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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.”
Israel, Gaza and the Spectre of Genocide
Israel appears to be seeking collective punishment for Hamas atrocities, and this is not self-defense under international law
Trump’s solution is not that the violence should stop, but that Israel should accelerate the war. Last month, in a phone call with Netanyahu, Donald Trump offered unequivocal support for Netanyahu’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, crucially telling him to “do what you have to do.”
Urging Netanyahu to hurry up and ‘finish’ the war means doing more of what he ‘has to do’ – more mass bombardment, more mass displacement, more enforced famine, more destruction of Gaza and beyond to achieve total victory asap. Trump in effect is calling for Israel to accelerate the combination of genocidal actions already being pursued.
The goal of this is not to revitalise prospects for civilians to return to Gaza, nor any resumption of negotiations on Palestinian statehood. Earlier this year, Trump’s son in law (and former Middle East advisor) Jared Kushner recommended that Israel should clear Gaza of civilians – transferring them to the Negev desert or Egypt – to develop its waterfront properties which could be “very valuable”. So it’s clear what Trump has in mind: for Netanyahu to intensify the military campaign to expel Gazans wholesale, and permanently, from their homes.
A vote for Trump, therefore, is a vote to accelerate the genocidal destruction of Palestinians. Which is precisely why earlier this year, far-right billionaires convened by David Sacks and Elon Musk decided to throw all their weight behind Trump. After Jacob Helburg, advisor to Peter Thiel’s Palantir, donated a million dollars to the Trump campaign, he explained it was because of Biden’s stance on Israel’s war. He did not mention that Palantir is providing AI products to support the IDF’s military operations.
Trump’s War on Democracy, Women and the Earth
Trump plans not only to allow Netanyahu to accelerate genocide, but to erect an unprecedented apparatus of potentially genocidal violence at home in the form of an industrial-scale network of mass detention camps and ethnically-defined mass deportation programmes for 20 million people. He also plans to demolish the foundational structures of democracy and economic stability, to a point that would likely lead to societal collapse. He also wants to stealthily slip through a comprehensive national abortion ban to the point that even if a woman is at risk of death she should be denied an abortion, through devious enforcement of the Comstock Act.
Let’s not forget, of course, that Trump has been publicly accused by 26 women of sexual violence, abuse and rape. A jury convicted him of sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll – proving that he lied about it – and in separate proceedings, a judge ruled that it is “substantially true” that he did, indeed, rape her.
And on top of this – and perhaps of foremost danger – is Trump’s determination to unravel environmental regulations and unleash fossil fuel exploitation beyond all constraints. This threatens to push the planet to a point that triggers irreversible amplifying feedbacks and tipping points that destroy the life- support systems of civilisation itself within the next few decades.
Jill Stein’s Effective Support for Trump
Unfortunately, voting for third-party candidates such as the Green Party USA’s Jill Stein will be ineffective and ultimately a free gift to Trump. Due to the nature of the two-party Electoral College system, third parties structurally cannot displace in any meaningful way the Democrat and Republican parties. This means that voting for Jill Stein amounts to little more than denting Harris and supporting Trump.
Electoral politics is not, in itself, the arena where fundamental change is achievable. But a clear-eyed assessment of the candidates in the context of the structure of American democracy shows that it is false to simply see the two main candidates as equivalent.
I believe that the imperative is clear: to use the vote to prevent Trump from tearing down the frayed institutions of democracy wholesale, accelerating genocide in Gaza and beyond, and destroying the fragile fabric of civilisation itself by supercharging the planetary ‘polycrisis’.
This amounts to a vote to limit the damage, creating space and time for movement, activism, education and change to work on the major challenges ahead, to build alliances and momentum – all of which Trump wants to make virtually impossible.
A Planetary Inflection Point
Many of the challenges we face today are occurring because the global system is moving rapidly into a new phase. The old industrial paradigm is in decline. Climate catastrophe is just one symptom of this civilisational crisis, but perhaps the most stark. As this decline accelerates, the risk of falling back on exclusionary ideologies which blame symptoms rather than systems is intensifying.
That is why the propensity to resort to exclusionary and ultimately genocidal violence is dramatically escalating. The Gaza genocide has normalised shocking images of mass violence against men, women and children, normalised dehumanising rhetoric which portrays an entire people as little more than extremists and terrorists who are unworthy of life. This has fuelled a dangerous vortex of extremism which is rebounding across our societies and normalising the rhetoric of fascist violence in the homeland and beyond.
Gaza, therefore, is a symbol and a crucible of our planetary predicament: of the propensity amidst crisis to project exterminatory mass violence while extracting and centralising control of material resources. This reflects our prevailing attitude to the earth itself, as we consume fossil fuel resources at exponentially increasing rates despite the resulting rampant destabilisation of the biosphere.
Instead of responding to this crisis through systemic transformation, we resort to intensifying violence to exert control against the forces of disorder – in the process, we endanger the very survival of civilisation, and our species.
To avert this emerging era of genocide both at home and abroad, escalating in the midst of a planetary ecocide against our own life-support systems on earth, we desperately need to do what we can to protect and enhance the space for communication, education and transformation – a space which Trump wants to summarily annihilate.
Voting, alone, will not do this work for us, most of which has to take place every day across all our systems and sectors, both across our societies and deep within ourselves. However, how Americans vote today will determine whether or not that space – the precondition for work – even remotely exists.