How we must end this genocide :: after 538 days we must consider doing what we've never done before

I have a few things I have to say, and I want to admit to you publicly, that because of the current conditions of the United States, saying so may have great consequences to me personally.

(Friends - I did not edit this for typos so please forgive any shortcomings. Otherwise, I mean every single word I say here. Also, please note, comments are OPEN TO ALL.)

As-Salaam-Alaikum (Peace be unto you) Sisters and Brothers,

I have a few things I have to say, and I want to admit to you publicly, that because of the current conditions of the United States, saying so may have great consequences to me personally.

But it must be said.

This genocide has been going on for 538 days. I can hardly believe it’s gone on this long. It makes me nauseous to even write that - 538 days.

It's evil. It's pure unadulterated evil. On our watch. In our lifetime. And for most of us, with our tax money. I wonder daily if I will have to answer to Allah for funding this genocide with my taxes. What I don’t wonder about is whether or not we will all one day be held to account by Allah for the cowardice of our inaction.

If social media was going to end this genocide it would've ended it 530 days ago. We’ve won the social media war - and we must continue to do so. It's important, but it's not enough. Trust me, I thought our momentum online, which has no doubt changed how the entire world sees Palestine, would actually stop the genocide itself. It hasn’t.

If documenting and filming every single gory detail of this genocide was enough to end it, the genocide wouldn’t have lasted a month. It’s far and away the most documented genocide in the history of the world. Please keep documenting it, but just know it’s not enough. It should be. On any given day we see enough carnage that should be enough to stop this madness, but it’s not enough.

If marches and protests could end this genocide, our marches in 2023 and our marches in 2024 would've ended it, but we're in our 3rd calendar year of this genocide. Keep marching. Keep protesting. But just know that marching won't end this thing. They are willing to endure our marches. They don’t like our protests, but they are willing endure them to achieve their genocidal goals. Keep marching, but do so knowing that we must also do what we’ve never done before to get new results we’ve never gotten.

If international courts and governing bodies could end this genocide, rulings and criminal charges from the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice would have done that. Because the ICC has NEVER held Israel accountable, millions of us thought that if they finally did, it would be so shocking to the world that it would help end the genocide. That did not happen. The leaders of Israel have criminal charges against them for this genocide but they don't care and neither do their allies. In fact, yesterday the State of Israel passed laws stating that no international laws apply to them.

SO WHERE DO WE GO AND WHAT DO WE DO?

I want to admit to you that I incorrectly thought that a combination of those 4 angles - social media, documentation, marches/protests, and international courts would likely end this genocide. Me and most of my closest friends, many who are the most renowned experts in the world on these topics, all thought these 4 angles combined would end it - and we honestly thought it would end it in perhaps a few months. It clearly didn’t. It’s been 18 months now.

And listen to me: it’s not because we did anything wrong - we were right to do ALL of the things we’ve done. It’s that we aren’t taking the exact actions that historically, and even recently, have ended genocides.

Now listen to what I am about to say next very carefully. PRAY. Yes, pray. Muslims, pray your obligatory prayers. Prayer your Sunnah prayers. Fast and pray. Pray in the middle of the night. Yesterday I literally prayed more in one day than I’ve ever prayed in my life. 5 days after my spinal surgery, with the hospital bandages still on my neck, I prayed deep into the night at the masjid. I cried and prayed and begged Allah to show us a way to end this genocide.

But I need us to understand that BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of prayers have been made for Gaza. Don't stop praying them, but is it our expectation that once we hit a TRILLION prayers for Gaza, which we may have already done, that Allah will then swoop down and end this genocide? That’s not how this works. It’s not how Islam works. And you know it. I know it.

Please, pray more, but we must pray AND do what we’ve never done before.

