The unintended consequence of Israel’s collective punishment of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, the Nazi Holocaust, and the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza, will forever be linked in the same sentence.

This was not what Netanyahu intended as his political legacy, or more immediately, his ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card.

Whatever the future holds for the people of Palestine and Israel, the myth of the idyllic Jewish Promised Land has been exposed and shattered, and along with it, the simplistic but effective propagandist lie that to oppose the fanaticism of Zionism is to be anti-Semitic.

That’s a claim that should have never had any more credibility than claiming opposition to the British National Front is to be anti-English or anti-British, or that challenging Trump’s MAGA policy was anti-American.

Those who have set the existence and activities of Hamas within the context of how Israel was created, and its internationally criticised illegal State actions during and since 1948, have been castigated as “apologists for terrorism”, as if what State power calls ‘terrorism’ was fundamentally different from that which governments across the world, and their armed civilian militias, daily inflict on those within their reach whom they determine to be the enemy – the second-class citizen, the refugee, the dissident, the different, the ‘others’.

This terror, inflicted by governments and their armies with the lion’s share of power and weaponry, resources and information outlets – therefore with more opportunities for better alternatives than war – is considered as normal government business, necessitated by the existence of those it seeks to silence or destroy.

The millions of victims of this global brand of ‘legitimised terror’ have insult heaped upon injury – they are demonised as they are destroyed, as a silent world watches in acquiescence on the basis that those so despised “must be wicked to deserve such pain”.

Once people have been seduced into this mantra, the pathway is set, and it ends where holocaust and genocide are considered acceptable collective punishment for those who will not of their own free will consent to being defined as something less than human, without inalienable rights, and submit to their fate as ‘the unchosen’ whose existence will always be viewed as a threat in itself.

Individual human beings who sleep well at night are thus enabled to watch dispassionately while other humans are incarcerated in prisons, torn to pieces in carpet bombing, starved to death, suffocated and poisoned in gas chambers or left drowning in oceans, their only escape from wars not of their making, and yet others can cheer on the insanity as if it war was a video game or a spectator sport like gladiators in the colosseum.

Globally, State-based terrorism has, since the invention of Nation States, been on a scale to which armed insurrectionists can never even aspire.

Lest we forget: The Ten Commandments allegedly given to Moses on Mount Sinai – including the one that read ‘Thou shall not kill’ – contained no exemptions for governments.

And also lest we forget: The reality of anti-Semitism, which is a very different thing from anti- Zionism, resulted in the death of 12 million people, and the perpetrator was a government.

Six million Jewish people were sent to their death between 1933 and 1945, almost half of whom – men, women and children – were industrially exterminated in killing centres such as Auschwitz.

Some two million people were murdered in mass shootings by the German State, and State agents occupied Eastern Europe in retaliation for resistance (being terrorists?), or simply on discovery of their continued existence.

A further million people died of deprivation, disease, brutal treatment, and arbitrary acts of violence, both within concentration camps and as a result of individual/collective citizen acts of anti-Semitic pogroms.

How could any Jewish person, to whose people this happened, support what is happening in Gaza?

The truth is that many don’t.

Jews all across the world are organising for peace, and are calling on Israel to stop, even before this latest war.

Only Zionists support Israel’s policy on Palestine, and a great many Zionists, like Joe Biden, are not Jews.

The remaining 6,000,000 victims of Nazi Germany (50 per cent) were not Jewish, but that does not diminish the anti-Semitic essence of the Holocaust.

Lest we forget: More than half of the non-Jewish victims were Russian prisoners of war, 3.3 million of them singled out for death because the Fascist State hated Communism as its ideological nemesis.

Hitler intended to colonise Poland with loyal Germans, and some 1.8 million Jewish Polish citizens were shot in the immediate wake of invasion, in case they might think of resisting.

Most died in Auschwitz and concentration camps within Germany.

Also lest we forget: Hundreds of thousands of brave Germans who opposed Hitler from long before the 1939-45 war were also counted in the second six million.

Those non-Jews who perished and counted for as little in death as in life included a conservative estimate of half a million Romani and Gypsy people, tens of thousands of gays and lesbians.

People with disabilities, and people of colour, also perished in largely unknown numbers.

Fast forward to 2023 as the power of the internet makes the whole world a spectator in the slaughter of the innocents of Gaza, as Netanyahu – on behalf of a Zionist Supremacist State – seeks to finally erase Palestine from the map of the world.

Nothing that Hamas has done, or has within its power to do by way of atrocity, including war crimes, can compare with the insane inhumanity being visited upon Gaza by the State of Israel.

120 Sovereign Nations are accused by Israel of supporting terrorism and hating Jews; Israel’s ambassadors insult and abuse our elected leaders; Israel insults and abuses the integrity and authority of the UN, whose refugee workers in the field it harries, and kills.

If this is not terror and intimidation on a global scale, what is?

Lest we forget: This rogue government has nuclear weapons!

Ultimately, Israel will be abandoned by its powerful allies which, to save their own reputations and avoid prosecution, will leave Netanyahu and his generals to stand alone before the International Criminal Court, where they will be found guilty of Crimes Against Humanity.

If not, we are all pawns in deliberate USA/Israeli brinkmanship counting on no country other than themselves wanting a third world war, and those who can find no tears for the people of Gaza will have cause, before too long, to weep for themselves and for their own children.

That war will come. It will not be won by the old Imperialists of the Western World.