Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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In today’s news, Israel’s stupid fucking genocidal rapists ran over an unexploded ordnance from their own evil carpet bombing campaign, blamed Hamas for the explosion, started bombing the fuck out of Gaza again, killed scores of civilians, said they were once again cutting off aid to the enclave, and then quietly backed down on urging from Washington.

Rather than report that Israel violated the ceasefire agreement as blatantly as any agreement could possibly be violated, the western press have been referring to this as a “test” of the ceasefire. Killing Palestinians is so normalized and accepted as a baseline expectation in the western press that CNN called it the “first major test” of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed.

I hope the “WHY AREN’T YOU CELEBRATING?” crowd have gotten their answer by now. We weren’t celebrating because we know more than you. We’ve actually been paying attention, so we know Israel is going to seek out every excuse to kill Palestinians and torch this fake “ceasefire”.

The Israeli government keep issuing statements making it explicitly clear that Israel will not consider the “war” over until Hamas is fully disarmed and Gaza is fully demilitarized, terms that the Palestinian resistance has explicitly refused. These mutually contradictory positions place Gaza on a collision course toward full-scale reignition of the genocide.

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For the last two years anyone who criticized these massacres would be told "tell Hamas to free the hostages then". The hostages are free and the massacres are still happening. https://t.co/cn4rGXPW6L

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 18, 2025

Whenever I talk about the IDF massacring civilians for inadvertently traveling into zones Israel has banned them from in Gaza I’ve been getting Israel apologists bleating “but they crossed the Yellow Line!” at me, which I guess is the new hasbara narrative.

Imagine thinking this is a good argument. Imagine thinking it’s perfectly reasonable to blow up a car full of children if they cross a made-up invisible line.

Think about how dehumanized Palestinians would have to be in your mind to believe this is a sane and reasonable position to have. To feel that deadly force via heavy war machinery is a perfectly fine way of administering crowd control.

Imagine if that was happening in your country. If police just blew up your vehicle if you accidentally turned onto a one-way street or made an unauthorized U-turn. If they could send a drone to go pick you off if you were walking down a street they didn’t think you should be on.

You’d never stand for it. You’d demand they find other ways to direct traffic besides deadly force.

“How about some signs?” you would say. “How about using verbal warnings and loudspeakers? How about road blocks? How about just not fucking murdering a vehicle full of kids for moving in an unauthorized way?”

But because it’s Palestinians, it never occurs to them that this should be the expectation. Palestinians deserve to be executed for the slightest transgression against the most arbitrary restriction.

Israel does this all the time, and its defenders are fine with it. During the aid distribution at GHF sites Israeli soldiers have told the Israeli press that they were ordered to fire upon anyone who moved in an unauthorized way, killing starving civilians every single day for seeking food. During the last “ceasefire” at the beginning of the year civilians would routinely get murdered for taking a donkey cart down the wrong road or whatever.

That’s the sort of thing people support of they stand by Israel. Supporting Israel is an innately racist and murderous position, because you support murdering Palestinian civilians for reasons you would never accept your own people being killed for.

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Israeli right wingers have been filmed literally pushing their babies in front of aid trucks in order to block food from getting to starving civilians. 

I mean, fuck. Israelis are something else.

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Israel cannot stop murdering and abusing and sowing chaos and destruction for even one fucking day and the western empire cannot stop supporting it for even an instant, but if you say anything about this people start making up weird stories about you hating the religion of Judaism.

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The Trump administration has ordered the repatriation to Colombia and Ecuador of the survivors of its attack on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, which punches some major plot holes in its claim that it has been blowing up these boats because they are full of Venezuelan “narco-terrorists”. The US isn’t generally in the habit of sending terrorists home, so it’s clear they targeted innocent people and had no case against them.

Anyone buying into the war propaganda about Venezuela is a fucking moron. The lies are dumb even by usual US warmongering standards, and US regime change interventionism is consistently disastrous. People who say they want Trump to remove Maduro are admitting they never grew up.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Last year I banged out an angry rant about the way Israel supporters would yell “release the hostages!” at anyone who talked about the latest massacre of Palestinian civilians, saying Hamas was to blame for the killing because of their refusal to release the Israeli captives, and that it would all stop once the hostages are free. I’m remembering that essay today because the hostages are free, but the massacres are continuing.

On Friday Israel reportedly blew up a vehicle carrying a Palestinian family of eleven people, including seven children. The IDF gave its usual excuse for the massacre: the civilians were deemed to have crossed an invisible line into a forbidden zone which made the Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. They did this exact same thing constantly during the last “ceasefire” as well.

In my polemic last year I argued that the slaughter we were seeing in Gaza plainly had nothing to do with pushing for the release of Israeli hostages, and that even if it did it would still be barbaric to massacre children until your enemies caved in to your demands. 

What Israel Supporters Really Mean When They Say "Release The Hostages"

What they are saying is that they believe Israel should murder children, decapitate them, rip their guts out, dismember them, mutilate them, burn them alive, every single day, until its military demands are… pic.twitter.com/3VnffoYStb

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 26, 2024

But two years of genocide have made it clear that the Israeli military was never killing Palestinian civilians in order to push for the release of hostages or force Hamas to cave in to their demands. The Israeli military kills Palestinian civilians in order to kill Palestinian civilians. The killing is the goal, and it always has been.

We see this illustrated over and over again, in all sorts of ways. Israel apologists always argued that the only reason the IDF had destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system with nonstop hospital attacks was because Hamas was using those hospitals as secret military bases. But then multiple independent reports from western doctors in Gaza confirmed that Israeli forces had been entering the hospitals after attacking them and systematically destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one in order to make them unusable. Hamas wasn’t the target in those hospital attacks, the hospitals themselves were the target.

And now we are seeing the “Israel is killing people because Hamas has Israeli hostages” narrative debunked in exactly the same way the “Israel keeps bombing hospitals because there are Hamas bases in all of them” narrative was. The hostages are free, but the massacres continue.

None of which will surprise anyone who was paying attention these last two years. Israel’s genocidal intent has been on full display every minute of every day, and it continues to be even during this joke of a “ceasefire” where the genocide was theoretically supposed to be on pause for a little while.

__________________

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In one of the more freakish acts of genocide propaganda we’ve seen in the last two years, the official Twitter account of the Israel Foreign Ministry made a post smearing desperate, starving civilians as cruel savages using the false allegation that they “tore apart” a “whale” that had become “stranded” on the beach.

“Gazans tore apart a stranded whale on the beach. This is cruelty that knows no limits. But we didn’t hear anything about it from Greta PR Thunberg,” the ministry tweeted, with accompanying footage of people using ropes to move the body of a sea creature on the beach.

There’s a lot to unpack about this one, but bear with me, because while this instance of propaganda wouldn’t even make a Top Ten Thousand list of the most evil things Israel has done, it says so much about the way this genocidal apartheid state dehumanizes the Palestinian people.

Gazans tore apart a stranded whale on the beach.

This is cruelty that knows no limits.

But we didn’t hear anything about it from Greta PR Thunberg. pic.twitter.com/Z8UszaoFWo

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) October 17, 2025

A quick glance shows that the animal in the video is not a “whale” at all but a whale shark, easily recognizable by the distinct spots and ridges on its back which no species of whale possesses. Whale sharks are not a type of whale at all, but the world’s largest species of fish, so named only because of their immense size.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry falsely claimed the animal was a “whale” because “starving civilians eat a fish” does not make for good propaganda if you’re trying to frame them as loathsome barbarians. 

Whales, unlike fish, can survive for hours or even days if they become stranded on land because they breathe air. The post is crafted to convey the image of a bunch of uncivilized subhumans ripping apart a sentient mammal while still alive in order to pull at the heart strings of western environmentalists. 

There is no such thing as a “stranded” fish; there are fish in the water and there are dead fish. The whale shark in the video was dead, and had probably been dead for some time.

To be clear, the Israeli government did not innocently misidentify a species of fish as a whale. The Israeli press had already reported that a whale shark had been butchered for food on the shores of Gaza, after having previously reported on sightings of the animal off Israel’s shores weeks earlier. 

They knew it was a dead shark, and they made the cold, calculated decision to circulate the lie that a whale had become beached on Gaza and met an agonizing end at the hands of the locals there.

Whale shark spotted off Ashdod in first recorded sighting in Israeli waters https://t.co/kYlWeJziqW

— Ynet Global (@ynetnews) September 27, 2025

In a sense this is a distinction without a difference, because only a monster would begrudge starving civilians feeding their children with actual whale meat in desperate times anyway. There is an overwhelming and consistent consensus among humanitarian aid groups that the people of Gaza are being starved by Israel.

But the fact that they’d go out of their way to lie about such a thing in order to make Palestinians look like depraved vermin really illustrates the hateful intensity with which Israel wants to exterminate these people.

I mean, think about it. Firstly, on its face the Israeli government is suggesting that the lives of Palestinians are worth less than the life of a single whale. Just that one fact, all by itself, shows you how low the Israelis rank the value of Palestinian life in the grand order of things.

Then they had to Israelify their position even more by lying about it, falsely claiming that a beached whale was torn apart by primitive sadists who should have instead helped the animal return to sea. An animal that they knew was dead.

