The events in Gaza and occupied Palestine are shocking and depressing. Over 30,000 human lives have been brutally taken away in Israel’s ferocious assault on Palestinians in Gaza, which is now widely being acknowledged as a genocide. Over 70,000 people are injured in a besieged enclave where hospitals are bombed, doctors targeted, and essential aid and medicines are denied. Israel has used every possible method to extinguish human lives. It has rained bombs from the sky which have trapped thousands under rubble. It has cut off food and water since the beginning of its assault, which has led to mass starvation and famine that has claimed many lives, including those of infants and children. The UNICEF says that 17,000 children have been left all alone in Gaza. Orphaned and with nowhere to go. It is not for nothing that Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network has said that Israel is imperilling its legitimacy through its own actions, calling it a “criminal” state, run by a “gang” and “zealots”.
The disturbing pathology of ‘Israeli society’ is visible in the way that its citizens are physically preventing the passage of aid trucks despite their awareness that their actions are compounding the hellish suffering right beside them. It is all justified in the name of Israeli ‘safety’ and ‘right to exist’. There are shameful pictures doing the rounds online of Israeli soldiers flaunting and posing in the underwear of women they killed and displaced, a clear vindication of how deeply militarism, male dominance, and sexual violence are interconnected. Bulldozers running people over and leaving them to rot in their grotesque state, only to be recirculated in putrid Telegram groups with expressions of glee and bombast. These toe-curling, gut-wrenching scenes are part of a historic continuum of escalating Zionist oppression in Palestine. Colonialism has not gone away but is right here, leering in the face of all the moral progress that humanity has made over the past two centuries. In other words, there is not a single atrocity that we can think of that has already not been perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. Visuals from this human catastrophe that will go on to define this century’s history (and a very dark one at that) are today being openly mocked, derided, and denied. How can we let things come to this?
‘Never again’ is for everyone, including Palestinians
The weight on all the world to act has never been higher, given that we have very recent historical precedents and existing commitments to institute mechanisms in place that would never allow a mass extermination like the Holocaust to happen ever again. On this note, it is also important to acknowledge that there are many other people who went through tragedies as deep as the Holocaust. The victims of King Leopold in Congo (1885-1908) and the Chinese victims of Japanese imperialism in the Nanjing Massacre (1937), as well as the Japanese civilians killed and affected by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) are unfortunate examples of people who paid the ultimate price for the sins of the 20th century.
This is not to pit one tragedy against another but to convey that the moral force behind the collective international will to declare “never again” has emanated from the lived experience of the whole world and not just one section of it. Zionists are misappropriating and perverting the memory of the Holocaust by weaponizing it against any criticism or scrutiny of its actions in Palestine. This has been the standard practice since the inception of Israel and its U.S.-backed influence around the world. On December 8, 2023, the Israeli ambassador trooped in with his staff in the UN General Assembly sporting the yellow ‘Star of David’ on their chests. This was one of the many humiliations enforced on Jews in the Nazi regime and is a sensitive memory that deserves to be treated with respect. However, the ambassador was bellicose in the assembly and continually sought to portray Israel as the victim in the U.N. whereas reality cannot be further from the truth. In fact, not only has the U.S. vetoed three resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (something which would impede Israel’s stated agenda of annexing all of Palestine and expelling/exterminating its indigenous people), but has also led its allies into pulling funding from the UN’s refugee agency (UNRWA), one of the sources from which Palestinians can access food and education. Reports now have the UNRWA’s staff alleging that Israel tortured them into ‘confessing’ that its staffers are aiding the resistance group Hamas or joining its ranks altogether! When has a U.N. member country been accused of torturing the institution’s staff before? Couple this with Israel’s relentless aggressive posturing against the U.N. and brazen flouting of its resolutions and we can safely say that it is a rogue state acting in total disregard for international law and norms.
The U.N. is a product of the victory against fascism and the anti-colonial movement as much as it is an institution to negotiate international realpolitik in the aftermath of World War 2. While it has never been perfect or radically disruptive to the agenda of Western, white supremacist capitalist hegemony, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has shaken its very foundations in its visible weakness when faced with good old-fashioned settler colonialism armed with modern-day weapons of war and information. Even these vestiges of its symbolic value will erode if Israel is allowed to run rampant on its current trajectory of total annihilation of the Palestinians. As it is, the U.S.-led West and their ‘allies’ are internationally isolated on this issue. Experts and ordinary people alike can trace the congruency between the West’s (relatively recent) settler colonial and fascist past and the present-day carnage being perpetrated in Gaza. Support is coalescing along the lines of ‘Global North vs. Global South’ and there is vigorous talk of a multipolar world emerging from the ashes, led by a Global South that is more substantial as a grouping than simply being “formerly colonized”.
Israeli genocide in Gaza: Documentation and resources
1. Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List [Link]. Ten Myths About Israel, Palestine Speaks, Blaming the Victims, The Case For Sanctions Against Israel, The Punishment of Gaza are available to read and download for free.
2. ‘25 threads to make sense of Israel/Palestine’ [Twitter threads]
3. 25 Zionist talking points/propaganda refuted [Twitter thread]
4. Genocidal intent declared by top Israeli leadership [Tweet, image]
5. Israeli minister endorses using epidemics to wipe out Palestinians [Tweet]
6. Israel starves special needs child Yazan al Kafarneh to death [News]
7. Girl child Anhar Al-Shanbari starved to death by Israel [Tweet]
8. Seven-year-old girl kidnapped by Israeli military in West Bank [Tweet, video]
9. Airstrikes wipe out family in Tal Al-Hawa, west of Gaza city [Tweet, video]
10. Women journalists and activists killed by Israel [Twitter thread]
11. Hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza lined up before the IDF [Tweet, video]
12. Israeli war crimes posted by IDF soldiers themselves [Twitter thread]
13. Rafah Flour Massacre: 112 killed, 750 injured by Israel [News, link]
14. Another massacre of Palestinians for seeking food [Tweet, news, video]
15. Exposing NYT’s fraud “exposé” on Hamas ‘rapes’ [Article, video]
16. 5-year-old Faisal recounts pregnant mother shot in the belly [Tweet, video]
17. “Gaza and its citizens are all dying ugly deaths and I love it…”- Nurse from Howard University Hospital in DC [Tweet, video]
Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi. He writes about current events and culture
