Two small bodies lie on the metal table inside the morgue at Gaza’s Shifa hospital. Omama is nine years old. Her right forearm is mangled and charred and the top half of her skull has been smashed in. Beside her lies her seven year-old brother. His name is not certain. It might be Hamza or Khalil. Relatives are having trouble identifying him because his head has been shorn off. Their parents will not mourn them — because they are dead too.

Just another day in Gaza, as the list of Israeli atrocities keeps on growing. Young children have been bombed to death while playing on the beach; white phosphorous bombs and flechette shells are being deployed against civilian populations; yet another hospital has been shelled by Israeli tanks. These are all simple statements of fact, but they can never describe the horror felt by ordinary Gazans as the F-16s thunder past, the bombs rain down from the skies, the tanks close in on their homes, and the drones zoom ominously overhead.

On Sunday, 67 Palestinians were killed in a single attack when the IDF virtually obliterated the entire neighborhood of Shujaya. As bystanders tried to evacuate the dead and wounded, Israeli troops targeted an ambulance, killing a paramedic. When a young man, accompanied by a team of international volunteers, went searching for surviving family members amid the wreckage of his home, an Israeli sniper shot him in cold blood, and kept firing even as he lay wounded on the ground — until the man eventually stopped moving.

By Tuesday morning, at least 600 Palestinians had been killed, up to three quarters of them civilians and a third of them children, with over 3.000 injured, many facing lifelong disabilities. Meanwhile, as Israel continues to bomb schools and hospitals and 100.000 terrorized civilians flee their homes by foot, with nowhere left to run or hide, The Guardian reports that “groups of Israelis gather each evening on hilltops close to the Gaza border to cheer, whoop and whistle as bombs rain down on people in a hellish warzone a few miles away.”

In Israel, room for debate on the occupation has always been practically non-existent, but it is now more obvious than ever that it is simply impossible to reason with the growing fanaticism that has grabbed a hold of the country. When a small group of brave Israeli pro-peace activists staged a protest against the assault on Gaza in Tel Aviv this weekend, they were pelted with rocks, beaten with sticks, and chased down the street by a 2.000-strong mob of warmongering, flag-waving nationalists — some of them actually wearing neo-Nazi T-shirts. An exasperated Israeli friend described to me the “hatred in the eyes” of her fellow countrymen and relayed the ominous atmosphere inside Israel: “It’s crazy and scary here. All you see and hear is the far-right. 90% of the people in Israel are pro-war. The reasons vary but they are the majority.”

Its hand strengthened by this rising tide of racist belligerence, the Israeli political establishment now appears to be dropping the veil of democratic pretensions altogether. Three weeks ago, the ultra-nationalist Knesset member Ayelet Shaked openly called for the death of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes”, and just last week, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Moshe Feiglin, who is a key member of the ruling Likud party, called for the occupation and annexation of Gaza and the expulsion of its Palestinian inhabitants:

After the IDF completes the ‘softening’ of the targets with its firepower, the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations … Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel.

These statements, in combination with the brute force brought down upon Gaza’s civilian population, leave absolutely no room for doubt or ambiguity: while a pliant President Obama and spineless European leaders still “strongly affirm Israel’s right to defend itself,” leading Israeli politicians have already taken to openly advocating genocide and ethnic cleansing. No longer should we mince our words for fear of alienating our audience — this is what is at stake in Gaza today. You cannot reason with such bloodthirsty fanaticism.

Many well-intentioned but ill-informed liberals in the West still like to take the moral high ground and criticize those who “take sides” in this “conflict,” elevating abstract principles of “peace” over any meaningful political engagement with the reality on the ground. Tragically, the reality is that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Jewish-Israeli citizens are not the least bit interested in peace — they prefer a dramatic escalation of the Gaza offensive. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, one of the last-remaining pillars of conscience in the Israeli public debate, puts it in straightforward fashion: “Israel does not want peace” — its “real purpose in Gaza is to kill Arabs.”

Now that Israeli society is starting to pay a price for its unlawful occupation and its military incursion into Gaza — in the form of its invading soldiers returning home in body bags — the mood of fanaticism is likely to intensify even further. “Hamas killed my friend,” a former IDF conscript told The Guardian. “We need to kill them — not just the Hamas militants but all the people in Gaza.” Another young Israeli in Jerusalem put it in similarly blunt terms: “Of course I’m against a ceasefire, we need to continue … Palestinians don’t care about human life, whereas we appreciate life. We want to live, they want to die.” Again, as the complete lack of empathy and the thorough dehumanization of the colonized other clearly indicate, you cannot reason with fanaticism.

As Israel intensifies its offensive, as the crimes against humanity continue to pile up, as leading politicians and ordinary citizens whip up the racist frenzy, as the cheerleaders of war gather with popcorn on the hill to witness the spectacle of civilian slaughter from up high, and as the courageous Israeli voices of reason are drowned out by the hate speech of rock-throwing nationalists, the world is forced to recognize that Israel has absolutely no interest in peace — and never had either. Frothing at the mouth with a fanatical disregard for human life or dignity, the occupier has brutalized its victim to the point of dehumanizing itself. Those who continue to waver in ambiguous aloofness and false neutrality in the face of these historic injustices will end up being remembered for it.

Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine.

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