Then they Israelified it even further by adding in their freakish obsession with activist Greta Thunberg, who recently confirmed earlier reports that she was tortured and sexually humiliated by Israeli forces after being abducted for trying to bring aid to Gaza.

Then they somehow managed to make it even more Israeli by adding in hypocrisy, accusing the Palestinians of “cruelty that knows no limits” after spending two years inflicting unfathomable suffering upon that population in full view of the entire world.

Imagine surviving two years of genocidal atrocities, starving, watching your children starve, getting hungrier and hungrier and more and more desperate, and then along comes this giant fish that could feed many families. 

It would feel like a gift from God. Imagine the elation you would feel. 

And then imagine learning that your tormenters had somehow found a way to spin even this miraculous, life-giving moment of relief as something cruel and barbaric.

Israeli propagandists would have seen Palestinians sharing videos celebrating their joy about the whale shark and recognized that if the footage isn’t carefully framed in a cunning way, it could actually bring hope to the people of Gaza and their supporters. So they made their very best effort to drop a big, steaming turd on it in order to kill those hopes.

Israel has done so many stunningly evil things to the Palestinians that it almost feels trivial to focus on this single act of social media propaganda today. But I expect this one will stick with me, just because of how much it says about Israel and its abusiveness.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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In October 2024 a Lebanese writer named Lina Mounzer wrote, “ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.”

I’ve thought about that line a lot over the last year.

I thought about it as Israel hammered Lebanon with at least 20 airstrikes during a supposed “ceasefire”.

I thought about it during the Gaza ceasefire negotiations when the western political/media class kept calling the Israelis held by Hamas “hostages” while calling the innocent Palestinians held captive by Israel “prisoners”.

I think about it as the IDF continues to murder Palestinian civilians every day during the Gaza “ceasefire” when they are deemed to be traveling into forbidden areas, because Palestinians are so dehumanized that Israel sees bullets as a perfectly legitimate means of directing civilian foot traffic.

I think about it as these daily ceasefire violations and acts of military slaughter barely make a blip in the western news media, while any time anything happens that makes western Jews feel anxious or upset it dominates headlines for days.

I thought about it while the western political/media class solemnly commemorated the second anniversary of the October 7 attack, even as the daily death toll from the Gaza holocaust ticked along with its victims unnamed and unacknowledged by those same institutions.

I thought about it when all of western politics and media stopped dead in its tracks and stood transfixed for days on the assassination of Charlie Kirk while ignoring the genocide he had spent the last two years of his life actively manufacturing consent for.

Day after day after day we see glaring, inexcusable discrepancies between the amount of attention that is given to the violent death of an Arab and the attention that is given to the violent death of an Israeli, a western Jew, or any westerner.

These last two years have been a time of unprecedented unmasking in all sorts of ways, but I think that’s the one that’s going to stick with me the most. The way western civilization came right out into the cold harsh light to admit, day after day after day, that they don’t truly view Arabs as human beings.

Ours is a profoundly sick society. 

One of the main arguments you’ll hear from rightists about why the west needs to support Israel is that Israel is helping to defend the west from the savage Muslim hoards — a sentiment that Israeli pundits and politicians have been all too happy to feed into of late. It’s revealing because it’s just coming right out and saying that slaughtering Muslims is a virtue in and of itself, so anyone who kills Muslims is an ally of the west.

But any time I come across this argument all I can think is, why would anyone want to defend the west if this is what the west has become? 

Even if we pretend these delusions that Arabs and Islam pose some kind of threat to western civilization are valid, why would it even matter? This civilization does not deserve to be saved. Not if we’re going to be living like this.

If we’ve become so detached from our own humanity that we can’t even see innocent children as fully human just because they live somewhere else and have a different religion, then we are the monsters. We are the villains. We are everything the craziest Zionist pretends the Arabs are.

These last two years have shown us that western civilization doesn’t need protection, it needs redemption. It needs to save its soul.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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In an interview with Swedish paper Aftonbladet, Greta Thunberg has corroborated earlier eyewitness reports that she and her fellow Global Sumud Flotilla activists were subjected to monstrous abuses by Israeli officials after being abducted from their boats carrying aid for Palestinians in Gaza.

Here are some excerpts (quotes from Thunberg are italicized, quotes from Aftonbladet are in bold):

“They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.”

“They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.”

“They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.”

In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag. “The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.”

“They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.”

Greta was then taken into a building to be searched and undressed. “The guards have no empathy or humanity, and they keep taking selfies with me. There’s a lot I don’t remember. So much is happening at once. You’re in shock. You’re in pain, but you go into a state of trying to stay calm.”

Outside, she was forced to take off her clothes again, she says. “It was mockery, rough handling, and everything was filmed. Everything they do is extremely violent.”

“It was so hot, like 40 degrees. We begged the whole time: Can we have water? Can we have water? In the end, we screamed. The guards walked in front of the bars the whole time, laughing and holding up their water bottles. They threw the bottles with water in them into the trash cans in front of us.”

“When people fainted, we banged on the cages and asked for a doctor. Then the guards came and said, ‘We’re going to gas you.’ It was standard for them to say that.”

“This shows that if Israel, with the whole world watching, can treat a well-known, white person with a Swedish passport this way, just imagine what they do to Palestinians behind closed doors.”

Thunberg told Aftonbladet that the Swedish government greatly downplayed the abuse she and her fellow Sumud Flotilla activists suffered, and wouldn’t even bring them water:

“We were together and told them about the treatment we received. About the lack of food, water, about the abuse. The torture. We showed them the physical injuries we had — bruises and scratches. We gave them all our contact details — I gave them my father’s number and the number of our contact in the organization. We were clear: everything we say now must be released to the media.”

“They didn’t do anything, they just said: ’Our job is to listen to you. We are here and you are entitled to consular support.’”

“We said over and over again: we need water. And they saw that the guards had water bottles. The embassy staff said: ’We’ll make a note of that.’ One of us, Vincent, said: ’Next time we meet you, you must bring water.’”

Then it took two days before the embassy staff showed up again.

“They didn’t bring any water, except for a small bottle of their own that was half empty. Vincent, who was in the worst shape, got to drink it. We kept asking the guards, ‘Can we have some water?’ but they just walked around with their water bottles and didn’t answer.”

“I said, ‘Are you going to leave us like this? If you leave now, they will beat us up.’ But they just kept walking.”

When Aftonbladet compares emails sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to relatives, with what the captives describe telling embassy staff, it becomes clear that the seriousness of the situation has been downplayed.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the scene at the port, where Greta Thunberg was beaten for hours, as follows: “She told us about harsh treatment and that she had been sitting on a hard surface for a long time.”

On Saturday, several media outlets published testimonies that Greta had been subjected to torture.

Aftonbladet has spoken to three other members of the flotilla who largely confirm what Greta Thunberg says and who have all experienced various types of abuse and humiliation. We have also spoken to relatives. Everyone is highly critical of how the Swedish embassy staff acted.

“Filmed while stripped naked” is sex assault btw https://t.co/B3GjwT5XEp

— Jacob Coxey's Ghost (@yung_coxey) October 15, 2025

Thunberg’s statements are not just in alignment with eyewitnesses who said these things were done to her, but with statements from the Israeli government itself. 

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said last month that Sumud activists must be treated as terrorists in order to “create a clear deterrent” from future flotilla activism, declaring that “Anyone who chooses to collaborate with Hamas and support terrorism will meet a firm and unyielding response from Israel.”

“We will not allow individuals who support terrorism to live in comfort. They will face the full consequences of their actions,” Ben-Gvir said at the time.

After the flotilla activists were abducted by the IDF, Ben-Gvir filmed himself taunting them and calling them “terrorists” and said he “was proud that we treat ‘flotilla activists’ as terror supporters.”

Israel, needless to say, has an extensively documented record of torturing and raping individuals who’ve been given the “terrorist” label by the regime.

So what Thunberg is describing would be Israel doing what it said it was going to do in order to send a message and deter future efforts to feed starving Palestinians — perhaps singling out the most high-profile activist on the flotilla for special abuse in order to really drive the point home.

Israel is so evil it’s actually hard to wrap your mind around it.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image by Kushal Das via Wikimedia Commons (Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)

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It’s actually never legitimate to withhold aid from starving civilians. It was never legitimate at any time.

That’s one of the annoying things about having to discuss Israel’s ridiculous claim that Hamas is hoarding hostage corpses in order to achieve some kind of goal, and therefore justifies reducing aid into Gaza as punishment: the conversation skates right over the fact that it has never been legitimate for Israel to withhold humanitarian aid into Gaza. Debating whether Israel is right or wrong to withhold aid under these specific circumstances tacitly assumes that it could ever be right to withhold aid under any circumstances.

Listening to Israel’s justifications for why it needs to inflict monstrous abuses upon the Palestinians has the effect of assuming that there are circumstances under which those monstrous abuses could be acceptable. And there just aren’t.

It has never been legitimate to intentionally deprive civilians of humanitarian aid that they need to survive. You have to give them aid.

It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants because you decided they crossed some sort of line into a forbidden zone. It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants at all.

It has never been legitimate to commit genocide. Israel just needs to stop the genocide.

The onus for stopping a genocide is on the party committing the genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to end it by meeting certain conditions. This should not even need to be said. 

