The level of violence and human suffering we witnessed in Gaza over the course of three weeks is worse than the sum of the past three or so Israeli massacres, and strongly resonates with the story of the Holocaust — the pitiless murder of a persecuted, captive people held out the specter of the genocide of a whole nation. It must not be forgotten that this campaign is on two fronts — a bloody war on 1948 refugees in Gaza is mirrored by the ongoing oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians living in the West Bank. To watch a 10-year-old girl in Gaza tell her tragic story of how she escaped death while on a visit to her aunt who had lost her children the day before, and who later returned home to find her whole family burned to death — her mother still holding her little sister close to her — is to witness lives devastated in an unnecessary war. This scene alone captures the cruelty of the Zionist assault on the Palestinian people, who according to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni were merely “collateral damage.” Her comment exposes the extent to which Israeli political and military discourse is morally bankrupt.
The contempt for the lives of Palestinian Arabs shown by the American administration in their funding and condoning of countless Israeli atrocities, their continuous moral support for the Israeli apartheid system, as well as a wider biased policy in the Middle East should make us in the Arab world ask ourselves: What do we owe these people that they should continue to take our lives and land with total impunity?
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was, as we saw, apparently powerless in spite not only of the huge scale of carnage in Gaza, but also the targeting and destruction of several UN buildings, which at the time were sheltering mainly women and children. These actions seemed to point to an unprecedented shift in Israeli policy whereby it was challenging the UN and the so-called international community to act. However, it should be remembered that this is not the first time Israel has openly defied the UN, and it yet enjoys a reputation as a “civilized”, “democratic” member state. Israel acted as it did in the full knowledge that no Western power would intervene to stop its mounting crimes. Our Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, however, was so enraged by the UN secretary-general’s passivity that he threatened to “turn his back on all UN conventions.” Although this may have sounded alarming, its tone reflected the mood on the Arab street, and it was exactly what people of integrity wanted to hear. Distressed and infuriated to see the guardians of humanity and civilization lift their masks and reveal the hard face of imperialism and militarization in blind support of the Zionist aggressor and occupier, individuals all over the world demanded justice and called out “shame on you” to their cowed governments.
This brutal massacre will live forever in the collective memory of millions of people; Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims. The inhuman scenes we saw of children, the sacrificial dismemberment of their tiny bodies — some left to be eaten by dogs after Israeli soldiers forbade their families to bury them, the scenes of women wounded or weeping over a beloved, not to mention the traumatized expressions on the faces of the men, who were unable to protect their families, all attest to the barbarism of the Zionist enterprise. The Israeli Cabinet did not think to spare the impoverished and unarmed Palestinians for even a day during their 22-day “offensive”. Not a day passed without rockets and missiles raining down on the densely populated Gaza Strip. Clear evidence of the army’s use of the banned white phosphorus has since emerged. The feeble denials by military spokespeople of any wrongdoing only serve to further enrage opinion worldwide. While it has long been known in the Arab world that Zionism is a racist and dangerous ideology bent on the destruction of another people, it has sadly taken this latest instance of their barbarity for many more in the West to see through the Orwellian-speak and cover-ups of the Israeli authorities.
Violence, however, engenders more violence and the clash of civilizations becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for its inventors; these images will widen the gap of understanding not only between Arabs and Israelis, but also between Arabs and Americans whose government is hugely culpable for such a massacre.
Being an oppressed nation of grieving mothers, sisters, brothers and fathers of martyrs, Palestinians have won the world’s sympathy, whereas the barbaric Israeli state and its supporters have lost all credibility in the eyes of millions of people. Now Hamas should invest this outpouring of compassion to its own advantage by toning down its aggressiveness and exercising the power of logic and self-control.
The agony and nightmare of the Israeli peoples is a tremendous one; they will now have to live with the guilt, and in anticipation of the death of their already decaying system, including an inevitable end to the occupation. They will doubtless try to continue selling themselves as a peace-loving nation in an attempt to erase from memory the ugliness of the recent massacre, and to convince the world once more that Israel is a democratic country.
The shadow of cultural and political shame will be cast over Israel for the next few decades, and will not resolve itself until justice for 61 years of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is seen to be done. In a perhaps not so ironic reversal of roles, the Israelis are seen as the Nazis of today for their attempted extermination of the Palestinians. Their hegemony over the world’s most important political and academic institutions and media corporations will not stand the test of time as people are no longer isolated or ignorant of their crimes. The media should carefully document and play these scenes over and over again to remind the entire world of the atrocities committed by the Israeli Army, who acted with total impunity throughout this massacre. The world must be united in prosecuting the crimes of the Israeli state, and thereby marking the beginning of the end of this decaying apartheid system in the Middle East.
— Basma Al-Mutlaq has a Ph.D. in comparative and feminist literature in the Middle East from SOAS, London University.
