Gaza Genocide, the system and the Neoliberal Bastards

For some of us, this is the essential question: How does a genocide continue? What sustains the world’s complacency and enables its complicity? Let's consider a few answers.

‘A wasteland of rubble, dust and graves: how Gaza looks from the sky’ says Guardian that joined a Jordanian military airdrop for a rare chance to observe the Palestinian homeland, 5 August 2025/ Alessio Mamo.

A tent beside a hospital, holding only four journalists from Al Jazeera, the only network that has managed to show the world Gaza’s devastation, is targeted and murdered by Israel. It is a blatant war crime. I am furious, in tears, and helpless. They were murdered because Netanyahu’s government has decided to bulldoze what remains of Gaza City, silencing the last eyes and ears on the ground before moving in at full force. I still ask the question, how can this be. How will we survive this as human beings, our bodies and souls intact? We will not. We are changing, altering. We are becoming different people as we watch this genocide. Don’t you think?

As Israel decided to take over Gaza City, as starvation in Gaza turned into a ‘political problem’, too costly to look away from, the Western leaders, (French, British, Canadian) decided to do something performative and urgent. No, no, they did not decide to impose sanctions. They decided that, if Israel does not scale down its genocide, they would, in September at the UN General Assembly, the place they collectively made redundant and a joke of, recognize a Palestinian state. How disgraceful to frame a Palestinian state as a punishment, as leverage against Israel. In a similar vein, how insidious to do this at this hour when bigger levers such as sanctions, arms embargo, intelligence cutoffs, cutting Israel off the network altogether are needed. But no. They chose to do something that will, in effect, change nothing. Division by zero kind of effort, bravo.

The British PM, a lawyer who still refrains from using the word genocide, has contended several times that even though recognizing a Palestinian state is part of Labour’s platform, it would be a performative act. So, he wasn’t for it, as a lawyer! It could have been a performative act, but it also may have meant something a decade ago, or five years ago, or three years ago. But knowing that it is performative and doing it at a time when practical and firm moves are necessary, is—I’m sorry—a bad, bad marketing tactic. Do they think we are all stupid or what? (The answer is yes, unfortunately.)

These developments remind some of us of the title of Omar El Akkad’s book on the Gaza genocide: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It reads like a prophetic pamphlet—the cover of the book. The introduction anticipates a time when the governments that enabled the killings will claim they have always opposed them.

It is a layered book that takes the reader on a ride on the waves of fury and disgust that El Akkad ostensibly felt while writing it. Yes, disgust is the word that gets repeated a lot. Cascades and cascades of disgust. I believe this is the right opportunity to talk about Akkad’s book because it is a sharp account of how we got here, what has really been wrong with the way we live, that we are now watching a genocide unfold—and what we can do that makes this ‘system’ so uneasy.

The Severance

The first layer of the book is about a break. A rupture. No, no, a severance. A severing of ties. Deep disappointment toward the Western narrative of enlightenment values.

“What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.”¹

The genocide in Gaza revealed the entangled arrangements. It framed a genocide as something Palestinians put themselves in and were guilty of. The institutions, the markets, the media, and the language all were shown for what they were.

“It may well be the case that there exist two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against victims of empire and victims of empire. Victims of empire [those who are citizens of the empire], those who belong, those for whom we weep, are murdered, subjected to horror, their killers butchers and terrorists and savages. The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be.Victims of empire aren’t murdered. Their killers aren’t butchers. Their killers aren’t anything at all. Victims of empire don’t die—they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.”²

This is the language of the Western press that actually lifts the burden from the shoulders of the so-called Western liberal elites, who try to insert lines of concern into otherwise Israel-loyal statements. Akkad is more furious at them than at those who openly support the genocide. With the latter, at least we know. At least it is conspicuous. They are honestly genocidal. The rest—the chorus of “Yes, it is all so sad what is happening in Gaza, but it is complicated.”

It really is NOT complicated.

The System

Akkad ‘tolerates’ the brutal honesty of the genocider supporters because they remind us how the world works and how some, usually the non-white colonized peoples, have to pay the price.

‘That face appears in talk shows and writes opinion pieces and say that The same world that you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep shipping lane open.’³

That is why, as many do, Akkad also underscores the power of exit from this system. Exiting is not that hard, although not easy either. Constant boycotting, in other words, non-participation, is the only tool we have, other than not electing. Although in many parts of the world, elections have become ‘performative’ as well. It does not have to be that the authoritarian leader jails his most formidable opponent as it happened in Russia and recently in Turkey. When the system bottlenecks the alternatives, yani, when you have to choose between Tory and Labour so that Reform doesn’t win, do you actually do a ‘choosing’? Kind of performative, innit?

(Yes, I am watching closely and with cautious optimism, the new leftwing party initiative with former Labour MP Zarah Sultana and leader Jeremy Corbyn. Do you know one of the main points where they want to differentiate from Starmer’s Labour? Gaza. In other words, they want to respond to the demands of the youth who want military aid, intelligence cooperation, and trade deals with Israel to end.)

It is important, as Akkad’s book’s final layer reminds us which focuses on the protests and boycotts that unsettle the system, to understand that we are watching a genocide helpless, not only because there is a far-right government in Israel. Not only because Netanyahu is a Machiavellian nasty piece of work, or that there is someone like Trump at the helm of a country that has the power to stop this genocide. It is more about a petulant system that we are all part of, a structure that manages its contradictions by assigning disposability. Refugees, precarious workers, the disappeared, they are absorbed into the margins to protect the core.