It’s so obnoxious how everyone’s getting sucked into these debates about whether or not Israel might need to resume the genocide because Hamas refused to disarm or they didn’t get their hostage corpses back or this or that ceasefire demand wasn’t met or blah blah whatever. Israel has never needed to commit genocide. It needs to stop committing genocide.

The world shouldn’t be bending over backwards to ensure that the state which is committing genocide is happy with the terms by which the genocide is ended. The world should be aggressively punishing the state that is committing genocide until it stops. That would be true peace. What we are seeing now is just a bad joke.

And of course this true peace is not emerging because the powerful western states who’ve been backing the genocide this whole time are perfectly fine with it. Their weapons industries get to profit from the genocide. Their empire managers get to enjoy the domination of a critical geostrategic region. They sleep like babies at night, because they do not view the victims of the genocide as human beings.

So we find ourselves doing this ridiculous dance where we go “Okay well maybe the genocide could stop if the victims of the genocide agree to terms X, Y and Z and don’t make too much of a fuss about being killed in smaller numbers every day.”

This is madness. It’s the craziest thing you could possibly imagine. We live in a dystopian madhouse.

_____________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image via Adobe Stock.

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I don’t know who first coined the saying that an Israeli ceasefire means “you cease and we fire,” but it proves reliably accurate time after time.

The IDF reportedly killed nine Palestinians trying to return to their homes today under the usual justification that they were traveling in some kind of unauthorized area in ways that made the troops feel threatened, blah blah. They did this all the time during the previous “ceasefire” at the beginning of the year, using the exact same excuses.

Just as we speculated the other day might happen, Israel has announced that it is going to cut the aid it allows into Gaza in half and cut off fuel and gas shipments because Hamas hasn’t returned the bodies of all the dead Israeli hostages. Israel was fully aware when it signed the agreement that Hamas would not be able to deliver the bodies of all the hostages right away due to the rubble and chaos caused by the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza. 

Israel was already 100% aware that Hamas would be unable to return the bodies of all the dead hostages because of the conditions created by the bombing campaign. They planned to use this to justify torching the ceasefire agreement before it even started. https://t.co/zYJHbsEgl5 pic.twitter.com/JHJlPJl5C3

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 14, 2025

On October 9, CNN published an article titled “Israel assesses Hamas may not be able to return all remaining dead hostages” which reported that “the Israeli government is aware that Hamas may not know the location of, or is unable to retrieve, the remains of some of the 28 remaining deceased hostages.”

The Red Cross says that finding all the bodies of the hostages will be a “massive challenge” in all the rubble created by Israeli airstrikes in the areas where hostages were being kept.

Drop Site News’ Jeremy Scahill explains that “During Gaza negotiations, Israel understood it would take time to recover all bodies of deceased captives. A specific mechanism for recovering the bodies was agreed. Now Israel is pretending that didn’t happen so it can violate the deal and cut the agreed aid shipments in half.”

Mondoweiss reported last week that Hebrew-language Israeli media had been saying that a “secret clause” in the ceasefire agreement would allow Israel to resume its onslaught if the bodies of the dead hostages were not returned within a 72-hour window.

So it looks like this was planned from the beginning. Create obligations that Israel knew Hamas would be unable to fulfill, then use it as an excuse to resume the slaughter.

And President Trump appears to be going right along with it, posting on Truth Social that “A big burden has been lifted, but the job IS NOT DONE. THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED!”

“We were told they had 26, 24 dead hostages… and it seems as though they don’t have that, because we’re talking about a much lesser number,” Trump told the press on Tuesday, saying, “I want them back.”

Trump also told the press that Hamas is going to have to be forcibly disarmed, which amounts to an open admission that this entire “ceasefire” show is a sham.

“If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it will happen quickly and perhaps violently,” Trump said on Tuesday.

This statement matches recent comments from Benjamin Netanyahu saying that Hamas will be disarmed “the easy way” or “the hard way”.

The president and prime minister are making it clear that in order for the ceasefire negotiations to proceed to a lasting peace, Hamas is going to have to completely surrender and Israel is going to have to be handed total victory. They’re branding it as a ceasefire deal when it’s actually a total surrender deal, and Hamas has made it explicitly clear that it is not surrendering.

As Drop Site News explains, “In reality, senior Hamas, Islamic Jihad and figures from other resistance factions have repeatedly rejected disarmament throughout negotiations, including in multiple interviews with Drop Site over the past year.”

A big part of the confusion around the ceasefire in public discourse today is that there are two contradictory ideas going around about what the ceasefire is and what it means. Israel supporters think “ceasefire” means “total victory and complete surrender by Hamas,” while everyone else thinks “ceasefire” means ceasefire.

Trump: If Hamas Doesn’t Disarm, ‘We Will Disarm Them, Perhaps Violently’
The president also expressed support for Hamas's executions of alleged criminals, saying he's 'OK' with it#Trump #Hamas #Gaza #Israel #Palestinians https://t.co/ScbSWYEOZy

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) October 14, 2025

That’s why you see Israel supporters celebrating the deal while Palestine supporters are much more apprehensive. Palestine supporters understand that a ceasefire and a surrender are two different things, and see Trump and Netanyahu stating that Hamas is going to have to completely disarm if “ceasefire” negotiations are going to move toward a lasting peace. They understand that the unyielding mutually exclusive positions of the Trumpanyahu administration and of Hamas are likely to come to a head in ways that result in the reignition of the Gaza holocaust.

So for all the applause and fuss that has been made about the ceasefire, as things stand right now it doesn’t look like much has changed. From the very beginning of this genocide it has been the officially stated position of the US and Israel that the killing will not end until Hamas lays down its arms and surrenders, and that is still their position today. There’s a much-needed pause in the slaughter, sure, but the Trumpanyahu team is making it explicitly clear that it is going to ramp up again under the justification of Hamas refusing to disarm.

And that’s assuming negotiations even make it that far; Israel is already doing everything it can to sabotage the ceasefire by murdering Palestinians and greatly reducing the amount of aid it promised.

Unless something significant changes about all this fairly soon, even this feeble reduction in Israel’s Gaza atrocities cannot be expected to hold.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via The White House (public domain).

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It’s bizarre how little mainstream attention is given to the fact that the president of the United States has repeatedly confessed to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, especially given how intensely fixated his political opposition was on the possibility that he was compromised by a foreign government during his first term.

During a speech before the Israeli parliament on Monday, President Trump once again publicly admitted that he has implemented Israel-friendly policies at the behest of Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, this time adding that he believes Adelson favors Israel over the United States.

Here’s a transcript of Trump’s remarks:

“As president, I terminated the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and ultimately, I terminated Iran’s nuclear program with things called B2 bombers. It was swift and it was accurate, and it was a military beauty. I authorized the spending of billions of dollars, which went to Israel’s defense, as you know. And after years of broken promises from many other American presidents — you know that they kept promising — I never understood it until I got there. There was a lot of pressure put on these presidents. It was put on me, too, but I didn’t yield to the pressure. But every president for decades said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The difference is I kept my promise and officially recognized the capital of Israel and moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

“Isn’t that right Miriam? Look at Miriam. She’s back there. Stand up. Miriam and Sheldon [Adelson] would come into the office and call me. They’d call me — I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else, I guess. Look at her sitting there so innocently — got $60 billion in the bank, $60 billion. And she loves, and she, I think she said, ‘No, more.’ And she loves Israel, but she loves it. And they would come in. And her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. It was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you? I’d say ‘Sheldon, I’m the president of the United States. It doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in. But they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about Golan Heights, which is probably one of the greatest things ever happened. Miriam, stand up, please. She really is, I mean, she loves this country. She loves this country. Her and her husband are so incredible. We miss him so dearly. But I actually asked her, I’m going to get her in trouble with this. But I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means — that might mean Israel, I must say, we love you. Thank you, darling, for being here. That’s a great honor. Great honor. She’s a wonderful woman. She is a great woman.”

Speaking in Israel, Trump suggests he moved the embassy to Jerusalem as a promise to the Adelsons, who he says have paid more visits to the White House than anyone he can think of.

He then says he asked Miriam if she loves Israel or America more and she refused to answer. Insane pic.twitter.com/jg9VXciRgg

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) October 13, 2025

Sheldon Adelson reportedly gave Trump and the Republicans over $424 million in campaign funding from 2016 up until his death in 2021. His widow Miriam continued her husband’s legacy and poured a further $100 million into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

On the 2024 campaign trail Trump also admitted to being controlled by Adelson cash. Here’s a transcript of those remarks:

“Just as I promised, I recognize Israel’s eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem. Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something — always for Israel. As soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else. I’d say, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, will you, please?’ But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it.

“You know, for 72 years they’ve been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn’t have the nerve. But I said, ‘You know what?’ I said to David Friedman, ‘Give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less on the Golan Heights.’ And he did. And I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ We got it done in about 15 minutes, right?”

Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don't. Trump said this week that he "gave" the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House "almost more than anybody." Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2024

Legitimizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem were two of the most controversial moves Trump made in Israel’s favor during his first term, which have now been eclipsed by his backing the genocide in Gaza and his bombings of Iran and Yemen.

And here is his, openly admitting that his billionaire Zionist megadonors have been using the access their donations bought them to push him to take drastic action in favor of Israel. 

