The genocide in Gaza changes everything
By Elia J. Ayoub
thefirethesetimes.com / iwritestuff.blog
CW: extreme violence of all kind, genocide
Every day, it seems, someone I know has been murdered. And if not them, a relative or friend or neighbors of theirs. To name but one: Refaat Alareer, a gentle soul and lover of literature, was murdered alongside his brother, nephew sister and three nieces by the Israeli state which “surgically bombed out of the entire building.” The Israelis told him where to go, and then bombed the entire building just to take out one academic who said bad things about them on social media. The moral depravity of it all. I can’t keep up. By various degrees of separations, I’m surrounded by so many deaths, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones — I’m in Switzerland, and the worst I have to deal with is racism and censorship and grief.
The Israelis have done everything in their power to prevent information from coming out, murdering at least 103 journalists according to Reporters Without Borders — an extraordinary crime against humanity in itself. But Gazans have continued to live-stream and document as much as they can, in the hope that this moves the world to do something, anything, to stop Israel from ‘finishing’ this genocide as so many in Netanyahu’s administration clearly wish to do — or as Trump put it, ‘finishing the problem,’ the Palestinian question.
What keeps me going is this: amidst of all this carnage Gazans are still trying to save one another from the might of one of the world’s most powerful armies. A nurse was forced to choose which premature baby was most likely to survive the lack of oxygen, leaving the others behind after being told by the Israelis that they would be safe; they were not, and a journalist discovered the rotting corpses two weeks later. A child died after his parents tried to mix animal feed with water to make ‘bread’ to avoid starvation, a desperate measure countless families have since had to resort to. Palestinians are lining up almost anywhere in Gaza for food, which didn’t prevent the Israelis from opening fire, killing at least 112 and wounding 750 more in southwest Gaza.
Besides the Assadist destruction of Aleppo and the Putinist destruction of Mariupol, no event in recent years has made it clearer to me that “hope is a discipline”, to quote Mariame Kaba. People are still trying, because they have to. To quote Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, “we teach life, sir!”
At the time of writing, 9 March 2024, some 60% of houses in Gaza are either partially or completely destroyed, amounting to the crime of domicide. A large part of the population — including over 90% of children — is at risk of mass starvation, the direct result of Israel’s policy of starvation as a weapon of war, which is a crime against humanity. Some 17,000 children have already been left orphaned, and are referred to by the acronym WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family. The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 15 litres of water per person per day for everyday use including drinking, with 7 litres being the absolute minimum. In Gaza, the number is around 3 litres, and that water is contaminated as a result of Israel blocking all access to water to the besieged strip. Diseases such as diarrhea and hepatitis are threatening to add tens of thousands of deaths while — just to add insult to injury — Israeli soldiers mock Palestinians’ suffering with open-air barbecues in destroyed Gazan neighborhoods.
And yet, the overwhelming majority of Israelis continue to believe their military is acting justly in Gaza, and that the violence is justified. We have reached the stage where no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the minds of pro-Israel apologists, and nothing but direct outside intervention of one kind or another can stop this carnage.
The cruel truth that underpins all of what is happening today is that Palestinians have, for years, tried to warn about Israel’s downward path towards mass-violence. The normalization of an occupation, a blockade, an apartheid system and an ethno-supremacist ideology could only be made possible if the Israelis became ‘moral monsters’ themselves, to use James Baldwin’s description of pro-segregation White Americans. Indeed, the genocide in Gaza is the end-result of decades of preventable policies by the Israeli state with the full-backing and complicity of Western countries, Arab states and numerous others. In fact, even as the Israeli state continued to colonize Palestinian lands decade after decade, the only real action taken by so-called democracies was to criminalize or censor the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, one of the few non-violent avenues left to Palestinians in their quest for justice.
Today, we find ourselves in cruelly absurd situations where the USA, Israel’s primary backer, is both apparently frustrated with how the Israelis are ‘handling’ the war while also sending billions worth of weaponry and financial aid to make the genocide possible in the first place and preventing any diplomatic response at the UN level. The US is more comfortable setting up a ‘port’ off the Gazan shore to deliver some aid than telling its supposed ally to simply allow aid to come in from the existing land crossings.
