When genocide fails – Israel’s strategic folly in Gaza

Genocide is history’s darkest act, meant to erase a people and claim a future. For Israel, this logic has unravelled – not on the battlefield, but in the eyes of an awakened world.

Source: X.com – Red Line protest in Amsterdam, October 5, 2025

Genocides, from a moral vantage point, are the lowest form to which mankind can sink. The industrial method of mass slaughter speaks to the gross, inexplicable perversion of the human soul. But from a geopolitical perspective, where morality has little bearing on actions, genocides serve a distinct, albeit grotesque, purpose – erasure in order to establish long-term viability.

And in certain contexts, genocides have worked. In the face of a crumbling Ottoman empire, Turkish forces effectively erased centuries of rich Anatolian diversity – Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians – to create a near-homogenous Turkish nation-state.

Israel’s blunder, however, is that it has become beholden to its own military might. So drunk is it on its unrivalled material power, courtesy of its total subjugation of the US political class, that any capacity for strategic thought has been inhibited. Israel has failed to foresee the consequences of pursuing a genocide.

Far from erasing the Palestinians, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has turned Palestine into a global symbol against oppression.

Gaza genocide not a surprise

Anyone who has truly studied Zionism understands that genocide was par for the course. The Zionist quest to establish a Jewish-only, exclusive homeland in a historically heterogenous Arab region has never lost its focus nearly two centuries in the making. In a century of Zionist colonisation of Arab lands, it has exploited every opportunity to expand its reach. Within the Palestinian territories, Israel has consistently sought to create ‘facts on the ground’ by way of new Jewish settlements and apartheid measures to encourage Palestinians to leave, all the while providing a smokescreen of negotiating a ‘two-state solution’.

Israel, perhaps, could have continued on its course of gradual colonisation and it may have achieved its desired Greater Israel within a few decades, with the matter fading into the background of human consciousness. But that it chose to accelerate its intentions with a genocide has had the opposite effect, and may in fact spell the beginning of its own unravelling.

Two requirements need to be in place for a genocide to succeed. The first is the internal will – an extremism so pervasive and heightened that it eschews any sense of morality. The second are the external dynamics – conditions must be such that allow for such a seismic, violent alteration to demographics on a mass scale.

There’s no dispute that Israel possesses the first requirement. But its potential folly is in misreading the second. Both the Turks and Nazi Germany benefited from the conditions of global chaos during the First and Second World Wars respectively. Both also benefited from the technological status of their eras – there were barely cameras let alone smartphones livestreaming either genocide to every corner of the planet.

Certain conditions have indeed worked in Israel’s favour. With the help of the US, it has over the decades vanquished its primary threats in the region. Egypt was subdued with the 1978 Camp David Accords. Iraq, Syria and Libya are broken, and Iran is too distant to pose an existential threat.

It seemingly makes perfect sense for Israel to seize this moment – a time in history when it is the undisputed military power in the region, with the US firmly in its pocket, allowing an open pipeline of military hardware, advanced technology and financial backing to assert its regional dominance.

But while the regional conditions may be in its favour, the global conditions are not. In contrast to the Turks and Nazi Germany, Israel has pursued a genocide at a time of relative global stability, thus drawing the gaze of the entire world upon it.

It is not a threat from the Arab world that Israel faces. More troubling for Israel, it has unleashed a threat from within the very source of its existence: the west.

Growing anti-Israel mobilisation in the west

Two years into the genocide, there are no signs the protest movement in western cities is losing steam. More than 250,000 protesters turned out in Amsterdam this week, dressed in red. Italy, meanwhile, is facing a near-popular revolt that appears to be only gaining momentum.

Accompanying the protests is poll after poll showing growing public discontent with Israel. A New York Times poll last week showed a majority of American voters oppose sending additional military and economic aid to Israel. A Washington Post poll followed with results showing 61% of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. And a YouGov poll in Australia, published yesterday in Deepcut, revealed a majority of Australians back sanctions against Israel – including 46% of Coalition voters.

Anger with Israel is not just limited to the streets – the genocide has spawned a mobilisation of efforts firmly dedicated to ending western support for Israel. And the mobilisation is happening across professions.

Journalists disillusioned with mainstream media’s complicity in the genocide have branched off to create independent outlets – think Zeteo, Drop Site News, Novara Media and Ette Media. Healthcare workers have teamed up to advocate, fundraise and organise in support of Palestine. Lawyers are rallying to provide legal support within both international and domestic jurisdictions.

And political currents are shifting, as witnessed with Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York, the French left’s top finish in the 2024 legislative elections and the massive public support shown for a new left party in the UK. The currents are also shifting right with a sharp MAGA split over Israel between America First nationalists and pro-Israel hawks.

For decades, the pro-Israel establishment in the west succeeded in quashing any discussion on western support for Israel. That era is over. As is the framing of Israel as a ‘peaceful democracy’ surrounded by Arab ‘terrorists’. Instead, the genocide has brought forth a more accurate framing that is solidifying in the western conscience – that Israel is a violent settler colony built on an extreme, racial supremacist ideology rooted in outdated 19th century thinking; and that, more significantly, Israel represents a barbaric past of colonialism to which many in the west no longer wish to remain attached.