Just imagine for a second if someone had leaked documents to the press proving that Trump and received extensive financial backing from a Russian oligarch to whom he doled out favors of immense geopolitical consequence. It would be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics, bar none. But because it’s an Israeli oligarch, he can admit to it openly and repeatedly without anyone batting an eye.

During Trump’s first term his political rivals spent years pushing a bogus conspiracy theory that he was controlled by Vladimir Putin, despite his having spent that entire term aggressively ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia. Entire political punditry careers were birthed trying to create a scandal out of a narrative that could be plainly seen as false just by looking at the movements of the US war machine and Washington’s actions against Moscow.

But here’s Trump openly admitting to bending over backwards to give an Israeli oligarch whatever she wants because she gave his campaign huge sums of money, while pouring weapons into Israel to facilitate its mass atrocities and engaging in acts of war on Israel’s behalf. And it barely makes a blip in mainstream western politics or media.

This is because mainstream western politics and media understand that we are living in an unofficial oligarchic empire to which both the US and Israel belong. They never acknowledge it, they never talk about it, but all high-level politicians, pundits and operatives in the western world understand that they serve a globe-spanning power structure run by a loose alliance of plutocrats and empire managers. They understand that states like Israel are a part of said power structure, while states like Russia, China and Iran are not. So they spend their time normalizing the corruption and abuses of imperial member states while facilitating the empire’s efforts to attack and undermine the states which have successfully resisted being absorbed into the imperial power umbrella.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only thing I like about Donald Trump is his infantile tendency to say the quiet part out loud. He advances the same kinds of abuses as his predecessors who were no less corrupt and controlled, but he exposes the underlying mechanics of those abuses in ways that more refined presidents never would.

__________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Trump White House (Public Domain).

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

I’ve seen a lot of empire loyalists going “Why aren’t the Free Palestine people cheering about the ceasefire?” 

If you saw a man beating a child into a coma, would you cheer after the beating stopped? No, your first reaction would be horror at what happened and your second would be fear that he’ll attack the kid again. And then at some point you’d start wondering why the guy isn’t in jail.

They actually expected a bunch of parades and trophies for pausing a genocide. They thought they’d get applause and adoration and then everything would go back to how it was pre-2023. 

That’s adorable. That’s precious. Not gonna happen, but it’s cute that they thought it would.

❖

Drop Site News reports that after the ceasefire was announced Israeli troops went on an arson spree and torched food, homes and critical infrastructure to ensure that Palestinians would have nothing to return to.

I keep thinking the Israeli military has run out of ways to shock me, but they somehow keep finding new ones.

❖

TYT’s Ana Kasparian was in hot water last week for rubbing her hands together while talking about how creepy and evil Jewish oligarch Larry Ellison is, with critics hastening to compare her depiction of Ellison to the antisemitic “Happy Merchant” meme.

Online Zionists eager to stoke the antisemitism hysteria actually went out of their way to digitally insert the Happy Merchant meme into the actual footage of Kasparian’s portrayal, which was probably done to show the similarities between the portrayal and the meme but in practice made it look as though TYT had displayed an antisemitic graphic during their show. 

Ana Kasparian, as the horseshoe theory tells us, is completing her transition from a far lefty into a neo-Nazi

Here she is re-enacting an infamous meme created by white supremacists called “Happy Merchant” which showed stereotypical Jew who rubs his hands in anticipation of smth pic.twitter.com/5guv9E7SjT

— Michael Elgort (@just_whatever) October 8, 2025

There is no reason to believe Kasparian was being antisemitic with her portrayal of Ellison, who is indeed creepy and evil. Ask a small child to imitate someone who is wicked and sneaky and they’ll rub their hands together looking sinister in the exact way Kasparian did without knowing anything about Jews or Judaism. The only reason anyone felt the need to insert the Happy Merchant meme into the footage in the first place was because hardly anyone knows what the fuck that is.

This has gotten so fucking stupid. You can’t even talk like a normal person in real time without getting accused of doing an antisemitic trope. Nobody can keep track of every little thing on the ADL no-no list. These freaks were accusing Greta Thunberg of being a Nazi for taking a pro-Palestine photo with an octopus plushie, because apparently octopuses are somewhere on the no-no list. 

You’re expected to tip toe around and avoid any reference to money, noses, blood, and who knows whatever the fuck else. Penguins? Poodles? IKEA furniture? No one knows. Nobody can keep track of all that shit, especially when speaking in a real-time format and you don’t have time to pause and research whether a certain normal hand gesture is on the antisemitic trope list. It’s an absurd dynamic designed to stagnate all conversation around criticisms of genocide, empire, and oligarchy.

❖

I got into an interaction with someone online who told me I should hate Hamas because they are a proscribed terrorist group. I said “Oh well if the GOVERNMENT says we have to hate Hamas then I stand corrected.” He said it had nothing to do with the government, arguing that it was just “common sense,” after literally just having cited the proscription of Hamas by his government.

It’s amazing how common this viewpoint is. Westerners actually think “terrorist” is some kind of innate quality that certain groups have, instead of a completely made-up designation imposed by specific governments.

They don’t understand that it’s a government-applied label; they think it’s something that those groups actually ARE. They’re so herd-like in their thinking that they actually allow their rulers to interpret reality on their behalf. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s governments do not consider Hamas a terrorist group. It’s a label that’s only applied by the Five Eyes states, the EU, Japan, a couple of the empire’s Latin American client states, and Israel. For everyone else it’s just a Palestinian armed resistance group.

In the US-centralized empire, “terrorist” just means “a population which poses an inconvenience to the interests of the empire”. It’s not a real thing. The UK designated Palestine Action a terrorist group because its activists put paint on some war planes to protest a genocide, while an actual, literal Al Qaeda leader has been warmly embraced by western states because he facilitated their regime change objectives in Syria. There are no consistent standards by which Iran’s IRGC should be considered a terrorist group while Israel’s IDF and Mossad should not.

Anyone who regurgitates the word “terrorist” is just telling you they’re a mindless and compliant empire drone.

❖

The Gaza holocaust will be a litmus test for high-profile figures for decades. Everyone’s comments or lack thereof on Israel’s genocidal atrocities will be looked up and amplified whenever their name rises to public attention. It will be the first step in determining whether anyone deserves to be listened to, taken seriously, or voted for. Their comments on Gaza in the mid-2020s will be the first gate through which they must pass to be considered worthy of attention by normal people.

❖

Someone asked me, “Why do you care so much about Palestine?”

I told them ultimately it’s not even especially about Palestine. I care about humanity. I don’t want my kids and grandkids living in the kind of world that would watch civilians get ripped to shreds in full view of the entire planet with the support of my government and its allies. I think that’s pretty reasonable.

_____________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel’s top officials are openly declaring that they intend to terminate the Gaza ceasefire after they get their hostages back.

Defense Minister Israel Katz has posted a tweet in Hebrew which machine translates as follows:

“Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States. This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons. I have instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission.”

Hamas has not agreed to any demilitarization or destruction of its tunnels. There is no way to demilitarize Gaza and neutralize Hamas of its weapons against their will without continued warfare, something Israel has demonstrated it cannot do without killing shocking numbers of civilians.

This is Israel's defence minister declaring that Israel will resume its military onslaught against Gaza once the Israeli hostages are returned. https://t.co/JWbD3VloDa pic.twitter.com/wvQkW3gwWL

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 12, 2025

Katz’s comments echo the public statements of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who said in a televised speech on Friday that “Hamas will be disarmed and Gaza will be demilitarized,” and that if Hamas doesn’t disarm voluntarily then “it will be achieved the hard way.”

In another statement Netanyahu said, “We have achieved tremendous victories but the campaign is not over; part of our enemies are trying to recover.”

Israeli outlet YNet reports that Israel is planning to resume its blockade and prevent reconstruction if all the bodies of the deceased captives are not returned, when Israel already knows that Hamas probably won’t be able to locate all the bodies of deceased Israeli captives due to the intensity of the Israeli bombing campaign over the last two years. 

“If Hamas does not cooperate with the return process, and Israel suspects that it is deliberately hiding the bodies in order to preserve them as a bargaining chip, it is expected to impose a series of sanctions on it — including preventing the reconstruction of the Strip, the entry of caravans, the opening of bakeries and the entry of civilian equipment,” Ynet reports.

In a recent article titled “Israel assesses Hamas may not be able to return all remaining dead hostages,” CNN reports that “Sources say the Israeli government is aware that Hamas may not know the location of, or is unable to retrieve, the remains of some of the 28 remaining deceased hostages.”

As noted by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, these two pieces of information would seem to indicate that Israel is planning to use the unreturned bodies as a pretext to break the ceasefire.

Reporter: Netanyahu has not said that the war is over yet.

Trump: The war is OVER! pic.twitter.com/9EhSvFOocT

— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 12, 2025

It is perhaps somewhat noteworthy that Israel’s open preparations to resume the onslaught in Gaza directly contradict the statements of the president of the United States. 

Asked by the press about Netanyahu’s refusal to say that the “war” in Gaza is over, Trump forcefully stated, “The war is over. The war is over, okay? You understand that?”

Trump suggested (without stating outright) that he has received “verbal guarantees” from Israel that the violence will not resume.

