Please subscribe to my Substack for more exclusive content

The Trump administration recently announced a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, a deal that was so generous to the Saudis it would theoretically permit them to have the ability to enrich their own uranium to the point of making a bomb. In short, the exact (stated) issue for which Israel and the United States went to war with Iran (to halt its possible nuclear weaponization), was then offered up on a platter to Saudi Arabia.

However, Trump quickly took to social media to add on new conditions to the deal; notably, that for the Saudis to get the deal they must normalize relations with Israel, something the Saudis have vocally said they would refuse to do unless Israel takes moves toward accepting a Palestinian state (something the Israelis have moved so far away from even pretending to entertain). This condition likely killed the deal that was just announced.

But on the issue of nuclear enrichment, there is a strange triangle of power relations in the region between Israel, the (oil-rich) Arab states, and Iran. The relationship between the Arab states and Israel has been historically fraught, and as is evident from the likely failure of the deal, continues to be politically challenging. But the Arab states and Israel find much common ground in their approach to how they deal with what they perceive as the threat of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

In a little more than a decade since the Obama administration signed the Iran nuclear deal, the Arab states (particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) grew closer to the Israeli position toward Iran. When the Iranian nuclear deal was announced in 2015, which would limit Iran’s enrichment capabilities in return for lifting of sanctions, President Barack Obama stated, “Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.”

As the Obama administration was working on the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, there were several constituencies that were opposing it. Apart from US Republicans who opposed everything Obama attempted to do, regardless of rationale, the deal was also strongly opposed by both Israel and Saudi Arabia, among other Gulf allies of the US. As talks were ongoing, the Saudi monarch died and a new king, Salman, came to power, and brought with him his son, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), then appointed as defense minister and chief to the royal court, soon to become the most powerful person in Saudi Arabia. He launched the war on Yemen, backed the Egyptian dictatorship, supported jihadist armed groups in Syria, and sought to more strongly oppose Iranian influence across the region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the deal as a “historic mistake” which could cause “a horrific war.” Netanyahu repeatedly lobbied against what he called a “bad deal” and said that, “It would increase the risks of nuclear proliferation in the region and the risks of a horrific war.” Additionally, he demanded that any deal with Iran also include “a clear and unambiguous recognition of Israel’s right to exist.” Netanyahu reportedly warned Obama that the deal could “threaten the survival of Israel.”

Gulf Arab allies of the United States, like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar all feared the consequences of a US nuclear deal with Iran, particularly what it meant for strengthening Iran’s role in the region, which they viewed as a counterweight to their own regional influence. Diplomats from Arab states were arguing that the US could assuage their fears by entering into formal defense agreements with them, or to upgrade their alliance status to “major non-NATO allies” (a status Bahrain and Kuwait already held at that time), as well as advancing increased arms sales to the region.

Saudi Arabia and Israel increasingly found themselves aligned not just on the Iran nuclear deal, but also on a number of broader issues, particularly as it related to opposing Iran’s influence in the region, whether through Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen.

After the Iran nuclear deal was officially reached and announced in mid-July 2015, Netanyahu warned, “The world is a much more dangerous place today than it was yesterday.” Upon announcement of the deal, Netanyahu declared, “Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran because Iran continues to seek our destruction,” adding, “We will always defend ourselves.”

One Saudi diplomat called the deal “extremely dangerous.” President Obama telephoned Saudi King Salman and other Arab Gulf leaders to reassure them of US support and that the deal would not threaten them. Though some Arab leaders, including Qatar and Oman and even to a degree, the UAE, saw potential economic benefits from the region opening up to Iran and as a result of the lifting of sanctions.

But the Arab states decided that there was little to gain in publicly opposing the nuclear deal, and instead sought to leverage their fears into getting support for other means to counter Iranian influence in the region, such as getting increased military training and intelligence sharing from the United States. The Pentagon agreed to a $1 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia as a means to help address the Kingdom’s fears about Iran, and to support its war efforts against Islamic State in Iraq and in its brutal war against Yemen.

Israel and Netanyahu took another tactic, which was to openly oppose the deal and heavily lobby the American Congress and public against it. A tactic which failed. The major pro-Israel political lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), lost its $30 million advertising and lobbying effort to oppose the deal. But even after he failed, Netanyahu continued to publicly deride the deal as “a very bad deal.”

So the Saudis resigned themselves to accept the deal but push for their own interests, while the Israelis just continued to attack the deal and fantasize about how the deal would purportedly lead to apocalyptic ends for Israel and the world. Once Donald Trump became president, however, both the Saudis and Israelis saw an opportunity. Crown Prince MBS was pushing Trump in 2018 to take a harder line on Iran.

While visiting the White House in 2018, the Crown prince renewed Saudi Arabia’s attack on the Iran nuclear deal, warning, “If they have a nuclear weapon, it’s a shield for them to let them do whatever they want in the Middle East, to make sure that no one attacks them or they will use their nuclear weapons.” He urged Trump to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran and replace it with a stronger one that also deals with Iran’s broader influence in the region.

In May 2018, Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on the country. Israel quickly announced public support for Trump’s withdrawal. As did Saudi Arabia. The UAE and Bahrain also supported the move. In particular, Israel, Saudi Arabi and the UAE had all lobbied the Trump administration to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran. And they were essentially the only countries in the world that were happy the deal was abandoned.

The Saudis were meanwhile lobbying the US government in 2018 to sell it designs to build nuclear plants in the Kingdom, and with the provision that they would produce their own nuclear fuel instead of buying it cheaper abroad, meaning that if they so desired, they could then enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The insistence of the Saudis on being able to produce their own fuel prompted American intelligence agencies to try to figure out if the Saudis were attempting to build their own bomb, the very issue that the Obama administration attempted to resolve in its 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The launching of the US and Israeli war on Iran at the end of February 2026 followed months of heavy lobbying efforts by Israel and Netanyahu, which ultimately convinced Trump, but not really anyone else in his cabinet, to favour a war with Iran.

In January, the US Arab allies in the region were largely cautioning the Trump administration against carrying out strikes on Iran, fearing the consequences to their own countries as such a war would surely spread rapidly through the region. The Trump administration warned them to get ready for a US strike, but its Arab allies began pressing the administration to hold back. Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar were reportedly warning Trump that such an attack would raise oil prices and hurt the US economy, though the UAE reportedly did not take part in the effort to persuade the US against undertaking strikes. Gulf allies even warned that they wouldn’t allow the US to use their airspace or territory to attack Iran, with both the UAE and Saudi Arabia issuing such warnings.

Yet on the first day of bombing, on February 28, the Washington Post reported that over the previous month of February, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had apparently changed his tune and began lobbying Trump – alongside the Israelis – to undertake a bombing campaign against Iran. While the Saudis were publicly pushing for diplomacy, the Crown Prince made repeated private phone calls to Donald Trump urging him to attack. Once the war was underway and a few weeks had passed, the Crown Prince was reportedly urging Trump “to keep hitting the Iranians hard,” according to the New York Times. Nearly a month into the war, the Crown Prince was urging Trump to continue the war, believing there was a “historic opportunity” to remake the region. The Saudis wanted the war to end, but only with what they would consider a positive outcome: having defeated Iran.

After largely having lobbied against starting the war, once it was underway the Gulf Arab states began pushing for the Trump administration to follow through and finish the job, fearing that a quick settlement would leave Iran more empowered in the region, which would overall become less stable. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were in particular lobbying the Trump administration to finish the war decisively. If the Iranians wouldn’t agree to extensive restrictions on their missile, drone and nuclear programs, both Arab states favoured an escalated military campaign. As Saudi intelligence confirmed that the Kingdom was urging the US to escalate, Trump himself said of the Crown Prince, “he’s a warrior. He’s fighting with us.” At the end of March, it was reported that the Saudis, the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait were all urging Trump through private conversations that the military attacks should end only when there was substantial changes in Iran’s leadership or behavior.

According to the Wall Street Journal in May, the UAE had secretly carried out military strikes on Iran, though refused to acknowledge this publicly. Days later, it was reported that Saudi Arabia had also carried out strikes against Iran. The UAE reportedly carried out dozens of attacks on Iran over several weeks in direct coordination with the US and Israel.

In just a little over a decade, key American-allied Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE had moved from a position of a kind of uneasy but unspoken alliance with Israel on pressuring the United States to abandon its nuclear deal with Iran, to becoming active participants in bombing Iran alongside the US and Israel, after the latter two launched their joint war of aggression against the country. The great irony, of course, is that all these domineering, wealthy and powerful states and alliances have failed to meet even a modicum of their stated objectives in the war with Iran. And Iran, for its part, while battered and bruised and subjected to immense brutality, has also defended itself against all of these states, asserted its newfound dominance in the Gulf (notably over the Strait of Hormuz), and the implications of the war may ultimately drive it towards trying to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Thus, the apparent fears that united the Arab regimes and Israel against Iran, in opposing the nuclear deal and supporting the war, may ultimately bring about their great fear that they were apparently trying to stop: a nuclear-armed Iran. Not only was the war a monumental failure, but it was a colossal catastrophe for stability in the region, and has left all the states involved weaker and more exposed. It is the manifestation of a crumbling empire desperately seeking to maintain its power projection and influence. And it is failing spectacularly.

The Gulf Arab states and Israel have long aligned with the United States in extending its imperial influence in the region; it only makes sense that their own power begins to wane with that of declining US power. But it also makes all of them more desperate and dangerous. The real issue at stake is not that of Iranian nuclear enrichment, but of US imperial influence. Empires tend to be most violent at their beginnings and their ends: when they are attempting to build and establish their imperium, and when they are desperately trying to hold onto it. No doubt, the historians of the future will look back on the Iran war as a radical accelerant for the decline of the American empire, and quite possibly the decline of Israeli and Arab regime power as well.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a writer and researcher of politics, history, and economics based in Toronto, Canada. His website is Empire and Economics, he hosts the podcast ‘In This Mad World.’ You can subscribe to his Substack and follow him on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and be sure to subscribe to his bi-weekly News Junkies newsletter.

It is not simply Gaza that is subjected to Israel’s expansionist aims and ruthless ways of war. A similar script plays out in Lebanon. A “ceasefire” was reached between Israel and the Lebanon-based armed group, Hezbollah, in November of 2024, and lasted for 18 months until Israel launched its war of aggression with the United States against Iran at the end of February 2026. In that time, a period of roughly 15 months, Israel violated the ceasefire more than 15,400 times, killing over 370 people, displacing countless others, targeting civilian infrastructure, and engaging in ethnic cleansing by expelling populations and refusing them the right to return. Again, what kind of meaning can the word ceasefire have when that is how Israel behaves during its supposed implementation? Additionally, during the official “war” (when Hezbollah was fighting back), Israel had moved in to occupy southern Lebanon and destroyed virtually everything in its wake. According to satellite imagery analysis by the Financial Times roughly a month into the two-month war in 2024, Israel had damaged or demolished 30 ancient towns and villages in Lebanon near the southern border with Israel. It was creating a 3km-wide “buffer zone” or “belt” along the border, which was in actual fact a process of scorched earth destruction and ethnic cleansing: the Israelis are expelling the population of southern Lebanon through copious amounts of state terror and destroying their homes and villages so there is nothing to return to.

When Orwell wrote about such tactics, he described them in terms of “defenseless villages” being “bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets,” which in political language was described as “pacification.” He further described a circumstance where “millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry,” which in political language was described as “transfer of population” or “rectification of frontiers.” This is perfectly applicable in relation to Israel and its war in Lebanon. As in Gaza, Israel builds its machine language around concepts of security and defense, so instead of pacification, rectification, and transfer, they opt for the euphemisms of self-defense, buffer zones, and evacuation. Though the specific euphemisms may change, the actual policy in effect – the reality on the ground – is no different than it was when described by Orwell in 1946, some eighty years ago: villages bombed, populations expelled, and homes destroyed so they have nothing to return to. In 19^th and early 20^th century Czarist Russia, these policies were carried out against Jews and known as pogroms, many of which were justified by the authorities at the time as acts of “self-defense, a reasonable response to a pariah people, capable of any and all transgressions,” explained one historian of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia.

