“Humanitarianism” from Hell

How Israel and its Western co-Perpetrators are weaponizing humanitarian aid for genocide and ethnic cleansing

The Gaza Genocide is special. And in not one but two regards: As has often been observed, this is the first genocide in history that is, in essence, live-streamed. No genocide before has been committed under the eyes of the world like this one. And second, the Gaza Genocide is undermining and, in effect, devastating whole moral and legal orders – or, at least, long-standing claims to them – in an equally unprecedented way.

These two peculiarities are, of course, related: The only way the world as a whole could have tolerated the Gaza Genocide for now almost three years is by stubbornly disregarding fundamental norms, both written and unwritten. For instance, almost no state – with the exception of Yemen (under de facto control of the Ansar Allah movement or “Houthis”) – has even tried to comply with its binding and clear obligations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, namely to “prevent and punish” the crime of genocide. No one with the power – alone or with others – to do so, not in the Middle East, not beyond it, has come to save the Palestinian victims of the Gaza genocide in the only manner that would work: by stopping their Israeli murderers by massive force.

Yet the small but still disproportionately influential part of the world that calls itself the West has gone beyond “merely” failing to act. That’s because, whether the West is a civilization once shaped by Christianity or not, for a long time already its true, most inner core has been hypocrisy. And during the Gaza Genocide, the West’s compulsive need to rationalize even its most vicious actions into acts of virtue covered by “values,” has led to a new peak of absolute moral and intellectual perversion: Precisely because the West has not “only” abandoned the Palestinian victims but is actively co-perpetrating this genocide together with Israel, its elites – in politics, culture, the media, the police and judiciary – have made a sustained, obstinate effort to radically alter our sense of right and wrong, from specific legal norms down to our intuitive and widely shared understanding of limits never to be crossed.

Waging, for example, a so-called “war” by killing or injuring – often maiming for life – over 50,000 children (as of May 2025)? A “war” in which we receive one reliable testimony after another that many of these children are targeted deliberately, including by sadistic drone operators and snipers? A “war” in which starvation, medical deprivation, and the promotion of epidemics have all been deployed equally deliberately? In the West, we are told to call this “self-defense.”

Indeed, we are asked – with great insistence, to say the least – to believe that this form of mass-murderous, infanticiding “self-defense” is something to be proud of, even vicariously: The mayor of Berlin Kai Wegner, for instance – notorious already for his bull-headed and odious suppression of any signs of resistance to Israeli genocide – has just declared that his city hall will keep flying the Israeli flag.

In the same depraved spirit, the establishments of the West hand out punishment – ranging from vicious police beatings via crippling lawfare to international sanctions – not to the perpetrators and accomplices of the Gaza Genocide, in Israel and elsewhere, but to those who resist it in solidarity with its Palestinian victims. Protesters, journalists worth their salt, and even a UN Special Rapporteur are treated like criminals, even “terrorists” for actually standing up against the crime of genocide, as – just yesterday, it seems – we were all officially supposed to do. But “never again” has been turned into “definitely again and as long as the murderers like since they are Israelis and our friends.”

It is in this context of a reversal of morality, law, and meaning so complete the overworked term “Orwellian” for once really applies that we can understand what is now happening to the concept of “humanitarian” action.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s back-to-basics definition a “humanitarian” is a “person who works to make other people's lives better,” for instance, by trying to end world hunger. Since modern humanitarianism already has a history of two centuries, historians, such as Michael Barnett in his “Empire of Humanity” have, of course, delivered more complex accounts. Critics have long denounced humanitarianism’s limits and even flaws. For French sociologist Jean Baudrillard it is what’s left when a more optimistic humanism decays: a sort of bleak emergency response, a sign that the world has gotten worse, again.

In particular, during the post-Cold War decades of American hubris – misnamed “unipolar moment” – humanitarianism often allied with Western imperialism. In the war of aggression against Iraq that started in 2003, for instance, humanitarian organizations became servants to the aggressors, invaders, and occupiers.