So here we have Israeli officials openly and explicitly saying that the attacks on Gaza have not ended, and the US president saying that they have. It’s not often you see these two governments directly contradicting each other with mutually exclusive positions in ways that will necessarily be proven or disproven by the events which follow.

So I guess we’re about to find out who has ultimately been in charge of the Gaza genocide this whole time.

______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image by Österreichisches Außenministerium via Wikimedia Commons (Attribution 2.0 Generic).

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel continued to hammer Gaza with military explosives on Thursday despite the announcement of the first stages of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. 

Israel always does this. When normal people get a ceasefire agreement they think “Good, this means we can finally stop fighting and killing.” Whenever Israelis get a ceasefire agreement they go, “This means we have to hurry up and kill as many people as possible before it takes effect.”

But it does appear that the killing and abuse will at least diminish for a time, which is an objectively good thing no matter how you slice it. 

The first stages of the agreement reportedly entail a partial withdrawal of IDF troops, Israel’s starvation blockade officially ending, humanitarian aid being allowed into the enclave, and both Israel and Hamas releasing captives and stopping the fighting. 

Drop Site News reports that according to Hamas sources, subsequent ceasefire phases will entail “No surrender, no disarming, no mass exile, but most of all a permanent end to the war.”

SCOOP: this is the agreement document between Israel and Hamas under the title "Comprehensive End to the Gaza War" – including the signature of the mediators. More details of my story – at @kann_news pic.twitter.com/1qGPGFck7q

— Gili Cohen (@gilicohen10) October 9, 2025

It remains to be seen if there will be any movement toward a lasting ceasefire beyond the first stage. When an agreement was reached late last year it never made it beyond the first phase and then the Trumpanyahu administration declared a siege and resumed the killing.

The far right members of the Netanyahu regime certainly seem like they don’t expect the ceasefire to hold. 

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement that Israel has a “tremendous responsibility to ensure that this is not, God forbid, a deal of ‘hostages in exchange for stopping the war,’ as Hamas thinks and boasts,” and that “immediately after the hostages return home, the State of Israel will continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas and the genuine disarmament of Gaza.”

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir issued similar remarks, saying that he and his Jewish Power party will use their leverage to dismantle the Netanyahu government if it “allows the continued existence of Hamas rule in Gaza.”

Netanyahu himself has been studiously avoiding any talk of commitment to a lasting ceasefire, mostly limiting his public statements to the significance of freeing Israeli hostages.

Notice how it doesn’t say words like “ceasefire,” “withdrawal,” or “end of war.” pic.twitter.com/HqSWje4313

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 9, 2025

So there’s not a whole lot to feel optimistic about here. If the killing does stop on a lasting basis, it will be a pleasant surprise. 

If it does, we can only surmise that the US and Israel calculated that the worldwide PR crisis created by the genocide was getting too severe to sustain, which would be a win for all of us. Trump has gone on record to say that “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Either that, or they calculated that they’re going to need all their firepower for a planned war with Iran. Which would of course be terrible for everyone.

We shall see. For now at least it will be nice for everyone to have a breather. If things really do calm down I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my entire writing career and try to take a full weekend off work to decompress. Focusing on a live-streamed genocide for two years takes a toll on the mind and body.

Here’s hoping for a better future.

_____________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

The new edition of JOHNSTONE is now available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version.

This month’s issue features a painting of Global Sumud Flotilla activist Greg Stoker calmly enjoying a smoke while the IDF was spraying the boats with skunk water in preparation to kidnap them.

My favorite thing about the Gaza flotilla activism we’ve been seeing is that it’s a glaring reminder that ordinary people really can just go up against the machine, and that the more there are the harder it is to stop them. It took Israel more than a day to abduct all the activists on the largest wave of boats because there were so many of them. A significantly greater number would probably have seen some ships land on the Gaza shore.

Everything about our society is geared toward stopping us from noticing this dynamic. Our education systems, our political systems, our media, our online information. Religions that have been around for thousands of years because the powerful endorsed and promulgated them are full of passages extolling the virtues of obedience, poverty, meekness, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. From the moment we are born our heads are filled with stories about why it’s good and right to consent to the status quo and why it would be wrong to take back what has been stolen from us by a predatory ruling class.

This is why we’re always inundated with messaging about the importance of civility and politeness any time people realize that they can simply confront corrupt officials in restaurants or at their homes to push for what they want. The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few.

Sorry this issue is late getting out; we tried to publish one with a painting of Charlie Kirk on the cover under the title “All Mainstream American Pundits Are Evil Scumbags”, but Kindle Direct Publishing blocked it and suspended our account because it was deemed offensive. I like this one better anyway.

You can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or a pay-what-you-feel digital copy by clicking here.

Other paperback editions of JOHNSTONE can be purchased by clicking here. Other digital editions can be downloaded by clicking here.

You can also get a subscription to the digital versions which will be sent to your inbox every month by clicking here.

CONTENTS:

Israel Droned Flotilla Activists And Then Abused Greta Thunberg … 3

Secretary Of War … 5

Thoughts On The Assassination Of Charlie Kirk … 6

Opposing An Ongoing Genocide Requires No Justification … 7

The Word “Terrorist” Becomes More And More Of A Joke By The Day … 8

They Just Bombed Greta Thunberg’s Boat … 10

Westerners Have A Moral Responsibility To Help Curb The Empire’s Abuses … 12

Some Days There’s Just Too Much Israeli Psychopathy To Write About … 14

ALL Mainstream American Political Pundits Are Evil Scumbags … 17

They Lowered The McDonald’s Flag Half-Mast At Guantanamo … 20

Trump Promotes A “Charlie Kirk Act” To Establish A Ministry Of Truth … 22

Celebrities Should Have Been Calling Out The Gaza Holocaust This Entire Time … 24

Trump Administration Rushes To Kill Free Speech In Response To Kirk Assassination … 26

Israel Is Committing Genocide. This Is A Fact, Not An Opinion. … 29

Assaults On Free Speech Go Into Hyperdrive After Charlie Kirk Killing … 31

Bernie Sanders Is A Ghoulish Zionist … 33

Netanyahu Keeps Making Statements Saying Israel Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk … 35

Imagine There Was A Violent Cult Committing Atrocities With Impunity … 37

“Recognizing” The Rubble Of Palestine … 38

More Attacks On The Gaza Aid Flotilla, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix … 40

The Two-State Solution Is A Western Liberal Fairy Tale … 42

The Real Violent Extremists Are The Freaks Who Run The US Empire … 43

The World Doesn’t Hate Jews, The World Hates Israel … 44

Trump Tyranny, Digital IDs, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix … 46

The Single Dumbest Conspiracy Theory In The Entire World … 48

Expect A Huge Fuss About The October 7 Anniversary As The World Turns Against Israel … 50

The Trumpanyahu “Peace” Plan, And Other Notes … 51

On The Manchester Synagogue Attack … 54

How Many Palestinian Lives Would It Take To Equal One Western Life? And Other Notes … 56

Again, you can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or click here for a digital pay-what-you-feel copy.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

Never forget October 7th 2023, that fateful day when Israelis were brutally massacred by Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters and Israeli drones and Israeli soldiers and Israeli bullets, and also by Hamas a bit.

❖

I’m sorry but it’s just plain hilarious that we’re still expected to hate Hamas after spending two years being shown exactly what it is that Hamas has been fighting.

Only Israelis could spend two years committing genocide and then demand everyone feel very, very sorry for them on the anniversary their genocide started.

❖

Hamas commander: Put the baby in the oven.

Hamas fighter: One of these 40 beheaded babies?

Hamas commander: No, cook a different baby. Leave those 40 beheaded babies in the pile.

Hamas fighter: Heil Hitler.

Hamas commander: Heil Hitler. [Turns, explodes 200 cars with a grenade.]

❖

Israeli government in English: No we are not abusing the flotilla activists, how dare you say that?

Israeli government in Hebrew: Yes of course we are abusing the flotilla activists and we are proud of it. pic.twitter.com/KHfrtZHGue

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 5, 2025

❖

The thing about October 7 is that if Israel supporters are going to insist on using it to justify everything that’s being done in Gaza, then the rest of us have no choice but to refuse to give a fuck about it.

If someone is using something as a weapon to hurt people, then you need to take their weapon away. If sympathy about October 7 is being weaponized for genocide propaganda, then you have an ethical obligation to withdraw your sympathy.

I don’t enjoy mocking and dismissing people who try to harness sympathy for October 7. It wasn’t particularly fun raining on the big sympathy parade the hasbarists threw for the second anniversary as they make a desperate effort to win back some of the global support they’ve been hemorrhaging all year. That’s just what you need to do when people are using something to facilitate crimes against humanity. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.

❖

CNN’s Van Jones, who in 2021 was given $100 million by Jeff Bezos, recently came under fire for claiming that people oppose the Gaza holocaust because Iran and Qatar are running a massive “disinformation campaign” to show people dead babies in Gaza. He made a joke about how everyone’s seeing “dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby” on their phones which cracked up Bill Maher’s studio audience.

How does @VanJones68 think these babies died?