‘This mandatory waiting period, in which rest of the planet politely pleads with the West’s power centres to bridge the gap between its lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality, to do anything at all, is not some natural phenomenon, but the defining feature of neoliberalism. What purer expression of power to say: I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in the graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.⁴

[…]To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand. Otherwise, there will be nothing left under this way of living. In the end we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering but absence, a hollow that will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum-wage workers and the climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars, and yes even those dead Palestinian children, who had they been allowed to live, might have done something terrible.’⁵

[...] One day this well end. In liberation, in peace or eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. When the time comes to assign to blamce, most of those to blame will be long gone. There will always be feigned shock at how bad things really were, how we couldn’t have possibly known. There will be those who say it was all the work of a few bad actors, people who misled the rest of us well-meaning folks. Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.’⁶

I had to share with you Akkad’s beautiful prose that displays the ugly side of neoliberalism that is connected to the genocide in Gaza. So that we remind each other if one of us, ma’azallah, slips and forgets.

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The black pudding and the bastards

While we are at it, I should extend the discussion on the relationship between neoliberalism and the far right.

According to members of the Mont Pelerin Society, the group founded by neoliberalism’s intellectual fathers Hayek and von Mises, the end of the Cold War was no final victory. Communism may have collapsed, but the state, even in its capitalist fervor, remained intact. And that was a problem.

In Bastards of Hayek, the new book by renowned economic historian Quinn Slobodian, we learn how a group of neoliberals broke away from Hayek and von Mises’s thinking and formed what came to be known as the new fusionists. From this strain, Slobodian argues, many of today’s far-right movements emerged. These figures did not appear as spontaneous reactionaries responding to the grievances of the left behind or to the rise of so-called woke politics. They belonged to an ideological formation that took shape in the 1990s and became known as new fusionism.

Earlier versions of fusionism in the 1950s and 60s, along with the New Right, had blended libertarian economics with religious conservatism. This updated variant defended neoliberal policies by drawing on cognitive science, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and sometimes even genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology.

It is a current obsessed with race and Charles Murray’s meritocracy. A worldview where IQ becomes a fixation and borders must remain closed. The common explanation for the rise of the far right is that it represents a backlash against neoliberal globalization. Slobodian contends instead that the new fusionists actively aligned themselves with advocates of traditional values, nationalist agendas, and cultural uniformity. Among them were so-called paleolibertarians who grounded their claims in biology and the belief in fixed, unchangeable differences. The right-wing neoliberals who formed or joined new populist movements did not turn away from market competition. They intensified it. These closed-border libertarians continued to demand free movement for capital and goods while drawing a hard line against certain kinds of people. Their vision was not simply an ethnostate. It was an ethno-economy.

“Since the political surprises of the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory in 2016, there has been a stubborn story that explains so-called right-wing populism as a grassroots rejection of neoliberalism, often described as market fundamentalism, or the belief that everything on the planet has a price tag, borders are obsolete, the world economy should replace nation-states, and human life is reducible to a cycle of earn, spend, borrow, die. This ‘New’ Right, by contrast, claims to believe in the people, national sovereignty and the importance of culture. As mainstream parties lose support, the elites who promoted neoliberalism out of self-interest seem to be reaping the fruits of the inequality and democratic disempowerment they sowed. But as this book helps make clear, this story does not capture the whole truth. By looking more closely, we can see that important factions of the emerging Right
were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism. The parties dubbed as right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels sent to smite economic globalization. They offer few plans to rein in finance, restore a Golden Age of job security, or end world trade.”⁷ [...] “As repellent as their politics may be, these radical thinkers are not barbarians at the gates of neoliberal globalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself. The reported clash of opposites is a family feud.”⁸

Israel fits squarely into the image of the ideal state imagined by the new fusionists. It is homogenous. It is almost entirely closed to the flow of people. Yet it is fully neoliberal in its economic policies and its seamless circulation of goods and capital. Its sense of superiority over the rest of the Middle East has become glaring. And Europe and the United States view it the same way. As the beacon of democracy in a ‘backward’ region. Children of light among and against children of darkness. The tech pioneer. The entrepreneurial genius. Operating the smartest intelligence agency in a landscape filled with terrorists and barbarians who once managed to kill people using pagers. What an operation. What a high IQ bunch.

Israel is the black pudding of modern states. It might sound like chocolate heaven. Maybe. But dig in and you will see it is full of blood. Certainly black, but not a pudding.

As Slobodian outlines, the new fusionists who aligned with illiberal populists and far-right parties believed IQ is a matter of nature, not nurture. One of the views they promoted was that there is a ‘distinct mental and physical lassitude among much of the population in underdeveloped countries, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.’⁹ In a sense, these are the centuries-old detritus of racism and social Darwinism that some privileged liberals believed they had vanquished.

From this perspective, Israel does not just claim that it is stronger. It boasts that it is naturally superior. That it takes the land of Palestinians who are less smart, less efficient, less capable. This, they believe, is how the world works. How it should work. Nauseating as it is, it is important to see the structure behind it: The connection between capitalist entanglement and the racial logic of the world system that enabled a genocide against an Arab people and watched.

1. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2025), 28.

2. Ibid, 70.

3. Ibid, 91.

4. Ibid, 168.

5. Ibid,177.

6. Ibid,182.

7. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: The Populist Right and the Neoliberal Roots of Our Present Crisis (London: Penguin Books, 2024), 18.

8. Ibid, 24.

9. Ibid, 40.