UAE , while Australia mulls buying Israeli surveillance technology . Israel has become the first state to recognise Somaliland ; whether this is the opening salvo for a Palestinian population transfer plan, or advance scouting for a US base, is hard to determine. In this context, intensified US bombing of Somalia over the past year makes more sense. On the other side of the pond, the US continues supplying arms and political cover to its Zionist proxy, while committing sea piracy in the Caribbean, claiming itself the true owner of Venezuelan oil . Machinations over Iran continue as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets US President Donald Trump yet again at Mar-a-Lago. Trump appoints Zionist czars of acceptable expression, and signs executive orders barring entry to Palestinians through new visa regulations . Diminishing horizons In an interview, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak spoke about the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack as something that provoked the imaginations of millions of people across the Muslim and Arab worlds: “Imagine a million people with pitchforks and machetes start walking towards Israel together … The imagination was ignited.” As Palestinians fight for their very survival, world powers simply want to pave over the rubble under which thousands of men, women, and children still lie unburied in Gaza. Any other course of events must be deemed unimaginable. Unlikely as it might seem, the official 9/11 Commission Report also discusses imagination. It comes to the startling conclusion that due to “four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management” revealed in the 9/11 attacks, imagination itself must be “institutionalized” - as those suffering from addiction or mental health issues might once have been. In other words, the act of flying planes into tall buildings - though already depicted ad infinitum in video games and movies - had been “unimaginable” before 11 September 2001, and thus, policies to prevent such a thing had not been implemented. The report goes on to state: “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.” The old narrative of Jewish victimhood and Israeli democracy now feels like the tale of a vampire, coming to light only when its excesses become too much to bear Rather than a projection of some desired future of total control, however, this was more akin to a description of what Washington and its Israeli proxy had already modelled - with diminishing horizons in all areas of thought, inquiry and policy, and the world divided into “us” and “them”. The 25 years since 9/11 have been characterised by the sheer hysteria of the West’s “war on terror”, and the projection - building on decades of popular film imagery and media saturation - of the spectre of Islamic, Arab and Palestinian “terrorism”, an indicator that fluctuates like a thermometer, depending on the geopolitical temperature of the time. The “war on terror” left millions dead and displaced in its wake, with countries utterly destroyed. And yet these policies - the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq , the destruction of the Libyan state, sanctions on Iran, the US role in Syria and Lebanon - are hardly a blip on the screen of American consciousness. Despite the Trump administration’s rhetoric against embarking on more “forever wars”, its current “Israel-first” policies tell a very different story, leaving the uni-party of war very much in charge. Global awareness But what has definitively changed is that, after a century of Palestinian and regional resistance to Zionism - and all manner of political, cultural and scholarly activism - global awareness of the atrocities committed by Israel, and the blatant injustices faced by Palestinians, has finally prevailed. The old narrative of Jewish victimhood and Israeli democracy now feels like the tale of a vampire, coming to light only when its excesses become too much to bear, the popular imagination ignites, and guardians of the old order emerge from their crypts to mindlessly crank out an exhausted narrative. This is a sea change that must be built upon in every way possible, from political action to institutional, communal and personal relationships. But we should never forget, even for an instant, that this change is paid for by the blood of Palestinians, amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza - the scale of whose horrors will take many lifetimes to process. Why Gaza's genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history Read More » In the centres of power, we have barely begun to resist the structures enabling imperialism and colonisation. We have also failed utterly in the essential task of conceptualising and imagining the purpose of the kinds of destruction perpetrated by the US imperial appetite. Putting up a Burger King , as US occupying forces did in Iraq near the site of Ur, the supposed origin of our primary structures of human habitation for millennia, has always seemed much more than an instance of geopolitical power. It was a relentless attempt to remake the world in our own narcissistic image; to fundamentally destroy the continuum of life that has existed for thousands of years, and to create new paradigms centred on extraction and consumption, severing peoples and nations not only from their own resources, but from their very memories and the foundations of their existence. As the attempt continues to annihilate a people steadfastly clinging to their land - holding on to who they are, and who they have been - our lens, going forward, can only be Gaza and Palestine. But its focus must be the destructive forces of imperialism, and their role in transforming the terms of the whole region from resistance to collaboration. Ironically, those facing the brutality of a high-tech genocide might be most equipped to find ways to resist it. Mohamed Abusal, who is among a group of artists in Gaza striving to create “indestructible art” through virtual means, writes : “We strongly believe today that power cannot defeat imagination.” And Ahmed Ashour, a lawyer in Gaza, writes : “Gaza today is not an exception; it is an early warning.” The extent to which we truly heed this warning, and decisively act on it, will largely determine the viability of our future political life. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0