Well, it’s been a year since my post in response to the attack last October. The months since have contained even more horror than I expected, and it doesn’t seem even close to ending. I’ve been trying to write a post about it for months now, and I keep finding myself unequal to the task. It’s all so big, so monstrous, and it seems like there’s nothing I can do. Israel wants wholesale genocide, and the US government seems to be willing to provide them with the means to carry it out. Israel wants regional war, and probably to expand their genocide to the whole area they consider to be “Greater Israel”, and from everything the Biden administration has done, they seem to want all that too. They tell long-debunked lies to justify the endless slaughter, they pay half-hearted lip-service to the idea of peace, while eagerly stoking the engines of war. They smear and demonize any who protest for peace, or speak out for justice, including members of their own party, all while the world is being shown the mangled corpses of innocent children and adults, and the perpetrators are so open about their hatred that they will protest for the right to rape prisoners to death.

Nothing I could possibly write would come close to covering everything that has happened, or the scale of hatred and sadism on display, so I’m not going to try. What I will do, is talk about one aspect of all this that I haven’t seen mentioned much in the possibly naive effort to persuade those still not convinced that what we have been witnessing is, in fact, a genocide.

There’s been talk over the last year of the tactics being used – Bombing civilians, starvation, disease, and so on. I’ve seen a couple other people mention it, but when it comes to the tactics of genocide, I would argue that what has been happening in Gaza has been a death march.

In brief, a death march is when you take a group of whatever minority is being subjected to genocide, and force them to walk for days, weeks, or months on end, with little to no food, water, medical attention, or shelter. This serves two purposes for the perpetrators- the most obvious, with marches like the Trail of Tears, is that it physically removes the victims from land that the perpetrators want. The main purpose of it is to kill as many of those people as possible, while maintaining the “plausible” deniability of merely transporting them, or of protecting them from some greater harm (usually threatened by the perpetrators themselves). The death marches of the Holocaust make this a little clearer, as they were generally moving Jewish victims between concentration camps, and many of them happened nearer the end of World War 2, as part of the “final solution”.

What has been happening in Gaza is just as nakedly genocidal in nature and intent as what the Nazis were doing. Since last October, we’ve seen the cycle repeat again and again: Israel tells civilians to evacuate to a “humanitarian zone” where they will be safe from bombing. That humanitarian zone is then bombed anyway, before the civilians are told to evacuate again to a different part of Gaza, which is also not safe. They’ve gone back and forth across the Gaza strip for months now, through an increasingly devastated landscape. Rather than forcing Palestinians to move from one place to another, they’re forcing them to walk around and around the rubble of their own homes, which used to provide shelter, being bombed, sniped, and otherwise attacked all the while.

Somewhere around January, or last December,  the “official” death toll stopped climbing. This was largely because Israel had destroyed most of the infrastructure and killed most of the people who would be able to provide those numbers. I feel comfortable saying the actual number is in the hundreds of thousands, because Gaza has been in a state of famine for months now, while also dealing with the total destruction of their sanitation system, and the absence of clean water. Those not killed by bombs, bullets, or the elements, are being killed by starvation, thirst, and disease. All of these conditions are ones that are known to cause death. People who are tired, hungry, and thirsty are also more vulnerable to all forms of infection. So are people who’ve had their limbs blown off, or gotten other injuries. They can’t heal if they can’t rest, and they can’t rest if they’re constantly under attack, and being forced to move around.

It is not plausible that the perpetrators of this do not know what they are doing, and how many will die as a result.

Israel likes to pretend that it’s doing the civilian population of Gaza a favor by telling them in advance to move away from where they’re going to bomb, but even that “kindness” is designed for mass murder. It’s been one endless death march, with the people of Gaza being given a choice between being killed directly and labeled as “terrorists”, a title which is now conferred upon anyone who commits the crime of coming in contact with an Israeli bomb or bullet, or dying of starvation and disease while trying to avoid that fate. It is also clear that Israel will not stop until they are forced to stop.

I’m not going to go into every detail of how to “solve” the situation in this post, but step one seems pretty obvious – the international community (especially the US) needs to cease all support for the nation of Israel, and place them under sanctions until the killing stops, and they agree to actual peace negotiations. Actual pressure needs to be put on Israel, because they have demonstrated that they have no better nature to appeal to – they are in this for total genocide.