Right now, I am incapable of doing more than write and take part in protests calling for an immediate ceasefire and for Israel to be held accountable. This is my way of bearing witness, I suppose. I do that because I’m the grandson of a Palestinian refugee who was exiled from his land, but also because I fear for a world that finds it easy to witness the annihilation of a people in slow motion and do nothing to stop it. Failing to stop the genocide in Gaza will not just hurt Gazans and Palestinians more broadly. It will greatly accelerate the ongoing authoritarian turn in large parts of the world, from India to the US. As with any situation, oppressors from around the world learn from one another. It is up to us to learn how to resist them, together.
VERSION WITH LINKS:
Title: The genocide in Gaza changes everything
By Elia J. Ayoub
thefirethesetimes.com / iwritestuff.blog
CW: extreme violence of all kind, genocide
Each day brings news worse than the day before. The more Gazans document the apocalypse brought upon by the Israeli state from the air, land and sea, the more it seems they are punished with more death and destruction. At the time of writing, 9 March 2024, some 60% of houses in Gaza are either partially or completely destroyed, amounting to the crime of domicide. Everything from schools to hospitals to bakeries to mosques to churches to kindergartens have been annihilated by the Israeli state. A large part of the population – including over 90% of children – is at risk of mass starvation, the direct result of Israel’s policy of starvation as a weapon of war, which is a crime against humanity. Over 30,000 Palestinians have already been murdered by the Israeli state since October 7, and thousands more are still buried under the rubble. Each day around 10 children lose one or more limbs, amputations are performed without anaesthetics, and around 37 mothers die. Some 17,000 children have already been left unaccompanied, and are referred to by the accronym WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family. Barely three weeks into the genocide and the Israelis had already killed more children than are killed in global conflicts annually over the previous 4 years. The numbers today stand at over 13,000 children killed. To make matters worse, the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 15 litres of water per person per day for everyday use including drinking, with 7 litres being the absolute minimum. In Gaza, the number is around 3 litres, and that water is contaminated as a result of Israel blocking all access to water to the besieged strip. Diseases such as diarrhea and hepatitis are threatening to add tens of thousands of deaths while – just to add insult to injury – Israeli soldiers mock Palestinians’ suffering with open-air barbecues in destroyed Gazan neighborhoods.
These are merely a few of the many examples of what the Israeli state has unleashed on the largely defenseless population of Gaza, a population with neither army nor navy nor airforce nor port nor airport facing one of the world’s most powerful armies backed by the world’s major military superpower. As a result, horror stories abound, the kind that can make even the most heartless individual think twice about endorsing this madness. And yet, the overwhelming majority of Israeliscontinue to believe their military is acting justly in Gaza, and that the violence is justified. The world’s largest open-air prison, populated by mostly children under the age of 18, has been turned into an extermination camp. We have reached the stage where no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the minds of pro-Israel apologists, and nothing but direct outside intervention of one kind or another can stop this carnage. Indeed, the scale of destruction is so large that comparisons to Dresden, Mariupol and Aleppo have been floated around in expert circles, including at a recent panel of UN experts that I’ve attended.
The cruel truth that underpins all of what is happening today is that Palestinians have, for years, tried to warn about Israel’s downward path towards mass-violence. The normalisation of an occupation, a blockade, an apartheid system and an ethnosupremacist ideology could only be made possible if the Israelis became ‘moral monsters’ themselves, to use James Baldwin’s description of pro-segregation White Americans. Indeed, the genocide in Gaza is the end-result of decades of preventable policies by the Israeli state with the full-backing and complicity of Western countries, Arab states and numerous others. In fact, even as the Israeli state continued to colonize Palestinian lands decade after decade, the only real action taken by so-called democracies was to criminalize or censor the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, one of the few non-violent avenues left to Palestinians in their quest for justice. While the October 7th massacre by Hamas and other groups was horrific, it is absurd to act as if it occurred in a vacuum. The Israeli state has done everything in its power to exert more control over Palestinian bodies than is possible almost anywhere else in the world – for decades. The list of crimes committed by Israel is so long I cannot do it justice here. Virtually everything imaginable has been done, from the obsessive destruction of ancient olive trees that predate nation states to the imprisonment of around 10,000 children processed in military courts, from mass torture and rape to routinely stealing Palestinian homes and moving Jewish settlers into them.