Genuinely do not understand how this is a “disinformation campaign”? pic.twitter.com/ffHURLla9l

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) October 4, 2025

This is one of the ugliest, nastiest pieces of western media propaganda about the Gaza holocaust that I have ever seen, and we’re two whole years in. Only someone who thinks “dead Gaza baby” is a hilarious punchline would believe people need to be tricked by foreign influence campaigns into caring about dead babies in Gaza.

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Someone who is truly and sincerely worried about a rise in antisemitism will oppose the mass slaughter of children under the Star of David banner by a state which claims to represent all Jews while Jewish billionaires buy up media to silence criticism of that state and Jewish oligarchs openly purchase the president of the world’s most powerful government to ensure the facilitation of that state’s atrocities.

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Progressive darling Zohran Mamdani has come out and described Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro and Cuba President Miguel Diaz-Canel as “dictators”, just as the Trump administration ends diplomacy with Venezuela in yet another step toward possible war. So that’s some nice timing.

The Democratic Party is a US empire party. The very best Democrats just want a slightly more polite and humanitarian empire. All of them support war and militarism. All of them support the subjugation of the global south by tyrannical force. Everyone needs to get clear on this.

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Here is a map of fertility rates.

You should be alarmed. pic.twitter.com/urPMRrFaQA

— Isabella Maria DeLuca (@IsabellaMDeLuca) October 1, 2025

It’s funny how white supremacists freak out about global birth rates, because it’s just the result of white supremacism getting everything it wanted. Whites spent centuries extracting wealth from the global south, and it turns out fertility rates decline the wealthier a population becomes. They plundered and exploited and enslaved and extracted from the darker-skinned people whom they viewed as inferior, and now those populations are the only ones reproducing at above replacement levels.

They’re freaking out because they understand their civilization will come crashing down without working-age people stepping in to keep the gears of the nation turning as prior generations age out, and now the only way they’re going to get those workers is by inviting them to immigrate from other continents. Those immigrants will have significant collective bargaining power because they are needed; they won’t just remain some permanently subjugated underclass. Eventually they start intermarrying with the white population, and before long humanity consists of lovely shades of tan. White supremacism loses, ultimately because it got everything it has ever asked for.

This is one reason why there’s so much overlap between white supremacism and Christian fundamentalism, by the way. White supremacists understand that they can’t have wealthy, educated women choosing when they do and do not reproduce, because it turns out having and raising children is a massive ordeal and a woman with rights and resources will only sometimes feel safe and supported enough to do it. So they need to find ways to turn them back into a man’s property and force them to churn out white children.

This is also a lot of the drive behind all the tradwife stuff, the incel stuff, the anti-abortion stuff, and the “your body, my choice” rape apologia you see on the far right. White supremacists are searching for ways to bump up white birth rates against the wishes of women. White supremacism is unworkable without male supremacism.

This is also why you see racists like Elon Musk simultaneously freaking out about declining birth rates and pushing AI like their life depends on it. They understand that automating society is the only way to stave off the future wave of immigration that will otherwise be necessary to keep civilization functioning. But it turns out AI is a bust, and that bubble is going to burst before long. Again, white supremacism loses in the end.

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It's so creepy how every major online platform is packed full of paid propaganda videos from a genocidal apartheid state now. https://t.co/TqVwlWlGw4

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 5, 2025

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I saw a good tweet from Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello saying “It’s wild how people can effortlessly understand the righteousness of everybody from Robin Hood to Andor and then in real life simp for the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Death Star.”

This happens because in Robin Hood and Star Wars the storyteller is sympathetic to the rebel characters while the pundits, editors and reporters who tell the stories of our time are sympathetic to those in power.

David Attenborough can get you cheering for the seal or for the polar bear depending on whose journey is being followed as a sympathetic protagonist. The narrators in our stories are those who control the narrative.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Everything before October 7 explains why October 7 happened, and so does everything that’s happened since.

Look at what happened before October 7 and you’ll see year after year of murder, oppression and abuse.

Look at everything that’s happened since October 7 and you’ll understand the kind of sadistic, psychopathic regime the Palestinians have been living under this entire time.

Israel supporters don’t want you looking at what happened before October 7, and they don’t want you looking at anything that’s happened since. They just want you to pretend history began and ended with a bunch of Hitlerite savages attacking innocent Jews for no reason.

Never forget October 7th 2023, that fateful day when Israelis were brutally massacred by Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters and Israeli drones and Israeli soldiers and Israeli bullets, and also by Hamas a bit. pic.twitter.com/bwjdARVQ0p

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 7, 2025

And they don’t even want you looking at the day of October 7 too closely, either. Looking too closely at the events of that day bring up inconvenient questions about the Hannibal Directive and what percentage of the death toll was actually caused by the IDF firing on their own people. Inconvenient questions about the suspicious stock trading in the lead-up to the attack and the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence that high-level Israeli officials allowed the attack to proceed undefended in order to advance the genocidal land grab we’re seeing advanced now.

They only want you looking at the parts of October 7 that make Israel look like an innocent little lamb who was attacked completely out of the blue and had no choice but to reluctantly respond with military force.

Forget the scorched earth incineration of the Gaza Strip.

Forget the bombed-out hospitals and methodically dismantled healthcare system.

Forget the hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been deliberately starved to death.

Forget the fact that every relevant human rights institution on earth has determined that Israel is committing genocide, and that zero comparable humanitarian institutions have said it isn’t.

Forget the fact that human rights experts had been describing Gaza as a giant concentration camp or open-air prison for years prior to October 7.

Forget the fact that Israel had been routinely murdering Palestinian children and other civilians in the months prior to the Hamas attack.

Don’t look at any of that stuff. Just look at the stuff that makes Israel look like the victim.

That’s the story, anyway. Luckily, fewer and fewer people are buying into it.

The longer this genocide goes on for, the more the world has come to view October 7 as Israel reaping what it had long been sowing.

________________

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Who would have imagined five years ago when we were seeing Greta Thunberg amplified by every mainstream western liberal institution that we would one day hear reports that she has been captured and tormented by the Israeli military for trying to bring formula to starving babies?

The Guardian reports the following:

“In an email sent by the Swedish foreign ministry to people close to Thunberg, and seen by the Guardian, an official who has visited the activist in prison said she claimed she was detained in a cell infested with bedbugs, with too little food and water.

“ ‘The embassy has been able to meet with Greta,’ reads the email. ‘She informed of dehydration. She has received insufficient amounts of both water and food. She also stated that she had developed rashes which she suspects were caused by bedbugs. She spoke of harsh treatment and said she had been sitting for long periods on hard surfaces.’

“ ‘Another detainee reportedly told another embassy that they had seen her [Thunberg] being forced to hold flags while pictures were taken. She wondered whether images of her had been distributed,’ the Swedish ministry’s official added.

“The allegation was corroborated by at least two other members of the flotilla who had been detained by Israeli forces and released on Saturday.

“ ‘They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,’ the Turkish activist Ersin Çelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.

“Lorenzo D’Agostino, a journalist and another flotilla participant, said after returning to Istanbul that Thunberg was ‘wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy’ — a scene described with disbelief and anger by those who witnessed it.”

WTF? Where are Obama and Biden and all the western leaders and celebs who held her up as a hero when she was campaigning on Feb climate? All silent now as reports suggest she may be being abused in Israeli detention? She must be released. https://t.co/NBtoQuzZ4B

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) October 4, 2025

These reports, as shocking as they are, also happen to more or less reflect exactly what the Israeli regime said it intended to do to Global Sumud Flotilla activists when they were captured.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said last month that Sumud activists must be treated as terrorists in order to “create a clear deterrent” from future flotilla activism, declaring that “Anyone who chooses to collaborate with Hamas and support terrorism will meet a firm and unyielding response from Israel.”

“We will not allow individuals who support terrorism to live in comfort. They will face the full consequences of their actions,” Ben-Gvir said at the time.

After the flotilla activists were abducted by the IDF, Ben-Gvir filmed himself taunting them and calling them “terrorists”.

Israel, needless to say, has an extensively documented record of torturing and abusing individuals who’ve been given the “terrorist” label by the regime.

So it would appear that they singled out the most high-profile activist on the flotilla for abuse in order to send a message and deter future efforts to break the siege on Gaza.

“These are the flotilla terrorists.”

In a video circulating online, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir can be seen repeatedly calling Global Sumud Flotilla activists “terrorists” as they were waiting for their transfer to an Israeli prison pic.twitter.com/7OiSMNeIrI

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 3, 2025

This comes as CBS News publishes a report confirming what we’ve been saying since last month: that Israel launched multiple drone attacks against the Global Sumud Flotilla.

Citing two US intelligence officials, CBS reports that Benjamin Netanyahu personally authorized attacks in which drones were deployed from an Israeli submarine to drop incendiary devices onto the boats to set them on fire. 

Israel has been documented using quadcopter drones to drop incendiary firebombs on tents and buildings in Gaza. Last month Trump’s middle east envoy Tom Barrack casually admitted during an interview that “Israel is attacking Tunisia,” which was where the boat carrying Greta Thunberg was docked during the first drone attack.

Like the reported mistreatment of Thunberg, these drone attacks would also fit in perfectly with the Israeli government’s depraved and cynical decision to treat the flotilla activists as terrorists.