The only way this genocide will end, and end for good, are two ways:

1. Everybody (or nearly everybody) in Gaza is killed or forced out. This is how many genocides end. And I need you to accept something very painful. THIS IS THE CURRENT TRACK WE ARE ON. The people are starving to death, being bombed to death, shot to death, droned to death, blown to bits by tanks, dying of basic illnesses and injuries that are all imminently treatable. The single lowest number of Palestinians killed so far is over 50,000. We have the names and the bodies have been identified. Experts believe far more than that are just trapped under the rubble. Some of the smartest data scientists and genocide scholars believe the number of victims is over 200,000. I saw one very thorough estimate six months ago that suggested the number of Palestinians killed is closer to 300,000. What are we waiting on? Who are we waiting on?

or

2. Physical intervention.

I won’t mince words here. We’ve all been SO careful with our words, out of fear more than anything else, that we have failed to say the very hard things that we must say. Now we see sisters and brothers here in the United States being arrested and deported for simply calling for an end to this genocide. What the American government, particularly the Trump administration, wants is to SHUT US UP. And I think it’s working, actually. Students across the country are telling me that their parents are BEGGING THEM to be quiet, BEGGING THEM to stop protesting. And the students are telling me that they are afraid. And of course they are. Their peers are being snatched off of the streets and sent to prison in rural Louisiana. This terrifies people.

So what are we going to do? Are we going to shrink? Are we going to cower? Are we going to hide? Are we going to disappear?

Yesterday Israel passed a law stating that ZERO international laws on humanitarian issues apply to them. They’ve always been a deeply unaccountable nation, but now they made their lack of accountability official. It’s law. It’s code. They should, as a result, be immediately put out of the United Nations. Not that that would matter, but Israel and the United States have all but rendered the UN toothless, powerless, and unable to fulfill its most basic mandates. The UN should leave the United States and change the policies that allow one single nation to effectively cripple the entire organization. It is a failed org at this point.

See that headline? That’s from the leading news outlet in Israel!

This past week Israel and the United States have killed more Palestinians, and more Palestinian children, than any other week of the genocide. One day this past week they killed more children than any day in the history of their country. It was a massacre. And it was actually reported by Israeli media. It’s GETTING WORSE.

15 Action Steps to Stop The Genocide of Gaza and the West Bank

Below I am going to list 15 action steps that I think have to happen to actually end this genocide permanently. These steps are not a plan. I am a strategic planner. A plan is way more robust than what I am about to say, but this is a summarized start, in a bit of an order, for what could give us the best chance at stopping this genocide.

I decided to start at point #1 on purpose. Israel has been given a peculiar permission to inflict evil upon their neighbors that is seemingly centered in misplaced compassion around the evils of the Holocaust. As a boy, I was actually as inspired to fight against evil because of what I learned about the Holocaust as I was about what I learned about Jim Crow racism in the American South. I cannot overstate how much learning of the Holocaust shaped how I saw the possibilities of evil on this planet. I mentioned this at length in my last book, which was printed five years ago, when many Jewish Americans still celebrated me for regularly speaking out against the bigotry they experienced. (Here is a literal Neo-Nazi I helped send to prison.)

1. A strong new answer to the loaded question of “Does Israel have the right to exist?” must be immediately formulated and understood by all of us who oppose this genocide. In November of 2023, Charles Blow of the New York Times reached out to me for an interview about Gaza. One of his first questions, as is often one of the first questions for thousands of us, was “Do you believe Israel has the right to exist?” For the next 20 minutes I gave Charles the most nuanced answer possible. Not a word of it was printed. Let me answer it for you now…
   
   No, in its current form, where Israel is openly committing genocide, violating dozens of international laws (millions of times), where it is openly admitting to starving people, where it blocks all food and aid from entering, where it slaughters more journalists and aid workers than any nation in modern history, where it has slaughtered more children than any modern conflict, where it literally steals homes and land daily, where it beats and kidnaps Academy Award winners and prestigious doctors, where it admits to sexually assaulting those they imprison, sometimes with dogs and other times with electric shock probes rammed up the anuses of men…NO….HELL NO - no country in the world that does these things has a right to exist in this form. Period. Full stop. That we have been afraid to truthfully answer this is a part of the problem.
   
   The leading experts of South African Apartheid have said they really now object to what Israel is doing being called Apartheid because it has now grown to be so much worse and so much more violent and deadly than Apartheid ever was. It’s its own unique blend of Apartheid, Jim Crow, and genocide with Torah sprinkled on top.

