What was your goal with Blowing Up Everything Is Beautiful? What brought you to the project?

The book is trying to do two things. One is to be a first draft of history, in the sense that it is history written in real time. This is a collection of reporting done over the course of the first phase of the war on Gaza: from October 2023 until the January cease-fire of 2025.

Because so much of this subject lives under a cloud of misinformation, propaganda, distortion, and lying, it’s very difficult for people who think they might be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause — or at least object to what the Israelis are doing — to know where to look. This book tries to cut through all that. That’s why I take such care that there’s a strong factual basis to the arguments I’m making.

The second point of the book is to make a prosecutor’s case. Israel is facing a charge of genocide at the International Court of Justice; there are now arrest warrants out for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant from the International Criminal Court. The book’s largest theme is not only the violation of international law but the breakdown of international law as a concept and as a practice.

In the preface, you talk about a time before Gaza and after Gaza. Why do you use this framework? What do you hope is the effect of marking this horrible division?

Gaza is and should be the dividing line in our history, because all of the beliefs that we once had about the moral order of the world — about international law and human rights — have been deliberately pulverized. Together the Israelis and the United States have destroyed it.

The future is being rehearsed in Gaza, in the sense of states being able to deploy massive violence without consequence. Walter Benjamin once said that barbarism has always been the history of the world, but at least for a time between 1945 and 2023, there was a reigning belief that even if an atrocity couldn’t be stopped, then at least it could be punished and retroactive justice could be done — in Rwanda or in Bosnia, for example. Even if the law was only symbolic, it meant butchers might hesitate or at least try to hide their crimes.

Israel’s actions in Gaza have destroyed this belief more than anything else. We have to speak of this regime of rights and laws in the past tense — it existed for eighty years, but no longer. It has never been more obvious to so many people that the protection that they once thought existed no longer exists. This is why it becomes really difficult to think about Gaza: if people over here can be destroyed on the whims of a superpower and its client state, then I can be destroyed as well.

We saw this in microcosm in the way that American police departments went after even the most peaceful forms of protest in the United States against what’s happening in Gaza. For raising your hand against the prospect of your own destruction, you might, at best, be called an antisemite and, at worst, get your head kicked in by the cops or be sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana. These things are interlinked. They are one and the same. It is massive state repression to the point of annihilation, to the point where an entire society is being destroyed in Gaza.

Could you talk about the current situation in Gaza?

In the middle of 2025, the method by which Gaza will be exterminated has become increasingly clear. There are two principal movements happening — it’s a kind of pincer movement. One is the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” — these armored citadels for the distribution of aid, which are mostly in the south Gaza Strip, around the area of Rafah, a city that has been completely destroyed. They are designed to concentrate the entirety of the population and put them under conditions of extreme stress, hunger, desperation, and general mental anguish.

The other part of the policy is the Voluntary Emigration Bureau, an Israeli government agency that lives within the Defense Ministry. This bureau is supposed to allow the Palestinians of Gaza a method by which they could leave the Strip, which would be facilitated by the Israelis through harbor towns and Ramon Airport [in southern Israel]. One of the most important but underreported statements of the war was made by Shlomo Karhi, the Israeli communications minister, at the Settlers Conference in January of 2024. He got up and said, essentially, “We demand the voluntary emigration of Palestinians from Gaza.” And he didn’t need to explain what he meant by voluntary emigration, because the auditorium was full of people just like him who knew exactly what he was talking about, but he went on to explain, “Voluntary is a state you impose on someone until they give their consent.”

What Shlomo Karhi is describing here is a state of torture. Under pain of torture, the Palestinians are being offered either death or exile. The Israelis want the Palestinians of Gaza to leave permanently. By these methods, through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Voluntary Emigration Bureau, they are going to facilitate the permanent displacement of the entirety of the population. There will be those who refuse to leave, who have said repeatedly: “The only places that we are going to go to are the villages from which we were expelled in 1948.” Which is an amazingly black-comic response to give under extreme pressure. Those who are left will have to live under Israeli occupation, which will be even more brutal than that which is being experienced in the West Bank.

