(contains spoilers)

To discuss season two of Disney’s Andor without discussing the genocide in Gaza would be both morally and intellectually disingenuous, and cowardly in a way that stains. Tony Gilroy knows this, despite his press-tour pussyfooting. Disney more than knows this, and I’m sure they’ve been rehearsing their response to the incoming discourse for months, if not since Gilroy first handed in the scripts.

Season two of Andor on Disney Plus — Tony Gilroy’s procedural exploration of the nitty-gritty necessities of armed resistance in the Star Wars universe — continues to chart the origins of the Rebel Alliance, and its titular, if reluctant, hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). We rejoin him as a hardened resistance soldier of a clandestine terrorist group whose leader, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), has burned his “decency for someone else’s future” and wants his soldiers to do the same to bring the Empire down.

What unfolds is an intricate web of tripwires designed to topple a behemoth of corporate-fascist violence. Petty political rifts end in executions, lovers are killed because of braggadocio and clumsiness, old friends are disappeared without a second thought. The rebels bank their personal happiness and freedom against the idea that others, in a future hopefully not too far far away, will be able to experience them, due to their thankless role as a cog in a shadow-network of faceless dreamers.

Rael, the radical who practises what he preaches, is the moral centre of a show that knows that sacrifice is the price one must pay for success. “I’m not sure I know what you’re saying?” says the liberal Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), when Rael implies an ally will have to be killed to keep their operation running. “How nice for you,” is his sardonic reply. Again and again, he posits that there’s only one way to stop a fascist: shoot first. And he’s proven 100 per cent right.

The series opens with the Empire’s version of the Wannsee Conference. Orson Krennic — Ben Mendelsohn in a much-anticipated return — holds an off-the-books conference of top-ranking Imperials, ISB, and cronies to lay out their plan for the planet Ghorman — a peaceful planet whose spider-silk has made it synonymous with high couture the galaxy over, but which also, unfortunately for the Ghormans, possesses a mineral needed for the Emperor’s “energy project”. Krennic and his collaborators smooth out a plan that involves antagonising “useful rebels”, allowing the Empire to justify a brutal occupation that is ultimately annihilatory — mining the resource will cause the planet’s core to collapse. “It’s bad luck for the Ghorman,” they decide with a shrug, and that’s that.

What follows is the slow unravelling of Ghorman independence, as the Empire steadily, then violently, pulverises the planet like the Death Star’s trash compactor. The representation of the occupation and rebellion draws heavily on Nazi-occupied France, from the rebel’s trench coats and berets to the fictional “Ghor” language, which sounds like “drongo-French”. But as the imagery turns to that of death and desperation, anyone who has scrolled past videos of Palestinians begging for freedom and their lives these past two years will find it hard not to make the obvious connections.

If the rest of Andor sits within a larger conversation about fascist-capital versus freedom, the Ghorman chapters explicitly draw on Israel and Palestine in ways that are as unsubtle as they are necessary and urgent. Author and studio intent have nothing to do with it: the show arrives within this reality, fully armed to aggressively tackle it. People denying Andor’s second season is anything but a reflection on the horrors of Gaza are as delusional as they are disingenuous. The show backs them into a corner, blaster pointed at their gut. To say Andor is little more than an allegory for fascist-colonial-genocidial projects of the past — not Israel, specifically — is to tacitly admit that’s exactly what Israel is, given the force of the parallels.

In this way, Andor’s victory is as ruthless and total as Rael’s ultimately is.

With the Ghor, we spend most our time floating around a central plaza where a massacre of 500 peaceful protestors, crushed by Grand Moff Tarkin, took place twenty years earlier. At the heart of this plaza is a monument which now is shadowed by the construction of what everyone knows, despite what the Empire says, to be an Imperial armoury. “They’ll make a prison of this city yet,” a Ghorman freedom fighter tells us. A young hotel bellboy who survived the initial massacre lets Cassian know the horror of that day stays with the Ghor, always, despite the Empire shrugging it off and disrespecting the very notion of the Ghor’s grief.

Over the four-year span coved in this second season, we see the Ghorman resistance manipulated by returning jackboot Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and the usefully stupid mumma’s boy, Syrl Karn (Kyle Soller). At Meero’s suggestion, the Empire purposely concedes minor victories to the rebel fighters, covertly masterminding a series of false flag attacks that allows them to frame the Ghor as a people overrun by dangerous extremists, which justifies the Empire tightening control. “They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore,” the harried Ghorman Senator tells Mothma as he begs for her support. “I suppose that’s the final humiliation.”

