The Palestinian Dimension

Operation Epic Fury · Brief 007 · Fictional Analytical Scenario

The Holocaust was a European crime. It was committed by the German state and its collaborators across occupied Europe. The Palestinian people had no role in it. No Palestinian participated in the Final Solution.

What happened in 1948 is therefore this: a European crime produced a refugee crisis. The international community resolved the refugee crisis by establishing a state in territory already inhabited by another people. The Palestinians paid the price for a crime committed against Jewish people by Europeans.

Stating this is not antisemitism. It is the Holocaust’s own logic applied honestly. The Genocide Convention was written in direct response to the Holocaust. That convention is now being applied to examine Israeli state conduct in Gaza. Netanyahu is claiming exemption from the Convention his country’s founding moral claim helped produce. He is doing it in the name of the people the Convention was written to protect.

The two-state solution is not dormant. It is not stalled. It is dead. There are approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The geometry of continuous viable Palestinian territory no longer exists. The settlement project has been the operational reality of Israeli policy for 57 years regardless of which government was in power and regardless of what was said in peace process negotiations.

Pretending the two-state solution is still available is not optimism. It is a mechanism for avoiding the question of what comes instead.

The word genocide has a legal definition. It requires proof of acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

The intent is documented in the perpetrators’ own words. Gallant called Palestinians “human animals” two days before the ground invasion. Netanyahu invoked the Biblical command to kill every man, woman, child and infant of a specific people on the eve of the ground invasion. Ben-Gvir publicly opposed humanitarian aid. Smotrich called for the destruction of entire population centres.

The operational evidence: 40,000+ dead, 97% of water infrastructure destroyed, systematic hospital raids, deliberate aid blocking producing famine conditions, displacement of 1.9 million of 2.3 million people to areas that were then bombed.

The ICJ has issued provisional measures orders. The ICC has filed warrant applications for Netanyahu and Gallant. These are the institutions the Holocaust produced. They are operating as intended.

Joe the American is not Trump. But Joe votes, pays taxes, and lives in a democracy. He may enable through silence, through the continued support of politicians who fund the operation, through the social pressure that makes criticism of Israeli state conduct feel professionally dangerous.

Izzy in Montreal is not Netanyahu. But Izzy may buy Israel Bonds. May donate to organisations that fund settlement expansion. May deploy social pressure against people who raise these questions. Moral agency exists on a spectrum. The gun and the dollar that buys the gun are not equivalent. They are not unconnected.

Wrong. Without qualification.

Also incoherent — Jewish people in Montreal did not order the strikes. Also strategically catastrophic — it is the single most effective gift to the people who need antisemitism to be real and visible in order to silence the genocide charge. Every attack on a synagogue is Netanyahu’s strategy working. Every person who conflates criticism of Israeli state conduct with hatred of Jewish people is doing the work the conflation was designed to do.

Never again means never again to all people. That is the sentence that cannot be stopped where political convenience requires.

This is a synthesis of Brief 007 of the Operation Epic Fury series.

Read the full brief at substack.joelmorin.com/brief-007.html

The complete series at substack.joelmorin.com