   Did Nazi Germany exist? Yes. Did Apartheid South Africa exist? Of course it did. Does genocidal Israel exist? Yes. Did they, or do they have a right to exist? That’s a very different question. They do exist, yes,
   
   Jews certainly have the right to exist. And I have fought against anti-Jewish bigotry my whole life. But no nation that is doing what Israel is doing right now has the right to do so. They have the opposite of the right to do so. What they are doing is fully illegal. And here’s the brutal truth, the current actions of the State of Israel are making Jewish people around the world LESS SAFE - not more so.
   
   If the debate is “Do genocidal states have the right to exist?” and your answer is “yes,” then we can simply part ways. We see the world so differently that engaging is not even worth it.
   
   One, like myself, can absolutely abhor the Holocaust, and abhor any violence, bigotry, or discrimination against Jews, and simultaneously declare that they are a genocidal nation that must be held to account.
   
   It simply cannot be the case that our genuine disgust at the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago, prevents us 80 years later from calling out evil because the current perpetrators of said evil are genetically related to people who experienced evil in 1945. That makes no sense. Are African Americans allowed to kill white people with impunity because of slavery and lynching? Are Asian Americans allowed to kill white people today because they were interred by white Americans in 1945 - at the same time as the Holocaust. No, of course not.
   
   Suffering one historic evil should never give any religion or ethnic group permission to then inflict similar pain on others. It’s a truly ludicrous concept.
   

2. Israel and the United States must be declared state sponsors of terrorism and genocide by as many possible nations in the world. It can’t just be Israel. Israel has proven that they are willing to endure such scorn as long as the United States keeps funding, arming, protecting, guiding, and defending them at every turn. The United States has simply not paid a price for their essential, fundamental role in this genocide. It is as much an American genocide as it is an Israeli one. A few months ago I would say every nation in the world is afraid of America. I think this is less true today than it’s ever been. This genocide could not have last even 100 days without the United States. It has only lasted 538 days exclusively because of the blank check and endless bombs from America. And America must also be held accountable for this.

3. A brand new international body, a war crimes tribunal just for Palestine, must be created solely for the purpose of investigating, identifying, locating, detaining, arresting, charging, and convicting Israelis and any material partner of this genocide. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. To this very day, such an international body exists to hunt down Nazis no matter how hold they are. To this day, Nazis that are almost 100 years old are still found, arrested, and deported to Germany to be tried for their crimes and sent to prison for them. Almost every nation in the world has supported these efforts. We should form them now for Palestine. Since existing international bodies are failing us, we must create new ones.
   

4. Every single nation that is a member state of this new international body must cease all trade, including in oil and gas, with Israel. You cannot truthfully and earnestly oppose a genocidal nation while literally fueling the genocidal party itself. Again, this is a tried and true consequence of genocide, and even actions that fall far short of genocide, from nations all over the world.

5. Every single member of the IDF, and any other party or person in the world that has given material support to this genocide in any possible way must be put on a newly created International Travel Ban on Genocide and they must be detained, arrested, charged, and convicted anytime they arrive at any airport of any participating airport or border crossing in the world.

6. Every single weapons, device, tool, and intelligence manufacturer and employee that has not only profited billions of dollars off of this genocide, but has done so with the full knowledge that their weapons or devices would be used to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent civilians, must be formally charged by either the newly created war crimes tribunal for Palestine and/or the International Criminal Court - preferably both. This includes employees of mega companies like Google and Amazon that are providing invaluable tools and contracts to make this genocide possible - ranging from AI that arbitrarily decides where to drop bombs to cloud storage used for explicitly genocidal purposes.

7. Palestine must be formally and permanently recognized as an official nation/state by the United Nations. 145 nations (over 75% of the world) agrees, but only one nation keeps vetoing this and preventing it from happening. Guess who? The United States. The United States, which is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, acts as a proxy for Israel at the UN, and does their bidding, as Israel literally has killed more UN workers than any country in the history of the world. While the following steps are fully possible without Palestine becoming an official state of its own in the eyes of the UN, it would certainly make everything else that follows much easier to justify.

8. A credible, heavily armed international military coalition, backed by nuclear powers, must be willing to physically defend the human rights of the Palestinians under the Geneva Convention (read it for yourself) and countless other international laws that are all being publicly and flagrantly violated right now. Otherwise the Geneva Convention is also dead. Maybe it already is. It requires nations to intervene to stop genocide. Declaring Israel and the United States as state sponsors of terrorism opens the door for these actions. This coalition can literally start with just a few nations and grow from there. I think we should begin channeling our efforts to forming such a coalition right away.

