Demonstration in Extremadura Against Rheinmetall Death Factory: A Universal Message

Tlaxcala, 23 October 2025

From the depths of rural Spain rises a cry of anger, of violated dignity, of appeal to the conscience of old Europe: stop the manufacturers and merchants of death! On Saturday 25 October, for the second time, a demonstration will take place in front of the Rheinmetall arms factory in Navalmoral de la Mata, province of Cáceres, Extremadura, called by the collectives La Vera con Palestina and Extremadura con Palestina. Below is a summary of the documents we published in Spanish and German.

The call is titled “No al rearme, stop genocidio”—No to the rearmament of Spain and Europe, stop the genocide. Within the framework of the European Commission’s “Rearm Europe” plan, the Madrid government has committed itself to NATO’s target of 2% of GDP in military spending. The goal—dividing the governing coalition—is to reach a budget of more than 40 billion euros by 2029.
“Os parece ético trabajar para esta empresa cómplice del genocidio?” – Do you think it’s ethical to work for this company complicit in genocide?

Linking Anti-Armament Struggles and Solidarity with Palestine

The central demand: to link the struggle against rearmament with solidarity for the Palestinian people, victims of a genocide perpetrated by Israel with Western complicity. The organizers call for the creation of an internationalist social movement against militarization and the war economy.

Critique of the Western Model and a Call for Disobedience

The appeal paints an apocalyptic portrait of the modern world: the West is a decadent empire led by selfish elites (USA and Europe) who, faced with ecological and energy crises, turn to war and conquest. Rearmament is seen as a strategy to sustain the hyper-consumerist model and seize the South’s resources. Germany, once the land of “poets and thinkers,” becomes again that of “judges and executioners,” following the USA, abandoning its energy autonomy (Russian gas) to relaunch itself through arms production.

The appeal advances an economic and moral argument: every increase in military spending results in a decrease in social spending. The authors denounce a new era of austerity, comparable to that of the 2010s, and accuse Spanish governments, including socialist ones, of privatizing the common good for the benefit of the military-industrial complex.

A direct appeal is addressed to Rheinmetall workers in Extremadura:

The demands include: withdrawal of public aid to the arms industry, total embargo on weapons to Israel, breaking diplomatic relations, prosecuting involved leaders, ending European rearmament, and initiating a program of degrowth.

Rheinmetall: Symbol of Modern Warfare

The article by José Luis Ybot (El Salto, 17 September 2024) traces the history of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms company, founded in the 19th century, associated with the Nazi regime, later converted to civilian production, and since 1956 again a pillar of rearmament. Since 2000, it has refocused on the military: Leopard tanks, Eurofighter Typhoons, drones, lasers, defense systems, and more.

In 2022, Rheinmetall bought Expal, a subsidiary of the Spanish group Maxam, owner of the El Gordo and Navalmoral de la Mata plants. These sites, involved in the manufacture and dismantling of antipersonnel mines, make Extremadura a “sacrificed” region in service of the war economy.

Since the war in Ukraine, Rheinmetall’s value has quintupled. Its shareholders include BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America. The company profits from global arms demand, particularly through its Ukrainian subsidiary created in 2023.

Investigation: Rheinmetall in El Gordo and Navalmoral

A report by Luis Velasco San Pedro (El País, 1 November 2024) shows how the village of El Gordo lives off Rheinmetall: 200 residents work there, salaries exceed 1,600 euros, and unemployment is nearly zero. But secrecy reigns. Employees sign confidentiality agreements and say: “Lo que se hace allí es top secret.”

Deputy Nerea Fernández (Unidas por Extremadura) denounces regional complicity and public funding of Rheinmetall (58,060 euros of European funds). She calls for the conversion of these factories to civilian production. For her, “the genocide in Gaza begins in Extremadura.”

Popular Mobilizations and Global Critique

The communiqué calling for the previous demonstration on 6 October 2024 urged boycott of Israel and civil disobedience: “La única forma de buscar la paz es no fabricar la guerra.” – The only way to seek peace is not to manufacture war.

Europe was described as a militarized “mega-Israel,” built on fear and dependence on the war economy.

