The Butchering Of Gaza
As the West watches an ethnic cleansing unfold in the Gaza Strip, the promise of "never again" seems more distant than ever.
The mangled corpse of a Hamas terrorist is retrieved from the rubble. His face is decorated with dust, his body slump and heavy like a sack, his stare blank and cold. He is a toddler of three-years-old. His desperate father weeps and cradles him in his arms.
Another terrorist is extracted from the wreckage. This time she’s clearly alive, her fair, curly hair is white with dust; she’s a child of five or six and is whisked away by her mother, squirming left and right, as though asking where help will come from.
Lying at the foot of a demolished building, a gaunt man in a tattered vest scribbles on a white sheet, folded like a shroud in his hands. It covers an infant’s body, his son. He waves it in despair. The infant hadn’t yet had a chance to join Hamas’ military headquarters in the Jabalya refugee camp. He had only lived a few days - a butterfly’s eternity - before being brutally crushed under the rubble of his collapsing apartment.
It’s only been a month since Israel ramped up its merciless, unforgiving bombing campaign against Gaza and already more than 11,000 civilians have been killed, 4,000 of which were children, according to the Gazan Ministry of Health. Claims that these numbers have been artificially inflated by the Hamas-linked organization can easily be refuted by just glancing at the scale of the destruction being inflicted on the small strip of land. Entire city blocks have been flattened. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to migrate south. And Israeli airstrikes continue unabated.
The Israeli response to the October 7th massacre, where 1,000 Israeli civilians were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists, has been anything but proportional. Despite assurances from the Western world that they were acting under restraint, there have been no attempts by Netanyahu to limit civilian casualties or push for hostage negotiations - instead, he has unleashed a torrent of bombs and infernos, turning Gaza, a city once thriving with life, into a massive graveyard.
Over the past few weeks, in response to waning public sympathy amongst Western audiences, his government has been cycling through a series of fragile excuses to disingenuously justify its heavy-handed response. From unverified claims of 40 beheaded infants to discovering unmarred, Arabic-translated copies of Mein Kampf in children’s bedrooms, there has been a concentrated effort to dehumanize the Palestinian people at every opportunity in a bid to win a propaganda war.
Positioned at the centre of these arguments is the necessity of rescuing the 240 hostages captured by Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. However, what would seem like a noble pursuit is anything but that. Israel has used the hostages more akin to theatrical props, a justification for escalating their genocidal war against the Palestinian people. Make no mistake, they have no intention of actually rescuing the captives, a fact only highlighted by the discriminatory nature of the bombing campaign. These are not surgical-timed strikes aimed at mitigating civilian casualties; these are spasms of anger directed at a people they want to wipe off the face of the Earth.
And it’s not difficult to see why.
Though Netanyahu has always been a right-wing demagogue, who has fed off of ethnic tension, his latest government is the most right-wing one in Israeli history. Comprising of the Orthodox Ultranationalist ‘Noam’ and the Jewish Supremacist ‘Otzma Yehudit’ parties, Israel’s incumbent government shows no traces of moderate voices. In fact, Netanyahu is flanked by ministers even more extreme than him. Amihai Eliyahu, the Minister of Heritage, made international headlines earlier this week when he suggested that nuclear weapons should not be ruled out of the equation. Inflammatory statements like this have also been voiced by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister for National Security. Ben-Gvir, a man who has previously called for the expulsion of Arab citizens living in Israel, recently argued that, in the aftermath of the conflict, Gaza should come under a military occupation with Israel playing a leading role.
Netanyahu and his acolytes cannot be reasoned with because they are not operating in good faith. They are driven by the zealous desire to either wipe out or expel the Palestinian people from their own land.
The Western world, despite priding itself on its commitment to freedom and decency, has ceded any grounds it had of moral authority on this issue, as governments not only ignore Israeli war crimes but embolden them. Two weeks ago, while bombs rained down on refugee camps and hospital wards, the US Congress unanimously approved another $14bn military package for the Israeli military. The humanitarian aid package for Gaza? Less than $100M.