   What is abundantly clear is that Israel and the United States won’t stop UNLESS THEY ARE STOPPED. And right now they are simply willing to pay the price for ALL OF OUR CURRENT ACTIONS.

9. An international Muslim military force in which all Muslims of the world are recommended to participate should be formed to protect and defend Muslims and Islamic priorities. Theoretically this should be the largest military in the history of the world. I know you can give me 100 reasons why this will never happen. I’m just telling you it should. And it’s possible. And I’m telling you now that many nations have already discussed this and are continuing to do so. Again, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here - this already exists for Jews. Ukrainians and their friends around the world were encouraged to return home to fight to defend themselves. Muslims must create our own military forces and coalitions.

10. The four nations surrounding Israel - which are Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria must allow the above international coalition into their countries to rescue Palestinians from this genocide and to force Israelis out of internationally agreed upon borders and boundaries that do not belong to them. These coalition forces must then protect these agreed upon borders and boundaries according to 1967 laws and treaties that are frankly already a huge compromise for Palestinians.

    For instance, over 1 million men of Yemen have already volunteered for such an international force, but a combination of those 4 nations would need to let them in. Nationalism is killing us right now. Nations that are against this genocide, if they aren’t willing to use their own military forces, must at least be willing to let others in.

11. Here is where I must put maximum pressure on the Egyptian government. Egypt shares an 8 mile long border with Gaza, but have allowed Israel to pretty much do anything and everything they want on this border - including destroying the Rafah border crossing, which belonged to Egypt and Gaza. Egypt MUST take back control of all of its borders with Gaza immediately - including the Rafah crossing. The Rafah crossing MUST be reopened and purely controlled by Egyptians and Palestinians. We simply cannot stop this genocide without Egypt. It’s how you get to Gaza. Period. We will never be able to get aid into Gaza, to get commercial goods in and out of Gaza, and we certainly cannot get military support into Gaza without Egypt. It is completely and utterly shameful the extent to which Egypt has simply rolled over like a dead dog in the face of this genocide - allowing Israel to prevent them from even getting a single bottle of water into Gaza whenever they feel like blocking them. This cannot stand.

12. Every single nation surrounding Israel, and other nations around the world, must completely close off their airspace to the genocidal state of Israel for 100% of commercial and military flights. Those commercial flights are literally full of war criminals and the military flights are full of weapons being used for genocide. What Yemen has valiantly decided to do in the Red Sea, blocking shipments of weapons from reaching Israel that pass by Yemen, must be done in the air. This is
    

13. Every nation surrounding Israel must block off all roads to and from Israel to block all war criminals from entering or exiting, to block all weapons of war from entering or exiting, and to create it’s own economic blockade against Israel. You cannot be against this genocide and allow their free movement.
    

14. All assets of any people or companies that have participated or materially supported in this genocide must be frozen if they are held in banks or investment accounts in nations that are formally against this genocide. Again, this is a tried and true practice around the world that has mainly been applied to everybody but Israel and the United States.
    

15. Brave Americans, Europeans, and others that are given easy travel access to Israel should consider flying or traveling into Israel to not only protest the genocide, but to support the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem that are struggling in the worst possible ways. Israel does not want this. They have tried to so tightly control the narrative that they do not want anyone filming their brutality, destruction, and open bigotry and Apartheid. They’ve banned media. They’ve banned millions of Palestinians that live around the world from entering. But they can’t ban all of us. You saw how powerful it was when the author Ta-Nehisi Coates went and saw the occupation for himself. It changed his life. Now you need to go see it, document it, protest it from the inside, and support the millions of Palestinians still living, but struggling there.

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    ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shaun King is one of the most followed and shared activists and journalists in the world. In addition to being the Founder and Editor in Chief of The North Star, he also leads the Grassroots Law Project and the Real Justice PAC. A historian by training, Shaun King is the New York Times bestselling author of Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future. Shaun’s daily news podcast, The Breakdown with Shaun King, has been heard and shared hundreds of millions of times in almost every country in the world and is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts are heard. Shaun has been with his brilliant wife, Rai, for over 25 years, and they are raising their 5 kids in Brooklyn, New York.