After South Africa brought the charge of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) the ICJ ordered the Israeli state to ensure ‘life-saving goods and services reaching a population at risk of genocide and on the brink of famine.’ There was a moment of hope there, and virtually everyone I knew, it seemed, was watching the livestream of a court. That in itself was quite the event as it gave many some hope that maybe, just maybe, someone will stop Israel, for once. This, as Amnesty International documented and as anyone with the capacity to pay attention to what’s happening knows, was soon crushed. Not “even the bare minimum steps,” in Amnesty’s words, were taken by Israel. In fact, they have stepped up their campaign of extermination through bombs and starvation since the ICJ’s ruling. Today, we find ourselves in cruelly absurd situations whereby the USA, Israel’s primary backer, is both apparently frustrated with how the Israelis are ‘handling’ the war while also sending billions worth of weaponry and financial aid (and preventing any diplomatic response at the UN level) to make the genocide possible in the first place. The US is more comfortable setting up a ‘port’ off the Gazan shore to deliver some aid than telling its supposed ally to simply allow aid to come in from the existing land crossings.
Every day, it seems, someone I know has been murdered. And if not them, a relative or friend or neighbors of theirs. To name but one: Refaat Alareer, a gentle soul and lover of literature, was murdered alongside his brother, nephew sister and three nieces by the Israeli state which “surgically bombed out of the entire building.” The Israelis told him where to go, and then bombed the entire building just to take out one academic who said bad things about them on social media. The moral depravity of it all. I can’t keep up. By various degrees of separations, I’m surrounded by so much deaths, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones – I’m in Switzerland, and the worse I have to deal with is racism and censorship and grief.
Calling this a months-long campaign a series of blood baths doesn’t seem to do it justice. There is something additionally horrifying about what’s happening in Gaza, and that is the sheer scale of documentation and evidence that anyone with an internet connection or access to newspapers is able to go through. The Israelis have done everything in their power to prevent information from coming out, murdering at least 103 journalists according to Reporters Without Borders – an extraordinary crime against humanity in itself. But Gazans have continued to live-stream and document as much as they could, in the hope that this moves the world to do something, anything, to stop Israel from ‘finishing’ this genocide as so many in Netanyahu’s administration clearly wish to do – or as Trump put it, ‘finishing the problem,’ the Palestinian question.
What keeps me going is this: amidst of all this carnage Gazans are still trying to save one another from the might of one of the world’s most powerful armies. A nurse has had to perform emergency caesarean operations on six dead pregnant women to try to save their babies. Another nurse was forced to choose which premature baby was most likely to survive the lack of oxygen, leaving the others behind after being told by the Israelis that they would be safe; they were not, and a journalist discovered the rotting corpses two weeks later. A child died after his parents tried to mix animal feed with water to make ‘bread’ to avoid starvation, a desperature measure countless families have since had to resort to. Palestinians are lining up almost anywhere in Gaza for food, which didn’t prevent the Israelis from opening fire, killing at least 112 and wounding 750 more in southwest Gaza.
Besides the Assadist destruction of Aleppo and the Putinist destruction of Mariupol, no event in recent years has made it clearer to me that “hope is a discipline“, to quote Mariame Kaba. People are still trying, because they have to. To quote Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, “we teach life, sir!” Right now, I am incapable of doing more than write and take part in protests calling for an immediate ceasefire and for Israel to be held accountable. This is my way of bearing witness, I suppose. I do that because I’m the grandson of a Palestinian refugee who was exiled from his land, but also because I fear for a world that finds it easy to witness the annihilation of a people in slow motion and do nothing to stop it. Failing to stop the genocide in Gaza will not just hurt Gazans and Palestinians more broadly. It will greatly accelerate the ongoing authoritarian turn in large parts of the world, from India to the US and passing by Germany. As with any situation, oppressors from around the world learn from one another. It is up to us to learn how to resist them, together.