Half of Israelis support exterminating all Palestinians

This is genocidal mania, and without external intervention, Israel's extermination campaign cannot be stopped

Almost a half of Jewish Israelis support killing all Palestinians in Gazan cities captured by the so-called Israel Defence Forces.

That’s according to a new poll which has been conducted by blue-chip Israeli polling firm Geocartography - brought to my attention by historian Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill at LSE - and the findings overall are deeply disturbing, testament to the genocidal mania which defines Israeli society, and underlining how this genocide can only be stopped externally, not least through the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign and mass movements.

The poll results are published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The question asked is:

Do you support the claim that the IDF, in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, i.e., to kill all its inhabitants.

47% of all respondents said yes. Now you have to just bear into account - that’s just the people who were willing to say that. To actually openly admit that you want to kill all Palestinians in Gaza, including babies, toddlers, elderly people - well, that is quite something isn’t it? You would imagine that there is another cohort who also agree with this but don’t want to admit to it.

The polling also shows that 65% believe there is a current incarnation of Amalek. This is important, and we will come back to it, but as a quick summary: this refers to the biblical story of the nation of Amalek, who attacked the Israelites. God orders the Israelites in response to “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!” Of those 65% who believe there is a current incarnation of Amalek, 93% believe that the mitzvah - that is religious commandment - to erase the memory of Amalek is also relevant to the contemporary Amalek.

It gets so much worse. 82% of those surveyed expressed support for the forced deportation of the residents of Gaza. This itself, to be clear, is a genocidal act, as genocide scholars have said. When towards the beginning of the genocide I interviewed Omer Bartov - the Israeli-American professor of genocide and Holocaust studies at Brown University - he stated that ethnic cleansing becomes genocide because a people you wish to remove do not wish to go.

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - which Israel is signatory to, as is Britain, as is the United States - defines genocide as a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

This itself is unashamedly seeking to end the existence of the Palestinians of Gaza. That’s what an overwhelming number of Jewish Israeli society support.

It continues. 56% of Jewish Israelis support the forced deportation of Arab citizens of Israel. In other words, that refers to the 20% of Israeli society that are Palestinian - that’s the descendants of the small minority of Palestinians who were not driven from their homes in the Nakba, or catastrophe, in 1948.

That’s not referring to Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank but in Israel itself - who are, it should be noted, treated as third class citizens and from whose ranks has emerged no meaningful resistance to the Israeli state.

Here’s a really important point. These polls reflect of course where Israeli society is at. And that Israeli society includes the soldiers - that is those who have guns and missiles and bombs at their disposal.

Israel has a conscript army, and therefore its army is representative of Israeli society - so you’d expect half of Israeli soldiers at least to be openly committed to killing all Palestinians in Gaza, let alone those who secretly think this. In fact all the evidence we have about armies generally is that they are more likely to dehumanise the people subject to their occupation.

None of this should be a surprise. Before we discuss the incitement and intent in the statements of Israeli leaders and officials - polling has consistently shown the genocidal mania within Israeli society. In January 2024, 50.2% of Jewish Israelis thought “an appropriate use of force” was being used in Gaza. That force already by then had destroyed Gaza and butchered vast numbers of innocent people. That force meant apocalyptic conditions. But it gets soo much worse. Another 43.4% thought that Israel was using too little force. So they saw that Gaza was being wiped from the face of the earth, and they decided that wasn’t enough. Can you even imagine what more firepower would have involved? Presumably, in line with the polling I’ve read out, just immediate mass extermination.

In another poll on Israel’s Channel 13, when asked ‘Does Israel he to let in humanitarian aid to Gaza’, 53% of Israelis surveyed said no, and 34% said yes, with 13% settling on ‘don’t know’. Bear in mind again that 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinians who overwhelmingly have different views and will account for much of the 34%.

And let’s not pretend these sentiments just appeared in the aftermath of 7th October, because of misdirected trauma. In a poll conducted between October 2014 and May 2015, nearly half of Jewish Israels believed that Arabs - that is, the Palestinian citizens of Israel itself - should be expelled or transferred from Israel. 79% believed that Jews in Israel should be given preferential treatment - there is a word for, and it is apartheid.

61% believe that Israel was given by God to the Jewish people, a nonsense religious justification for land theft.