The dossier combines investigation, manifesto, and moral plea. It denounces war capitalism and links the local struggle against Rheinmetall to the Palestinian cause. The authors assert a conviction: the fight for peace begins where weapons are made.

The message applies urbi et orbi—in Europe, North and South America, and Asia: we must stop the manufacturers and merchants of death, wherever they are, “by any means necessary.” To date, only one arms factory—Elbit Systems in Bristol, UK—has ceased operations. Credit goes to the courageous militants of Palestine Action, now banned as a “terrorist” group, with members prosecuted. The same fate befalls Palestine Action Germany, whose activists carried out symbolic actions against Elbit Systems in Ulm; five are now on trial.

Another aspect of necessary mobilization concerns the transport of arms to Israel—either ready-to-use weapons or components destined for Israeli arms factories. Protests have occurred in Marseille, Genoa, and Tangier, with others ongoing.

The cargo ship Marianne Danica, carrying 155 mm shells for Elbit Systems from Chennai, India, to Haifa, diverted from Gibraltar to Casablanca to avoid Spanish protests. Another vessel, Ocean Gladiator, carrying 163 tons of brass cartridge cases from the Wieland factory in Buffalo, USA, recently passed through the Strait of Gibraltar en route to Ashdod, with its next stop scheduled in Limassol (Cyprus) on 3 November [track it here]. We'll await it there. 

The People Without a Map: Diaspora, Conscience, and Palestinian Recognition

Two years after the onset of the Gaza genocide, the State has vanished, but the people remain. Across the world, the Palestinian diaspora embodies a conscience that refuses erasure.

François Vadrot, Oct. 7, 2025                           

Silhouette of Gaza, void at the heart of a sky saturated with stars. Around the darkness, the light — that of the living dispersed.

On October 7, 2023, what was first presented as a new “war” between Israel and Hamas marked instead one of the most violent episodes in a process that began in 1947: the progressive destruction of the Palestinian people. Two years later, the military fiction has collapsed. It was not a war, but an annihilation.

And yet, beyond the ruins, Palestine endures through its diaspora — a people without a map, but not without memory. This recognition, the acknowledgment of the Palestinian People on the same moral level as the Jewish People, now defines the century’s deepest moral fault line.

Gaza, Destruction, and the Return of the Real

Two years after October 7, 2023, the truth can no longer be evaded: Gaza did not endure a war but a genocide. The report of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, published on September 16, 2025, formally concludes that Israel has committed, and continues to commit, acts constituting genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention. The experts document, with evidence, the four legal criteria: “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction, imposing measures to prevent births,” with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian people of Gaza.

The report dismantles the fiction of a “war”: these are not “disproportionate operations,” but a systematic campaign of destruction. Civilians were the target — bombings on evacuation zones, executions inside shelters, hospitals and schools razed, water and power infrastructures annihilated, the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon (the blockade of infant formula, fuel, and water). The report details the targeting of children — “including toddlers shot in the head and chest” —, the destruction of Gaza’s only in-vitro fertilization clinic, and the repeated use of sexual violence as a tool of domination. Even symbols of continuity — mosques, churches, cemeteries, universities — were deliberately obliterated.

The numbers defy language: over 50,000 dead, 83% civilians, 200,000 homes destroyed, and 1.5 million people displaced in a strip rendered uninhabitable. A military expert cited by the UN notes that Israel “dropped in one week more bombs than the United States did in an entire year in Afghanistan.” The report concludes: “There was no military necessity to justify this pattern of conduct. The people of Gaza, as a whole, were the target.”

What has been destroyed is not merely life, but the very condition of living. What collapses under the ruins is not a political entity — it is the possibility of inhabiting the world.

Yet precisely in this total negation appears the trace of survival: where the land is destroyed, memory expands.

A Global Diaspora, Mirror of Erasure

TIGRILLO L. ANUDOThe Flotillas That Are Kidnapped Every Day

Tigrillo L. Anudo, October 6, 2025
Translated by Tlaxcala

Español Français Italiano عربية

The world changes little. Historical patterns repeat themselves. The past never left. The objectification of human beings continues. Colonization is the order of the day. Piracy in international waters is revived with other actors (who finally kept the aid and belongings of the occupants of the humanitarian flotilla bound for Gaza?). Those who undertake actions in favor of justice are labeled “terrorists.”

