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war & peace
War, Doublethink, and the Struggle for Survival: the Geopolitics of the Gaza Genocide
The slaughter in Gaza is carried out, financed, and defended by Israel and Western powers for domestic political reasons.
Apr 02, 2025
In a genocidal war that has spiraled into a struggle for political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and the global powers supporting him continue to sacrifice Palestinian lives for political gain.
The sordid career of Israel’s extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir epitomizes this tragic reality.
Ben-Gvir joined Netanyahu’s government coalition following the December 2022 elections. He remained in the coalition after the October 7, 2023 war and genocide, with the understanding that any cease-fire in Gaza would force his departure.
Though “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” as Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz once surmised, in Israel’s case, the “politics” behind the war is not about Israel as a state but about Netanyahu’s own political survival.
As long as the killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their cities continued, Ben-Gvir stayed on board—though neither he nor Netanyahu had any real “next-day” plan, other than to carry out some of the most heinous massacres against a civilian population in recent history.
On January 19, Ben-Gvir left the government immediately following a cease-fire agreement, which many argued would not last. Netanyahu’s untrustworthiness, along with the collapse of his government if the war ended completely, made the cease-fire unfeasible.
Ben-Gvir returned when the genocide resumed on March 18. “We are back, with all our might and power!” he wrote in a tweet on the day of his return.
Israel lacks a clear plan because it cannot defeat the Palestinians. While the Israeli army has inflicted suffering on the Palestinian people like no other force has against a civilian population in modern history, the war endures because the Palestinians refuse to surrender.
Yet, Israel’s military planners know that a military victory is no longer possible. Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon recently added his voice to the growing chorus, stating during an interview on March 15 that “revenge is not a war plan.”
The Americans, who supported Netanyahu’s violation of the cease-fire—thus resuming the killings—also understand that the war is almost entirely a political struggle, designed to keep figures like Ben-Gvir and extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in Netanyahu’s coalition.
Though “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” as Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz once surmised, in Israel’s case, the “politics” behind the war is not about Israel as a state but about Netanyahu’s own political survival. He is sacrificing Palestinian children to stay in power, while his extremist ministers do the same to expand their support among right-wing, religious, and ultra-nationalist constituencies.
This logic—that Israel’s war on Gaza reflects internal politics, ideological warfare, and class infighting—extends to other political players as well.
The Trump administration supports Israel as payback for the financial backing it received from Netanyahu’s supporters in the U.S. during the last elections. On the other hand, Britain remains steadfast in its commitment to Tel Aviv, despite the political shifts in Westminster, thus continuing to align with U.S.-Israeli interests while disregarding the wishes of its own population. Meanwhile, Germany, it’s said, is driven by the guilt of its past crimes, while other Western governments pay lip service to human rights, all the while acting in ways that contradict their stated foreign policies.
This mirrors the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984, where perpetual war is waged based on cynical and false assumptions, where “war is peace… freedom is slavery… and ignorance is strength.”
Indeed, these elements are reflected in today’s equally dystopian reality. However, Israel substitutes “peace” with “security,” the U.S. is motivated by dominance and “stability,” and Europe continues to speak of “democracy.”
Another key difference is that Palestinians do not belong to any of these “superstates.” They are treated as mere pawns, their deaths and enduring of injustice used to create the illusion of “conflict” and to justify the ongoing prolongation of the war.
The deaths of Palestinians—now numbering over 50,000—are widely reported by mainstream media outlets, yet rarely do they mention that this is not a war in the traditional sense, but a genocide, carried out, financed, and defended by Israel and Western powers for domestic political reasons. Palestinians continue to resist because it is their only option in the face of utter destruction and extermination.
Netanyahu’s war, however, is not sustainable in the Orwellian sense, either. For it to be sustainable, it would need infinite economic resources, which Israel, despite U.S. generosity, cannot afford. It would also need an endless supply of soldiers, but reports indicate that at least half of Israel’s reserves are not rejoining the army.
Furthermore, Netanyahu does not merely seek to sustain the war; he aims to expand it. This could shift regional and international dynamics in ways that neither Israeli leaders nor their allies fully understand.
Aware of this, Arab leaders met in Cairo on March 4 to propose an alternative to Netanyahu-Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza. However, they have yet to take meaningful action to hold Israel accountable if it continues to defy international and humanitarian laws—as it has since the Arab summit.
The Arab world must escalate beyond mere statements, or the Middle East may endure further war, all to prolong Netanyahu’s coalition of extremists a little longer.
As for the West, the crisis lies in its moral contradictions. The situation in Gaza embodies Orwell’s concept of “doublethink”—the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both. Western powers claim to support human rights while simultaneously backing genocide. Until this dilemma is resolved, the Middle East will continue to endure suffering for years to come.