In late November 2024, right after the “ceasefire” was reached in Lebanon, and Israel had to pull back closer to its border, many Lebanese sought to return to their homes in the south. Here is how the Financial Times reported it: “What they found was a sobering trail of destruction. Entire neighbourhoods obliterated. Water and electrical infrastructure destroyed. Medical clinics damaged. Mosques and churches reduced to rubble. Historic markets razed. Cemeteries overflowing.” Israel claims that this deliberate policy of destruction and expulsion is actually a targeted policy against Hezbollah and its “terrorist” infrastructure. They blame all civilian casualties on the opponent, accusing them of using “human shields,” without evidence.

Several months into the ceasefire, Israel announced that it would not fully retreat from Lebanese territory. Instead, an Israeli military spokesperson affirmed, Israel would remain at five key “strategic” locations in southern Lebanon. In other words, Israel would maintain military outposts on occupied territory, seeking to once again alter its borders through force, a grave international crime. Israel has entrenched its occupation of southern Lebanon and consolidated the process of ethnic cleansing of certain towns and villages through a dual policy of mass displacement and mass destruction, including during a period of so-called ceasefire. The more direct language of mass displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, ethnic cleansing, and controlled demolitions of entire neighbourhoods and villages is simply too evocative and accurate in its imagery: it conveys the images of what is actually taking place (i.e., war crimes and crimes against humanity). To avoid evoking such images, Israel employs the language of machines through the paradigm of security and defense, which we could also understand as issues of empire and nation. Security has to do with the establishment and maintenance of control over other peoples and lands – about managing an empire; while defense has to do with protecting the nation from the consequences of maintaining its empire.

Additionally, Israel justifies and frames everything it is doing as targeting terrorist infrastructure (while broadening that definition to basically include every building, home, bridge and road in every village and town in southern Lebanon). The language of anti-terrorism is broadly understood and widely used in Israeli society, as it also is in the United States and other western nations. It is an effective tool when it comes to demonizing marginalized or repressed populations, justifying war and occupation, and subsequently destroying entire societies. So long as the use of political language can maintain these fantasies (Israel is defending itself; they are only targeting terrorists; they are building a buffer zone), the policies – and language – will continue. Add fascism into the mix, and there is an accelerant to the violence and destruction.

After 15 months of occupying stolen land, violating the ceasefire over 15,000 times and killing over 370 people in Lebanon, Israel then launched a war of aggression against Iran (with the United States) at the end of February 2026, immediately killing the Iranian leadership. Hezbollah sent a few rockets over the Israeli border as an act of “revenge” for the killing of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the first time they had fired rockets into northern Israel since the ceasefire was reached in late November 2024, when Hezbollah ceased and Israel kept firing. The IDF reported that it had intercepted one of the rockets and allowed the remainder to fall into open spaces, reporting no injuries or damage. In response to this rather meagre military action, Israel launched a full-scale war and invasion of Lebanon, dwarfing the previous one in its intensity.

As with the start of the war on Gaza in October of 2023, an eruption of bellicose rhetoric and brutality spewed forth from the mouths of Israeli leaders. The oscillation between a euphemistic political language and a language of brutality – and the combination of both simultaneously – particularly at the start of a new and expanded war, reflects the normalization of fascist language and politics in Israeli society, and its fusion into a form of fascist imperialism: an imperialism that seeks rapid expansion, colonial occupation, expulsion or elimination of ‘undesirables’, settlement and annexation of new territories, and ruthless defeat of all enemies. Fascist imperialism is colonial imperialism without restraints, aiming to make deranged fantasies into a reality, and fuelled by a popular base of fanatics. Fascist imperialism is both the engine for the rapid growth and radicalization of fascism at home and abroad, and the source of its own destruction, for it produces countless enemies while establishing no legitimacy except that which results from fear and terror, which cannot sustain itself over the long-term. Thus, imperialism is both the expansionary and radicalizing phase of fascism, while it also represents its overextension, hubris, collapse and failure. Fascist imperialism allows the fascist fanatics to attempt to create in reality their most deranged fantasies in the newly conquered and colonized lands, where they are unrestrained by any laws, rules, or norms that may exist in their home countries. At home, they are citizens of the ‘great nation;’ in the occupied territories and colonies, each individual fascist can be like a king and conqueror.

A week into the March 2026 war, with Israel invading Lebanon, Israeli finance minister and settler leader, Bezalel Smotrich, threatened, “You wanted to bring hell on us, we are bringing hell on you,” adding, in reference to the southern area of Beirut where Hezbollah is based (Dahiyeh) and a city in Gaza that was wiped off the map, “Dahiyeh will look like Khan Younis, and our citizens of the north will live in peace and quiet.” In other words, Beirut will look like Gaza. Another senior Israeli official said, “We are going to do [in Lebanon] what we did in Gaza.” The official explained: “The goal is to take over territory, push Hezbollah’s forces north and away from the border, and dismantle its military positions and weapons depots in the villages.” The defense minister warned that Lebanon would face a “loss of territory.” He threatened to destroy villages in southern Lebanon, again invoking Gaza as the prototype, saying they would apply to Lebanon “the model we applied in Gaza’s Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” citing two cities that were completely destroyed by Israel. The defense minister added that the hundreds of thousands of Shiite Lebanese who had been displaced from the south “will not return to their homes.” Smotrich declared that the Litani river, roughly 30km north of the border with Israel, “must become our new border with the state of Lebanon.” Citing the “buffer zones” in Syria and the “yellow line” in Gaza, Smotrich said that a new border along the Litani river would represent “a radical change” far beyond defeating Hezbollah, that Israel will push its enemies “away on all fronts and create a sterile security cordon that will separate the enemy from our citizens.”

The language above reflects how fascist language has been integrated with Israel’s more euphemistic political language of machines, reflecting the closer integration of fascist politics and parties into the ruling system, accelerated through expansionary wars of fascist imperialism.  They explicitly threatened to turn villages into rubble, openly demanded the expulsion of over a million Lebanese, and announced their intentions to seize new territory and change Israel’s borders. The Israelis were thus being quite open about their intentions to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon and expand Israel’s border into occupied territory, a major international war crime. Yet these clear calls for and justifications of brutality are still ensnared in the wider web of euphemistic political language, particularly that of the lexicon of security and defense. Thus, such clear examples of brutal language and threats are justified and mystified through a language of “buffer zones,” “yellow lines,” and creating “a sterile security cordon.” Even Bezalel Smotrich, an extremist, right-wing settler, religious fanatic who wants to turn Israel into a kind of authoritarian religious theocracy (sort of like the Jewish supremacist version of the Islamic Republic of Iran), has learned to articulate his desires through the political language of security. Thus, while Smotrich makes open threats and statements of brutality such as, “We are bringing hell on you,” and brazenly calls for Israel to seize southern Lebanon, altering its borders by force, all of which is brazenly criminal, he frames it through the language all Israelis understand, that of security and defense: Israel would “not return to the October 6 situation, where the enemy is on our fences,” he said. Israel will push them back “and create a sterile security cordon that will separate the enemy from our citizens.”

In late April 2026, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a report noting how Israeli destruction of southern Lebanon was continuing during the ‘ceasefire.’ One Israeli military officer in Lebanon told the paper that in the southern part of the occupied country, they weren’t even really fighting Hezbollah, instead affirming: “The only mission is to continue the destruction… There is no other mission.” Another IDF commander said that despite claims by the IDF that Israel was just targeting “terrorist infrastructure,” the truth was different: “It isn’t terrorist infrastructure; we’re destroying everything.” The name of the IDF operation to destroy villages and communities across southern Lebanon was Operation Silver Plow. Another IDF officer commented that, “At the end of every day, there’s a report on how many homes were destroyed,” with civilian contractors getting paid based upon the number of homes they demolish, while Israeli soldiers watch over them.

In late May, another report in Haaretz detailed the experiences of Israeli soldiers that had been operating inside occupied southern Lebanon, where looting by soldiers was rampant and systematic. One soldier described their experience in a wealthy Lebanese village, when after walking into homes “shooting everywhere,” then “the real mission would begin – to find the valuable stuff.” The soldiers wouldn’t just ransack homes, but shops as well. “At any given time, you could see soldiers walking around the village with civilians’ stuff on them; it felt like the main mission,” recounted one soldier, adding that, “Most senior commanders didn’t care.” The only concern appeared to be to demand that as they loot, soldiers should shoot when entering new buildings, in case there were “dirty ones” that were “hiding.” A soldier reflected: “The feeling is that the IDF has become like an army of Vikings – they let soldiers loot to they’ll be happy and keep fighting.”

Another soldier noted, “In the village we entered there were no terrorists; the houses were empty. There was no fighting there, only operations to flatten the houses.” The soldier added: “This is the IDF of the last two years – the Israel Defense Forces for destroying houses. The news will report on fierce battles and the destruction of terrorist infrastructure, but our mission was one thing – to leave no structure standing, to destroy everything.” They even stopped using explosives to destroy villages and homes, instead bringing in civilian contractors with bulldozers and excavators, “They were all either extremist settlers or Bedouin and Druze,” while the role of soldiers “was to protect them.” Every day, noted the reservist, “each company was assigned a new compound in the village. It felt like we were in a race against time, trying to demolish as much as possible. Every evening the officers had to report how many houses each company had demolished. They called it ‘achievement assessment’.” Only in Israel could the physical process of ethnic cleansing and mass destruction be referred to as “achievement assessment.”

A reservist commented: “For many of the religious guys with me, this was a supreme mission. The battalion commander was the worst extremist. He refused to go home; the smile never left his face. He was euphoric.” They added: “Most of the people with me didn’t care. They’d go in and look for things to steal, to loot… Others enjoyed the destruction, the vandalism. They’d take a hammer and smash things, or just open cabinets and shatter cups and plates. The only reason was revenge.” Another reservist commented that, “I felt that there, over the border [in Lebanon], it was somehow okay to be crazy.” This latter point reminds one of the descriptions of fascist imperialism that we addressed in earlier parts of this essay, where it is in the conquered, occupied territories that fascist fantasies are able to play out, away from the gaze and laws of domestic society, in a world without rules and restrictions.

A New York Times investigation from early May 2026 found that in southern Lebanon, “Israel has razed border villages as part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a larger occupation.” Defense minister Katz even stated it was built on tactics used in Gaza. The investigation found that, “Widespread demolitions have flattened expanses of at least two dozen towns and villages near the border, with damage to government offices as well as civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and mosques.” The IDF was also building new outposts across southern Lebanon, suggesting it was preparing for a long-term occupation. One IDF soldier in Lebanon told Haaretz that, “These are permanent outposts that will be manned for a long time.” Another army source told the newspaper: “We’re behaving just like we did in Gaza… There’s a list of homes to be demolished, and we measure success based on the number of buildings destroyed in a day. It’s not clear why so many troops are need[ed] to protect these activities, or what the broader goal beyond this is.” As one senior officer in the IDF told Haaretz in early May: “I’ve learned that defending from the line of the gate [the border] and sometimes from the line of the community isn’t enough, and we must not allow big problems to only get bigger… As long as this is what we’re told to do, this is what we’ll continue to do… As a senior officer, I feel great value in our presence here, holding this zone, pushing back the enemy, holding the territory and destroying infrastructure.”