The hijacking of the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was carrying humanitarian aid to the tormented people of Gaza, is what happens every day in many countries. It is happening right now in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, where neoliberal policies subject the population to hunger, lack of healthcare, education, housing, employment — to a slow death.

The difference is that these are not flotillas traveling by sea. They are flotillas of social investment, which remain kidnapped in plutocratic and corrupt Congresses and Assemblies. The difference lies in the fact that this practice of global capitalism becomes more visible in a nation invaded, massacred, and humiliated by Zionist ideology, the conception of a supremacist State that carries out ethnic cleansing against those it considers “inferior” and “terrorists.”

In the countries mentioned, the human rights of other ethnic groups (indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, peasants, mestizo workers) are kidnapped; repressive and anti-democratic dictatorial regimes operate there. They do not kill with bomber planes and artificial intelligence, but with the denial of human dignity — an ignominy made invisible by corporate media and educational apparatuses that program political illiterates.

Everything is interconnected. Daniel Noboa (President of Ecuador), Dina Boluarte (President of Peru), and Javier Milei (President of Argentina) are allies of the Zionist government of Netanyahu. Like them, Donald Trump (President of the United States) and other presidents of European nations have business interests and defend the Israeli regime. Although some European governments verbally rejected the terrorist actions of the Israeli State in Palestine (among them Italy and Spain), they ended up bowing their heads before the genocide. There is no integrity in their rejection. They are afraid to assume upright positions; they do not want to leave the Club of the world’s powerful accomplices.

The United States government follows Zionist ideology; it is its point of reference. It is the natural ally of those who embody the most characteristic features of capitalism 2.0: usury, control of banking and the financial system, management of the most lucrative industries, production of weapons and surveillance technologies, espionage services and techniques for combating “internal enemies,” developments in artificial intelligence that increase labor exploitation and unemployment. Capitalism 2.0 advances technology and diminishes humanity.

Israel teaches the United States how to do business, involving it as a partner in an ambitious hotel project on Palestinian territory. Neither International Law nor Human Rights stop the rate of profit. The elitist political world continues, for the most part, to be very permissive toward the genocide in Gaza. It suits them. Invisible threads of commercial and diplomatic interests predominate in the agenda of foreign policy. Political economy prevails, not ethics nor international solidarity.

Not even the dystopian novels of the 20th century foresaw the negative utopia the world lives in today. A small country with a powerful army, backed by the U.S. empire, “defends” its right to commit genocide. Furthermore, it considers the act of bringing food, water, medicine, and other humanitarian aid to a besieged people as terrorist acts financed by Hamas. It grants itself permission to impose a maritime blockade on the Gaza Strip (for 17 years), subjecting it to thirst, hunger, and lack of medicine. It also allows itself to violate the right to the sea by boarding vessels in international waters.
Who cares about Palestine?

How to confront the danger posed by Israel’s State terrorism? Marches and humanitarian flotillas are more symbolic than effective. However, they are valuable and must continue because they make visible the infamous offensive of a machine that kills children and women. There are also boycott campaigns against companies that finance the terrorism of the Zionist army. Their reach is limited, but they add to the cry for peace. President Petro proposed an Army of Salvation of Humanity, but there was no timely response to make it a reality. President Trump announced a recolonizing “Peace Plan” to stop the “war” (he does not say genocide) and administer the Gaza Strip with Tony Blair (killer of Asians). A deception and mockery of the world. They cancel the self-determination of peoples with a stroke of the pen; they decide for Palestine.

Ahmed Rahma, Türkiye

Everything indicates that the disorder that destroys International Law can only be compensated by the use of force by new and daring actors. The Houthis of Yemen, a poor country devastated by war, have dared to launch drones and missiles at Israel; they do so out of solidarity with Palestine, to make themselves felt as a neglected and beaten nation, for historical-religious motives, for strategy, political calculation, and because they have the dignity and courage that rich nations lack. These actions, along with the supersonic missile responses from Iran that shattered Israel’s Iron Dome, are encouraging other countries to intervene to stop the massacres committed daily with impunity by the fanatical soldiers led by Netanyahu. Israel is not so invulnerable; it has already been demonstrated. And a tiny country like Yemen understands that it can play a role by controlling the Red Sea, through which navigates a large part of the fuel and goods of international trade. In a world where the rules of coexistence and respect between nations are violated, the continuation of such violations by other interested parties is authorized. Israel is risking being erased from the map because of its persistent defiance of peace and international morality.