The outrageousness of Israeli actions in Gaza would not be this extreme if they didn’t have the support and patronage of the United States. What the Israeli leadership has been given by the United States is impunity. There is apparently nothing Israel can do that will be punished by the United States.

What themes emerged as important across your reporting in this project?

One of the most important threads, especially in the context of the genocide case and the widespread use of the term “genocide” by those opposing the extermination of Gaza, is the proof of intent. I emphasize exactly what those in a command position in Israel said and match it to the actions carried out. I include a long list of quotes by Israeli political and military leaders about, for example, “total siege” — which in and of itself is a violation of international law — or the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, saying “It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” And “No Uninvolved Civilians” has become a catchphrase or motto in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and in wider Israeli society. The president of the country said no civilians were innocent, and his nation behaved like that was true.

Closely related to the matter of intent are the ways IDF conduct, especially in its bombing campaign, has been carefully designed to appear like it could be legally justified on the grounds of what is called “military necessity.” There has been no carpet-bombing in the campaign, mainly because the technological capacity of the Israeli Air Force doesn’t allow it — this isn’t like Operation Rolling Thunder, with huge heavy bombers flattening entire districts in one run. But the IDF Intelligence Department allows a very wide window of what they call “proportionality,” or what in the United States is called a “non-combatant casualty and civilian cut-off value.” In the bombing campaign, even in strikes targeting the lowest-ranked Hamas fighters or people in the civilian wing of Hamas — clerks, bureaucrats, and police officers — the Israelis were allowing up to twenty or thirty civilian casualties per strike. And for high-ranking fighters, that threshold went up to one hundred or even three hundred civilian casualties. So the deaths by bombing are cumulative in this way, but a clever and devious lawyer could always argue that the bombing is justified by the excuse of “military necessity,” — that their air strikes are “proportional” to the “threat.”

This is the difference between deliberate killing and targeted killing. There are a lot of targeted strikes on civilians, all the time, especially on journalists and doctors. But the wider and more important fact is that the IDF allows itself to kill dozens of people at a time, even if those people weren’t the direct target of the strike. Every single time they drop a bomb on an apartment block aiming to kill some Hamas fighter, they calculate very deliberately that dozens of people will die. An equally clever but righteous lawyer could argue in turn that this is in no way “proportional” at all. And it isn’t. It’s grotesque how calculated it is.

You spend some time in the book on the definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity. Why are these international legal terms important, and how do they shape how we talk about Gaza?

In several years time, the International Court of Justice will hear the case brought by South Africa against the state of Israel for breaches of the Genocide Convention. When those hearings happen, we’re going to run headlong into the problems that are inherent in the Genocide Convention, particularly the extremely strict intent clause, which very few cases have ever surmounted.

I think a lot of people were shocked when the Israeli government deliberately broke the cease-fire in March. It was perceived that their rhetoric was much more aggressive than it previously had been. But in a way, there was no mask-off moment, because the mask was never on. They had been saying these things from the very start. These statements alone might be enough to surmount that extremely high threshold to prove intent within a genocide case.

Why is that intent clause there to begin with? Because this is how the framework of international law was built after 1945, after Nuremberg. This is how the empires of the time — Britain, the United States, and the USSR — designed it, in which there were things that they could do that fell below the bar of criminal actions. This is why the deliberate resettlement of populations is not necessarily part of the crime of genocide. There was a specific carve-out for forced population transfer, which is exactly the blueprint that’s being followed now in Gaza. The redrawing of borders, as was done in 1948 in Israel and Mandatory Palestine, in India, and throughout the broader Middle East, also does not fall under the Genocide Convention. Nor does military occupation.

These three things that are very applicable to Palestinians today do not fall under the word that is being used most frequently to describe what is going on. This is a difficulty that arises out of the construction of genocide itself.