IDF military commanders told Haaretz that they were destroying schools, infrastructure and homes in order to “clear the area.” Defense minister Katz stated, “all houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be demolished according to the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza.” He said the IDF would remain “positioned in a security zone inside Lebanon” and “will maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani” river. The IDF established a new “yellow line” (much like in Gaza) which was about 10km north of the Israeli border and 20km south of the Litani, and was “clearing” all homes and infrastructure south of that “yellow line,” representing an unofficial new border. Mass destruction, displacement, occupation and ethnic cleansing are all made vague and banal through the language of machines: to clear the area (displace and destroy), build a security zone (occupy), and establish a yellow line (to change the border by force). It was the lower-rank IDF soldiers and officers who were more honest with their descriptions of what was taking place, untrained in the arts of political language, when they acknowledged that, “The only mission is to continue the destruction,” and that, “It isn’t terrorist infrastructure; we’re destroying everything.” These statements are, in effect, accurate translations of the machine language of clearing and building security zones.  But the problem with the honest descriptions is that they reveal a level of brutality that is not consistent with popular perceptions of a civilized or democratic society. Honest descriptions convey the reality of monstrous policies. No army or state making claims to be moral or righteous can pursue a policy of destroying everything. So, they hide their monstrous actions with their emotionally detached machine language.

The language of fascist imperialism is to talk like monsters and machines, interchangeably and simultaneously. The language of fascism – the language of monsters – is used to incite emotions, inspire supporters, and strike fear among enemies. Israel intends to destroy the villages, expel the population, and occupy the territory of southern Lebanon. In stating this clearly, Israeli officials are able to rally the fanatical support of their base, and strike fear among their ‘enemies’ and intended victims. Stating such clear intentions can also help actually implement the policies without having to do anything concrete; as in, by saying that you will destroy everything and kill anyone, you are encouraging people to flee without having yet to do anything on the ground. For a fanatic base of extremists who dream of settling in southern Lebanon and realizing their fantasies of a ‘Greater Israel’, such a language of monsters arouses their greatest emotional desires and political objectives, and assures them that their leaders have not been led astray by the ‘moderating’ influence of establishment politicians and structures. Such a language of monsters, then, clearly serves several objectives in war and empire.

But the vague euphemisms of political language – the language of machines – still has the central role to play. While the language of brutality conveys objectives and tactics, the language of machines – of banality, as Hannah Arendt might put it, justifies and obscures this brutality from the wider public and the ‘international community.’ The combined vote share of the parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the two most extreme right (and fascistic) political leaders in the Israeli government, was approximately 11 percent of the national vote in 2022. Their extreme language may rally their base and the settler movement (which itself comprises about ten percent of Israel’s Jewish population), but euphemistic political language allows them to embed their brutality in the wider political system, normalizing and legitimizing their language (and politics) while also dampening and obscuring its true violence. In short, by integrating the language of monsters and machines, the monsters (the fascists) are able to both legitimize and sanitize their language and politics within the establishment and popular culture. Thus, Smotrich can declare both his intent to bring “hell on you” while justifying and softening that violent language by saying it is done to “create a sterile security cordon.” To be “bringing hell” evokes images of fire, destruction and death, but a “sterile security cordon” evokes barely any images at all, just vague concepts of ‘emptiness’ and ‘cleanliness.’

Those who are the targets of the brutal language (whether the base of support or the enemies under threat) understand that that language is for them – the settler extremists hear “bringing hell” to be the promise of a Biblical fantasy realized, while the Lebanese hear “bringing hell” to be a violent and destructive threat. When the extremist base hears their leaders use vague and empty language like “sterile security cordon,” they accept it as the price to gaining power, that their leaders must, to a degree, play the game of politics in order to gain and exercise political power. They might therefore view their leaders’ use of such machine language to be part of a deliberate effort to deceive the establishment and wider society. Conversely, those who are the targets of the political language of machines, the wider public and establishment, believe that the use of the extremist language of brutality is designed to placate “the base,” and may even accept it as a necessary amount of bravado to strike fear among their shared enemies. To them, the use of vague terms like “sterile security cordon” reflects a moderating impulse among the extreme right, their possible “maturing” by accepting the established political discourse of security and defense, a paradigm which most Israelis can accept and support. They believe that it represents the extremist leadership accepting that shared reality (by speaking its language), while interpreting the “bringing hell” rhetoric to be fantasy consumption for the extremist base, not necessarily a statement of policy. After all, to most Israelis, Israel doesn’t destroy and ethnically cleanse or “bring hell,” it pursues security interests through acts of self-defense, regardless of what the “fringe” says (even when the fringe is now centered squarely in power). Thus, all sides acknowledge that the use of political language – both brutal and banal (monsters and machines) – is inherently deceptive, they just don’t agree about who is being deceived and for what purpose.

What Smotrich and other right-wing extremists in Israel and the United States have done is to legitimize those with a more violent and explicitly racist language by integrating it with the common euphemisms of political and security discourse. This does not challenge, but supports Orwell’s overall thesis on political language: that it consists primarily of “the defense of the indefensible” in order to avoid arguments that were “too brutal for most people to face,” and therefore, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” When the Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon acknowledged that, “we’re destroying everything,” and, “The only mission is to continue the destruction,” they were describing an indefensible policy, as Orwell would put it, something which was “too brutal for most people to face.” Thus, the monstrous reality of destroying everything was translated into the stated objective of creating a sterile security cordon, a term Orwell would certainly have agreed constituted “sheer cloudy vagueness.”

One notable difference with Israel is that brutal language is more common than elsewhere, so while euphemisms are still widely used, the language of monsters – let alone its politics – does not provoke a significant backlash as it might in other countries. Israeli political language has introduced more openly racist and violent language because the Israeli leadership and society have become more openly racist and violent, or at least more openly supportive of those ideas and actions. Most societies are likely to view such statements and arguments as being “too brutal for most people to face,” but Israeli society has to a significant extent become more brutal, and therefore such statements appear more normal within the Israeli political context. That this more explicitly fascist language has integrated itself with the common machine language of Israeli security and defense reflects how Israeli fascists themselves have become more integrated with the Israeli political and security establishment and society at large. Even if the actual popular support base for figures like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are relatively low, their politics and language are now mainstream and cut across the spectrum.

The interaction between language and politics is neither exact nor immediate. It is an evolutionary process, complete with successes and failures, advances and declines. Decades of brutality, apartheid, colonialism, killing and control over Palestinian life and land, justified through the euphemistic language of security and defense, has contributed to making Israel a more brutal, racist, and violent society. Decades of justifying or erasing Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinians (in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza) through the use of political language has helped to create fascist and religious extremist movements, which have unsurprisingly emerged out of the settler-colonies in the West Bank, and took power in Israel itself, reshaping both it and the wider region according to their dangerous fantasies of a ‘Greater Israel.’

And of course, those fantasies – and Israel’s current stage of fascist imperialism – does not stop at Gaza or Lebanon. It even extends into Syria. But it is also dramatically realized in the apartheid hell-hole of the Israeli occupied West Bank, where Israeli settlers run rampant and terrorize Palestinian communities. It is in the occupied West Bank where Israel’s modern fascist movement was born and from which it came to seize power in Israel itself. It is to the West Bank where the fascists return to make their deadly fantasies a reality.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a writer and researcher of politics, history, and economics based in Toronto, Canada. His website is Empire and Economics, he hosts the podcast ‘In This Mad World.’ You can subscribe to his Substack and follow him on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and be sure to subscribe to his bi-weekly News Junkies newsletter.

Below are links to the first two episodes of my interview series where I discuss my ongoing series on political language, empire, and fascism, ‘Monsters and Machines.’

Episode #204 Fascism and Political Language with Andrew Gavin Marshall (Part 1)

Today we have a lengthy conversation with friend of the show Andrew Gavin Marshall to discuss the first part of his recent series on fascism. We discuss a working definition of fascism, the usage of political language and how it can be invoked in different ways, and how society has been focused on avoiding confronting and learning about fascism and the detriment therein.

Episode #205: Fascism and Political Language with Andrew Gavin Marshall (Part 2)

We chat with Andrew Gavin Marshall on part two of his series on fascism. In this interview, we discuss the amorphous nature of fascism, how its adherents don’t really have a political history to work off of, why former colonies didn’t lean towards fascist tendencies, and finally end with a discussion on how one can attempt, if at all, to help someone who is enamored by fascism.

Another American citizen has been killed by the fascist regime’s racist paramilitary police forces. The government is rapidly attempting to establish an authoritarian state under the almost singular leadership of its mentally decrepit octogenarian president, desperately seeking to overcompensate for his immeasurable inadequacies as a human being by forcing the world to kiss his golden ring. Much of the population of the United States toils under a system of economic uncertainty and social instability. The country’s parasitic oligarchy expands their riches and extends their reach literally into the universe beyond our planet.

America’s vast and declining empire grows more violent and exposes its own immense weak underbelly. The strength of its military and economic power is matched by the exposure of its bases and assets, the precarity and lack of trust of its allies, the interdependence of its economy, and the extent of its hubris. America’s empire was always powerful in what it can project and collect, but weak in what it can sustain and inspire. Under fascism, its empire has lost even the pretenses of creating a safer or more democratic world, long mythologized but now officially euthanized and eulogized by the Trump regime. America’s empire is stripped to its skeletal structure of pure power interest. It wants to strike fear and terror, extract tribute, demand subservience, and establish its credibility only through brutality. It wages war and seeks to expand its territory.

Do not seek logic or rationality in fascist madness. It is a system of intense self-destruction which seeks rapid expansion and violent domination. It is the empire abroad come home to roost. It is the naked truth of what America has become. And where it is going.

Fascism is not some political plaything or term-dated social experiment, capable of being ended through an electoral upset or inspiring speech. It is the abyss of the human political animal. In a world of hypocritical, unequal, brutal, dictatorial, and mythical political ideologies, states and systems, fascism is the worst of them all. It is the political parasite that kills the host, the cancer that destroys the cells, the black hole into which the star collapses.

Fascism is the product of broken political, economic and social promises. It is not a rebellion against reality, but a rejection of it altogether. It is thought for the thoughtless, feeling for those with no empathy, it is recollection for those with no memory, it is movement for those with no sense of direction, it is courage for cowards, power for the pathetic, and human nature for the inhumane.

Fascism is a total project, though it is not politically or economically revolutionary. It does not seek to tear down, reimagine, and create new forms of power and social structures, it seeks to reorganize and reshape them to its will, bend them to its command, use them to its advantage. But it is culturally revolutionary in that it seeks to tear down and create a new concept of ‘human’, a new culture it defines as ‘pure’ and tied to some mythical past for which it is willing to violently kill and destroy. Fascism is not politically or economically revolutionary because that would require a level of creativity, imagination, and hope that fascism and its adherents and leaders typically lack. They cannot envision a new system or society because they cannot even understand the one they live inside. Their revolution is cultural because they can only grasp the language and vision of popular cultural appeal, so their great war is waged by people against people, not against power structures and systems they do not understand.

Click here to continue reading…

Welcome to the first ever News Junkies newsletter, a bi-weekly newsletter from Empire and Economics focused on providing you with summaries, quotes and context for some of the most interesting and important news stories of the day. I do the scouring of sources (often hidden behind paywalls) so you don’t have to!

The first half of this newsletter is sampled free for all to see, but paid subscribers have full access to the entire newsletter! Please consider subscribing below if you haven’t already. Paid subscriptions go towards meeting the costs of my time, effort, and my own numerous newspaper and media subscriptions that help me provide you with important sources from around the world.

Unfortunately, knowledge is often hidden behind paywalls, whether it is newspaper subscriptions like the Financial Times or the New York Times (two essential papers of record for any news junkies in the English-speaking world), or academic journals, magazines, and university educations. I would love to provide as much free content as possible for readers, to reach as wide an audience as possible, but I also need to meet my costs and try to generate an income so I can sustain and grow my writing, podcasting, videos, and other efforts to get news and information out into the world.

