"America's exterminist historical time."

The narrative of state impunity is failing.

The meaning of victory. Slaughtering Gazans in a designated safe zone, Rafah, 26 May. (Al Jazeera Screenshot.)

We are pleased to offer our readers a superb novelist’s view of American complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Peter Dimock’s concern is “the moral coherence of American national history” and the significance of how Americans determine what their ethical response to this question must be.

—The Editors.

Peter Dimock

27 MAY—In an indispensable article published by Al Jazeera on Wednesday, 22 May, Ali Harb demands that we interpret the war in Gaza from the perspective of his piece’s subtitle: “What does victory look like for the U.S. and Israel?”

I urge a reading of Harb’s article as compelling recognition that the question American citizens now face is the following one: What actions by ordinary citizens or policymakers acting in our name can now prevent the United States, in partnership with Israel, from earning future designation as a pariah state? 

Harb’s central point is the crucial one: The complete and sadistic destruction of Gaza—and any kind of bearable existence for Palestinians as individuals or as a sovereign people—is the agenda of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. The final ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people whose land Israel now occupies and wishes to annex, possess, and dominate entirely is what victory means for Israel as I write this sentence. 

The Biden administration’s “iron-clad support” for Israel now consists chiefly of its continuous casting of a blatantly hypocritical and criminally culpable blind eye to the enormities of the massive violations of domestic U.S., international, and humanitarian law—which both Israel and the U.S. are now openly committing before the gaze of a disgusted and outraged world.