Yet whatever view of humanitarianism – still affirmative or mostly critical – you may endorse, there are things the concept can only accommodate for the completely deranged and limitlessly evil, such as massacring starving civilians and concentration camps. And yet, in Gaza both have been labeled “humanitarian.” The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a shady US-Israeli concoction, has promoted a scheme, in which pittances of food are effectively used as bait for lethal traps: Palestinians deliberately blockaded by Israel have been lured to four kill zones masquerading, barely, as aid distribution points.

Over the past one and a half months, Israeli forces and Western mercenaries have killed at least 789 victims – and injured thousands – at or near these satanic traps. Obviously, killing of the unarmed on such a scale is not “collateral damage” but deliberate. By now, the murderous intent behind the scheme has been confirmed by various sources, including Israeli ones. No wonder that 170 real humanitarian and human rights group have signed a protest against this fake relief and genuine mass murder scheme.

And then there is the concentration camp plan: Israeli leaders have already driven the surviving inhabitants of Gaza – one of the most densely settled places on Earth even before the genocide – into an area comprising only 20 percent of Gaza’s devastated surface.

Yet that is not evil enough for them: On the way to what seems to be their idea of a final solution of the Gaza question, they have now pitched a new plan to their US allies, namely, to herd the survivors into an even smaller area. This de facto concentration camp they advertise as a “humanitarian city.” From there, Palestinians would have only two ways out: by death or by leaving Gaza. This, the Israeli minister of defense, Israel Katz, wants to sell us as “voluntary.” It is an irony of history that Israeli genociders now compete not only with the crimes of the Nazis but also with the Germans’ horrendous abuse of language.

The location of this deadly ethnic-cleansing transit station? The ruins of Rafah. You may remember Rafah, once a bustling city in southern Gaza, as the place Israel’s Western allies pretended to try to protect, sort of, for a while. Those warnings were worth nothing, of course. Rafah was flattened, and now its area is earmarked for the concentration camp to end it all.

The scheme is so outrageous – but then, that is Israel’s “ordinary” modus operandi – that even its critics can hardly keep up with just how depraved it is. Philippe Lazzarine, head of UNRWA – the effective aid distribution organization that Israel has shut down in pursuit of its starvation strategy, killing almost 400 of its local staff – has posted on X that the so-called “humanitarian city” would amount to a “second Nakba” and “create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians.”

The Nakba was, of course, the Zionist ethnic cleansing, interspersed with massacres, of about 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. But Lazzarini is wrong if he believes that this first Nakba ever ended: for the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence it only initiated an ongoing process of theft, apartheid, and, often enough, murder. A process that has now culminated in genocide, as multiple international experts acknowledge, including the eminent Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. This is not a “second Nakba” but the Israeli attempt to complete the first one which never went away.

Lazzarini’s comment that the “humanitarian city” plan would create concentration camps on the border with Egypt is, of course, also true as far as it goes. Yet all of Gaza has long been what, in 2003 already, the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called “the world’s largest concentration camp ever.” The point is not to be pedantic. What Lazzerini’s protest – welcome as it is – still misses is that what Israel is now doing to the Palestinians is creating a fresh hell within a much older one.

But not Israel alone. The West is, as always, deeply involved. Let’s set aside that the interwar Zionists learned about how to use concentration camps against Palestinians from the British Mandate authorities, as with other methods of vicious suppression, too. Now as well, various Western figures and agencies have become involved in the Israeli schemes of “resettlement” that drive the “humanitarian city” plan. Tony Blair’s foundation – really, a commercial consulting and influence-peddling company systematically working for the dark side wherever it pays well – and the prestigious and powerful Boston Consulting Group have both been caught contributing to Israeli ethnic cleansing planning. And behind that stands, all the time, the declared will of no one less than Donald Trump, the president of the US, who has long been explicit that he would like to see Gaza rebuilt as a vast glitzy Trumpistan and without Palestinians.

From the beginning of the Gaza Genocide it has been both a brutal crime and a constant attempt to redefine what is right and what is wrong so that this crime would appear necessary, justifiable, and even as a legitimate opportunity to profit. And the West’s elites – with far too few exceptions – have joined Israel in this absolute perversion of fundamental ethics and reason no less than in the mass-murdering. If both Israel and the West are not stopped at long last, they will use the Gaza Genocide to change much of the world into a hellscape where everything we have learned to despise about the Nazis will become the new normal.

First published on RT.com, 15 July 2025