Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power—in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism—are erased. There is to be no shared reality.

This Via Dolorosa leads to a global death spiral, especially as the climate crisis reconfigures the planet and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, become hollow appendages. We are sowing the Middle East with dragon’s teeth and, as in the ancient Greek myth, these teeth are rising from the soil as enraged warriors determined to destroy us.

The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.

Israel’s settler colonial project is protean. It changes its shape but not its essence. It grinds forward with its deadly, perverted, racist logic. And yet, the Palestinians endure, refusing to submit, resisting despite the overwhelming odds, grasping at tiny kernels of hope from bottomless wells of despair. There is a word for this. Heroic.

The corporate state must be destroyed if we are to restore our open society and save our planet. Its security apparatus must be dismantled. The mandarins who manage corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt media, must be driven from the temples of power.

We may feel insignificant in Israel, but here, in Gaza, we are King Kong, a little tyrant on a little throne. We stride through the rubble of Gaza, surrounded by the might of industrial weapons, able to pulverize in an instant whole apartment blocks and neighborhoods, and say, like Vishnu, “now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against Indigenous peoples. Slavery. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes. History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump: the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, and the Democratic Party. Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches.

Julian Assange’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

It is clear from the ICJ’s ruling that it is fully aware of the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. This makes the decision not to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza all the more distressing. But the court did deliver a devastating blow to the mystique Israel has used since its founding: it made the word genocide, when applied to Israel, credible.