Please consider becoming a subscriber below.

News Junkies – Middle East Mayhem

This edition of the newsletter will be focused on the upcoming Israeli elections in the fall and the escalating war between the United States and Iran, with its regional implications.

Israeli Elections

Financial Times: “The man running against Benjamin Netanyahu“

Polling data in Israel is showing that Gadi Eisenkot is leading ahead of Netanyahu for the upcoming fall scheduled elections. Eisenkot is a former IDF chief of staff (that’s the top military position in the country), reflecting a long-standing trend of top generals and military officials transitioning into Israeli politics. Netanyahu is attempting to portray Eisenkot as a leftist (a slur inside rightwing Israel) who will work with “the Arabs.” Eisenkot, for his part, rejects the accusation and repeatedly brandishes his own credentials as a hawkish military figure. Indeed, Eisenkot was the general who formed Israel’s exceedingly brutal military doctrine (prior to the Gaza genocide) known as the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ (named after the neighbourhood in Beirut, Lebanon, that Israel flattened during the 2006 war on Lebanon). The doctrine called for the use of overwhelming force against civilian targets and civilian infrastructure (an international crime) claiming that because rockets may be fired towards Israel from civilian areas, those areas are then considered military targets. This doctrine was utilized in repeated Gaza wars between 2008 and 2021, up until the outbreak of the latest war and genocide in Gaza that began in October 2023, when the Dahiya Doctrine was essentially expanded and made so much more extreme to the point of targeting the entirety of Gaza for destruction. It was a criminal doctrine that paved the way for Israel’s most criminal war to date.

Eisenkot also joined the Netanyahu government’s so-called ‘war cabinet’ at the start of the Gaza genocide, alongside another notable former army chief-turned-politician, Benny Gantz. HIs son was even killed while deployed in Gaza as part of the Israeli invasion and occupation army of extermination and destruction. But after falling out with Netanyahu, as everyone who works with the country’s ultimate liar does, Eisenkot retired from the war cabinet in 2024. But due to his connections with the IDF, which is still the most trusted institution among Israelis (despite being the number one child murdering institution on the planet, and a perpetrator of genocide), Eisenkot has been rising in popularity, with his party polling just one seat ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud.

In reaction to the attacks from Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition, Eisenkot has assured potential voters that he is no leftist and certainly doesn’t support Palestinian rights to self determination and liberty. “I have never in all my 66 years said the words ‘Palestinian state’,” he recently declared in an interview.

Haaretz: “Netanyahu’s Biggest Challenger: Who Is Gadi Eisenkot and What Does He Stand For?“

This article in Israel’s oldest national newspaper, Haaretz, reported that Eisenkot’s party platform includes efforts to make Israel a regional power, “to expand the circle of peace, to ensuire a solid Jewish majority for generations and establish Israel’s position in the world.” His party platform says very little about the Palestinians, whether those residing inside Israel with Israeli citizenship (who he proposes should be drafted into the IDF (of which they have been exempted to date), but affirmed he does not support a two-state solution, and supports Israeli Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which he refers to as “Judea and Samaria.”

What do these stories tell us about Eisenkot and the upcoming elections?

Firstly, it’s that Israel’s conduct in war and toward the Palestinians is not a government issue, or a purely Netanyahu issue, but an Israeli political and society-wide issue. Getting rid of the Netanyahu government might remove a fascist government from power, but it does not change the fact that Israel is a genocidal state and society. Perhaps the degrees of violence, brutality, racism and genocidal behaviour may change, but the problem is institutional and social. For Israel to truly have change, meaningful change, it would essentially require an almost revolutionary movement and transformation. But there is nothing remotely resembling this inside Israel.

To be sure, there are those inside Israel who acknowledge and oppose the country’s genocide against the Palestinians and ever-expanding imperial presence in Lebanon, Syria, and its criminal war of aggression against Iran, but they are sadly a tiny minority of the population, incapable of effecting real political and social change. The implications of this are that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its imperial footprint in the region will not be abandoned with a change of government, and that change cannot actually come from within Israel. This makes it all the more important for the country’s major arms dealers, financial supporters, and diplomatic partners (the US, Germany, Italy, UK, France, Canada, EU, etc.) to exert extreme efforts and pressure upon the country to make profound transformations. But there is clearly no indication that this is happening. Public opinion across the west, including the United States, has turned steadily and increasingly against Israel and its conduct, but that has yet to turn into policy change. So while Israel has elections on the horizon, it may be elections in the United States, Germany and elsewhere that are ultimately more important to forcing change inside Israel itself.

The sad reality is that no matter who is elected and what parties come to govern the country, the genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, occupations in Lebanon and Syria and wars of aggression against Iran are likely to continue.

End of the free sample of the News Junkies newsletter! To receive the full newsletter, please become a paid subscriber below!

I’ve got a few new things on the horizon for you to look forward to.

Not only do I have more of my ongoing content to post here on my website – with the ‘Monsters and Machines’ series continuing – but I also have some exciting new offers and platforms for you to follow for original, exclusive content.

First, please sign up to my new paid newsletter on my website, where I will be curating a list of top news stories, summaries, quotes and important pieces of information from some of the top news sources around the world. Don’t have time to keep up with the geopolitical and economic news of the world? Not to worry, I’ll curate the list for you! Sign up below, choose from a monthly subscription of $4.99 or a discounted yearly rate of $40.

In addition, I also just set up my own Substack, so please follow and subscribe to me there. I won’t just be cross-posting content from my main website, but will be posting exclusive written content for subscribers there.

Click here to follow and subscribe to my Substack!

I also just established my own Patreon account for my podcast, In This Mad World, which will not only host the podcast episodes that everyone has access to for free, but will also be producing exclusive podcast content for subscribers, so be sure to follow and subscribe to my Patreon here!

Additionally, I just signed up to Medium where I will also be posting exclusive written content, so be sure to give me a follow there as well!

And just in case you haven’t done it yet:

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel here

Follow me on Twitter/X here.

Follow me on Instagram here.

Follow me on Facebook here.

Follow me on LinkedIn here.

And of course, be sure to subscribe to my podcast, In This Mad World, which will also be re-launching new episodes in the coming weeks, by subscribing to it on Spotify here, or Apple Podcasts here!

It will take me a few weeks to be able to start posting new and exclusive content to all these platforms, but I’ve been working on material and plans for new written, audio, video and social media content exclusive to each platform, so be sure to follow, like, subscribe, rate (five stars please!), review, comment and share!

None of this can happen without your support, whether it’s reading, following, liking, and sharing content, or becoming a paid subscriber or supporting through donations, and it is all greatly appreciated!

To make this expansion happen, which takes substantial time and effort (and expenses on my end), I will continue to need your support in its many forms going forward. So please click the links above, follow my accounts, and if it’s within your means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter, Substack, and soon to my Patreon account as well!

And stay tuned for all that’s to come!

Thank you, dear readers.

Andrew Gavin Marshall

Today’s post is unique in that I am asking for some financial support in the form of donations to help with maintaining my research, writing, podcasting and other media. At the moment I am looking just to meet current expenses (for the website, recording services, graphic and design software, podcast distribution services and other costs in the maintenance, production and distribution of articles, podcasts and videos. It’s a costly process, and one that so far has only drained my funds rather than providing any new ones.

I am working on some longer-term methods of monetizing content, making videos, building a podcast and website audience, utilizing social media, producing written content to purchase, and I recently just created my own Substack account which you can (and should!) follow and subscribe to here!

There are many ways you can help. Much of the struggle to get your content seen and read and watched is trying to understand and utilize the algorithms that dominate our social media universe. It has become increasingly hard (and expensive) to try to break through algorithmic restrictions, and it is rarely helped when the content you are producing is highly political and highly critical of existing power structures, which the tech oligarch algorithms are largely designed to support. Some of the free and easy ways you can help support me in this effort is to *like* the content I share, comment on it, share it yourself (forwarding by email, posting on social media, sending to friends and family). The more you engage with the content, the more algorithms will push it. Every bit helps!

Another way you can help support is by providing a one-time or even monthly donation to help me meet the existing costs so that I can continue this work and expand the scope and content forms. I’ve got much more coming your way in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Fill out the donation button below!

Every form of support is a great help for which I am eternally grateful, so thank you in advance for any and all support you are able to provide.

Thank you sincerely,

Andrew Gavin Marshall

Part 1: READ – LISTEN – WATCH

Part 2: READ – LISTEN – WATCH

Part 3: READ – LISTEN – WATCH

Part 4: READ – LISTEN –

WATCH BELOW

This is Part 4 of a series, “Monsters and Machines: The Political Language of Fascist Imperialism,” part of my Little Book/Long Essay (LB/LE) series.

To listen to Part 4, click here.

To watch Part 4, click here.

Read Part 1: “To Make Lies Sound Truthful”: Orwell on Political Language

Listen to Part 1 here.

Watch Part 1 here.

Read Part 2: The Monster Method: Defining Fascism

Listen to Part 2 here.

Watch Part 2 here.

Read Part 3: When Monsters Make Empires: What is Fascist Imperialism?

Listen to Part 3 here.

Watch Part 3 here.

By: Andrew Gavin Marshall

One sentence summary: How the combination of an Orwellian political language of euphemism with a brutal language of fascism manifested in the genocide in Gaza.

In part 1, we examined George Orwell’s concept of ‘political language’ which is “designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It is a language which hides and justifies the brutality of states and empires through the use of vague and euphemistic words and phrases that can make its speakers sound like machines. While political language can be used in many areas and contexts, for the purpose of this essay, I am focusing on the use of the language of machines when the machinery is that of empire. Thus, for the purposes of this essay and my argument, the language of machines is the language of empire. But I also introduce another form of political language, more evocative and emotional, a language of brutality – of hate, fear, and violence – with its fascist dialect, the language of monsters.

In part 2, we attempt to address one of Orwell’s main concerns about using clear and direct language. In his 1946 essay, he identified the term fascism as having already become almost meaningless. Eighty years later, it is likely that most people would be hard-pressed to express anything beyond a superficial or largely symbolic understanding of the term. For that reason, we took some time and effort to explore what fascism is, and subsequently, what fascist imperialism is, which was the focus of part 3. And then we applied our definition of fascism to the present day Israel and United States governments, and establish that they are, indeed, fascist regimes.

Now, in part 4, we get to the main focus: the language of fascist imperialism; the language of monsters and machines. We have established the nature and role of the political language of machines (and empire), as well as the political language of monsters (fascism), and now we explore how they are combined in order to support each other in the endeavour of building or expanding an empire through fascist imperialism. The first and most extensive focus is on Israel, since it has had a fascist government for roughly two years longer than the United States (since the end of 2022), and has been waging its wars of fascist imperialism since 2023. The United States gained its fascist government at the start of 2025 and launched its initial wave of fascist imperialism at the start of 2026 in Venezuela. These two regimes are at different places in their internal fascist development, as well as in their external empire-building, and may differ on overall interests and objectives, but they came together in an alliance of fascists to launch a war of aggression against Iran. This part focuses on the language of monsters and machines (fascist imperialism) in Israel from the start of the Gaza War in October 2023 to the joint US-Israel war on Iran (February 2026 – June?). 

For those who have long followed the subject of Israel’s repression, colonization, and occupation of the Palestinians, the language of machines and monsters have always existed alongside each other. Racist, discriminatory, dehumanizing, and violent rhetoric has often accompanied the dry, lifeless, euphemistic language of occupation. In particular, the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that began with the 1967 war, nearly sixty years ago, put millions of Palestinians under Israeli military rule, with no civil or political rights. It established the occupation, and with it, an Israeli empire. This shaped the political language inside Israel, and among its allies in the West, and a shared language of empire – the language of machines – took hold in Israeli and western political systems. But born of this same occupation was a settler movement of religious extremists who had a vision of a future ‘Greater Israel’ to meet the promise of Biblical prophecy, to cleanse the land of non-Jews, to colonize, to settle, to expand. The settler movement in occupied Palestinian lands became a laboratory for right-wing religious extremist movements.

