By Roshmi Goswami
And it continues unflinchingly, relentlessly, with complete impunity emboldened by the ‘ironclad’ support and a non-stop supply of weapons from the senior genocidal partner. The ‘ironclad’ body of the international defence fraternity is ecstatic as shares in the stock market skyrockets, bank accounts soar and elated Zionists across the world head out for exotic holidays financed from dividends earned from a Genocide now more appropriately the Gaza Holocaust. For over 365 days the 14000 US supplied General Dynamics’s 2000 pound bombs or Martin Lockheed’s Hellfire missiles and Boeing’s small bomb aircrafts have targeted and pulverised Gaza’s schools, hospitals, cultural centres, infrastructure tearing bodies of human beings to smithereens leaving devastated parents/grandparents, siblings, surviving relatives or just volunteers to gather up unrecognisable body parts predominantly of children that now fit into just one kg plastic bags.
The partnership of the world’s most powerful and formidable military might’s attack against unarmed civilians mostly women and children is undoubtedly not a war but a Genocide – an ethnic cleansing of unimaginable depravity and proportion. But wait a minute aren’t the attackers the poor victims – the eternally oppressed Chosen Ones ? As Gideon Levy, senior Israeli journalist of the Haaretz comments tongue in cheek – ‘not only are they the Victims but the only Victims in the entire world and history’!
So when the world marked October 7, 2024 the bleeding heart outpouring for this victimhood was evident everywhere, notably amongst people of certain affiliations, values and belief systems. On Western media outlets or social media interviews there was once again a suffusion of the defensive Piers Morgan one line propaganda – ‘But do you condemn Hamas?’ A year into the genocide and after innumerable interviews of course Morgan and his ilk have been sufficiently informed that Hamas is the Palestinian Resistance and while many do not endorse the violence that took place on October 7, Resistance to over 76 years of Israeli oppression and settler colonial supremacist savagery, is expected as pointed out by even the Secretary General of the UN. Indians going off on a pseudo moral shrill given our proud history of freedom struggle – both violent and non violent resistance against colonial oppression and brutality is especially unctuous.
By now there is enough evidence to show that most of the atrocities as reported by the Western/Zionist media is false and that almost half of the 1200 Israelis killed on that day were killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces themselves following the promulgation of the Hannibal Directives whereby you kill off your own people rather than have them taken hostage. But the intent of the Zionist propaganda media was amply served. The intent was to create and set a narrative to justify the Genocide and the annexation thereafter so we hear the likes of Kamla Harris and other wily fanatics still parroting the false narrative. The same kind of propaganda that was used by numerous Western media including some blatantly biased NYT editorials, to justify the destruction of Iraq. The ‘Cradle of Civilisation’ destroyed by a morally and culturally inferior genocidal country based on a strategically packaged lie and then too to appease Israel. And as more evidence surfaces of Israel’s actual intent and as they with arrogant impunity (God given apparently!) advance and annex Lebanon the game is crystal clear. The hostages issue for the Israeli regime is literally a buried chapter. There is no intention and never was to get them back. You don’t kill the chief negotiator if your concern is for your people.
As the Gaza Holocaust enters the second year Israel crosses all levels of humanly conceivable horror and perversity. Even as I write the heartrending cries of women and children being burnt alive in the relief camps within the grounds of Al Aqsa hospital in Gaza’s Deir al – Balah region resound in my ears. Images abound of little children in body bags after being bombed with precision by a high tech Israeli arsenal while they played football with childish innocence and abandonment outside their shanty little shelters in Al – Shati relief camp. Can well imagine the ‘moral outrage’ if the skin on those little bodies was ‘white’ or more insidiously if the religious belief system of their community was different. Targeting children is the most despicable of all war crimes and appears to be a special modus operandi of the Israeli military. As reported by doctors and paramedics worldwide who have volunteered in hospitals in Gaza a vast majority of dead children brought into the hospitals did not have shrapnel or bomb wounds but died from single or multiple sniper shots to their heads and to their hearts. Or the 355 tank bullet shots fired at a car where a terrified six year old Hind Rajab the single survivor waited to be rescued. The shooters were close enough to clearly see that there was just a little child left in the car.
