October the 6th, 2023.
whilst Israel bombards us with propaganda, remember what it was doing the day before it was 'defending' itself.
Good day, spectators,
And it's been two years. Two years since the world, in the collective imagination of Western media and political discourse, was reset to zero. Two years since what Israel likes to call its '9/11'. A narrative so potent that, in the eyes of many unaware people, successfully erased the preceding 75 years—and the preceding 365 days—in a single, bloody stroke.
Today, in October 2025, we are witnessing the final, hurried chapters of a genocide. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry has concluded what anyone with eyes and a conscience knew long ago: Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians, finding it responsible for four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention. The stage they set is one of pure and absolute ruin: over 64,500 killed, nearly 90% of the population displaced, and a man-made famine weaponised to complete the job the bombs can’t. This is the end. The 'final solution' to the Palestinian problem, executed in full view of a complicit world.
Watch: A video filmed by drone and released by the Israeli genocide forces to boast of the extent of its domicide and genocide in Palestine. This gives us a small glimpse into what the Palestinian people are enduring right now.
But today, I will not be talking about the end. Instead, we’re looking back at the beginning. Not October 7th, 2023, but October 6th and further back. Let’s remember what 'normal' looked like for Palestine the day before the world was told everything had changed.
the day before the 'beginning': October 6th, 2023.
On October 6th, 2023, there was no 'war'. There was no 'massive bombing campaign' dominating the headlines. There was, however, the grinding, daily reality of Israel's military occupation and system of apartheid, a status quo the West had not only learned to live with but actively tried to cover up and push out of sight.
2023 was already one of the bloodiest years for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades. Imagine that. By the 6th of October, Israeli forces and settlers had killed over 200 Palestinians that year alone, including dozens of children. This was not a war; it was a brutal policing of a civilian population under indefinite military rule. In January alone, Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians in a raid on Jenin refugee camp, the deadliest single operation in years. In February, settlers from the illegal outpost of Eviatar rampaged through the village of Zaatara, torching homes and cars whilst Israeli soldiers stood by. This was their 'calm'.
Every single day, including the 6th of October, thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank endured the humiliation and violence of the checkpoint regime. Their movement, their livelihoods, and their dignity were subject to the whim of young, radicalised Israeli soldiers. Palestinian farmers were routinely prevented from accessing their own olive groves during harvest season, it happens all the time. It's land theft by bureaucratic strangulation.
On the day before the 7th of October, illegal settlements, considered a war crime under international law, were expanding relentlessly. Palestinian families in the West Bank were living under the constant threat of settler violence, home demolitions, and land theft, all backed, if not encouraged, by the Israeli state. Finance Minister and extremist Zionist Bezalel Smotrich had just weeks earlier approved the largest West Bank land seizure in decades. This was 800 hectares declared 'state land' and prepared for settlement expansion. This was the 'peace' Israel talks about.
This was the 'before' picture. A people subjected to daily violence, dehumanisation, and a deliberate, slow-motion erasure of their rights and their land. To pretend October 7th erupted from a vacuum is not just ahistorical; it is a deliberate act of sickening, genocidal propaganda.
the year of the fire: 2023's accelerating violence.
So we have taken a look at the situation the day before. Now let's take a look at the year proceeding October the 7th, 2023. A lot of people do not know that the Israeli government, its most far-right coalition in history, was actively escalating tensions.
And we can clearly determine this because the rhetoric from senior Israeli officials was not of de-escalation but of consolidation and conflict. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted racist who has recently been torturing Greta Thunberg and humiliating the participants of the Global Sumud Flotilla and who is too extreme even for the Israeli army, distributed thousands of rifles to settlers but not only did he do that though. No, he also dramatically increased their powers to 'defend' themselves which, many of us will know, means to attack Palestinians with impunity:
Watch: A group of savage Zionist extremist settlers attacks a Palestinian school in the occupied West Bank. This video is one of the tamer videos that you will see of these attacks.
Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu openly called for nuking Gaza months before October 7th because they've never hidden their intentions. The agenda was clear: more settlements, more annexation, more ethnic cleansing…less hope for Palestinian self-determination.
Throughout the year, and particularly during important religious holidays, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, one of Islam's holiest sites. In April, during Ramadan, over 400 Palestinian were injured when Israeli police stormed the mosque, beating worshippers with batons and firing rubber bullets and stun grenades inside the prayer hall. These provocations, televised across the Arab world but notably ignored by Western mainstream sources, were not seen as isolated incidents but as part of a systemic campaign to alter the status quo of the holy city.
The killing of Palestinians, the demolition of homes, the expansion of settlements, these are all things which have continued with no meaningful check from Israel's friends or the international community as a whole. In Huwara, after a ‘settler’ was killed in February, hundreds of settlers carried out what some Israeli officials themselves called a 'pogrom'. They burned Palestinian homes and cars whilst chanting 'death to Arabs'. Smotrich responded by saying Huwara should be 'erased' entirely. The message to Palestinians was unambiguous: no law applies to your occupier. Your lives are cheap, your rights are negotiable, and your future is nonexistent. Go away or we'll make you.