One such movement came to be identified as the Kahanists, named after a right-wing extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane (who had previously founded a paramilitary racist group in New York, the Jewish Defense League, which was eventually outlawed). After he moved to Israel and founded the Kach party and broader Kahanist movement, he generated a following of people who believed, as he did, that the Arabs (they never use the name Palestinian) must be expelled from all of the land, or turned into a people with slave status; that segregation and apartheid structures must be expanded beyond the barriers of the occupation and across Israel as a whole; that the liberal democratic political system must be replaced with an authoritarian religious theocracy. He was explicitly racist, imperialistic, and fascist, and he and his party were deemed to be beyond the pale even for mainstream Israeli society. Even the right wing Likud party, then led by Menachem Begin, a former Zionist terrorist leader in pre-Israel Palestine, refused to engage with Kahane or his ideas, and he along with virtually all other parties would stand and leave the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) when Meir Kahane would stand to speak during his very brief duration as a member of the Knesset, before he was ultimately banned for hate speech. And as I am sure you could imagine, to surpass the bar for hate speech against Arabs in Israel was surely a feat. But it was also a different time, many decades ago.

Kahane himself was assassinated in New York in 1990. But his legacy lived on in the actions of Jewish terrorists, such as Baruch Goldstein, who massacred Palestinians at prayer in an ancient mosque in Hebron in 1994, or the settler who assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, for having agreed to peace talks with the Palestinians. After several high-profile terrorist acts, the Kach party and Kahanist movement were outlawed as terrorist organizations. But its ideas lived on among a group of extremist settlers in the West Bank, and over time they founded organizations and parties that sought to pursue Kahanist ideals, and trained Israeli youths to become child soldiers in a paramilitary army inside the occupied West Bank (known as the ‘Hilltop Youth’ – these are the racist teenage boys that you see harassing and attacking Palestinian farmers and villagers on a daily basis), who have also engaged in numerous acts of terrorism, such as burning Palestinian families alive, including a baby, while they slept in their home. The Kahanists would agitate and frustrate even the Israeli army, let alone the Palestinians.

After years as a young activist getting arrested dozens of times for various provocations and racist acts, one prominent Kahanist even became a lawyer, and would go on to represent the Hilltop Youth and other Jewish terrorists. Over time and after several failed attempts, this lawyer would enter the Israeli Knesset under a new party, the Jewish Power party, the modern incarnation of the racist and fascist Kach party. Soon after, Benjamin Netanyahu would engineer this party into a coalition government under his leadership, and the party’s leader, a man named Itamar Ben-Gvir, would be given the cabinet position of National Security Minister with responsibility to oversee the police and prisons.

Thus, the political system and language of empire and occupation (the machines) created the conditions for the extremists and fascists (the monsters) to rise, explicitly from inside the occupation, but then to expand outward and take power in Israel itself. So, while there has long been a conversation between the language of machines and monsters in Israel, it took an increasingly dark turn after the establishment of the new government in late December 2022. Fascist language and fascist politics were now explicitly mainstream and in power, no longer relegated to the margins or dismissed as fringe. Fascism had taken political power. And after the Hamas attacks of October 7^th, 2023, fascist imperialism would be the default response. As such, the language of monsters and machines became more entangled than ever before; the conversation had become a monologue, but one delivered by a deranged psychopath. It would appear as if the language of machines and monsters has become inseparable in Israel, and thus, that the project of empire is now inextricably linked to the project of fascism.

Though the explicitly fascist party – Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) – and its leader Ben-Gvir are not by far the most popular party or political leader in Israel, its ideas are increasingly part of the mainstream, and it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish political leaders based upon their rhetoric. The language of monsters and machines (fascism and empire) blends and becomes mutually reinforcing, as do their political projects and methods.

Israel’s fascist war began following the events of October 7^th, 2023. It was clear from the start that this was going to be a different kind of war, with an unprecedented level of intensity and brutality. The Israelis were not simply aiming to address the threat posed to them by a militant armed resistance group inside the besieged territory of Gaza, but they were aiming to exact a punishment upon all of Gaza and its population, to impose a system of collective punishment (which is a war crime) on 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in a small and isolated territory. The Israelis were not only pursuing imperial objectives related to security and defense, but they were pursuing violent emotional objectives related to vengeance and brutality.

In the first days of the war, when Israel ordered roughly half the population of Gaza, some 1.1 million people, to flee south to the bottom half of the Strip, it was evident that mass displacement was going to be a prominent feature of this war. The order of displacement, or ethnic cleansing, was called an “evacuation,” and Israel warned that anyone who remained in the north of the Strip would be seen as “an accomplice in a terrorist organization.” In other words, Israel was determining that by virtue of your geographic location inside an enclosed territory, you would be designated as a terrorist and thus, your murder would be officially justified. This is the language of machines, of empire: when ethnic cleansing and mass displacement can be called evacuation. When Orwell described this same act with the political language of eighty years ago, he said mass displacement was translated into transfer of population. The Israeli version is even more cynical than this euphemism, since by framing it as an evacuation, they imply that it is being done for the good of the population, that it is a moral imperative, that they are saving the people from the death and destruction (that the Israelis are about to unleash). Such language is stated by the Israelis and then repeated by their allies and the media. The language of machines has always served to hide monstrous acts. As one Israeli military official put it, “This evacuation is for your own safety.”

It became quite clear, quite fast, that mass displacement was not the only threat to the Palestinians; Israel’s political language and actions had entered a genocidal stage. I do not intend to litigate the case for why Israel’s war on Gaza constitutes genocide: the case has been made and largely settled by others. Numerous human rights organizations, international bodies, and experts have come to the conclusion that Israel was and has been committing a genocide in Gaza, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s own human rights groups B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and various UN bodies and experts, along with numerous scholars of genocide studies, including several of the top experts in the field. There is also an ongoing case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for committing genocide, and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for committing the crime of starvation. Establishing the case for genocide is not the focus of this essay; I continue on the assumption that the case has been made and settled.

But I want to provide the legal definition of genocide, as outlined in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” with the acts identified as: “(a) killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Important to keep in mind is the centrality of the “intent to destroy,” but also that this is qualified with the phrase, “in whole or in part.” In other words, genocide – and the intent to destroy a people – is not dependent upon the aim or actions to destroy the entire population, but could be aimed at “part” of the wider population or group, so long as it meets other aspects of the criteria, such as the fact that the “intent to destroy” is aimed at “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” and specifically because they are members of that group. Thus, genocide is not something that can be identified only when it has succeeded in theoretically destroying or killing an entire group of people.

Genocide must be understood as a process, not an event or single outcome. Similar to how we defined fascism, we can also understand genocide as a method of politics that is concerned with issues of war, domination, nation, and empire. It, too, exalts in violent depraved fantasies made real, and is fuelled by a sense of victimhood, humiliation, and revenge. It aims to mobilize and incite significant segments of the population, and to take or consolidate power through mass death and destruction. The Nazi Holocaust is the most famous genocide, and the one that prompted attempts to define and prosecute the crime. That genocide was undertaken by the Nazis for both national and imperial objectives and rationales. They wanted to ‘cleanse’ their nation of Jews and other ‘undesirables,’ but there were limitations to how far the Nazis could initially go. When they came to power in 1933, they attempted to implement a boycott of Jewish businesses. It was a rapid and dramatic failure. The majority of Germans simply didn’t share the same Nazi zeal for anti-Jewish ideas and actions. German society had to be further radicalized, and the most extreme racial policies and objectives had to be less in the public view.

Initially, the Nazis simply wanted the Jews gone, to deport them to other countries and places. But the war changed everything. As Germany’s borders grew and its empire expanded, it found itself the ruler of many more millions of Jews and other ‘undesirable’ elements. Nazi policy during its fascist wars of conquest and subsequent occupations unleashed violence and brutality against the Jews and all those deemed enemies. The Nazis built up their vast system of concentration camps across Eastern and Central Europe, largely designed as labour or detention camps, at least initially. But as the war went on, and the number of Jews under German rule increased, the intentions and actions became explicitly genocidal, and concentration camps became death camps. The Holocaust was thus designed and implemented at an industrial scale. German fascism was concerned with issues of nation and empire; so too was the genocide it undertook, to cleanse the nation and rule the empire.

While this is the most famous genocide, it is far from the only one. Probably the vast majority of genocides in modern world history were perpetrated through imperial and colonial wars. The decimation of indigenous peoples across the Americas over the course of centuries is perhaps one of the most striking examples of understanding genocide as a method and process, rather than as a single event or objective. Imperial and colonial wars are most violent in the early stages of building the empire or the final stages of trying to keep it from falling apart. In these situations, they can often take on genocidal proportions. The French in Algeria, and the British in Kenya are two notable examples in the post-World War II period of imperial decline leading to wars approaching or reaching genocidal proportions. They were wars waged in response to armed movements resisting colonial governments and racist settler societies. While the tactics of the resistance was often described as terrorism, the response of the imperial powers was to resort to mass killing, displacement, and even corralling into concentration camps, ultimately murdering many hundreds of thousands. But in the end, they lost their colonies, which became new and politically independent nation states.

As empires declined and decolonization spread across much of the world in the post-World War II period, nearly one hundred new nations were formed out of the colonies of collapsed or declining empires. Just as genocide had its own unique characteristics during the imperial and colonial era of the 19^th to early 20^th centuries, so too would it take on distinct characteristics in the age of the nation-state, which became the predominant political unit of the global system. Nations that sought to create homogeneous societies often defined along ethnic, religious or racial lines, would frequently turn to violent and brutal tactics of domination, ethnic cleansing, expulsion, or mass killing and genocide. The method and process of genocide became a method of building and consolidating nations and states, of ‘cleansing’ the communities within their borders, of establishing their control over their territory and populations, of addressing threats to their power and enacting efforts to expand and consolidate that power. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 is an example of this post-colonial nation-state genocide, pitting one ethnic group against another, and in the context of an invasion and civil war, allowed them to wage a campaign of extermination framed as an act of self-defense.

Genocides can be understood as most common in the actions of colonial empires, or in the actions of states that used to be colonies. Nation and empire are linked in acts of genocide, even if indirectly and at a distance. War is central to the methods and process of both fascism and genocide; and whatever their motives, it is the methods that matter more. But in analyzing the uses of political language – both machines and monsters – we gain a better understanding of both.

The formula for interpreting political language is actually rather simple. Orwell warned that certain words and terms were “often used in a consciously dishonest way,” which, he explained, manifests when “the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” To identify and try to translate political language, you look at what is said, and then you look at what is done. If they do not align in a meaningful way, and yet the policy does not change over time, then you can assume that the policy is correct, but the description or justification of it is wrong or deliberately misleading. Yet, if the language does not change, and the policy does not change, then they are both assumed to be correct in the eyes of the policymakers. Therefore, when words and phrases do not align with actions and outcomes, and yet both continue uncorrected, those words and phrases have a unique meaning to the person saying them, and we can translate them based upon their effect.

