Genocide in Gaza: Silence is complicity
Over the past year, Israel has carpet-bombed the Gaza Strip, known to be one of the most densely populated areas in the world, slaughtering men, women, and children on a staggering scale. The bombing has been so extreme that it has been described by experts as “of the most intense” bombings in the history of modern warfare. Israel has destroyed more than 80 percent of the homes, and virtually the entire population have been displaced several times over. Children account for more than half of the 50,000 dead and hundreds of thousands injured (those staggering numbers are likely conservative estimates).
The carnage and destruction being inflicted on the people in Gaza has been described as a genocide by reputable genocide prevention watchdogs, experts, and historians of genocide and the Holocaust. On December 5 Amnesty International published a report amplifying the alarm: “Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocide acts fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza.”
Before the Amnesty report, the Lemkin Institute of Genocide Prevention stated, “Let us be clear: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The US is complicit in genocide. These are not political statements. They are statements that are made from knowledge and experience.” Moreover, Raz Segal, an eminent Holocaust and genocide studies scholar, called it a “textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” Barry Trachtenberg, a Holocaust historian, quoted in The New Yorker, talked of “consensus opinion among historians of genocide,” adding, “We are watching the genocide unfold as we speak.”
Nor are Israeli officials hiding their genocidal intentions; politicians and generals have, in fact, regularly announced such intentions. The Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, for example, is widely quoted in the media saying, it is “justified and moral” to starve to death two million Palestinians in Gaza, but that the international community won’t allow this to happen. At the start of the war, Maj.-Gen. Ghassan Alian asserted, “Human animals [Palestinians] must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
In the announcement of its genocide report, Amnesty International said that “Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” Amnesty International’s secretary-general Agnes Callamard stated, “The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience.”
The carnage in Gaza has also been described as the “world’s first digital genocide,” where pain and suffering are live-streamed to phones in the palms of the world’s population. However, the tale isn’t new. The war against Palestinian people began 75 years ago when the state of Israel was established as an ethnocratic Jewish state in historic Palestine. The state of Israel was built on the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. As the slogan of the Zionist movement said, a land without people, for a people without land; as Golda Meir, Israel’s only woman prime minister, famously said: “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”
The Israeli state is based on the ideology of denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. Therefore, the Zionist ideology of the state has also denied the right of the Palestinian people to exist. To deal with the inconvenient reality of their existence, Israel has continuously ethnically cleansed and expelled Palestinians, and established a regime of apartheid over them, with very restrictive prison-like conditions, always under the whim of colonial authorities. Now the state of Israel is committing genocide to further break the Palestinian people and consolidate the regime of apartheid and domination. The last one year of carnage in Gaza emanates from the logic of decades of denial of Palestinian people and denial of their right to exist.
The massive crimes against humanity in Gaza, and its endorsement by Western governments, tells a lot about the human condition and the dangers humanity is facing. It exposes the callous hypocrisy of those in power and the moral degradation of the global system and institutions. It illustrates that ideologies of hate, racism, and “othering” can still galvanize support for crimes against humanity and prepare the conditions for mass murder and genocide. It also shows that states can commit genocide under the cardinal principle of “self defense.”
Furthermore, if that state has strong and powerful friends, they can get away with it. The murderous right-wing Israeli government is publicly planning and executing a genocide while Western politicians state that “Israel has the right to self-defence.” In a very telling slip of a tongue, the Swedish prime minister said, “Israel has a right to genoci … self-defence”
The Western mainstream media also shows similar biases and double standards. The media depicts two kinds of humans: those whose lives matter more and those whose lives matter less. Just compare the coverage of October 7 Hamas terror attacks, with the Israeli war of extermination in Gaza, across Western media sources. The first is reported with immense empathy for the victims and consistently negative tropes against Hamas and Palestinians. While covering the war in Gaza, as the Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd says, “The industry standard is to dehumanize Palestinians. Our grief is negligible; our rage is unwarranted. Our death is so quotidian that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather.”
Recently, in two different interviews, one with BBC Persian and in one with BBC Pashto, the Taliban foreign minister was faced with the statement that the international community will not recognize their regime if they do not respect human rights and do not abide by international law. He responded by asking “what about human rights and international law in Gaza, and whether Palestinians did not have human rights?”
Thus, the Taliban are using Israel’s trampling of international law as moral precedent to defend their own actions. Although the Taliban foreign minister was trying to draw attention to Western double standards on the question of human rights, he was also insinuating that if Israel has the right to violate international law under the guise of protecting their state, then why should the Taliban not be able to violate human rights for building their Islamic state and maintaining “peace” in Afghanistan.
The Taliban foreign minister’s opportunistic and cynical reference to Gaza calls for a comparison of the situations in Gaza and Afghanistan. The Taliban are denying the human autonomy and agency of the people of Afghanistan, dehumanizing women, and building a regime of gender apartheid. The Israeli colonial occupation is dehumanizing Palestinians, ethnically cleansing them, and establishing a regime of racial apartheid.
The Israeli occupation is pursuing a historical project of ethnic cleansing and genocide to take Palestinian lands for building a racist and ethnocratic state. The Taliban are denying the right to self-determination of the people of Afghanistan so as to build a tyrannical theocracy that will continuously grind the people under oppression.
This war against the Palestinian people and the ongoing genocide is for the purposes of consolidating the Israeli regime of apartheid. If history is our teacher, we have seen that the consolidation of an ethnocratic and supremacist state means a commitment to continuous crimes against humanity. In the words of the Lemkin Institute, such a state will remain “a genocidal state.”
The world must take a clear stance against Israel’s genocide to prevent the further entrenchment of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. The only human solution is to denounce the claim of supremacy of Zionism in the lands of historical Palestine and embrace and rely on ideas of human equality and solidarity. Therefore, the only way out of the current and future nightmare is to embrace a democratic, decolonized, and secular future that allows both peoples to live in peace, and start the process of healing and creating an environment of moral recovery. Israelis and Palestinians can end the cycle of violence and harm by rejecting Zionism and Islamism and defining a new course and a new politics of human solidarity.
Hamayon Rastgar is the communications officer at Zan Times.
