"The genocide in Gaza is not a freakish anomaly. It is a harbinger of what awaits us as the ecosystem disintegrates and governments embrace climate fascism" -Chris Hedges

Gaza does not mark the end of the settler colonial project. It marks, I fear, its final phase. Western states, enriched by their own occupations and genocides — in India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America — are returning to their roots as they face a global climate crisis and the obscene levels of social inequality that they engineer and sustain.

As the world breaks down, as the climate crisis drives millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people north, in a desperate search for survival, the genocide in Gaza, which Israel is slow walking until it can resume its usual murderous pace, will replay itself over and over and over until the fragile social and environmental networks that hold the global community together disintegrate.

The refusal to extract ourselves from fossil fuels, the steady saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), ensures soaring temperatures in which most life, including human life, will eventually be unsustainable. The global average concentration of CO2 surged by 3.5 parts per million, from June 2023 to June 2024, to reach an average of 422.8 parts per million, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. The following twelve months saw an even further increase of 2.6 parts per million of CO2. Violent conflicts, already exacerbated by extreme weather and water scarcity, will erupt across the globe with volcanic fury.

There is no mystery as to why the genocide is funded and sustained by Israel’s Western allies. There is no mystery as to why these states flout the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, the Arms Trade Treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and international humanitarian law. There is no mystery as to why the United States has given a staggering $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023 and has repeatedly blocked resolutions at the United Nations censoring Israel, in what the latest U.N report on Gaza calls an “internationally enabled crime.”

The U.S. accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s weapons imports. But it is not alone. The report names 63 countries that are complicit in “Israel’s genocidal machinery” in Gaza.

In the words of a report from the Quincy Institute and Costs of War project, published on Oct. 7 of this year, “[w]ithout U.S. money, weapons and political support, the Israeli military could not have committed such rapid, widespread destruction of human lives and infrastructure in Gaza, or escalated its warfare so easily to the regional level by bombing Syria, Lebanon, Qatar and Iran.”

There is no mystery as to why thousands of citizens from the U.S., Russia, France, Ukraine and the United Kingdom serve in the Israeli occupying forces and are not held accountable for their participation in genocide.

“Many States, primarily Western ones, have facilitated, legitimized and eventually normalized the genocidal campaign perpetrated by Israel,” the U.N. report, compiled by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, reads. “By portraying Palestinian civilians as ‘human shields’ and the broader onslaught in Gaza as a battle of civilization against barbarism, they have reproduced the Israeli distortions of international law and colonial tropes, seeking to justify their own complicity in genocide.”

According to the report, by September 2024, the U.S. had supplied Israel with “57,000 artillery shells, 36,000 rounds of cannon ammunition, 20,000 M4A1 rifles, 13,981 anti-tank missiles and 8,700 MK-82 500lb bombs. By April 2025, Israel had 751 active sales valued at $39.2 billion.

We will see this again. The same mass killing. The same demonization of the poor and the vulnerable. The same tropes about saving Western civilization from barbarism. The same callous indifference to human life. The same lies. The same billions of dollars in profits extracted by the war industry that will be used to suffocate not only those outside our gates, but those within them.

How will the wealthiest nations react when their coastal cities flood, their crop yields plummet and drought and floods displace millions internally? How will they replace dwindling resources? How will they cope with hundreds of millions of climate refugees pounding at their gates? How will they respond to social upheaval, declining living standards, crumbling infrastructure and societal breakdown?

They will do what Israel does.

They will use disproportionate violence to keep the desperate at bay. They will steal the fertile land, the aquifers and the rivers and lakes. They will seize by force the rare earth minerals, natural gas fields and oil. And they will kill anyone who gets in the way. Damn the United Nations. Damn the international courts. Damn international humanitarian law. The industrial states are cementing into place, as Christian Parenti writes, a “climate fascism,” a politics “based on exclusion, segregation and repression.”

“What we are seeing in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro argued at the COP28 U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2023.

The masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons deployed on our streets to terrorize undocumented workers will show up at our door. The concentration camps, now being built across the country, will have room for us. The law, twisted to persecute an array of fictional internal enemies, will criminalize dissent and freedom of expression. The billionaires and oligarchs will retreat into gated compounds, mini-Versailles, where they will feed their insatiable lusts for power, greed and hedonism.

In the end, the ruling billionaire class too will become victims, although they may be able to hold out a little longer than the rest of us. Industrial nations will not be saved by their border walls, internal security, expulsion of migrants, missiles, fighter jets, navies, mechanized units, drones, mercenaries, artificial intelligence, mass surveillance or satellites.

Before this final extinction takes place, however, huge segments of the human species, along with other species, will be consumed in an orgy of fire and blood. Gaza, unless there is a rapid reversal in how our societies are configured and ruled, is a window into the future. It is not a freakish anomaly. War will be the common denominator of human existence. The strong will take from the weak.

The destruction of civil society in Gaza is the template. Chaos is the objective. Subject populations are controlled by arming proxy militias and criminal gangs, as Israel has done in Gaza, along with its arming of rogue Jewish militias in the West Bank. They are controlled — as Israel has done — by banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East to block humanitarian aid. 

They are controlled — as Israel has also done by destroying hospitals, clinics, bakeries, housing, wastewater treatment plants, food distribution sites, schools, cultural centers and universities, along with assassinating its educated elite including over 278 Palestinian journalists. When life is reduced to subsistence level, when disease and malnutrition is endemic, resistance can be broken.

Language in this emerging dystopia bears no correlation to reality. It is absurdist. Israel, for example, has violated the current ceasefire agreement from its inception, but the fiction of a “ceasefire” is maintained. Israel apparently “has a right to defend itself” although it is the occupier and perpetrator of apartheid and genocide and the Palestinian resistance poses no existential threat.

The “Trump Plan,” supposedly formulated to end the genocide, offers no route to Palestinian self-determination, no mechanism to hold Israel accountable and proposes to hand Gaza over to updated versions of imperial viceroys, with Israel controlling the borders.

The struggle for Palestine is our struggle. The denial of freedom for Palestinians is the first step in the loss of our freedom. The terror that defines life in Gaza will become our terror. The genocide will become our genocide.

We must fight these battles while we still have a chance. The openings for resistance are closing with alarming speed. We must, through civil disobedience, shut down the machine. We must remake the world. This means removing the ruling global class. It means demolishing a society constructed around the mania for capitalist expansion. It means ending our reliance on fossil fuels. It means enforcing international law and dismantling Israel’s settler colonial and genocidal rule. If we do not succeed, Palestinians will be the first victims. But they won’t be the last.

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