For example, Israel’s use of the word “evacuation” to describe the policy of ordering the population of northern Gaza to flee south for their own safety, often presented as a kind of ‘humanitarian’ action as evidence of Israel’s ‘moral’ superiority, is understood and translated best by what it looks like on the ground: mass forced displacement through violence and the threat of violence; ethnic cleansing, mass killing, spreading fear and terror. That, then, is the definition of evacuation when used by Israel in the context of dealing with the Palestinians. To those policymakers who use the term “evacuation,” they understand the true context in which it is implemented: the mass killing, displacement, and terror. But because neither the language nor the policies change, we are left with the assumption that “evacuation” simply means something different to those who say and advocate it in this context, versus many who listen and think it is representative of Israel’s “moral” methods of waging war. The reality, is of course, relentlessly immoral and wrong. The machine language hides monstrous policies. But with fascist imperialism and genocidal mania gripping the country of Israel and guiding its government’s actions, the monstrous was immediately mainstream and heavily empowered. The language wasn’t simply hiding or obscuring monstrous actions, it was openly and blatantly encouraging monstrous acts.

Typically, one of the greater challenges of litigating a case of genocide is to prove intent, precisely due to the reasons we have discussed – political language obscures rather than enlightens, and especially when it comes to committing monstrous crimes for fanatical reasons, people are unlikely to be so explicit in explaining their intent to commit such horrifying crimes. Most criminals try to avoid publicly incriminating themselves. But there has to be enough said publicly to help facilitate dehumanization of a target group and to incite fear, humiliation, and desires for vengeance in other population groups – reflected through the language of monsters. And that is where you have to try to decipher the intent. But in the case of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza, intent was quite clear from the beginning.

A non-profit group, Law for Palestine, published an open, online database of over 500 statements made in the aftermath of October 7^th 2023, which could constitute incitement to genocide, and which were said by numerous Israeli cabinet ministers, the prime minister, Knesset members (parliamentarians), military leaders, security officials, former government and security officials, journalists, and others. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant memorably announced the “complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” declaring: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Gallant on numerous occasions announced that, “I have removed all restraints” on Israeli military actions in Gaza, warning that, “Gaza will not return to what it was.” He also stated, “We will eliminate everything.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that, “Gaza is the city of evil, we will turn all the places in which Hamas deploys and hides into ruins. I am telling the people of Gaza – get out of there now. We will act everywhere and with full power.” Netanyahu also frequently employed religious rhetoric, saying, “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” and invoking the Biblical enemy of the Jews, Amalek, who God apparently called upon the Jews to commit a genocide against, to kill every man, woman, child and animal. Netanyahu early on stated, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” Netanyahu also stated, “We’re facing monsters… This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism.” Statements also came from the more centrist, respected political figure of Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel (a largely ceremonial position), who declared in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks that, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”

Various Israeli cabinet ministers and members of the Knesset showed little restraint in their choice of words. Revital Gottleib of Netanyahu’s Likud party posted on twitter: “Bring down buildings! Bomb without distinction!” and called to “Flatten Gaza. Without mercy!” Another Likud Knesset member, Ariel Kallner, called for a “Nakba,” using the term used by the Palestinians to describe the 1948 ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians from their land when Israel was established, posting online: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” The education minister, Yoav Kisch, said of those he described as his enemies in Gaza, “I relate to them like Amalek… Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated.” Other politicians called to “Erase Gaza,” while a military official responsible for managing Israel’s occupied territories stated, “You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Many lawmakers invoked the Biblical enemy of “Amalek,” while calling for “no mercy,” while some called for resettlement of Gaza by Israelis, that the borders of Gaza will change, and called for “razing Gaza” to the ground, to “expel them all.” There were also politicians who called for imposing a system of “hunger and thirst among the Gaza population,” and many supported the withholding of any aid for the people of Gaza.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister and the most extreme of Israel’s government ministers, said, “the only thing that needs to enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of explosives by the Air Force, and not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” Another Knesset member said, “Erase all of Gaza from the face of the earth… Gaza should be erased,” and warned that the “Gazan monsters” could try to escape into Egypt “or they will die.” Another Likud member said, “The war will never end if we don’t expel them all.” One Knesset member and a minister in the government (from Ben-Gvir’s fascist Jewish Power party) even suggested that, “One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza.” Another minister said on television that, “We’re doing a Gazan Nakba 2023.” The deputy speaker of the parliament, from the Likud party, complained, “We are too humanitarian,” adding, “We have to burn Gaza now, nothing less!” Another Knesset member declared, “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.” Minister Ben-Gvir stated: “Let it be clear, when they say that Hamas has to be eliminated, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who give away candy, all of these are terrorists. And they also need to be eliminated!”

This hardly constitutes the machine-like political language that Orwell described as consisting “largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Instead, this language is quite blunt, direct, overtly dehumanizing, violent, and highly incriminating. With explicit calls for brutal vengeance, mass displacement, mass destruction, and even elimination, this clearly constitutes a language of monsters. This language, so much of it coming from government officials, politicians, and military and security elites, reflected a genocidal and fascist transformation taking place in Israeli society, unleashing a political force that was about to be expressed most brutally and directly in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s burgeoning fascism has collided with an imperial (“security”) crisis, and the result is a genocidal war in Gaza and a wider unleashing of fascist imperialism across the region. And this would require a constant, evolving conversation between both of these forms of political language, that of monsters and machines (fascism and empire). In the immediate aftermath of October 7^th, however, the language of monsters was most prevalent. In fact, the widespread use of openly genocidal language began to raise eyebrows abroad and concern at home. Israel’s attorney general, hardly an ally of the sitting government (who wants her fired), warned as early into the war as November 2023 that government officials should be cautious when using incendiary language, saying in a television interview that, “These remarks give support to those who wish us ill because they [the statements] are against the rule of international law and are interpreted as a war crime.” Prime Minister Netanyahu warned his ministers directly, “you need to learn to keep quiet and to not say things you regret a day later.”

It’s worth asking the question that, if this language is so direct and violent, can it be considered a form of political language at all, which Orwell defined as consisting of “euphemism” and “sheer cloudy vagueness”? Well, it is political language by definition, since it is language used by political elites and helps to shape political decisions and outcomes. Does that mean, then, that Orwell’s definition of political language no longer applies? Has it become outdated? Have we now returned to a time of direct and honest political communication? Of course not! So we have to differentiate between the kinds of political language. There is the vague and euphemistic language that Orwell described, which I have otherwise referred to as the language of machines – or the language of empire, but it perhaps even better to think of it as the common tongue of the political establishment. I generally use the term empire throughout this essay because my focus is on the imperial aspects of political language, but it is more broadly representative of the language of political elites.

But then there is that other category of political language we have identified, which spreads hate, fear, racism, discrimination, extremism, and violence. We have a language that hides these things, and a language that celebrates them. We can broadly identify this latter category as a language of brutality, and it serves as the basis for our more specific category related to fascism and genocide, the language of monsters – a language which seeks to incite, justify and glorify monstrous acts to make monstrous fantasies a reality. When this language enters the mainstream of politics, it does not replace the language of machines, but it coexists alongside it. In our previous attempt to define fascism, we examined how when fascists entered power, they did so in cooperation with existing, usually conservative, establishment elites. Perhaps as a linguistic reflection of this process, the political language of monsters must accommodate itself to and integrate itself with the language of machines. One does not replace the other so long as both sources of political language remain empowered. If fascism continues to exist as a form of cooperation with other elites, we should expect both forms of political language – that which is extreme and that which is vague and detached – to persist alongside each other.

If the language of monsters ever becomes the singular political language of a society, than it is likely that a genocidal and/or fascist regime is in the last stages of its radicalization, and is approaching a violent self-destruction. If the language of machines becomes once again dominant and pushes the other to the margins, it is likely to reflect a political reality in which the establishment has effectively asserted control over or removed and sidelined the extremists. But the language should not simply be understood as a response or reaction to political processes, it is also central to driving them. Orwell emphasized this point when he observed that, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Fascist language fuels fascist politics, advancing fascist objectives, which legitimizes fascist language. It’s not simply a matter of language reflecting the political reality, but that it is actively helping to shape it.

The willingness of elites to cooperate with fascists in power is reflected in how the language of machines coexists and interacts with the language of monsters. And just as the power-sharing deals between fascists and elites serve mutual purposes, so too does the mixing of language. For the fascists, they gain entry to power and wider political legitimacy. For the establishment, they gain a legitimacy that comes with a more popular appeal that fascists bring. Because the language of machines is deliberately vague, misleading, and empty of meaning, it inspires little among the public, even when hiding monstrous and horrifying things. But that is its purpose, it is designed to satiate and obfuscate, not instigate and inspire. Fascist language appeals to evocative images and emotions, which can generate a popular appeal, and thus, a degree of political legitimacy. For elites and institutions – for the machine politics of the establishment – their dedication to sounding like machines has made them detached and lacking in legitimacy among the wider public. To embrace fascist politics – and the language of monsters – alongside their machine-like mother tongue, can be understood as an attempt to gain legitimacy by attaching themselves to the mass base of support that fascist movements attempt to develop. This helps to explain why, when many establishment politicians find themselves struggling to connect with the public and maintain legitimacy, they sometimes turn to racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and homophobia.

The languages of monsters and machines can therefore be mutually reinforcing, each providing the other with a degree of legitimacy and access to power. But their combination can create the basis for a fascist and/or genocidal government, state, and society. Israel is a clear example of this. But Israel has long experienced a combination of both of these forms of political language, a reflection of – and support to – the political realities of settler-colonialism, occupation, and domination over millions of Palestinians without political or civil rights. A language of brutality long predated fascism’s rise in Israeli politics, but it helped to make its rise more rapid. And once fascism assumed power, the language of brutality became even more explicitly monstrous. The language of monsters and machines has made possible the rule by monsters and machines.

The effects of this language, and the ideas and actions that propel it and result from it, are clear to see in the ruined landscape that was once the Gaza Strip, now largely, as Netanyahu had promised in those first days of the war, turned into a city “of ruins.” The population has been subjected to endless terror, bombings, starvation, decimation, and genocide. The details of death and destruction are beyond the scope of this essay, but needless to say, Israel has largely carried out – or is still carrying out – many of the wishes and objectives articulated in those first days and weeks of war, to flatten Gaza, to re-occupy and settle the land, and to do all it could to expel and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their land. But to some degree, the language of those first few weeks and months has followed the advice of Netanyahu when he told his ministers to “learn to keep quiet.” Especially with a criminal case going to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide, and International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants out for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his then-defense minister Yoav Gallant for various war crimes, it was seen as important to better manage their use of political language.

To be sure, the language of monsters was still part of the mainstream, and particularly from the more monstrous (fascist) political parties and politicians, but the language of machines reasserted itself at the center. Israel’s nation and empire has long employed a language of machines that was built around the concepts of security and defense, giving it a distinctly militaristic quality. This has been the case from the origins of the state in 1948 to the start of the occupation in 1967, right up until present – both nation and empire expressed and expanded through a dialectic of security and defense. This more than Hebrew is the mother tongue of the Israeli political and military establishment, and society more broadly. Thus, those who espouse the language of monsters – of hate and violence – are equally capable of adopting the standard dialect. What were in late 2023 open calls for ethnic cleansing and a new Nakba against the Palestinians in Gaza, to eliminate and destroy, have now largely (though not exclusively) become more sanitized, dulling, and vague discussions about “buffer zones” and “voluntary emigration.”

Israel had long been creating “buffer zones” inside occupied Gaza. As Israel occupied new territory in Gaza, it destroyed all the buildings and infrastructure that constituted Palestinian life and society. It was a forward trajectory of scorched earth policies, destroying all in its wake, making it unliveable. This strategy of destruction began with a so-called “buffer zone” along the inside of Gaza’s border with Israel, stretching into Palestinian, not Israeli territory. The Israeli foreign minister at the start of the war, Eli Cohen, said that Gaza’s territory would have to “decrease,” whereas former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter said: “On the Gaza Strip all along, we will have a margin. And they will not be able to get in. It will be a fire zone. And no matter who you are, you will never be able to come close to the Israeli border.” In justifying these destructive operations, an IDF spokesman said, “the IDF is locating and destroying terror infrastructures embedded, among other things, inside buildings. This is part of the imperative actions that are needed in order to implement a defense plan that will provide improved security in southern Israel.” All actions, no matter how destructive, are justified as “destroying terror infrastructure.” This is a language all Israelis can understand and find legitimacy within.