At every opportunity, Joe Biden and his cabinet have evaded responsibility. Instead of demonstrating leadership on the issue and using their leverage in Tel Aviv to reign Netanyahu in, they have feverishly latched themselves to his ethnic cleansing project, giving him blanket immunity and amplifying his genocidal rhetoric on the world stage.
Things are just as bad on the other side of the Atlantic. In Britain, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have refused to support a cease-fire, instead endorsing a humanitarian pause. This phrase, nonexistent in the British political lexicon weeks ago, has quickly become a well-worn refrain, brandished as a shield by those in Westminster. British politicians clearly hope their support of a pause — a feeble demand that pretends toward acknowledgement of the terrible devastation visited on civilians in Gaza — will fend off criticism of their refusal to call for a cease-fire and their dogged insistence that Israel’s assault on Gaza is one of self-defence.
Such a weak response is hardly surprising for Sunak, whose party has historically been an ardent supporter of Israel. It’s a different story for Starmer, a man who has made his reputation as one of Britain’s top human rights lawyers. In fact, he has built his pitch to be Britain’s next prime minister on this image of him being a judiciocrat. A former director of public prosecutions, he has distanced himself from a succession of ethically dubious Conservative leaders by extolling his own virtues as a faithful disciple of law and order, one whose moral compass is permanently pointed due north. So his coyness on whether United Nations and European Union experts are correct in their assessment that Israel’s war on Gaza violates international law — and could even, in the words of a United Nations human rights expert, amount to ethnic cleansing — has been viewed as a profound act of moral bankruptcy.
If this absence of moral leadership wasn’t bad on its own, the Western world’s response has only been exacerbated by the media’s coverage, which has done its best attempts to frame every man, woman and child in the Gaza Strip as if they are co-conspirators in Hamas’ genocidal crusade against the Jews. By re-orientating the debate around the October 7th conflict - “Do you condemn Hamas? “Do you disavow what happened on October the 7th?” - the media is effectively taking the agency away from the Israeli state, reaffirming the illusion that the current conflict originated a month ago and not in 1948.
What is worth repeating is this - the struggle between Israel and Palestine is an asymmetric conflict, not an even struggle. One side is funded, militarily and financially, by the largest military-industrial complex, not just in the world, but in the history of mankind. The other is a ragtag bunch of rebels, mostly reliant on outdated Soviet weaponry and confined to an open-air prison camp. Hamas poses no realistic threat to the existence of Israel. They are under-armed, short on supplies and their technological aptitude is dwarfed by Israel’s. Portraying it otherwise is disingenous.
Never has there been a more black-and-white conflict than this one. History will vindicate those who stood by the Palestinian people in their hour of darkness, just as it did with those who stood against Apartheid South Africa, the institution of American slavery, and all the other stains in human history.
But what hurts just as much as the casualty count is the knowledge that humanity still has not learnt from the lessons of the Holocaust. We are watching a genocide unfold in front of our eyes, and doing nothing to stop it.
If Israel and the US are, as they like to claim, working under the belief that this aggressive response will eradicate Hamas, they are sorely mistaken. For every Palestinian killed in an airstrike, three more future Hamas terrorists are born. It is a pattern that has repeated all over the world - the IRA in Ireland, the Vietcong in Vietnam, Poqo in South Africa. When communities are threatened with subjugation and extermination, they band together and wage a war of liberation against their oppressors. It’s as true now as it was back then.
Only by breaking this vicious cycle of hatred can we hope to see peace and harmony restored to the Middle East. But in order to do so, Western countries will need to call for a ceasefire to end this unnecessary bloodshed. Palestinians need time to grieve, to bury their dead, to mourn for what they have lost. And then, as the strongest actor in this conflict, the onus will be on Israel to uphold its end of the bargain and steer negotiations towards a two-state solution.
The embers of Palestinian terror can only be extinguished by reigniting Palestinian hope.