Our Wednesday News Analysis | It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth

Confusingly, Trump seems to grasp some of this.
On Tuesday, he said Hamas “took out a couple of gangs that were very bad…

They killed several gang members.

That didn’t bother me much, to be honest. That’s okay.”

What then does Trump imagine will happen if Hamas lays down its arms,
as he and Israel have insisted they do?
Will these “very bad gangs” not re-emerge?

Ceasefires stick because the two sides in a war have reached military stalemate – or because the incentives for each side in laying down their arms outweigh those of continuing the bloodshed.

None of this applies in Gaza.

The past two years in the enclave have been many things. But the one thing they have not been is a war, whatever Western politicians and media wish us to believe.

Which means the current narrative of a “ceasefire” is as much a lie as the preceding narrative of a “Gaza war”.

The ceasefire is not “fragile”, as we keep being told. It is non-existent, as evidenced by Israel’s continual violations – from its soldiers continuing to shoot dead Palestinian civilians to it blocking promised aid.

So what is really going on?

To understand the “ceasefire” and US President Donald Trump’s even more deluded 20-point “peace plan“, we first need to make sense of what the earlier “war” rhetoric was used to conceal.

Over the past 24 months, we witnessed something deeply sinister...

Read more: It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth

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FROM REFUGE TO RUIN: HOW ZIONISM BETRAYED ITS PALESTINIAN GUARDIANS

Source: CounterCurrents
https://countercurrents.org/2025/10/from-refuge-to-ruin-how-zionism-betrayed-its-palestinian-guardians/

By Asif Hussain
Published October 26, 2025

What makes the present tragedy unbearable is the inversion of moral history. The descendants of a people who once knew the agony of ghettos, the horror of exile, and the pain of statelessness are today inflicting the same suffering upon another people. The very guardians who gave them refuge in their darkest hour — the Arabs and Muslims — are now branded as their enemies.

To call this a conflict is to distort the truth. Conflicts imply parity. Palestine has no army, no navy, no air force. It has only its memory, its resilience, and its right to exist. Zionism, on the other hand, wields nuclear weapons, Western support, and a narrative of eternal victimhood that has long outlived its moral claim.

This is not a struggle between two faiths but between colonizer and colonized; between an expansionist ideology and an indigenous people fighting for survival. Zionism hijacked the Jewish tragedy and repurposed it as a license to dispossess another nation.

The oppressor in the Palestine–Israel story is not the native Palestinians, but the Zionist movement that turned the compassion of its former hosts into a colonial conquest.

History bears witness to ironies that shake humanity's moral foundations. Few, however, are as profound as the story of the Jewish people who, having endured centuries of persecution in Europe, found refuge and dignity in the Muslim world — only for a section among them, under the banner of Zionism, to turn their guns against the very people who had once sheltered them. What we witness today in Gaza and the occupied territories is not a conflict between equals, nor a religious war, but a colonial conquest — one in which the oppressor is unmistakably the Zionist project that has, in less than a century, through genocide, pushed Palestine to the brink of annihilation.

For centuries, Jews faced unspeakable atrocities across Europe — expulsions, forced conversions, and systematic massacres. The Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews, was the horrific culmination of Europe’s own anti-Semitic legacy. Yet, when Europe turned its back on them, it was not Christian Europe but the Muslim world that offered safety, compassion, and coexistence...

Read more: From Refuge to Ruin: How Zionism Betrayed Its Palestinian Guardians

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CURRENT SECTION ISRAEL NEWS IN THE RUSH TO MOVE ON, WHO WILL MAKE ISRAEL FACE ITS MORAL FAILURES?

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-10-18/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/in-the-rush-to-move-on-who-will-make-israel-face-its-moral-failures/00000199-f5ee-dfc6-a3bf-f5eeb7010000

By Eran Rolnik
Published October 18, 2025

Israeli society is prepared to process the failures of Oct. 7 in technical terms – military intel, army, logistics – but refuses to confront its own moral blindness. This is where the 'other Israel' must step in

An IDF helicopter is bringing a hostage home on Monday. Once the goal of returning hostages was achieved, the "other Israel," like postwar "good Germans," risks becoming a voyeuristic elite, unable to convert moral consciousness to political action. Credit: Itai Ron

At present, "the other Israel" is like a conscience with no power: a community of the educated, of therapists, teachers, physicians, and people of culture and science who speak of healing and hope – but it cannot yet offer a new political language other than repeating
"Bring them all home – now" for the return of hostages.

Once the goal of returning the hostages has been achieved, the "other Israel," like the postwar "good Germans," risks becoming a voyeuristic elite, aware of the disaster but unable to articulate its causes or to convert moral consciousness into political action.

"The other Germany" is a phrase that entered public discourse in Israel in the early 1950s, during debates over the reparations agreements with the postwar German government. Its origins, though, go back much farther. A small newspaper in 1920s Berlin bore that very name, seeking to frame post-World War I Germany as a moral, pacifist country that was aware of its historical responsibility.

The newspaper was shut down after Hitler's ascension to power, but the term "the other Germany" remained cultural currency: an expression of the possibility of a different Germany – national but not nationalistic, capable of grieving over its decisions and of looking squarely at its face in the mirror of history. In the midst of World War II, in a recorded speech aired on the radio from his place of exile in California, Thomas Mann prepared his compatriots for the idea that "the other Germany" could rebuild itself – not out of pride but out of shame.

In psychoanalytical terms, the need to speak of an "other Germany" was a response to the catastrophic losses it caused during the war. In "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud distinguished between mourning – the process of separating from a lost object and its idealization – and melancholia, in which the lost object loses its reality but remains imprisoned within the psyche, paralyzing its capacity to grow and develop.

German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich later described postwar German society as suffering from "the inability to mourn," a community that recognized its military defeat but not the depth of its emotional and ideal investment in the murderous father. The state sought to forget what it had wrought too quickly. Out of that selective amnesia emerged a culture that spoke of "reconstruction" and "normalization" instead of responsibility and guilt...

Read more: Current section Israel News In the Rush to Move On, Who Will Make Israel Face Its Moral Failures?