Two Israeli authors actually wrote a book on the subject of language during the Gaza war, titled, “A Lexicon of Brutality,” focusing on how the language of the war finds its origins before the war, but collectively shapes the Israeli perceptions about Palestinians. The fact that IDF generals would say things like, “there are no uninvolved people in Gaza,” as in, implying that all Palestinians of Gaza are to be held responsible for the October 7 attacks, or that Palestinians were being displaced and relocated to so-called “humanitarian zones” that were anything but, or that Finance Minister Smotrich would call for the “depopulation” of Gaza and the “voluntary emigration” of its people, all filtered through the media and public discourse of the war and into the consciousness of Israelis. One of the authors of the book, a sociologist, commented that in normalizing such language, “we’re becoming a brutal society.” The second author, a historian, stressed that these rationales didn’t begin with October 7^th, but have their origins in the 1948 Nakba, when “Israel deported hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed villages, allowed the public to loot the property of their former neighbors, to dry out orchards and fields, and to use great physical violence.” But he added that the current Israeli government was exceptional in how it stood out: “That is, there is an explicit policy of transfer, murder and starvation, and this is leading more and more people in Israel and around the world to blame Israel for perpetrating the crime of crimes: genocide.” The sociologist noted that the current war was notable for “the brutal use of words. There’s no longer any shame or desire to conceal… From the first moment, the leaders have been saying exactly what they’re going to do – and they do exactly that.”

In Gaza, Israel destroyed entire cities, such as Rafah in the south, turning it into a so-called “buffer zone.” For much of the war, Israel would order Palestinians in Gaza to “evacuate” (read: be displaced to) areas it called “humanitarian zones” or “safe zones.” These places turned out to be exceedingly dangerous, lacking in resources to sustain life, lacking the ability to house the numbers of displaced persons, subjected to ongoing Israeli attacks, including using massive bombs, and even locating them in areas that Palestinians could not go to. Eventually, Israel had made the concept of a “humanitarian zone” or “safe zone” so meaningless that it dropped its practice of using the terms altogether, instead just focusing on establishing “buffer zones” and “no-go zones.” Less euphemistically but perhaps more horrifyingly, Israel even established “kill zones” inside Gaza, where any Palestinian who crossed the boundary into often arbitrary and unmarked areas would be murdered, otherwise called a “combat zone.” A Gaza “buffer zone” would in effect become a “kill zone” for Palestinians. Notably, the new border buffer zone that Israel demolished into Gaza along the border with Israel became a permanent ‘kill zone‘ for Gaza’s residents.

Behind this euphemistic and sanitized, vague language of machines was a brutal reality of mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and occupation. Gaza itself has been devastated beyond recognitions, with various reports indicating between 60% and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip damaged or destroyed, including 89% of the buildings in the city of Rafah, 78% of Gaza City, and 84% of Northern Gaza. Israel has undertaken repeated attacks on healthcare facilities, infrastructure, and personnel, killing an average of two healthcare workers every day, over 1,700 by October 2025. Nearly 90% of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed. Israel has killed upwards of 200 journalists in Gaza since the war began, some counts put the number above 261, and that of the unprecedented 129 journalists killed around the world in 2025, Israel was responsible for killing two-thirds of them, most of them Palestinians, and of the 47 journalist and media worker killings that were classified by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as deliberately targeted, Israel was responsible for 81% of those murders. These realities are both obscured and made real by the uses of political language. The vast destruction wrought onto places like Rafah and northern Gaza were described as establishing buffer zones. Palestinians were displaced and ethnically cleansed into humanitarian zones, which the Israelis would then bomb. The language of machines hides monstrous actions.

By late 2025, after the ceasefire was announced, Israel controlled more than 50% of Gaza. The US military helped to devise a plan to divide Gaza into two areas: the “Green Zone” occupied by Israeli forces, which will be rebuilt, and the “Red Zone” in which Hamas rules, where the Palestinian population is crushed into crowded camps and tent cities. Between the two is a so-called “Yellow Line” that divides the territories. This colour-coded language sanitizes the reality on the ground: the so-called red zone is a wasteland of ruins in which most of Gaza’s 2 million residents are pushed into less than half of the Strip they had at the start of the war. The green zone is another wasteland, but one being cleared out by bulldozers so that US and other developers can come make shiny high-tech cities and ritzy resorts for their rich friends (the so-called “New Gaza”), and so that Israelis can realize their dangerous fantasies of resettling the land.

The red zone is a giant displacement camp, and the green zone is the area for the colonization that follows the destruction of Gaza’s society and the ethnic cleansing of its people. This so-called “reconstruction” is not taking place in the red zone, where all aid and rebuilding materials is severely restricted by the Israeli army, and where most of the population reside. The yellow line that separates the red and green zones is a “new border,” according to the top general in the IDF. But crossing the yellow line, if you are Palestinian, is a death sentence. As the Israeli defense minister stated, anyone who dared to cross the line would be “met with fire.”

These are the conditions that prevail under the “ceasefire” agreement between Israel and Hamas agreed in October 2025, the so-called “Gaza peace plan” negotiated by the Trump administration. The word ceasefire has a unique meaning when used by Israel. While for most, it means to cease firing, for Israel it means that the other party must cease firing back, but Israel itself can continue to bomb and kill at will, though preferably at a reduced rate. In the first six months following the October 2025 ceasefire, Israel had murdered over 750 Palestinians in Gaza, whereas Hamas or other armed groups killed four Israeli soldiers. In its first six months, Israel violated the ceasefire over 2,400 times, including with 1,100 bombings and 920 shootings resulting in the killing of over 750 people. While this is certainly a reduced rate of bombing and killing from that which prevailed prior to the “ceasefire,” it can hardly be described as having ceased the firing, at least on Israel’s part. By mid-May, over 850 Palestinians in Gaza had been reported to be killed by Israel since the ceasefire went into effect, and that this killing increased during the Iran war, and increased still further after there was a ceasefire declared between the US and Iran.

And the occupation itself expanded. In May of 2026, Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel now controlled roughly 60% of the Gaza Strip, a larger share than was permitted under the US-backed ‘ceasefire’ agreement. Netanyahu declared, “In the past two years, we have shown the world what immense power is inherent in our people, in our state, in our army, in our heritage… We rose like a lion, we roared like a lion. The greatest thing we did was break the barrier of fear. We brought all our hostages home, to the very last one. Today we control 60 percent.”

Just as numerous ministers and officials promised at the start of the Gaza war, Gaza’s borders will change as a result of the war, implying that Israel will seize more territory. The establishment of buffer zones is the method for pursuing this policy. The actions of violently expelling or killing a population, decimating and razing their homes, communities, cities and society to the ground, and then stealing the land is filtered through the political language of security and defense – the machine language of the Israeli political and imperial establishment – and comes out as phrases like establishing a buffer zone, building a security perimeter, or designating areas as part of the red zone or green zone. This is how political language makes ethnic cleansing and genocide sound vague and technocratic.

One is reminded of how the Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, who herself narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the top architects of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, when he was tried and subsequently executed in Jerusalem in 1961. In reflecting upon Eichmann’s last words, a kind of boiler-plate eulogy one would expect someone to give if it wasn’t their own funeral, Arendt wrote: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Arendt elaborated on the idea of the banality of evil, observing that for Adolf Eichmann, “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil grasps at an important truth, that acts and objectives of evil can and often are filtered through a kind of technical, bureaucratic machinery. The Nazi Holocaust of Jews was not simply the violence and visceral brutality of gas chambers and massacres, but it was also the result of memos typed by secretaries for officials hundreds of kilometers away in Berlin, or discussions on the logistics of railway transportation systems, labour inputs, quotas, lodging units, and levels of industrial production. There is a scene in the award-winning film, The Zone of Interest, which tells the story of the family of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The film is a uniquely remarkable Holocaust movie in that it does not show any acts of violence on screen, nor does it even show anything inside the concentration camp. It takes place directly outside the walls of the camp, where the family – Hoss’s wife and children – built their dream home, with a large garden and small swimming pool for the children. All around them is the machinery of pure evil: the trains arriving in the background with new victims aboard, the constant ringing out of gunshots from inside the camp, the smokestacks burning the bodies of murdered Jews all through the night. But for the family, it was their own small paradise, inviting family and friends to visit for garden parties with kids at play in the pool. But the evil was an inescapable part of their lives. The father would return from “work” and have a concentration camp prisoner clean his boots. His wife would try on fur coats and lipstick plundered from murdered Jewish women, and hand out clothes once worn by murdered children to her housekeeping staff. And while the film did not show the horrors of the gas chambers killing thousands, it had a scene in which the industrial manufacturers of the gas chambers came to the Hoss household to discuss their designs for the updated model, walking Rudolf Hoss through the logistics of how the gas chamber works at such an efficient scale at handling “the loads.”

This film perfectly encapsulated Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil; that such monumental evil can coexist with and is even a product of such seemingly benign, technocratic and bureaucratic processes. When people conjure images of gas chambers, they understandably imagine those who are stripped and hoarded into them, left to await their fate in unbelievable fear as they peer at the shower faucets; they do not typically imagine a group of men sitting around a kitchen table pouring over engineering blueprints. People may imagine – as was portrayed in other films like Schindler’s List – visuals of women with their heads crudely shaven being lined up and walked into an underground chamber with a fuming smokestack above them; they do not typically imagine the commandant’s wife, Hedwig Hoss, standing in front of the mirror modelling her new fur coat or a trying out a new shade of lipstick taken from those women marching into the gas chambers. The banality of evil is not about a technocratic and emotionally detached form of evil replacing the more visceral, violent and fanatic depictions of evil with which we are more familiar; it is about recognizing that both coexist and mutually support one another. In this sense, Arendt was articulating something not unlike Orwell’s own discussion of political language. Arendt even referred to the role of language in her initial quote, writing that one of the great lessons of “human wickedness” was found in “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

In the Zone of Interest, not only was the banality of evil present in the depiction of the family home, but this was also a manifestation of the attempt of fascists (and genocidal mania) to try to make their fantasy worlds into a reality. Locations of great evil and brutality also became areas to experiment with and attempt to build a new society, a ‘new man’, a new empire, to make the fantasies that motivated this death and destruction into a reality. For the Hoss family, this was the dream home situated on the outside of the walls of Auschwitz. Behind those walls was an unending eruption of human wickedness; but on the outside, a paradise of flowers, parties and a pool. The Hoss family had wanted to move to the east – to Nazi-conquered and occupied territories – where they could realize their dreams, build a home they could never afford in Berlin, raise their family with great privilege and opportunity, have servants, host social events, and live their dream of having a country home. Shortly after she died in 2023, an interview was published with the daughter of Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss, who moved to their home outside Auschwitz camp at the age of seven. “I remember we had fun,” she recalled, “We had a little swimming pool in the backyard. And my mother had a beautiful garden house with flowers.” She described her mother as “a nice person” who was known as “the Angel of Auschwitz.” On her father, the camp commandant who managed the mass murder of roughly one million people, a huge percentage of which were children, she reflected: “He was a wonderful dad… He was a wonderful, absolute wonderful person… I couldn’t have wished for a better father,” and added that, “We didn’t even know what his work was really,” though acknowledged, “I’m sure my mom knew what was going on.” Both visceral and banal evil coexist and mutually reinforce one another, just as I have argued in this essay in terms of understanding the relationship between the language of monsters and machines.

In the context of Israel, we see the banality of evil in all the political language of machines that hide monstrous acts. And just as we see such banality behind words and phrases like “red zone” and “buffer zones,” hiding the realities of brutality, violence and destruction, we also see the construction of fantasy worlds. But we are also able to witness the fantasies of the fascists playing out, particularly in the motives and actions of the settler movement.

