Our Wednesday News Analysis | "Gazafication"

Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Beirut, Lebanon, Friday 6 March 2026. Photo credit; Hussein Malla

One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.

Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.

What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.

The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.

It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.

What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action...

Read more: "Gazafication"

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THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION IS STILL THE CORE OF THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT

Source: Zeteo
https://zeteo.com/p/palestinian-israeli-conflict-middle-east-solution-ayman-odeh

By Ayman Odeh
Published March 29, 2026

Read Palestinian Knesset Member Ayman Odeh’s poignant essay for Zeteo, breaking down what’s at the center of the repeated eruptions of violence in the region, and what must be done to end the cycle.

Palestinians rally on Land Day on March 30, 2018, in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus. Photo by Nedal Eshtayah/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

At the start of every parliamentary session, Benjamin Netanyahu would give his customary speech. He would parade his achievements, while his servants in parliament rose to applaud him at every pause, and he would ignore his failures. But there was always one topic he reserved for after a long, deliberate pause – his way of signaling its importance. By now, we knew exactly what was coming.

He would smile and declare with confidence something along the lines of: ‘They used to say the Palestinian issue is the root of the conflict. But the real root is the refusal to recognize Israel. The Abraham Accords show that peace with the Palestinians does not guarantee peace with the Arab world.’ He would add, ‘The true challenge is achieving peace between Israel and the Arab states.’

We knew this argument contradicted both reality and reason. Yet, in recent years, the Palestinian issue has been at a difficult turning point. Several Arab states were normalizing relations with Israel, one after another, with strong encouragement from Donald Trump. At the time, we warned clearly that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians would not end unless it became truly costly for Israel.

Now, everyone understands that the occupation has indeed become unbearably costly.

The latest war began in Gaza, and after two and a half years of staggering loss – both in lives and resources – its consequences have rippled across the entire region...

Read more: The Palestinian Question Is Still the Core of the Middle East Conflict

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GREEN AND YELLOW: TWO LINES THAT SEPARATE ME FROM MY LAND

Source: Al-Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/3/30/green-and-yellow-two-lines-that-separate-me-from-my-land

By Refaat Ibrahim
Published March 30, 2026

Israel can draw as many lines as it wants, but we will not give up the right to our land.

A photo of the author's neighbourhood in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, taken on April 28, 2024 [Courtesy of Refaat Ibrahim]

It is Land Day today in Palestine, a day when we commemorate our special bond with the Palestinian land. And I cannot help but think about my grandfather, his dispossession, and the repetition of that trauma in my own life.

My grandfather, Hamdan, was 12 years old when Zionist forces began the campaign of ethnic cleansing that we now call the Nakba. He lived with his family in the village of al-Faluja. They were peasants who got by working their land, raising farm animals, and selling their seasonal crops at local markets.

Starting in early 1948, al-Faluja came under attack from Zionist militias. It was a strategic target due to its location at the centre of a network of roads leading north to Jerusalem and Jaffa and south to Gaza. As the brutal Zionist assaults intensified, my grandfather fled with his family to nearby villages.

They did not take anything with them, thinking they would return soon. The only thing they carried was the key to the door of their home. An Egyptian brigade held on to al-Faluja, besieged by Zionist forces well into 1949. The armistice between Egypt and the newly established Israel forced them to abandon their positions.

The Green Line was drawn, leaving 78 percent of historic Palestine in Zionist control and cutting off my grandfather from his ancestral village for the rest of his life.

It is in the nature of colonisers to fear anything that reminds them of the land’s rightful owners, because it exposes the fact that they have taken what does not belong to them. Israeli militias therefore set out to destroy what remained of al-Faluja, along with other Palestinian villages, and in the 1950s established several settlements on its land, including Kiryat Gat, Shahar and Nir Hen...

Read more: Green and Yellow: Two lines that separate me from my land