Nothing excuses the murder of innocent civilians. But if that is true for Hamas, it is also true for the IDF. The numbers of dead prior to Hamas’s violent incursion speak volumes. Palestinians who live in Gaza and in the West Bank have been systematically murdered by a state that is determined to cleanse its lands of Palestinians and build a nation only for the Jews. Who will stop Israel?

Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the UN reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.

If the diaspora really wants to take a shot at making things “normal” in Israel, it has two paths: to either fully back genocide or give up on Zionism and push Israel towards reconciliation and integration. I know it’s useless to type all this out. I don’t have much faith in the second option happening. My Zionist diaspora isn’t into it at all.

The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence.

As in Vietnam in 1968, the lessons are there to learn, if people are prepared to learn them. When history presents us with parallels, albeit imperfect ones, we need to pay heed. One thing is for sure: Israelis and their allies can no longer ignore Palestine, pretending that the brutal occupation can continue with impunity.

We often hear the refrain that Israeli politics is very complicated. It’s usually used as an excuse to stop conversation dead. But given the current turmoil among Israel’s Jewish population, it’s imperative to try to step back and simplify. The crisis now roiling the country is a dramatic moment in an ongoing and epoch-making demographic and political shift.

By allying with extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the country so far to the right that he appears to be causing tensions with Israel’s most powerful backers in the West. The recent article in Foreign Affairs shows how this tension is influencing the thinking of an element of the US foreign policy elite.

What do Faisal Bhaba, Desmond Cole, Linda Sarsour, Idris Elbakri and Fadi Ennab and countless others have in common? They are racialized people who have been special targets of pro-Israel lobby organizations in Canada because they spoke out on Palestinian rights. And these examples suggest how the defend-Israel-at-all-costs industry has a racism and Islamophobia problem.

The mask is being lifted from the face of Israel’s apartheid state, writes Chris Hedges. The brutal subjugation of Palestinians, justified by a toxic ideology of Jewish supremacy and racism, will only be halted by the kind of sanctions campaign mounted successfully against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Short of that, Israel will be a despotic theocracy.

Across Latin America, the state of Israel’s best friends are, almost without fail, the most reactionary right-wing elements of the ruling classes. This seems to contradict the tolerant brand that Israel has been attempting to cultivate as of late, which seeks to elevate Israel to the status of an enlightened and democratic outlier amidst an archipelago of authoritarians.