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“We are terminating your blog with immediate effect”.
It was 2014, and Israel was in the midst of Operation Protective Edge. My editor at The Guardian had just unilaterally – and in breach of contract – cancelled my ‘Earth insight’ blog at The Guardian’s environment section where I’d been writing for nearly two years.
My great impropriety had been publishing an article pointing out the role of Gaza’s 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas resources (among other factors) in motivating Israel’s operation to uproot Hamas in Gaza. At The Guardian, I had been commissioned as part of a team of “the world’s best environment bloggers” to write about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises.
I would frequently investigate how major events in the news cycle were linked to the planetary ‘polycrisis’ – the Arab Spring, the war in Ukraine, Myanmar’s genocide against the Rohingya, and the rise of ISIS. But when I wrote about the war on Gaza, noting that the incumbent Israeli defence minister had previously urged the IDF to consider a major military operation to destroy Hamas as the only way to make access to Gaza’s gas viable – I had clearly crossed an invisible line.
My editors did not tell me that my article was factually flawed, badly reported, or poorly argued. Instead, I was told that what I had written “is not an environment story”.
I would later reflect on this incident, observing that by implication The Guardian’s editorial position was – in effect – that ‘Palestine is not an environment story’.
American Carnage: The Musk-Trump Plan for Total Collapse
A systems lens suggests a quarter of GDP could evaporate on a pathway to violent civil unrest, concentration camps, and genocidal violence that would be a free gift to Putin
War is Always a Racket
There is unfortunately a direct relationship between silencing voices critiquing the colonial structure of Israel’s relationship with the Occupied Territories and the radicalisation of the violence – as Israeli professor of international law Neve Gordon observed many years ago.
It is not just about Gaza. Gaza’s gas resources are part of a whole network of gas reserves across the Eastern Mediterranean. For the last two decades, Israel has moved swiftly to exert a de facto monopoly on these lucrative energy resources, forging various gas export deals with other Arab states such as Jordan and Egypt.
Yet as a major UN Trade & Development (UNCTAD) report noted some years ago, it’s not just Israel that has a right to these reserves. So do Palestinians. Denied statehood and sovereignty for over 75 years, the Palestinians have not only seen the tiny strip of land they inhabit gradually shrink over time under the encroachment of illegal Israeli annexations and settler expansionism, they have been denied any access to, stake in or control of their legitimate portion of these resources – which remain unilaterally exploited and dominated by Israel.
This has created an intractable situation. Having ensconced itself as Gaza’s political masters, the continued occupation – in which the IDF has literally calibrated exports of food and fuel into Gaza to keep Palestinians on the brink of starvation – has in turn allowed Hamas to entrench itself.
To Save US Democracy, American Muslims Must Resist Foreign Interests Backing Trump
Nafeez Ahmed digs deeper into the censorship of an article he wrote attacking those on the left who are boycotting the largest campaign to get Muslims out to vote in next month’s Presidential Election
Prior to 7 October, this was reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who for years deliberately stoked Hamas’ ascension in Gaza because he thought that an Islamist terror group would provide him carte blanche to justify his refusal to engage in peace negotiations.
In 2015, I warned that this colonial structure was unsustainable, and would push Israel to seek a “final solution” in Gaza involving relocating the population and extending Israeli control over the strip. Hamas’ 7 October terrorist strikes in Israel have, arguably, triggered exactly that. The evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity is now overwhelming.
The incumbent Democrat administration – which continues to fund and support the IDF – is therefore clearly complicit in this genocidal violence through its virtually unconditional supply of arms. But does this mean voting against the Democrats makes sense?
Only if doing so has a serious chance of ending this genocidal violence. But in reality it doesn’t.
What Trump Wants in Gaza
That’s because the Trump movement has no intention whatsoever of putting a stop to the genocide, but on the contrary wishes to accelerate it. And no other party has any chance of displacing either the Democrats or the Republicans.
Trump has repeatedly demanded that Netanyahu “finish” the war. This echoes earlier statements he made in which he criticised the fact that images of civilian atrocities were being broadcast.
But Trump’s concern was not that Israel is fighting a war resulting in civilian deaths as such, but that this was creating a PR crisis:
“Every night, they’re releasing tapes of a building falling down. They shouldn’t be releasing tapes like that. They’re doing, that’s why they’re losing the PR war.”