To my knowledge, the first public, English-language warning that a genocide was unfolding in the Gaza Strip came from Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal, five days after the events of 7 October 2023. Amnesty International confirmed Segal's conclusions fourteen months later, by which time at least 40,000 more Palestinians were killed.

The Amnesty Report still failed, however, to compel Western governments to act, despite being the first of its kind the organisation issued in the midst of a genocide.

Instead, the live-stream slaughter continued broadcasting for another ten months when a ceasefire finally came into effect in October 2025. By that time, at least 72,000 Palestinian were killed, and virtually all of Gaza’s urban infrastructure had been transformed into rubble.

The question of why and how Israel’s genocide persisted for so long despite repeated warnings and full knowledge of its unfolding is a question that must not slip from public conscience.

Indeed, it is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room that world powers pretend isn’t there, and the continued failure to explain its presence tempts others to repeat similar crimes elsewhere.

However, the danger of the genocide resuming full-throttled in Gaza is also very real, particularly after Israeli and US mid-term elections. Almost daily, Israel’s politicians and military brass vow to complete their ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and bicker over whether the slaughter they already committed there was enough.

Furthermore, the US has also recently resupplied Israel with 40,000 two-tonne bombs - the chief weapon of the genocide.

The daily toll of those killed also reminds us that the ceasefire itself was never observed.

Collectively, these factors remind us that the forces that committed the genocide, protected it and pushed it forward, are all still very much alive today, and have used the passage of time to reposition.

Ending the genocide

So how does the solidarity movement get rid of the guerrilla, especially given that Western democratic institutions and representatives have proven themselves to be so spineless, paralysed and complicit?

To its credit, the movement did an impressive job shining a flashlight into the institutional undercarriage of Western capitalism, trying to discover what made the killing machine run.

Of course, its work was assisted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose longstanding work documents where the bloody shoes that stomped all over Gaza were initially purchased and tread.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese also produced an important report that mapped key political-economic connections running between government, the private sector and universities.

The report admitted, however, that it could only document “the tip of the iceberg” and warned that complicity around the genocide would not end “without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives."

This is precisely what lies behind the US State Department’s recent declaration of sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC). This extraordinary measure was not just another Trump administration swipe against multilateralism but was a specific attempt to protect US citizens and corporations from possible future prosecution.

Both the ICJ (which prosecutes states) and the ICC (which prosecutes individuals) are deeply engaged in investigating Israel’s genocide and the individuals responsible for it. While article 25(1) of the Rome Statute prevents the ICC from prosecuting corporations, the Court can target individual corporate officers, including directors and employees.

In sum, the US knows it needs to get ahead of the curve because there is no shortage of US corporations and executives that are targets of these courts.

The political economy of the genocide

As time passes, more research surfaces explaining the political economy of the genocide. One of the most effective of these is a visualisation recently produced by an anonymous collective tracing the genocide’s “blood money”.

This impressive set of figures and visualisations exposes a tangled web of inter-permeated interests and actors, chiefly focused around the military-industrial, big tech, and financial services sectors. While none of these sectors is entirely surprising given their profiteering role, the scale and depth of their complicity were both active and conscious, rather than circumstantial or passive.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon provided cloud services to the Israeli government and its main arms producers that enabled Israel to draw up the genocide’s kill lists. This included collecting 200 million hours of audio files that these companies helped Israel browse and analyse.

How many of these recordings document the last horrific screams of 20,000 children killed when daddy finally did come home? Thousands, certainly.

Google and Amazon even had a secret “winking” mechanism to tip Israel off when foreign courts asked them for information on their servers.

In a just world, the heads of these corporations would all be on trial for these crimes, right next to Netanyahu, Trump, Biden and Starmer.

The audio and video resources these execs helped Israel process should also be made public through enforced court disclosure procedures. They are the records that document the banality of evil in today’s world, and should be interred in a future version of the Palestinian genocide museum when the time comes.

For years, big tech’s relations with Israel have been like a kid in a candy store, as Silicon Valley shopped in Silicon Wadi to see the latest Unit 8200 spinoffs and gadgets. Israeli start-ups were showered with billions in venture capital, encouraging innovation in the dark arts of occupation, apartheid and genocide for the purpose of commercial hyper-scaling.

The blood money visualisations also show that even larger behemoths of Western capitalism sit behind big tech, also profiteering from genocide - the major index funds like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and others.

These funds oversee assets larger than virtually every country in the world, except the US. They own significant chunks of big tech, and virtually everything profitable on the S&P 500.

The index funds link genocide profits to public and private sector pension plans, making individual Western employees unwitting benefactors of Gaza’s blood money.

Profit and interest

All of this speaks to how the genocide was hardly the act of a Zionist cabal that penetrated Western government and corporations. Instead, it was a set of interests, relations, and inclinations that saturated the heart and nervous system of Western capitalism, particularly its big tech, financial services, and military-industrial wings.

These wings have come to dominate Western capitalism today and are deemed ‘too big to fail’ by the political class, as they also lie at the centre of Western geo-economic strategies to compete with China in this post-neoliberal age of imperial anxiety.

Their power transcends the domain of states, and they use their resources to manipulate the markets, states, and international systems they operate across.

These corporations also hide their wealth in tax havens and defy regulation because they operate at the frontiers of technological and economic ‘innovation’ the world has never seen.  It will take years for lawmakers to catch up to their tax-beating chicanery, if ever.

By serving as parastate actors, they undermine traditional bourgeois liberal capitalism and its elementary associated values - not only of free trade and competition, but also of privacy, free expression, the free press, the right to organise, and academic freedom. It is not by chance that critics have come to describe this era as one marked by technofeudalism that is ushering in authoritarianism and fascism.

Indeed, this is the anatomy of the 800-pound gorilla that explains its self-righteous staid. The gorilla that hangs about the room smashing up Gaza has also plundered the public assets of social democracy, to say nothing of the resources of the Third World. He is king because we are in his jungle.

Like the ‘disposable’ people of Gaza, the Western working class now awaits an inevitable culling, be it from mass AI-induced redundancy, WWIII or both.

Seen in this light, Palestine and the Gaza genocide are but one frontier in a fragmented global dystopia where AI technologies now juice the gorilla with amphetamine.

This is also why the movement to end the genocide in Gaza has such a historic role: it is the key global political actor that understands the political-economic connections that animate the gorilla and which make it so dangerous - not only in Palestine and the Middle East, but also in Porto, Paris and Milan. It has also built and mobilised an inchoate global infrastructure of movement to contain the gorilla, even though the task of actually disempowering him is now down to the ropes and arrows of the global Lilliputian class in our millions.

God save us all if we fail.