If the Israeli army arrogates to itself the right to kidnap ships in international waters, it is validating the Houthis attacking ships carrying weapons, goods, or fuel through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the southern entrance to the Red Sea, through which pass ships loaded with oil that supply not only Israel but also Europe and the United States. The ships of this last country will also suffer. Oil prices may rise. The world economy could be affected. The law of the jungle is expanding across the planet; an uncertain future could mark international relations.

The dispute over markets and global trade routes is a chessboard for Russia, China, Europe, and the United States. None of them cares about the fate of Palestine. They are concerned with how they position themselves against their rivals. Each time a new war front opens for the U.S., Russians and Chinese take advantage of it. They are interested in seeing the U.S. exhausted by helping its Israeli partners. Hence, bears and dragons do not enter energetically to defend Palestine. That is how political economy works. Small countries like Yemen and Lebanon (Hezbollah) do more for Gazans than the great powers. Arab governments also fail to agree on how to support their Palestinian brothers or how to confront the Zionist challenge.

Only the peoples save the peoples. Other initiatives will be indispensable to halt the genocide. There is no military power that saves lives in Gaza. No government dares to intercede for the massacred Palestinians. None wants to “get into trouble”; each one looks to its own interest. So far, only Indonesia has offered 20,000 soldiers for an improbable army of salvation. No one believes in armies of salvation.

Gaza is alone. Its inhabitants continue to fall under the murderous bullets of Netanyahu. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Palestinian genocide is the greatest failure of humanity.
The Zionist leadership is determined to exterminate the people of Gaza. It has been doing so since 1947, when its British partners deliberately settled them in Palestinian territory.
Their hatred and fear (lack of love) have led them to consider all Palestinians as terrorists.
They say the same about those who try to bring them aid.
Fascism is reigning, and we have not realized it.

JORGE MAJFUDThe Peace Agreements of the Addicted White Man

Jorge Majfud for La Pluma y Tlaxcala, Oct. 5, 2025

Translated by Tlaxcala

On September 29, 2025, The New York Times reported on the meeting at the White House between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. under this headline with a clarifying subtitle:

Cease-fire…It is not that history rhymes—it repeats itself.
Since the fifteenth century, all the treaties signed by the European empires have been made at gunpoint and systematically ignored once they stopped serving their purposes or when they managed to push forward their lines of fire.
Destruction and dispossession were always seasoned with some noble cause: civilization, freedom, democracy, and the invader’s right to defend himself.

For centuries, it was the same story repeated in the diplomacy between Indigenous peoples and white settlers—no different from the most recent case of the “Peace Agreement” proposed and imposed under threat by Washington and Tel Aviv on Palestine.
It is the same history of the violation of every peace treaty signed with the Native Nations on either side of the Appalachians, before and after 1776.
Later, what historians call the “Louisiana Purchase” (1803) was not a purchase at all, but a brutal dispossession of the Indigenous nations who were the ancestral owners of that territory, as large as the entire rising Anglo country in America.
No Native person was invited to the negotiating table in Paris, far from those being dispossessed.
And when one of these agreements included some “representative” of the attacked peoples—as in the 1835 Cherokee Treaty—the representative was false, a Guaidó invented by the white settlers.

The same occurred with the transfer of Spain’s last colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam) to the United States.
While hundreds of Sioux dyed the snows of Dakota red demanding payment according to the treaty that had forced them to sell their lands, in Paris a new peace agreement was being signed over tropical peoples.
No representative of the dispossessed was invited to negotiate the accord that supposedly made their “liberation” possible.

For Theodore Roosevelt, “the most righteous of all wars is the war against savages… the only good Indians are dead Indians.”
Further south, he wrote and published that “Negroes are a stupid race.”
According to Roosevelt, democracy had been invented for the benefit of the white race, the only one capable of civilization and beauty.

