The support of so-called progressive institutions, media, and politicians for violent state repression is becoming increasingly explicit in response to mass mobilizations around Palestine solidarity. One of the most alarming local moments was the political-class consolidation around the demonstrable lie that a pro-Palestinian rally, including an anonymous climbing Spiderman, was specifically targeting Mt. Sinai Hospital. This false claim was repeated and uncontested on this panel and promoted by two of the most prominent participants at the Summit, Jagmeet Singh and Olivia Chow. The purpose of this lie is to repress dissent in the name of “safety,” a strategy that has justified police violence from protests to picket lines. Progressives attack conservatives as spreading misinformation, but close ranks across the political spectrum in service of colonial-imperial state projects.

Genocide is intentional dismantling of another’s humanity. It is the reduction of a proud, educated, high-functioning ancient society into penniless objects of charity, forced to eat the unspeakable to survive; to live in filth and disease with nothing to hope for except an end to bombs and bullets raining on and through their bodies, their lives, their histories and futures. But history will not lie. It will record that Israel perpetrated a holocaust in the 21st century.

Streams of Palestinians filed into the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Monday to salvage what they could from the vast destruction left in the wake of Israel’s offensive, a day after the Israeli military announced it was withdrawing troops from the area.Many came back to the Gaza Strip’s second-largest city to find their former hometown unrecognizable. With scores of buildings destroyed or damaged, piles of rubble now sit where apartments and businesses once did. Streets have been bulldozed. Schools and hospitals were damaged by the fighting.