Here’s a really important point. These poll results have nothing to do with the respondents being Jewish. Indeed there are around as many Jews in the US as there are in Israel. As long ago as a year ago, around a third of Jewish Americans thought Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. That rose to nearly 4 in 10 Jewish Americans under 44.

This is about the dynamics of settler colonialism, which are in no way unique to Israel, but which has had genocidal implications in the Americas, in Africa, and so on. It’s very straightforward. In settler colonialism, you have to justify stealing the land of others, and you do it through dehumanisation. You cannot believe that your victims are people like you, otherwise your emotional faculties - unless you are sociopathic - would stop you from accepting such an injustice. You have to justify it by saying - these people are backward, inferior, indeed, not really human. And when your victims inevitably resort to various forms of violence, you then respond by presenting that as evidence that they pose an existential threat to you - that they are inherent barbarians, even though you are the ones doing the violence of stealing their land and expelling them with all the physical violence that involves.

From the very beginning, Israeli leaders tapped into, exploited, inflamed, justified the genocidal sentiments we can all see exist in Israeli society.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at the beginning: “It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved—it's not true. They could've risen up, fought against that evil regime.”

Defence minister Yoav Gallant declared Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Israeli general Ghassan Alian declared: “Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating instead of being horrified. Human animals are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

Netanyahu said, both in an address to the Israeli people and then directly to the Israeli soldiers: "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible". He was referring to that biblical story where God ordered the Israelites to murder every last Amalekite, men, women, children and livestock - and as the polling shows, two thirds of Israeli society see the Palestinians as Amalek.

Yair Golan, the opposition leader who has backed Israel’s onslaught and never previously objected to the treatment of the Palestinians during this horror and indeed fantasised about the disappearance of all Palestinians, declared that the Israeli Defence Forces was “killing babies as a hobby”

This genocidal incitement and intent has been relentless. Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, declared that Israel must separate women and children en masse and then execute all men in Gaza. This is exactly what the Bosnian Serb army did at Srebrenica in 1995, which was judged to be genocide.,

Note that it is illegal under the Genocide Convention and indeed Israeli law to publicly incite genocide, and the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to take legal action against the public incitement of genocide - with no action taken.

History will look back at all this and swiftly conclude: of course this was always genocide. History will ask: how can everyone not have heard and read the genocidal intent from day one, based alone on what Israeli leaders and officials publicly said? And history will be repulsed that the question of genocide could even have been debated. And do you know what. History will be right.

We have watched our political and media elites facilitate a genocide. A genocide that has been livestreamed for 19 months. A genocide in which the perpetators have boasted to the world over and over again about their genocidal intent, with no subtlety.

A genocide in which every possible crime has been committed - the mass slaughter of civilians - babies, toddlers, children, men, women, the elderly, the infirm; the butchery of medics, journalists, aid workers; the mass destruction of all civilian infrastructure - homes, hospitals, schools, libraries, universities, mosques churches; repeated violent displacement; deliberate starvation; the destruction of agriculture, livestock, food production; a siege on all the other essentials of life, like medicine and fuel; mass incarceration of innocent civilians; every possible form of torture - and yes over and over again rape, including Palestinians literally raped to death.

There is no coming back from this. How can you possibly argue that a political elite and a media elite which has systematically lied about such a monumental crime, which has whitewashed it, which has airbrushed the truth, ignored atrocities, dehumanised the victims and not even bothered to pretend their lives have any meaning, which has repeatedly regurgitated the lies of the perpetrators and deferred to their claims, and which has demonised and defamed and monstered anyone speaking about that horror - how can you possibly claim that political and media elite has any legitimacy ever again?

They don’t. And we have to act accordingly. In time, we have to sweep those elites away - and that includes politicians going to jail, and that includes journalists who are complicit in genocide having their careers ended.

We can see now as the enormity of the crime becomes impossible to ignore - when it is much much too late - Western politicians and media outlets suddenly expressing horror and disgust at what is happening. And farcically Netanyahu now denounces British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron for “emboldening Hamas” - even as for example the UK government continues to arm genocide, all because of meaningless words and empty gestures.

The truth is no genocide has been so confessed to as it happened, so documented as it happened. It was obvious from the start that this would be one of history’s great crimes. And unless we want to normalise this crime and pave the way for humanity to be overwhelmed with violent barbarism, then we have to make sure that all of those who are complicit face accountability.