Almost as soon as the war began, a settler movement emerged that was advocating for the resettlement of Gaza following the war. This would imply a permanent Israeli settler and military presence inside Gaza, and an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing. In January of 2024, a few months into the war and genocide, a major settler conference was held bringing thousands of settlers and right-wingers together to propose and plan to build a host of new settlements in Gaza, including recruiting families to be among the first to go. Among those attending and speaking at the conference were 11 ministers of the sitting government, and 15 members of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) who came from parties of the governing coalition. Those attending included two ministers from the Religious Zionism party, including its leader Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and special minister inside the defense ministry with responsibility for the West Bank; and all the cabinet members from the overtly supremacist party, Jewish Power, with its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was also invited as a special speaker. It also included five sitting ministers from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party. Smotrich declared, “God willing, we will settle and we will be victorious.” Ben-Gvir declared, “Without settlement, there is no security. And without security on Israel’s borders, there is no security in any part of Israel.” With endorsement of settlement came endorsement of expulsion of the Palestinian population of Gaza, though using the euphemism of encouraging “voluntary migration” to justify their vision of ethnic cleansing.

We see the ongoing use of political language here, even among the most fascist and extremist of political leaders. Ben-Gvir’s comment was particularly enlightening, saying, “Without settlement, there is no security.” This describes the process of settler-colonialism, of occupying and displacing the indigenous population (Palestinians) in order to build your own homes, communities and society – to clear and then settle, to colonize the land. The language of security of course invokes the language of empire, but it hides the brutality of what Ben-Gvir advocates. To settle is to colonize and displace – even through genocidal acts if need be, and from this process, security will be established. In this sense, security is understood as the absence of Palestinian resistance, to subdue, suppress, kill or otherwise remove the threat of Palestinian resistance (to Israeli occupation, siege, colonization, genocide, apartheid, etc.). But for Ben-Gvir, who embraces a Kahanist fascist ideology, and believes that “the Arabs” should be expelled or reduced to the status of a slave class, the problem is the existence and presence of the Palestinian people themselves. The threat is not their response or reactions to being repressed and killed, but the threat is their existence and presence, full stop. Therefore, security can only be achieved through removing the threat – removing the people. To ensure that they are removed and never return, Ben-Gvir and the other attendees at the conference believed that “settlement” – mass displacement and colonization – were the only answer. We might be reminded of history, when the Nazis imagined the solution to the “Jewish question” to be to expel the Jews from Germany. But when Germany’s borders expanded and its empire conquered new lands, to settle and build a vast “thousand year Reich,” the number of Jews under German control grew many times more. As expulsion became a harder policy to implement, with few countries in the world willing to take in Jewish refugees, the logic of genocide became official policy. “Without settlement, there is no security.” Without displacement, there is no control.

This logic plays out in Gaza. The state seeks to establish “security” through the construction of buffer zones, vast wastelands of destruction of Palestinian life and society, and create a newly occupied Israeli zone of interest (to borrow the title of the film referenced above). The settlers – an array of racists, religious extremists, and fascists – offer (unsurprisingly) settlement as the solution: to displace, destroy, kill, colonize and control the land, to make it Jewish and build their own communities there. They want to realize their fascist fantasies in the occupied Gaza Strip. But to do so would require a genocidal policy. They learned their techniques from the Jewish supremacist fantasy land of the occupied West Bank, where they are able to employ strategic uses of terror, violence and intimidation to displace dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Palestinians from large swathes of territory, all with the active protection of the Israeli army. In Gaza, however, it requires overwhelming violence, destruction, and mass killing to remove hundreds of thousands or millions of people from even less land. In Gaza, Israel occupies a relatively small piece of land with a large concentration of Palestinians. If security – the absence of Palestinian resistance – is the goal, directly occupying and overseeing millions more Palestinians without rights makes Israel less secure, not more. Unless they are able to expel the Palestinian population to other countries, which is described with terms like “voluntary migration,” the logic of genocide will build, and the settlers get closer to realizing their fantasies.

Officially, Israel does not endorse the Jewish settlement of Gaza. Though nearly a third of Netanyahu’s government (11 of 37 cabinet ministers) attended the settlement conference, in addition to 15 members of the Knesset from the ruling coalition built around his party, the Likud, prime minister Netanyahu attempted to distance himself and Israel’s policy from the actions and statements of many of its ministers. While government ministers like Ben-Gvir took the stage and said, “We must encourage voluntary migration. Let them leave,” Netanyahu initially replied by saying that ministers were “entitled to their opinions.” But eventually Netanyahu was pressured to release a statement, in English (i.e., for a foreign audience), where he said he wanted “to make a few points absolutely clear,” that, “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”

While officially, the government did not embrace the settler designs for Gaza, the policy was largely aligned with helping to make such a reality more possible. Here again, we see the interplay of the language of machines and monsters. The settlement conference and its main leaders and participants best represent the language of monsters, even though as ministers they have learned to speak in both tongues at the same time. Thus, calls for ethnic cleansing become calls for voluntary migration. Smotrich and others calls for Israel to “permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip” and to build settlements there. Ben-Gvir agreed that, “We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip,” and that settlement was “an important thing.”

For Netanyahu, however, in responding to international pressure to come up with a “day after” plan for what Israel intended to do with Gaza after the war ends, released a one-page document in February of 2024, roughly six weeks after the settlement conference took place and four months into the war, with full-scale Israeli control of the Gaza Strip being envisioned. Israel would pursue its war to defeat Hamas in the near term, and the medium-term of the plan sought to build a “security area” that ran along the inside of the entire border of Gaza (a buffer zone). The document read: “The security perimeter being created in the Gaza Strip on the border with Israel will remain as long as there is a security need for it.” But as we have previously addressed, security implies the absence of Palestinian resistance, so in this concept, the security perimeter – or vast buffer zone of destroyed Palestinian society – will be occupied by Israel as long as Palestinian resistance persists. Of course, Palestinian resistance will continue for as long as there is a colonial and imperial system of domination over their lives, so Israel will therefore embrace permanent occupation, or seek to expel or otherwise “remove” the threat. So even in Netanyahu’s “security” plan for Gaza, a similar genocidal logic can play out as in the settler fantasies.

These fantasies go well beyond the deranged religious fanaticism of the settler extremists and their political allies, but extend across many political parties from right to center-left (there is no functional leftwing party in Israel) as well as the army and other power centers and opinion-shapers. It is the shared delusion of a Greater Israel. This goes back to the origins of Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel. It is the belief in establishing a larger Israel. From the beginning, during the Nakba in 1948 – the mass ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine – Israel defined its frontiers through force of war. It has never truly settled its borders because it has never truly finished redrawing them through force. In 1967, Israel took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem (from Jordan), Gaza and the Sinai (from Egypt), as well as the Golan Heights (from Syria), and thereafter established long-term occupations and settlement programs in each region.

It was evident from the start that occupation breeds resistance and war. The Israelis occupied vast new territories with new populations under their control. And they quickly moved to begin the settlement enterprise. The Israelis controlled the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm El-Sheikh, in the then Israeli-occupied Sinai of Egypt. There had been ongoing discussions about the possibility of giving up occupied territory in return for peace agreements with Arab states. In 1969, two years after conquering the territory, defense minister and general Moshe Dayan told the Israeli Knesset, “I prefer to sit in Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than have peace and return Sharm el-Sheikh to Egyptian hands.” The question was thus one of empire: Israel can have peace, or it can have an empire. Israel can have peace, or it can expand its borders. It cannot have both. For officials like General Dayan, the decision was obvious: better to have more land “without peace” than less land with it. Eventually, Israel did negotiate with Egypt and returned the Sinai, along with Sharm El-Sheikh, to Egyptian hands in 1979, in return for a peace agreement, showing that returning stolen land can actually bring peaceful solutions. But that was not the lesson learned by the present-day Israeli government, or the Israeli establishment for that matter. Israel held onto the occupied Golan heights in Syria and officially annexed the territory, just as it did East Jerusalem; and maintained major military occupations and settlement enterprises in the West Bank and Gaza, eventually withdrawing from inside Gaza to its borders in 2004, after which it sealed it tight in 2007, imposing a blockade and siege that lasts to this day (though now in much more brutal fashion).

The vision of a Greater Israel prevails and gains in prominence. There are variations of this vision, of course, depending on who is speaking (or being spoken to). But its simplest is one that imagines an Israel that annexes the occupied West Bank and officially incorporates it into the State of Israel. A slightly extended version adds the Gaza Strip to this vision. And then we have those who advocate for taking over southern Lebanon, more of Syria, and potentially returning to the Sinai in Egypt. For the religious extremists, their vision extended to recreating what they perceive to be the Biblical borders of an ancient Israel. One of the most visible leaders of the settler movement, Daniella Weiss, told a journalist that her vision of a Greater Israel included not only Gaza and the West Bank, but Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Daniella Weiss said at a major settler conference in October 2024 that, “We know from the Bible that the real borders of Greater Israel are the Euphrates and the Nile,” referring to the major rivers in Egypt and Iraq, and said to eruptive applause in the conference hall. She added, “And the sooner we make this a reality, the better.” She claimed she would make the dream a reality within the year, telling a group of journalists, “You will see… Jews will go into Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza.”

In an interview for the French-language channel Arte‘s documentary, “Israel: Extremists in Power,” Finance Minister Smotrich was asked whether he endorsed the vision of Greater Israel that viewed expanding Israel’s borders beyond the Mediterranean and Jordan River, to which he replied, “Okay, bit by bit,” adding that, “it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,” in Syria, stressing, “only Jerusalem, until Damascus.”

In August 2025, Prime Minister Netanyahu was interviewed by a reporter who handed him a gift to give to Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, a necklace of “a map of the Promised Land.” It was a map of an expanded, ‘Greater’ Israel. The reporter asked the prime minister, “Do you connect to the vision?” to which Netanyahu replied, “Very much… very much.” The reporter noted that the map was of “Greater Israel,” to which Netanyahu replied: “If you ask me, we are here… You know I often mention my father. My parents’ generation had to establish the state. And our generation, my generation, has to guarantee its continued existence. And I see that as a great mission.” When the reporter asked Netanyahu if he believed he was on a mission for the Jewish people, the prime minister responded that he is “on a mission of generations – there are generations of Jews that dreamt of coming here and generations of Jews who will come after us,” adding: “So if you’re asking if I have a sense of mission, historically and spiritually, the answer is yes.”

Fascist fantasies are played out in their most extreme forms in conquered territories. Israel’s form of fascism is distinctly imperialistic, seeking to expand its borders, conquer new lands, and build and extend a vast regional empire. The fact that the Greater Israel project is a vision shared by much of official society does not undermine the fascist vision of it, but it does mean that fascists are likely to find convenient allies among the establishment to pursue this goal. Wherever the Israeli army and state go, the settlers seem determined to follow. Fascism and empire merge their interests and their language in the pursuit of a Greater Israel. This process is made possible through war, and its methods of war have reached genocidal proportions. This is the fascist imperialism of Israel, expressed through the language of monsters and machines.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a researcher and writer on issues of political and economic history, empire, war, oligarchies, and resistance movements. He has been studying in and out of school and writing for 20 years, published in various journals, papers, think tanks, and online publications, and is currently getting a degree in History and Political Science at the University of Toronto. His website is empireandeconomics.com, which has a YouTube channel, and you can listen to his podcast, ‘In This Mad World,’ or follow him on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

The research, writing, editing, as well as podcast and video production takes a lot of time and effort and money. I am also a full-time student. I try to make as much available for free as I can, but to help sustain these efforts, please consider making a donation through PayPal below.

Thank you!

Andrew Gavin Marshall