The occupation reaches its climax in an episode that may be the finest piece of storytelling in all of Star Wars, second only to Andor season one’s prison escape. “They can’t silence us!” “We’ll be silent when we’re dead!” the Ghorman resistance leader warns his daughter as she rushes off to join a rally, not knowing that he’s right — and the Empire is more than happy to prove him so.

Peaceful protestors are corralled into the plaza beneath the memorial — which they’ve been told is a safe zone — where they are summarily and brutally massacred. They chant: “we are the Ghor, the Galaxy is watching!” and sing their anthem — “valley, highland — let me spend every day there.” Then an Imperial officer signals to begin a Hannibal Directive-type play, and an Imperial sniper shoots one of their own green recruits in the head to instigate the violence. Throughout the episode, we’ve seen other Imperial’s emphasise their shock at the age of these green recruits — “sir, they’re children!” one complains — and it is hard not to look at the teenage stormtroopers and think of the eighteen-year-old IDF conscripts thrust into the frontlines of Israel’s genocidal project.

We witness unarmed citizens gunned down by top-of-the-line weaponry and terminator-like Imperial security droids, imagery eerily familiar to anyone who has watched Israel’s tanks and drones annihilating Palestinian civilians — the impossible precision of incomprehensible machines committing unabated and unthinkable slaughter. “This is murder!” cries a teenage resistance fighter as she desperately flicks through radio signals in the futile hope of getting the word out as her city is destroyed and her friends are literally torn to smithereens. “Is there no one who can help us?”

But there isn’t.

What follows, instead, is the liberal response. Mothma passes Senator Bail Organa (Jimmy Smitts) in the corridors of the senate, and asks: “Have you seen the numbers? The Ghorman dead? It’s beyond belief!” “You won’t see it in the imperial news,” is Organa’s response, and the two plan what they see as their only valid response — a handwringing speech.

Mothma’s journey is one of the show’s most rewarding, as her equivocations are shown to fail again and again in the face of what they’re up against. She is now covertly funding the rebellion, yet can not reconcile with her politics with its methods — she is a progressive, shocked to find herself suddenly a radical. Her epiphanic turn happens as she dances through a rave at her daughter’s three-day-long wedding celebration, which the show intercuts with Imperial forces committing sexual violence and hunting down undocumented farm labourers.

Andor wants to make it clear that democratic norms will not — can not — overthrow a dictator, no matter how well intended and intelligent those who believe they can are. This is a lesson Lucas laid down — if cornily — way back in Revenge of the Sith, when Padme Amidala turns to Bail Organa and says: “so this is how liberty dies — with thunderous applause.”

Following the massacre, Mohtma makes a career-burning speech that sees her join the rebellion outright. “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss,” she tells the Senate. “The death of truth is the most ultimate victory of evil.” When she says that what took place on Ghorman was an “unprovoked genocide”, she is roundly booed, her decades-long career as a sensible voice of the senate dead on the spot.

In a sense, her courage may be the closest the show gets to outright fantasy. We now know there is no real-world Mon Mothma equivalent willing to stick their neck out like this.

Gilroy does not let his monsters off the hook. Syril’s arc is that of the desktop killer — “people kill for a desk at headquarters,” he tells a hireling in his first scene — slowly coming to grips with the blood on his hands. “You didn’t seem to mind the promotions,” Dedra tells him as he realises what he’s been party to. But by then, it’s too late—unlike Filoni’s Star Wars, Gilroy’s offers its war criminals no reprieve or redemption.  Andor wants its fascists to know there will be no forgiveness, glory or mercy for them, either.

And as we know — this being a prequel — these fascists, like all fascists, are bound to lose.

Andor’s politicking turns around the axis of Rael, the most vindicated man in all of Star Wars. As he tells his protege, Kleya (Adria Arjona), in a flashback in the penultimate episode: “We have to fight to win. That means we lose and lose and lose until we’re ready. All we know is how much we hate. You bank that and you keep that alive until you know what to do with it.”

Star Wars — at its best — has always known what to do with it. A New Hope is a story of an isolated farm boy coaxed by a religious extremist — the galaxy’s most wanted terrorist — into blowing up the Empire’s biggest government facility. It has always hinged on political violence being the one and only real means to stop forces as evil as they are vast — to end villains, but also the systems that breed them, there is one way out. Andor lays down the manifesto that leads to that new hope: “Freedom is a pure idea … tyranny requires constant effort.” It insists that we remember that the only way to stop the Death Star and all it represents is to blow it up. In this way, Andor is pure Star Wars: a celebration of a joyous truth as embodied by Han Solo’s giddy “yahoooooooo!”: it feels damn good to watch these fascists die.