Primo Levi’s astonishing account of a year in Auschwitz, If this is a man, reveals a mad bureaucracy at work as the Nazis administered this concentration/death camp: the giving out and tattooing of numbers, the incessant roll calls, the requirement for neat bed making and uniform wearing, the constant selections of those fit enough to work and those for the gas chamber, the detailed hierarchy with standard of food, clothing and accommodation attached to each role. Children were expendable, being useless mouths to feed; ditto pregnant women.  Those seeing out each day as slave labour had to learn complex and dehumanising  skills of survival without any hope in a future. And at the end, as the Russians advanced, the total disintegration into a macabre, corpse-ridden world.

There is a similarly mad bureaucracy of genocide beginning to operate in Gaza, with the IDF bureaucrats, having obliterated Northern Gaza and world opinion tut tutting, spending the ceasefire period designing a more intricate map of destruction for Southern Gaza, presumably having realised that not all the world is unconditionally supporting their final solution to the colonial state’s ‘Arab problem’. Accordingly, they will warn a district’s inhabitants before reducing the district to rubble. They will then move to the next district. It’s not painting by numbers, rather destruction by numbers.

 A ridiculous logic is operating. Hamas is hanging out in tunnels, so don’t go into the tunnels to sort it out, bomb that which is above the tunnels. I get the impression of a defence force of cowards, hiding in planes (Hamas have no air force or air defence system), or tanks or drone command centres. Person to person combat is too dangerous.

It seems they’re using AI to generate the list of targets. Presumably data is inputted: name of presumed militant, sympathetic facebook posts, overheard conversations, seen at a demo or two,  address, movement patterns, family connections; the algorithm spits out a target and boom, there goes an apartment block, the bigger the better, for those suffering the collateral damage will be losing sympathy with Hamas.

Further craziness is revealed. The IDF knew of the October 7th Hamas plan a year ago, but dismissed it as aspirational. They were further warned by their ‘spotters’ (those who keep an eye on the strip) during the week leading up to it but told them to be quiet. Did they actually want it to happen so they could then have an excuse to begin the final solution: to expel all the remaining Arabs into tents in the Egyptian desert and that’s been the plan for a while? Nothing is impossible.

The whole world’s watching. This is all over the news. So what? Those who count have given unconditional support. The Israeli intelligence system is intertwined with the CIA and MI5 and the Europeans, as is the Israeli military with the other militaries. And the politicians. The media connections are sound. And always the Israelis have the excuse of being privileged religious/ethnic victims who are eternally deserving of compensation. As for ‘the Arabs’ in the West Bank, they put them in prison for as long as they want, without trial, they torture them, destroy their houses and kill them regularly, the settlers assisting.

There is rumour that before any such operation as the Gaza invasion, a death figure is proposed. Forty thousand seems to be the current figure, mainly women and children. That’ll help  the demographic problem.

It is all obscene and insane, and the worst thing is that Auschwitz was kept secret. This is being universally witnessed and no-one in authority is saying no apart from demonstrators and wimps at the UN and NGOs who don’t really count. This situation is as psychotic as any final solution. And there begin to be the photos now that remind one of the death camps – the texture of hopelessness is the same.