Remember all the Zionist slop accounts were trying to convince you the Gaza aid flotilla boats fired flares on themselves while in Tunisia? Well now we have reporting that Netanyahu directly ordered the attack, a clear war crime. pic.twitter.com/CFzNcxtx0F

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) October 3, 2025

After the initial claims of a drone attack on the flotilla, the information ecosystem was flooded with hasbarists claiming it was ridiculous to blame Israel for the attacks, and that the fire hadn’t come from a drone at all.

Odious genocide propagandist Eyal Yakoby got nearly ten million views on a tweet where he falsely claimed to have video evidence showing that the fire was actually the result of a misfired flare from one of the boat’s crew members. Anyone who’d actually watched the video would have seen that it showed nothing of the sort, but because Yakoby inserted a narrative above the video claiming it shows that, I had people in my Twitter notifications telling me for days that it had been conclusively proven the fire was started by a flare.

I encountered even some solid Palestine supporters expressing doubt about the drone attacks when the reports first emerged, because it seemed too heinous to be believed. But this just goes to show that there really is nothing you can put past these freaks.

Israel and its apologists lie about everything. Everything, everything, everything. We are far past the point where it is reasonable to give Israel the benefit of the doubt when we hear reports that it has done something evil. If you’ll launch drone attacks on activists trying to bring aid to starving civilians, there’s nothing you won’t do. 

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image by Brahim Guedich via Wikimedia Commons (Attribution 4.0 International).

One of the final videos that activist Greg Stoker sent out from the Global Sumud Flotilla before being abducted was this awesome clip where he’s having a cigarette while the IDF sprays the boats with skunk water, and I just had to paint it.

2:50 am local time. Israeli Navy trying to spray us with skunk water.

Still in international waters

Save Gaza pic.twitter.com/qoDZ7VgvIO

— Greg J Stoker (@gregjstoker) October 1, 2025

_____________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

British police report that one of the two fatalities in the Manchester synagogue attack was caused by gunfire from police. One of the reported injuries was also the result of a stray police bullet.

So he killed one person. The Manchester synagogue attacker killed one single person and the entire western world stopped in its tracks to mourn and grieve and weep and denounce, on the same day that Israel killed at least 57 Palestinians and it was completely ignored by western politicians and media.

Ever since I learned about this I’ve been wondering how many Palestinian deaths it would’ve taken to bump the synagogue attack off the front pages and become the main story. Fifty-seven Palestinians dying didn’t make a blip in the news.

So how many deaths would it have taken? How many Palestinians would have needed to be murdered for it to have risen to the level of interest and attention from western politicians, pundits, and news reporters that we saw them giving to the violent death of one western Jew?

A hundred deaths? Definitely not. A thousand? I doubt it. Ten thousand? Maybe. Maybe if Israel had actually deployed a tactical nuclear weapon in Gaza and killed thousands of people, maybe that would have eclipsed the one single death in the Manchester synagogue attack in the eyes of the western world. Maybe.

It’s an interesting question to contemplate. It’s just so incredible seeing how little value is assigned to Palestinian lives in the glaring disparity between the attention given to these easily quantifiable and comparable death tolls. Westerners really do think the lives of their house pets matter more.

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One key lesson from the Global Sumud Flotilla experiment was that Israel doesn’t have the ability to quickly apprehend a large number of aid ships. It took them more than a full day to capture all the flotilla activists. That could be useful information to have.

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If those boats hadn’t been carrying a bunch of white westerners Israel would’ve cheerfully incinerated every last one of them.

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It really looks like the US and Israel are getting ready to try to sell us on “Uh-oh, Hamas rejected our Tony Blair enslavement plan, looks like we get to keep committing genocide!”

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Nobody gives a fuck about October 7. Israel used up all its sympathy. It's gone now. https://t.co/c0az3JE12q

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 1, 2025

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The Washington Post reports that the US is putting pressure on Iran “to accept four stringent conditions as a baseline for new negotiations,” which include that “Tehran must agree to zero enrichment of nuclear material and curbs to its missile program, and it must cease funding its proxy forces.”

Whenever the Trumpanyahu administration starts demanding that an enemy accept conditions they know they’ll never accept, they’re setting the stage for more killing and destruction.

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Perennial presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg spouted the long-debunked claim that Hamas put babies in ovens on October 7 in a recent interview. Continuing to repeat atrocity propaganda that’s been debunked since 2023, here in late 2025, is an unforgivable act of genocide facilitation. It’s odious when it is done by anons on Twitter with 30 followers, let alone this lab-grown swamp monster who the western press can’t stop interviewing.

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I always get Israel apologists justifying the Gaza holocaust by claiming that Palestinians don’t value the lives of their children. 

Think about what they are saying when they do this. They are saying Palestinians lack a quality that is common not only to all humans, but to all mammals. They’re saying Palestinians are animals more akin to beetles or squid, who simply reproduce and then go on with their lives in cool indifference to their offspring.

They are saying this to frame Palestinians as a nonhuman type of creature whose extermination could be morally justified. Nobody with a healthy sense of empathy would want to exterminate a group of humans like vermin. They wouldn’t even want to exterminate a group of other large mammals who care for their young as we do, like gorillas or pandas. But cockroaches or termites or some other pest that’s wholly unlike us? That’s not seen as a very big deal.

This is the type of dehumanization that is necessary to support the state of Israel. Without it, supporting a genocidal apartheid state doesn’t sit right in your guts. The cognitive dissonance would destroy you. So you have to make up fake stories about Palestinians being these strange subhuman orc creatures to feel okay about it.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image via Montecruz Foto (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Two people were reportedly murdered on Thursday while attending a Manchester synagogue in what the British government has labeled a terrorist incident. Four others were seriously injured. Police say they shot and killed the suspect, a British citizen of Syrian descent.

After the attack an Arab-Israeli hasbarist named Jonathan Elkhoury jumped on Twitter to tell me that “When you dehumanize Israelis and Jews to this level, you end up with a terrorist attack in a synagogue in the UK,” adding, “You’re as complicit as the terrorists attack you sick psycho.”

Whenever western Jews get hurt these days you always see the Israel supporters having a big parade where they go “Okay that’s it, wrap it up, nobody gets to criticize Israel’s behavior anymore because you’re causing terrorism!” And then everyone ignores them and goes back to protesting the genocide, because that’s ridiculous.

I’m absolutely livid. People are waving Palestinian flags all over the place tonight, demonstrating for Palestine after the horrific murders in Manchester. They are the vile individuals who clearly have no respect for our wonderful Jewish communities or indeed for Britain as they…

— Susan Hall AM (@Councillorsuzie) October 2, 2025

I don’t know whether the Manchester attack had anything to do with Gaza. It could have just been some guy having a mental health crisis. It could have been something else. But the fact that so many Israel apologists are jumping out of the woodwork to say this means everyone needs to stop defending Palestine is very revealing in and of itself.

Some thoughts:

Murder is wrong. Israel should stop committing it.

Antisemitism is wrong. Israel should stop fomenting it by massacring children under the banner of the Star of David while claiming to represent all Jews.

Terrorism is wrong. Israel should stop perpetrating it by deliberately targeting civilians with mass scale violence for the purpose of advancing a political objective.

Attacking places of worship is wrong. Israel should stop bombing mosques and churches.

Woke up to news of three horrible terrorist attacks:

1) An assailant killed 2 at a Synagogue in Manchester
2) The Israeli government murdered 45 in Gaza.
3) The Israeli government murdered 2 in Lebanon.

The 1st terrorist was killed. The remaining terrorists are still at large.

— Omar Baddar عمر بدّار (@OmarBaddar) October 2, 2025

I wish the attack on the Manchester synagogue had never happened. I also feel weird about even talking about it while dozens of Palestinians are killed today whose individual names I’ll never know and whose individual deaths I’ll never see decried in western media headlines.

Their lives didn’t matter any less than the two people who were murdered in the synagogue attack. They’re just not white westerners, so their lives aren’t treated as significant. Their violent deaths aren’t seen as horrific. Their murderers aren’t denounced as monsters.

I’m seeing Israel supporters claiming that this attack means everyone needs to stop protesting against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, just like they claimed after two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in Washington back in May. Their demands will be ignored just like last time, because they are stupid. Even if a double homicide is directly motivated by opposition to Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, that is not a valid reason to stop opposing an active genocide. This shouldn’t even need to be said.

Last I heard it is unknown whether the synagogue attacker was motivated by Israel’s actions in Gaza, but if he was I’d say that’s one more reason to oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza. If you are too racist or apathetic to oppose a genocide on principle, then you should oppose it because it is fomenting violent extremism which could end up hurting people who look like you and live where you live.

Actually, what fuels antisemitism is murdering children by the thousands under the banner of the Star of David while adamantly insisting that your actions are inseparable from all Jews and the totality of Judaism.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 26, 2023

Back in December 2023 I wrote that “Actually, what fuels antisemitism is murdering children by the thousands under the banner of the Star of David while adamantly insisting that your actions are inseparable from all Jews and the totality of Judaism.”

In April of this year I said that “If you believe that all the violence and destruction in Gaza is the fault of Hamas then by your own logic you must also accept that the coming wave of antisemitism and violent extremism which is going to ensue from the incineration of Gaza will exclusively be the fault of Israel.”