During those years, the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity needed a justification for its brutality and its habit of stealing and then washing its crimes away with peace agreements imposed by force.
Since in the second half of the nineteenth century the epistemological paradigm of science had replaced religion, that justification became racial superiority.

Europe kept most of the world subjugated through its fanaticism and its addiction to gunpowder.
Theories about the superiority of the white man went hand in hand with his victimization: Blacks, Browns, Reds and Yellows took advantage of his generosity while threatening the minority of the superior race with replacement by the majority of inferior ones.
Sound familiar?

Because those biologicist theories were not sufficiently grounded, history was invoked instead.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Europe was teeming with linguistic and later anthropological theories about the pure origin of the noble race (Aryan, Iran), the white race derived from the Hindu Vedas.
These far-fetched stories—and Hindu symbols such as the Nazi swastika and what is now known as the Star of David (used by different cultures centuries earlier but originally from India)—became popular as racial symbols in print.

It is no coincidence that it was precisely at that moment that supremacist theories and Zionism were founded and articulated within their historical concepts in the white, racist, imperialist Europe of the North.
Even the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, understood that Jews belonged to the superior “Aryan race.”

Until the Second World War, these supremacisms coexisted with certain frictions but not enough to prevent them from forming agreements, such as the Haavara Agreement between Nazis and Zionists, which for years transferred tens of thousands of white Jews (of “good genetic material”) to Palestine.
The first anti-Zionists were not the Palestinians who received them, but the European Jews who resisted that ethnic-cleansing agreement.
At the same time that the Palestinians were colonized and stripped of their lands, Judaism itself was colonized and stripped of its tradition.

When the Soviets crushed Hitler’s Nazis, being a supremacist became a disgrace.
Suddenly, Winston Churchill and the USAmerican millionaires stopped boasting of being Nazis.
Earlier, the 1917 Balfour-Rothschild Declaration had been an agreement among whites to divide and occupy a territory of “inferior races.”
As the racist and genocidal Churchill—then Minister of War—said:

“I am strongly in favor of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes.” [and he used it in Iraq, Transl. n.]

But the brutal irrationality of the Second World War also ended the Modern Era, founded on the paradigms of reason and progress.
Science and critical thought gave way to the irrationality of consumerism and religion.

Thus, today’s Zionists no longer insist before the UN or the White House on their Aryan racial superiority, but rather on their special rights as God’s chosen Semites.
Netanyahu and his evangelical escorts quote the biblical sacredness of Israel a thousand times, as if he and King David were the same person and as if that dark-skinned Semitic people of three thousand years ago were the same Khazars of the Caucasus who adopted Judaism in medieval Europe.

The Washington agreement between Trump and Netanyahu, to be accepted by the Palestinians, is illegitimate from the start.
It does not matter how many times the word peace is repeated—just as it does not matter how many times the word love is repeated while a woman is being raped.
It will always be a violation, just as Israel’s occupation and apartheid over Palestine are.

On Tuesday, September 30, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gathered his generals and quoted George Washington:

“He who desires peace must prepare for war,”
not because Washington “wanted war, but because it loved peace.”
President Trump concluded: it would be an insult to the United States if he were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1933, in his speech before the Reichstag, the Nobel Peace Prize candidate Adolf Hitler declared that Germany sought only peace.
Three years later, after remilitarizing Rhineland, he insisted that Germany was a pacifist nation seeking its security.

Even if the new agreement between Washington and Tel Aviv is accepted by Hamas (one of Netanyahu’s own creations), sooner or later it will be violated by Tel Aviv.
For the superior race—for the chosen peoples—there are no agreements with inferior beings, only strategies of plunder and annihilation: strategies of demonizing the slave and the colonized, and of victimizing the poor white man, that addict to gunpowder—now to white powder.

TIGRILLO L. ANUDO The UN decertified by the peoples

 

Tigrillo L. Anudo, 30/9/2025
Translated by Tlaxcala

The world is a madhouse. So many unleashed beasts will not be controlled even by a Salvation Army of Humanity. A theatre of cruelty is needed just to stifle the assault on reason that has seized human societies. Performative disruptions, massive paralysis, the breaking of normality, widespread cries for truth and freedom, bold actions, challenges to the powers. Until common sense reappears each morning with the rising sun.

