To engage in a bit of both-sidesism, there's no shortage of "genocidal dreams" on both sides. Or just "homicidal dreams". Those are the political aspirations of many hardline Zionists and many hardline anti-Zionists.
But there is a very concrete difference between the sides.
Israel has actually murdered 100 times more people than "Hamas"—whatever this has meant since at least when Haniyeh was assassinated—or Palestinian resistance more broadly.
I use the term "murdered" with care, reflecting on the chosen rules of engagement and instruments of the IDF campaign in Gaza as well as its stated objectives, alongside the genocidal public comment from Israel's leaders throughout the conflict, which continue in the hardline segment of Netanyahu's cabinet. And also reflecting on the outcome of this campaign with the loss of life extending up from the most conservative, concrete, recorded estimate of 68,000 up to far, far more.
I don't say the two helicopters that transferred the 20 living hostages back to Israel in the past day or two should have been shot down, but I do say it's hard to envisage how such an atrocity would have affected the accounting of Israel's bloody, bloody ledger.
Even the extra-territorial assault on Iran which assassinated dozens of scientists and officials was just a punctuation mark in the carnage.
It's notable no western journalist today is opening their interviews with "But will you condemn Hamas?" Any claim Hamas had on Gaza is now hotly disputed by militias, effectively crime organisations, funded and armed by Israel no less than Hamas has ever been funded by Iran.
If 250 Palestinian political prisoners and about 2,000 more Palestinians arbitrarily detained in Israeli jails are being released, then the scale of this concession alone hammers home how absurdly skewed the discourse of "the hostages" in western media has been, ever since the first 10,000 Palestinian civilians were massacred in the opening sorties of the IDF campaign way back in 2023.
The United States, one global actor with the capacity (and the obligation in my opinion) to forcibly intervene, has until now been watching "the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust" returned, then returned tenfold, now returned one hundredfold to Palestine. A hundred eyes for an eye, a crocodile's mouthful of teeth for a tooth.
All this has been done by the United States' strategic beachhead Israel, operating in the grip of what can justly be called genocidal ethnonationalist fascism—but let's not call it Nazism, eh?
Is the memory of the Holocaust more sullied by onlookers comparing Israel to the Nazis, or by Israel where it conducts itself like the Nazis?
During the conflict, the US has given USD22bn in military aid to Israel, and its military-industrial complex has turned over tens of billions more in wartime profiteering. Sorry, allow me to be precise: genocide profiteering.
As Israeli families celebrate the return of a bare 20 living hostages from the Hamas assault on Nova music festival, even the average Israeli citizen understands the Israeli state's military campaign has aimed at stamping out Palestinian life in Gaza as far as it has been possible, not returning those hostages.
The only surprise in all this for me is that the US and the international community appears to have successfully convinced the Israeli cabinet to temporarily set aside its aspirations to annex parts of the Gaza Strip.
So that's the concrete difference.
In either presenting a ceasefire as leading both sides to celebrate, or in viewing the politics and horizonal program of both sides as equally extreme, this difference is lost.
If anyone thinks this difference is not the salient moral fact of this conflict, I can't see where they adhere to any categorical imperative of security and safety for all civilians, for all human beings. They do not.
If two neighbours are overheard aspiring to murder each other, it's the neighbour who actually commits murder who must face trial, even if they plead a right to defend themselves.
To put what I've written in its suitably disappointing left-liberal context, the Guardian's symmetric lead headline on the commencement of the ceasefire was:
Israel-Gaza war
Israelis and Palestinians celebrate as truce brings hope of ‘era of peace’
The way the west has preferred to imagine the world works, there would a reckoning for a nation-state found to commit genocide by international process.
This reckoning would include an agreed program of reparations, partition of Israel and a carve-up of land, sanctions or military intervention against Israel in aid of regime change.
This reckoning would include a free Palestine absolutely protected by the armed might of the world from any prospect of Israeli incursions.
This reckoning would call into question the constitutive premises of the project of Zionism and the continued existence of Israel as far as it makes this project concrete, much as the aftermath of WWII ended the Nazi project.
If the world works this way for justice, then let's see that reckoning happen. And if this isn't how the world works, then the world's global failure of justice can be the headline, rather than throwing a veil over the world's failure and celebrating an "era of peace".