But a huge cohort of dedicated, brave individuals and organisations of different races and religious persuasions are ensuring that every aspect of this Holocaust is documented. Among non-Arabs, the loud and unequivocal voice of political scientists like Norman Finklestein, a son of Holocaust survivors with decades of experience, is an invaluable leading voice. Equally passionate is the persistent hard hitting evidence by British journalist Owen Jones or the incisive reports of Francesca Albanese the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and many more. Apart from the meticulously researched and sharp accounts like the South African submission to the ICJ there are several other rigorously researched reports bringing out the depth, dimension and psychopathic core of the Genocide.
The recent Al Jazeera documentary- ‘Gaza- Investigating War Crimes’ by historian, award winning British documentary filmmaker Richard Sanders, is made from footage of the extraordinary proliferation on social media of war crimes provided by the Israeli military itself as they took great pride in documenting their own war crimes which lays bare the culture of the Israeli military and provides overwhelming evidence of the punitive slaughter of Palestinians. Other important reports is the B’Tselem’s ‘Welcome to Hell’ documenting torture of Palestinian detainees by Israel since October 7, 2024. B’Tselem is a Jerusalem based non-profit organisation whose stated goals are to document human rights violations in the Israeli Occupied Palestinian territories. For those of us who have worked and engaged with sexual violence in conflict zones across different locations, the IOF’s perversity has crossed all red lines and far beyond. A new vocabulary of words is needed. For every act aimed at dehumanisation and demonisation of a people there are no existing words of human usage.
The sickening details of setting dogs to rape a Palestinian detainee in the notorious Sde Teiman military prison after spraying ‘something’ on his backside as documented in the Al Jazeera documentary plus the Euro Med Monitor field team and reported in the Deccan Herald Oct 11th, the perverse rape of male prisoners by female IOF soldiers, prolonged periods of nudity for both men and women, the heinous act of using of a mobile phone for rectal penetration as in the highly publicised case again at the Sde Teiman military base in July this year. The endless cases of utter inhumanity and depravity speak of the deeply embedded hate in the apartheid settler colonial enterprise. What is especially astounding is the way the IOF have themselves filmed their own violations. An outrageous sense of entitlement and ‘Chosenness’ that they cannot be touched and are answerable to none.
As Francesca Albanese has repeatedly pointed out the world need not have reached this stage had Israel been held accountable earlier. UNIMIL the UN peacekeeping forces would not have been fired at, humanitarian aid into Gaza may not have been vandalised etc. The UN recognised Israel in May 1949 after just a year of the Nakba where 750,000 Palestinians were brutally expelled from their homelands or butchered. Even now while most countries have endorsed a ceasefire the US has vetoed each and every ceasefire resolution. Almost five months after the ICC prosecutor called for an arrest warrant against Netanyahu the judges have not moved. Rather the prosecutor has faced intimidation and death threats for his ‘audacious’ action against a ‘white man’. Apparently the ICC was set up for action against Africans and coloured people but not ‘civilised’ Europeans! Gaza has completely unmasked the utter hypocrisy, entrenched racism, double standards and evil manipulations of the West.
Indeed today the world order has irrevocably changed and there are only two Axises. The three pronged Axis of Genocide – the countries and individual supporters, the defence and weapons industry and the Zionist propaganda media; next the Axis of Resistance which besides the original countries include all protests, campaigns, action and mobilisation against this mass slaughter. The BDS – Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanction movement which is hurting the Genocider’s economy and business interests significantly is a critical articulation of the Axis of Resistance. Ultimately the choice is yours. Which Axjs would you want to be placed and remembered? A Genocide does not allow for fence sitting.