I note this because if it turns out that this was yet another instance of someone flipping out about Israel’s criminality in Gaza and attacking Jewish civilians in a misguided attempt at retaliation, it’s worth pointing out that it was entirely foreseeable and preventable. 

______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

The Trumpanyahu administration is pushing a “peace plan” for Gaza which critics are saying would damn Palestinians to permanent subjugation under the thumb of Israel. The proposed plan would see Gaza supervised by Trump and by war criminal Tony Blair, and Netanyahu is already saying that the deal will allow the IDF to remain in the Palestinian territory indefinitely.

The last time the US brokered a “peace plan” between Israel and Hamas, the US and Israel torched it in a few weeks, laid siege to the enclave, and announced a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So even without all the major problems with the offer, there’s not going to be a whole lot of enthusiasm about it.

I’m seeing a lot of purportedly pro-Palestine voices proclaiming that Hamas needs to accept the deal in order to end the genocide. I personally will never tell Palestinians what they should do to address their abuse at the hands of the empire or what deals they should accept. My job as a westerner is to oppose the western empire that is butchering them, not to finger-wag and moralize at the empire’s victims.

The onus is on the party committing genocide to stop committing genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to sign agreements in the hope of saving themselves from the genocide. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t a psychopath.

Well there you have it. Usually we have to wait more than a few hours before confirmation that the Israelis were lying about ceasefire negotiations. https://t.co/ItvifFgyS6

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 30, 2025

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The Israeli Foreign Ministry keeps trying to claim that the Global Sumud Flotilla bringing aid to Gaza is actually a Hamas operation. Their latest effort in this ridiculous campaign was a statement trying to connect the dots between Hamas and people associated with the flotilla which bizarrely featured a photo of British politician George Galloway whom the ministry falsely identified as a British Palestinian man named Zaher Birawi.

Not one single person in the entire world believes this narrative. Literally nobody believes the Gaza flotilla has any connection to Hamas. It’s just a framing they’re circulating to preemptively justify any cruelty they might inflict upon the flotilla activists. 

Meanwhile the death count of people who have starved to death in Gaza has risen to around 453. Israel is trying to convince the world that the Global Sumud Flotilla are terrorists for trying to help stop this.

In addition to everything else this genocide has been, it has also been one nonstop insult to our intelligence.

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Two separate news reports have just come out about Israeli propaganda operations to manipulate western opinion. 

In an article titled “Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post,” Responsible Statecraft’s Nick Cleveland-Stout reports on documents showing that 14 to 18 individuals have been receiving significant compensation to generate pro-Israel content for platforms like TikTok and Instagram. 

In a write-up titled “Trump’s Ex-Digital Guru Works to Combat Antisemitism,” O’Dwyer’s PR News reports that “The firm of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale has a four-month $6M agreement for strategic communications and media services in support of Havas Media’s engagement by Israel to develop a nationwide campaign in the US to combat antisemitism.”

Journalist Jack Paulson notes that we know about Parscale’s six million-dollar psyop because he had to register as a foreign agent of the Israeli government, saying Parscale was paid “to map out Gen-Z influencers and distribute a narrative about antisemitism in the United States.”

This is what happens when a state doesn’t have facts, reason or morality on its side, but has unlimited funding.

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It’s silly how people call it “the Holy Land”. If the land was holy it would have turned Israelis into decent people.

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One of the many ugly things about the Trump era has been watching so many hippie woo woo spiritual types turn into crazed transphobic QAnoners, because those were my people. It’s kind of an embarrassing admission at this point, but they were.

I didn’t come to where I’m at ideologically from reading Lenin or talking to Marxists, I got here because I did a lot of inner work and had some transformative experiences and came out the other side with a deep love for this beautiful planet and for the strange naked ape mutants who people it, and with a yearning to help create a healthy world. I just kinda felt my way through the human experience as the barefoot hippie earth mama that I am, and it carried me to a clear intuitive understanding that the western empire must end and that capitalism cannot carry our species into the future.

And I’d just sorta assumed the people who looked and talked like me were on a similar journey this whole time. It looked like we were for a hot minute a decade ago when we were all getting excited about Bernie Sanders and the possibility of a real socialist movement in the western world, but then after that it got really weird and gross. I started watching so many of the leftwardly-inclined spiritual types I’d connected with in 2015 and 2016 start getting sucked into the Trumpian worldview and getting crazier and crazier with QAnon and all its related psyops until they were indistinguishable from garden variety American conservatives.

I remember a Bernie guy I’d made friends with in 2016 shrieking at me in 2020 and accusing me of acting like an Iranian mullah when I criticized Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani. My Facebook feed increasingly morphed from Bernie Sanders stuff to Jill Stein stuff to pro-Trump stuff, and then with Covid a lot of them went full-blown wingnut and started posting crazy right wing shit about trans people and Muslims and immigrants and China. I saw it happen to people I’d known in person my whole life, transforming from the barefoot peaceniks I’d always known into stuffy reactionaries in just a few years.

I’d tell them they’d turned into Republicans and they’d generally get all huffy and indignant and claim they were just like me, free-thinking leftist dissidents who opposed the fake two-party system. But there they were, fully buying into the entire worldview of one of those parties — and it was the one that’s further to the right.

And I just found the whole thing baffling. I mean, why were these people ever attracted to the left in the first place? Did they not have any values? If they did, what happened to them? How could they not see they were being duped into throwing their support behind the establishment they used to oppose? What happened to their spiritual insight? Their intuition? Their rebelliousness? Where was their connection to nature and to heart which had previously caused them to stand for peace and love?

And eventually I learned that it was just an act for most people. For most people spirituality is just an accessory for the ego, and being a hippie is just a feel-good fashion statement. They’re not engaging in the kind of rigorous interior excavation and ruthless self-honesty that would have protected them from imperial psyops to corral their political energy back into the mainstream herd. They just like how weed makes them feel and enjoy Alex Grey art. They wear spirituality, but they’ve never lived it.

This feels like kind of a confession because I’m admitting to having been naive about something many of you probably already knew for a long time, but it’s just the truth. I was naive. I stumbled into this commentary gig after years of focusing almost entirely on spirituality and inner work without paying much attention to what other people were doing. I have a journalism degree and I was a news junkie when I was younger, but then I fell down the rabbit hole of inner exploration and lost track of the outer world. It took me a while to get a read on things once I tuned back in.

It’s been a trip, man.

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Feature image via Trump White House (Public Domain).

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The single dumbest conspiracy theory in the entire world is that every major humanitarian institution on earth is conspiring to falsely frame Israel for the crime of genocide.

And yet believing this bat shit insane conspiracy theory is the only way to think it’s not a genocide. There is no other way to claim that there is no genocide happening in Gaza without treating this self-evidently ridiculous theory as true.

In order to believe that there is no genocide in Gaza, you need to accept it as a given that the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory is conspiring to frame Israel for this crime. 

You also need to believe that the International Association of Genocide Scholars is in on the conspiracy. 

You also need to believe the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem is in on the conspiracy. 

You also need to believe that Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, another Israeli organization, is in on the conspiracy.

You also need to believe that Amnesty International is in on the conspiracy.

You also need to believe that Doctors Without Borders are in on the conspiracy.

You also need to accept that Human Rights Watch are in on the conspiracy.

You also need to accept that the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights is in on the conspiracy.

You also need to accept that the International Federation for Human Rights is in on the conspiracy.

You also need to believe that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is in on the conspiracy.

You also need to believe the conspiracy is so widespread and pervasive that there exists not a single major human rights group which holds that Israel is NOT committing genocide in Gaza. You need to believe this conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

Toward what end are all these institutions conspiring to deceive the world into thinking that the innocent, virtuous state of Israel is guilty of these heinous crimes? Well, that’s where the “theory” part of conspiracy theory comes in. You need to have some reason why all these groups would be working together to trick everyone into thinking Israel is committing genocide. “Cui bono?”, as they say in conspiracy circles.

If you press the average Israel defender to explain why all these institutions would be lying about Israel’s actions in Gaza, you will eventually get them to admit that their theory is that all these institutions secretly hate Jews. That it’s a giant antisemitic conspiracy designed to discredit the Israeli state and make Jewish people feel sad.

I defy you to find me a dumber conspiracy theory than this. There’s nothing that can possibly compete. QAnon. Flat earth. Reptilians. They all seem fairly reasonable in comparison to this demented nonsense. They’re certainly a lot less harmful.

They’re a lot less harmful because they’re not being used to justify an ongoing genocide, and because they’re not being promoted by the most powerful people in the world. All the major western powers who’ve refused to acknowledge that we’re looking at a genocide in Gaza subscribe to the dumb conspiracy theory in question. All the mass media institutions who frame genocide as an unfounded accusation rather than an established fact verified by the overwhelming consensus of the world’s relevant experts necessarily subscribe to the world’s dumbest conspiracy theory as well.

It’s the dumbest conspiracy theory in the world, but it’s also the mainstream narrative. It’s what our governments and our media tell us is reality. They’re a bunch of tinfoil hat-wearing crackpots, and they rule the world.

The western empire is the craziest, most murderous, most deceitful, and most dangerous power structure on earth, and it is only getting more so. Which is why the narratives we’re being asked to believe are getting dumber and dumber by the year.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.