The United Nations — the UN — is a theatre of simulation and lies. Nothing meaningful for the tranquillity of living beings springs from this instrument of the corporate elites that oppress the human family. An entity without authority before military and economic powers. An entity without a soul, without rooted peoples, without representation of the oppressed. The voices of life, of water, of the sacred, of the ancestral, of peace, of childhood, of the migrant, have no place there.

Diplomacy failed once again, as Petro said in the streets of New York. For two years, the parade of words across the UN carpets has been unable to stem the rivers of blood in the deserts of Gaza. Since its founding 80 years ago, it has prevented almost no wars. The conflicts that broke out ended largely because of the deterrence caused by the very weapons themselves. The UN is so ineffective that countries place more trust in the deterrent capacity of nuclear weapons or in strategic alliances. That is why they worry about developing them. A country that does not want to succumb to the rapacity of aggressive powers shows its atomic and supersonic weapons.

BAHMAN KALBASIIn its statements, the US State Department is applying Israel’s positions Interview with Shahid Qureshi, fired for non-compliance

Bahman Kalbasi, BBC Persian, 17/9/2025

Bahman Kalbasi is the BBC Persian’s  correspondent at the United Nations in New York.

Translated by Tlaxcala

(Since Qureshi’s remarks in English were simultaneously translated into Farsi for broadcast, we have retranslated them into English from the Farsi version.)

 

Shahid Qureshi worked in the Bureau of Global Public Affairs of the US State Department and was recently dismissed from his job. Mr. Qureshi tells Bahman Kalbasi in a special interview program: Condolences to the families of Palestinian journalists killed by the Israeli army in Gaza and emphasizing USA’s opposition to ethnic cleansing in Gaza were positions that he intended to include in State Department statements according to the usual procedure, and this is why he was dismissed. In his first interview with a Persian-language media outlet after his dismissal from the US State Department, Mr. Qureshi talks about what happened and his experience working in different US administrations.

Bahman Kalbasi: In the months following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, pressure has increased on a number of activists and students opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza; from the administration’s efforts to deport some who were not U.S. citizens to firing others from their jobs. Shahid Qureshi worked in the public relations department of the U.S. State Department and was recently dismissed from his job. He had tried to include, based on the usual procedure, condolences to the families of Palestinian journalists killed by the Israeli military and opposition to ethnic cleansing in Gaza in the State Department’s statements. He says this is precisely why he was fired. This is his first interview with a Persian-language media outlet since his dismissal from the U.S. State Department, in which he talks about his experience in both the previous and current administrations, as well as what happened. I am Bahman Kalbasi , and I am speaking with this former U.S. State Department employee in a Special Dialogue.

 

Shahid Qureshi, thank you for the opportunity you’ve given BBC Persian. Before we get into the matter, could you talk a bit about yourself? Where were you born? Where did you grow up?

 

Shahid Qureshi: Yes, I was born in Seattle in 1991. For university, I studied International Relations at the University of Washington. My parents are from the city of Saveh in Iran and came to America around the time of the revolution. After getting my bachelor’s degree, I went to Washington D.C. and got my master’s degree in the same field, International Relations.

 

Bahman Kalbasi: How did you end up working for the U.S. State Department?

 

Shahid Qureshi: From a young age, and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I became sensitive to the endless wars the United States had become involved in. I felt that the image of Iraq formed in American public opinion before the invasion helped justify that operation. When we traveled to Iran to visit family and returned to America, seeing a similar negative image being formed about Iran worried me that what happened in Iraq could be repeated for Iran. 

That’s why I became very active in civil society organizations working to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and prevent its repetition in Iran. At the same time, working at the State Department was appealing to me as a diplomat, both to understand the forces that lead a country to war and to help find diplomatic paths for resolving disputes instead of war. I am very happy I was able to work there for a while.

 

Bahman Kalbasi : When you joined the U.S. State Department, what exactly did you do in your role in public relations? What were your duties?

 

FRANÇOIS VADROT The Netanyahu Scale of Massacres

When the media grades horror the way we mesure earthquakes

François Vadrot, 16/9/2025

Preamble

It all started with the front page of the French Newspaper of Record on the morning of September 16, 2025. It reported that the “Palestinian civil defense” (a carefully chosen formula to avoid the word Hamas) “fears a major massacre” in Gaza, while an Israeli minister rejoiced that “Gaza is burning.” 