One of the ways that history prominently appears in the book is in charting the development of international law and the ideas of universal jurisdiction of equal protection for anyone, anywhere: the ascendancy of human rights as a concept. This version of international law, which I call the “moral order of the world,” is at risk of being — or has already been — destroyed by Israeli actions in Gaza. The development of the United Nations, the establishment of the Genocide Convention, and then, later on, the concept of crimes against humanity, were all products of the midnight of the century, of World War II and the Holocaust. They were created at Nuremberg in 1945 when the Allies said, “These are the actions that you cannot commit.” It is one of the great ironies that the moral order built in part as a response to Jewish suffering is now being destroyed to protect a Jewish state’s brutality.

Why is it important to approach this as history in addition to journalism? What does history writing offer the project you’re trying to complete?

History is a weapon and a warning. The thing about an occupation of someone else’s home is that it not only involves doing horrible things to your victim; you do horrible things to yourself. This corrosion has been going on in Israel for a long time — this garrison state where massive violence is the first and only response to any kind of challenge.

And the Holocaust has been deliberately misremembered so as to draw the most troubling lesson from it. If you always identify your enemy as a Nazi, or the biblical figure of Amalek, then your own annihilation is constantly imminent. If you feel that’s true, ideologically, there is nothing you won’t do to protect yourself from what you perceive as your own doom, a second Holocaust. It frees you from any moral sense or feeling at all.

Then you have very real embodiments of this continuity in Israeli history. Remember back to the days after October 7. There was a ninety-something-year-old man named Eza Yachin in his reservist fatigues, giving pep talks to the IDF soldiers heading south toward Gaza. This guy said he was “instilling the spirit of the underground.” Well, Eza Yachin had been part of the Stern Gang in the 1940s, a Jewish terrorist group. Their head of operations was Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister of Israel in the 1980s. And Yachin was present at the massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948, where a hundred Palestinians were butchered. That’s history as a revenant, a literal ghost coming to haunt the present.

On the other side, I was reading a lot of I.F. Stone when I was writing the preface to the book. He was not only a great radical and socialist and journalist but a great moral mind. While he wasn’t a Zionist before World War II, the founding of Israel was deeply moving to him, and he defended Israel for the rest of his life. But not to the point where it meant giving up on his own conscience, or his own sense of right and wrong. After 1967, he was constantly warning his Israeli readers: “If you don’t make a political settlement with the Arabs, you will continue to do terrible things to them, you will live in a garrison state riven with paranoia and suspicion, and racial supremacy will be the only outcome.” And I.F. Stone was right then, just as we’re right to object now. By protesting, by doing our absolute best to throw anything into the gears of the machine, we’re doing a favor to the future.

You also discuss the involvement of the British government. What role has it played in the annihilation of Gaza?

One of the most critical aspects of the history of the Israeli campaign has been intelligence gathering. They need intelligence data to funnel into their “artificial intelligence” machines like “Lavender,” “Gospel,” and “Where’s Daddy?” to spit out names in order to bomb them.

In the first phase of the war, the British Royal Air Force flew 645 reconnaissance flights over Gaza, which is twice as many as the Israelis or the Americans flew, at least in the first phase of the war. The principal intelligence gatherer by air was the British government. There’s been some suggestion that the data has been passed on to the IDF to be fit into their targeting system; the British government denies this.

But even that they’re allowed to fly over and collect intelligence of any kind, regardless of who it’s passed to or what it’s then used for, is outrageous — Just in the same way that the British government has 350 arms export licenses with Israel. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, said he was canceling thirty of them, so there are now technically still 330 active arms export licenses to the state of Israel.

In the last couple of weeks, the British government sanctioned Bezalel Smotrich. That should have happened five years ago. When the International Criminal Court issued their arrest warrants for Netanyahu and [former defense minister] Yoav Gallant, the British government, like a lot of European countries, said, “If they arrive in the country, we might arrest them, but probably not.” This is a direct violation of their obligations under the Rome Statute which is a major pillar of international law in Europe, as in other places in the world.

At every stage, the British government has done the barest minimum possible to look like they object to the annihilation of Gaza, but in reality, they are just as complicit as the Germans or, indeed, the United States.