The Real Outrage In Yemen Is US War Crimes
As Democrats decry the Trump Administration’s national security lapse, the United States is engaged in an actual killing campaign.
Mar 31, 2025
Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”
Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.
The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.
Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable cause...
The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”
President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.
In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.
As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”
On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.
According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets ... This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”
The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”
Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.
A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.
No One Wins When Nuclear-Armed States Believe That ‘We Can’t Lose’
Any conflict risks going nuclear if one of the belligerent parties choses to use their ultimate weapon rather than accept the possibility of defeat.
Mar 28, 2025
Nations engaged in wars with conventional weapons are not likely to hold back from using their most powerful weapons if they believe they are losing the war, and for too many countries in our world the most powerful weapons are nuclear. Countries committed to fighting a conventional war are also likely to be committed to the meme of “We Can’t Lose.”
A nuclear war could begin with the losing side in a conventional war making use of a small local tactical nuclear weapon to destroy the supply lines of its enemy. But once one side uses such a weapon the other side will feel that it too must engage with its most powerful weapons. Frustration is likely to set in when it appears that restricting such weapons to the immediate battlefield of the war is not sufficient to win. It might then be seen as necessary to destroy the enemy’s airfields and the power centers in its capital with longer range, more powerful nuclear weapons.
Just such a sequence of escalation in the use of nuclear weapons from tactical use in a local battlefield to strategic use in the destruction of an enemy’s cities was shown to be likely in a 1983 simulation described in a recent article by William Langewiesche in The New York Times Magazine. The simulation was large scale and involved much of the U.S. defense establishment. The simulation began with a conventional war between Russia and the West on the fields of Poland and East Germany. As it began to appear that the West was losing and the Netherlands was threatened, the West initiated the use of small tactical nuclear weapons that it fired onto the enemy’s supply lines in the local battlefield. Russia followed suit. Within a few days the airfields behind the frontlines from which the planes dropping the tactical weapons took off were struck with larger nuclear weapons. Finally, strategic weapons were used against the capitals of Western Europe and Russia.
One fears the near inevitability that one or more of the current wars in our world will end in nuclear war, the accompanying nuclear winter, and the possible end of human life on Earth.
The results surprised those who participated in the simulation. The conclusion was that a nuclear war cannot be controlled.
Our world has many local conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that involve nuclear powers. This is in addition to major geostrategic conflicts between the nuclear powers of U.S., Russia, and China. All of these conflicts have the potential of becoming nuclear.
Russia, for example, has warned the West that it will use a nuclear weapon in its war with Ukraine if it believes it is losing the current war with conventional weapons. Russia is thus telling the west that “we can’t lose.”
Israel has warned that it will exercise “The Samson Option” if it is in a war with its neighbors and believes it can no longer defend Israel with conventional weapons. The Samson Option involves the nuclear bombing of cities such as Damascus, Bagdad, or Cairo with nuclear weapons. More recently, Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Israel too is thus telling the world that “we cannot and will not lose.”
It is likely that the United States too believes that “we cannot lose.” If it is in a war with China using conventional weapons and China is gaining the upper hand then it is quite possible that the U.S., with its triad of nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and land-based missiles, would use these nuclear weapons. In fact, many in the U.S. defense establishment believe that a nuclear war with China can be fought and won by the U.S. Thus, the U.S. too believes that “we cannot lose.” Similar considerations by the U.S. would apply if it were losing a war with Russia.
Other states with nuclear weapons may also believe they cannot lose. North Korea has stated that it would not use nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike but would use its nuclear weapons if attacked, and recent events on the Korean peninsula suggest that war between the two Koreas is a real possibility. It also seems likely that if Pakistan or India were engaged in a conventional war and one side was losing, that that side would believe they could not lose and would initiate a nuclear exchange.
The likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons becomes still greater if other nations such as Japan, Brazil, Iran, or Saudi Arabia join the nuclear club in the interest of deterrence (no nuclear armed country has ever been invaded) and adopt the meme of “we cannot lose.”
All this makes one pessimistic. One fears the near inevitability that one or more of the current wars in our world will end in nuclear war, the accompanying nuclear winter, and the possible end of human life on Earth.
What can be done? It seems the only solution is the complete abolition of nuclear weapons as proposed in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that has now been signed by 93 non-nuclear states. Unfortunately, the nuclear states have not signed onto this treaty but should be encouraged to do so.
Skeptics will say that nuclear powers might sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons but would hold in secret a few nuclear weapons so as to be able to dominate their enemies in a conventional war. That may well happen, but the vast reduction of nuclear weapons that the treaty would require and the absence of nuclear fear it would bring with it would make the universal adoption of the treaty a self-perpetuating step toward the world we deserve and must have.
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