The dissonance was striking: on one side a civilian institution fearing a massacre, on the other a political leader celebrating it. But the most disturbing point lay elsewhere: the very idea of a “major massacre.” As if there existed an implicit taxonomy, a bureaucratic classification of killings. Would a “minor” massacre then be acceptable, dissolvable into the routine of daily war tolls?

 From this arose the idea of a Netanyahu scale of massacres: a satire of media language, a graduated accounting of horror, where the word “massacre” only appears once an arbitrary threshold is reached, and where indignation is calculated to the decimal point.

The Netanyahu Scale

Level 0 — Insignificant incidents
Snipers, drones: isolated deaths do not enter the accounting.

Level 1 — Micro-massacre
Fewer than ten dead. Called an “incident” or a “targeted strike.” No photo, just a lost line in a live update.

Level 2 — Moderate blunder
10 to 20 dead. The word “massacre” is forbidden: instead, “an uncertain toll” is evoked.

Level 3 — Minor massacre
20 to 49 dead. Newsrooms admit the term, but in the conditional: “fears of a massacre.”

Level 4 — Major massacre
50 dead or more. A live news feed is opened. The word “massacre” is allowed, but with the adjective: yes, a massacre, but a “major” one.

Level 5 — Catastrophe
100 dead and more. The word “horror” appears, but voiced through an NGO or a historian.

Level 6 — Apocalypse
Several hundred dead in an instant (camp, school, hospital). Described as a “turning point in the conflict,” immediately erased by the next one.

Level 7 — The unspeakable
An editorial is rolled out on the “failure of the international community,” without ever naming the criminal.

Conclusion

On the Richter scale, we measure the strength of earthquakes. On the Netanyahu scale, we measure the media’s tolerance for horror.

AMENA EL ASHKARThe problem with Hamas equating the Gaza genocide to the Holocaust

“What [the highly distinguished, highly humanistic, highly Christian bourgeois of the 20th century] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man per se, it is the crime against white man, it is the humiliation of white man, and of having applied to Europe colonialist methods that until then had only been used on the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the negroes of Africa.”

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955

Hamas’s effort to gain Western sympathy by comparing the Gaza genocide to the Holocaust is understandable but ultimately shortsighted. Instead, putting the genocide in the larger context of colonial violence could build genuine solidarity.

Amena El Ashkar (bio), Mondoweiss, 29/8/2025

 

Palestinians bury the bodies of 110 people killed by Israeli attacks in a mass grave in the Khan Younis cemetery, November 22, 2023. (Photo: © Mohammed Talatene/dpa via ZUMA Press APA Images)

For over two years, Palestinians in Gaza have been declaring: “We are being exterminated.” These declarations did not emerge from official Israeli statements alone, but from lived experience, where Israeli military operations have turned Palestinian bodies into sites of extreme colonial violence. Yet, despite the visibility of mass displacement, bombardment, and starvation, much of the international community remains reluctant to categorize these actions as genocide.

In practice, Palestinian reality becomes “legitimate” only once it passes through the moral frameworks of international institutions—frameworks that often understate the scale of the violence. Recognition usually follows a lengthy process: assessment, verification, data collection, and the involvement of a “credible,” “neutral” authority to study and label the event. Only then can Palestinian suffering acquire a certain degree of legitimacy. In effect, Palestinians may die without restriction, but they are not permitted to name their own deaths without external approval.

In an effort to combat this, we have seen how Palestinian resistance figures, including Hamas itself, have attempted to contextualize the genocide in Gaza by using one of the most potent historical analogies in the Western lexicon: the Nazi holocaust.

In the context of colonial struggle, this is not simply a matter of terminology—it is a strategic challenge.

At first glance, Hamas’s media strategy to use the Nazi holocaust during World War II appears logical: spokespersons aim to evoke the Western moral memory of the Holocaust and Nazism, hoping to mobilize public opinion in Western societies in a way that would pressure governments to act and end the suffering in Gaza.

Yet, after more than two years, this effect has not materialized. Why?