This, spectators, was the fertile ground in which the events of October 7th took root.
It was not an unprovoked attack on a peaceful nation; it was a horrific explosion from the heart of a pressure cooker that Israel had been sealing for decades.
a decade of deception and manufacturing consent.
Zooming out further, the past decade has seen Israel refine a sort of dual strategy: on the ground they brutalise people, and in the media and outside world they use a very generously-funded propaganda machine. It's what they call 'hasbara' or ‘explaining’ to whitewash the brutality for Western audiences.
Israel has pumped billions into projecting itself as a liberal, tech-savvy democracy whilst painting Palestinians as backwards and violent. This is not organic; it is state policy. I think back to the time when Israeli diplomat, Ido Aharoni, straight up admitted, 'It is more important for Israel to be attractive than to be right'. This 'Brand Israel' strategy has involved everything from pinkwashing Tel Aviv's image to using influencers to broadcast propaganda from the Gaza border. Just the other week in the midst of all of the news about the growing famine in Gaza we saw this. There were influences on Instagram going to Gaza with the IGF and talking about how there was plenty of food, no famine and how Israel was doing everything it could to get aid to the Palestinian people. Bonkers.
Guided by strategists like Frank Luntz, Israeli advocates were taught a scripted discourse designed to win 'the media war'. The talking points are familiar: always emphasise Israel's desire for 'security', frame any criticism as 'antisemitism', and paint Palestinian resistance as irrational terrorism. The goal, as Luntz put it, is that 'it's not what you say that counts. It's what people hear'.
In the current genocide, this has evolved into a high-tech disinformation campaign. Israel's foreign ministry posted a likely AI-generated video of a strike on an Iranian prison, presenting a clean, 'surgical' fantasy whilst the reality involved significant civilian casualties. Israeli officials fabricated claims about 'beheaded babies' and mass rapes on October 7th and these stories dominated headlines for weeks before being quietly debunked leaving millions of people believing a false narrative which created consent for the start of the genocide.
This is the modern face of hasbara: using any tool available to create a reality divorced from the blood and rubble on the ground.
a century of colonial violence.
The events of the past two years, the past decade, and the past century are not discrete episodes. They are chapters in the same story: a settler-colonial project intent on displacing and replacing an indigenous population. A tale the Irish know very well.
From its inception, the Zionist movement relied on the myth of 'a land without a people for a people without a land', a genocidal fiction that required the erasure of Palestinians. This is best encapsulated by Golda Meir's infamous 1969 statement: 'It was not as if there was a people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist'. The genocide we see today is the logical endpoint of this erasure.
The methods of 1948 such as the massacres of Deir Yassin where Zionist militias killed over 100 Palestinian villagers, forced expulsions of 750,000 people and enacted the deliberate destruction of over 500 villages. These are the same methods being deployed in Gaza today, simply with more powerful weapons.
Watch: Elderly Zionists laugh and joke about their war crimes during the Nakba more than half a century ago around the founding of Israel.
In 1982, Israeli forces facilitated the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, where their allied militias slaughtered up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees whilst Israeli soldiers controlled the perimeter and lit the camps with flares at night. Ariel Sharon, the defence minister responsible, later became Prime Minister.
For 75 years now, Israel has 'engineered, managed and marketed false narratives, images and vocabulary to win the ideological war'. It has successfully sold its violence as 'self-defence', its occupation as 'disputed territory', and its apartheid as a 'conflict' between two equal sides. When Israeli snipers shot over 200 unarmed Palestinian protesters during the 2018 Great March of Return in Gaza, they killed medics, journalists, and children. Then like now, the world shrugged. When Israel bombed Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, killing thousands of civilians, it was presented as 'mowing the lawn'.
The intent has always been the same: to seize the land and remove its people. To create an Israel free of Palestinian Arabs. The current genocide is not an aberration; it is the most efficient and brutal iteration of a long-standing policy. And it's the natural end to the impunity that Israel has enjoyed.
When you hear an Israeli spokesperson, a Western politician, or a media pundit frame the events of the last two years as a war that 'started on October 7th', you now know the truth. Go and spread it. That date is a propaganda tool, a carefully constructed amnesia designed to justify a genocide.
The war did not begin on October 7th, 2023. For Palestinians, it has been ongoing for generations. October 7th was simply the day the world was forced to stop looking away. And now, as Israel executes its final solution, we must refuse to forget October 6th, and all the many days that came before it.
And on that note, I'll let you go,
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Balanced? Unbiased? not really ….omitted are decades I can recall of regular suicide bus bombing, incursions and fairly constant missiles with no targets other than ‘whoever gets it’ conveniently supplied by the hounds’ comrades with equally barbaric intent, le mullahs of Iran. Yassa.
This is an extremely thorough and damning article deaglan thanks very much for this, it's absolutely disgraceful what they've been allowed to get away with and I will be sharing this article with everybody!!