Our Wednesday News Analysis | From the Age of Catastrophe to the Age of Hope: Why a Free Palestine Matters to the World

"Zionism exported to Palestine the age of catastrophe, disrupting a very different trajectory unravelling in Palestine at that very age." Ilan Pappé. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, EuroMed Monitor. Design: Palestine Chronicle)

“If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness (585).”

“Zionism is not the same as Nazism. It did not have an exterminationist intention at its core, though, as we shall see, Zionism has been, and is, capable of genocidal outbursts. But Zionism is rooted in the traditions of European imperialism.

That truth alone is sufficient to serve urgent warnings
about the implications of Zionism’s ruthless colonial ambitions in Palestine.”

This piece is written on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My parents, German Jews, lost members of their families in that terrible chapter of Nazi genocide. From that position, I found Tony Blair’s initiative in launching this date a cunning and dishonest approach to endorsing the Zionist manipulation of Holocaust memorialization.

But interestingly, in Israel, there is very little reference to this day, apart from repeating the allegation that opposing the genocide of the Palestinians is a new form of antisemitism.

Israel prefers a day of remembrance that it controls exclusively, and which conveys the twin messages that Zionism is the only guarantee against another Holocaust, and that the Palestinians and their allies are the new Nazis threatening Western civilization. Moreover, Israel refuses to universalize the Holocaust, claiming it cannot be compared to genocides that preceded it and those that followed it.

Today, however, anti-Zionist Jews all over the world offer an alternative Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust. They remember all genocides and boldly point to a much wider context in which mass killings of any group in modern history should be discussed. They insist that all genocides should be analyzed as equally crucial for better understanding the human-made catastrophes that plagued the world, ironically, in the age of enlightenment, modernization, and progress—the age we are still living in...

Read more: From the Age of Catastrophe to the Age of Hope: Why a Free Palestine Matters to the World

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Like a Gambler Who Lost His Fortune, Israel Wants Another War

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-02-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-wants-another-war/0000019c-15d1-d473-abfe-55fb68a20000

By Gideon Levy
Published February 1, 2026

Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Saturday. Credit: Stringer/Reuters

Embedded in an Associated Press report on Saturday's killings in Gaza was an advertisement in Hebrew: "This winter's hit – a whirlpool bath, imported from the United States. A Jacuzzi and fitness in your backyard." Israel 2026.

There was a dead horse at the site of Saturday's Israeli airstrike on Al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza. The sight was heartbreaking; its brown body was gaunt, and the bombing certainly put an end to its suffering, the suffering of a starving horse that had been put to hard labor in the Strip. When human beings groan, their beasts of burden groan even more. All around, plumes of smoke rose from the scraps of the tents where tens of thousands of miserable displaced people had found a refuge that turned out to be false. In vain, they had believed in the cease-fire; in vain, they thought they were in a safe area. On both counts, Israel deceived them.

The images from Gaza were horrific, as always: the mangled body of a woman being carried on a stretcher; a baby with a disfigured face being ventilated manually, likely in vain; bodies strewn on the ground and terrible crying in the background: a woman screaming in anguish at a corpse wrapped in a cheap, fuzzy blanket.

Already before first light Saturday, seven members of a family were killed in Muwasi, all of them terrorist infrastructure. The death toll later reached 31, including at least six children. It was one of the deadliest days of bombing since the cease-fire went into effect. Israel has killed 509 people in Gaza since the October 10 start of the cease-fire, according to the Palestinian health ministry there, which Israel now believes, officially, and this bloodbath is still not enough for it.

Neither Saturday's strikes themselves nor their timing were accidental. Israel claimed they were in response to Hamas' violation of the cease-fire. It takes extraordinary chutzpah to complain about Hamas violating the cease-fire after killing more than 500 Palestinians in Gaza and thinking that additional unrestrained killing of civilians is legitimate after a few gunmen emerged from a tunnel, but it's impossible to ignore the proximity between Saturday's killings and Sunday's planned reopening of the Rafah crossing...

Read more: Like a Gambler Who Lost His Fortune, Israel Wants Another War

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THE NEXT STAGE OF THE GAZA GENOCIDE HAS BEGUN

Source: Al-Jazeera

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/2/2/the-next-stage-of-the-gaza-genocide-has-begun

By Ghada Ageel
Published February 2, 2026

Recent remarks by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo herald the next phase of Israel’s genocidal project: erasure.

A woman holding the hand of a young boy looks towards destroyed buildings at the Nuseirat camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on January 31, 2026 [AFP]

The Palestinian people, and millions in solidarity around the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the living martyr Jamal, each of us will take the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.

Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralysed. He experiences constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them, nor can his mother. To keep the spasms under control, a drug called baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscles and stops the shaking. Suddenly halting the use of baclofen can have serious health consequences.

Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the family’s tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza a week ago. It was her son’s seventh day without the medicine. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs leave him screaming out in pain.

Baclofen is unavailable anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.

Jamal now endures dozens of spasms each day. There is no alternative medication or substitute. There is no relief, only pain.

Jamal’s story is not to be told if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their way...

Read more: The next stage of the Gaza genocide has begun