In the Western political imagination, the Second World War is a central moral reference point, and the Holocaust lies at its core. Within the framework of Western epistemic dominance, these states have been able to impose their ethical standards and define unacceptable behavours, shaping the very foundations of the concept of “humanity.” The Holocaust was not a historical anomaly; the same states’ colonial histories are replete with genocides and famines perpetrated against colonized peoples. What rendered the Holocaust a moral absolute was not the act of mass killing itself, but the identity of the targeted body — the European body. In this sense, global moral frameworks have been built on a Eurocentric foundation.

By choosing to frame the events in Gaza through the Holocaust, Hamas reveals two dynamics: first, that the Palestinian tragedy is not being presented as a self-standing experience but rather through the lens of another catastrophe — one that Western powers have designated as the archetype of atrocity. This reinforces the authority of a moral system that is selectively deaf to Palestinian suffering and inevitably grants primacy to Western trauma. Second, the use of this analogy sends a message to Western audiences: “Believe us because what is happening to us resembles your own history.” This reinforces the idea that Western pain is the benchmark for all suffering, and that other tragedies require comparison to it to be deemed credible. This dynamic risks undermining the Palestinian historical experience by situating it within the moral order from which it seeks to break free.

There is also a structural problem in the comparison itself. By invoking the Holocaust and Nazism, the Gaza war is placed in an unwinnable position, because the comparison is judged against a metric designed to keep the Holocaust at the top of the hierarchy of atrocities. This overlooks the fact that the Holocaust occupies a protected space in Western collective memory, one maintained through decades of investment in museums, films, literature, and education. The enormity of Nazi crimes is thus preserved as unmatched. In this framework, if the violence in Gaza is perceived as falling short of that standard — for example, lacking the iconic imagery of gas chambers — it becomes easier for skeptics to reject the label of genocide.

Furthermore, the term “Zio-Nazism” frequently used by Hamas is imprecise. While similarities exist, including advancing an ideology of racial supremacy, Zionism is a settler colonial project, and Nazism was not. While both have committed grave crimes, these crimes differ in substance and purpose. Israeli policies in Gaza are best understood as part of the longer historical continuum of settler-colonial violence, not as a direct iteration of Nazi methods. Technically and politically, the analogy risks obscuring the structural logics of Israeli violence and allows Israel to dismiss the charge by discrediting the comparison.

When Hamas chose to employ the Holocaust and Nazi comparisons, its intended audience was clearly the Western international community. This reveals two related problems. The first is a misreading of the structural nature of Western support for Israel — seemingly assuming that the West’s position is driven by ignorance or moral blindness, rather than by long-standing strategic and colonial interests that position Israel as a functional ally in the region. In this view, Western securitization of Palestinians and of the resistance could be reversed if the public were persuaded to see Israel through a different moral frame, such as that of the Holocaust.

It also overestimates the likely impact of Western public pressure on state policy, misjudges which alliances are viable, and constrains its diplomatic maneuvering to frameworks set by others. In such a context, the Holocaust analogy does not merely fail to persuade — it signals an underlying strategic posture that risks hindering the movement’s ability to convert battlefield gains into long-term political advantage.

Resistance and liberation are not solely about reclaiming land; they are equally about reclaiming imagination, consciousness, and language. At first glance, speaking of decolonizing knowledge frameworks during a war of extermination may seem secondary — yet it remains essential. What is happening in Gaza today is not an exceptional event, nor does it resemble the Holocaust as the West has constructed it in its moral imagination. Rather, it is the continuation of a long colonial legacy — one that has shaped not only the fate of Palestinians but that of other peoples across the Global South.

Seeing Gaza’s present as part of this broader colonial continuum is essential for building new alliances in a shifting geopolitical order. The region’s own colonial history offers ample comparative frames to expose atrocity, without reinforcing moral regimes that — after more than two years — have yielded very limited diplomatic and political returns for the Palestinian struggle.

The way we name what is happening is not a symbolic act; it fundamentally shapes the trajectory of strategic thinking and is an indicator of how we perceive things and how we think we are perceived by others. Decolonizing the frameworks through which we speak is therefore not merely a symbolic goal, but a strategic pathway toward a political and diplomatic practice capable of translating tactical gains on the ground into long-term strategic victories — using terms we define ourselves, rather than those imposed from outside.