I’ve not seen anyone say this yet so I feel like I ought to:
even if the ICJ demands that Israel stop their military operations, we still need to keep talking about Palestine. Even if Israel actually fully honours this ruling and stops the siege (something that I, unfortunately, don’t think is very likely) we still need to keep talking about Palestine. Palestine is not free until the occupation ends; Palestine is not free until the illegitimate colonialist-satellite state of Israel is completely wiped off the map, and remembered only in history books for its crimes against humanity and the Arab people. Palestine is not free until it is free, from the river to the sea. Even when this bombardment ends, DO NOT STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE.
If Israel is allowed to exist in its capacity as a settler-colonialist satellite state for the USA, it will commit genocide again. It’s not an if, it’s a when. Israel’s genocidal rhetoric defies humanity, and I fear defies all orders. It exists as an attack dog for the US, and will continue to commit war crimes for as long as it remains.
Heaping the pressure on is vital, at this point, especially if you live in the imperial core. It is our job now to ensure that Israel becomes a pariah state, rejected and sanctioned by the imperialist nations it once worked for. All future weapon shipments must be blocked, all Israeli products boycotted, and our governments made to pay for supporting their genocide. Even when the bombardment stops, continue to cry genocide, and continue to fight for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.
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Four months into the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has forced over a million refugees to the edge of the Egyptian border and is now bombing them while threatening to mount a ground assault against them. In the following text, Jonathan Pollak, a longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, explains why we should not look to international institutions or protest movements within Israeli society to put a stop to the genocide in Gaza and calls on ordinary people to take action.
A shorter version of this text was rejected by the liberal Israeli platform Haaretz—an indication of the diminishing space for dissent in Palestine and within Israeli society.
Human Rights Discourse Has Failed to Stop the Genocide in Gaza
We are now more than 120 days into the unprecedented Israeli assault on Gaza. Its horrific repercussions and our inability to bring it to an end should compel us to reevaluate our perspective on power, our understanding of it, and, most significantly, what we have to do to fight it.
Amid the spilled blood, the endless days of death and destruction, excruciating dearth, starvation, thirst, and despair, the ceaseless nights of fire and brimstone and white phosphors raining indiscriminately from the sky, we must grapple with the bare ugly facts of reality and reshape our strategies.
The officially reported fatalities—in addition to the many Palestinians who remain buried under the rubble and aren’t yet included in the official count—already amount to the annihilation of nearly 1.5% of all human life in the Gaza Strip. As Israel escalates its attacks on Rafah, it seems that there is no end in sight. Soon, the lives of one in every fifty people in Gaza will have been extinguished.
The Israeli military is inflicting an unprecedented toll of suffering and death on the 2.3 million people of Gaza, surpassing anything ever witnessed in Palestine—or elsewhere during the 21st century. Yet these staggering figures have not penetrated the thick layers of dissociation and disconnect that characterize Israeli society as well as Israel’s Western allies. If anything, the reduction of this tragedy to statistics seems to hinder rather than enhance our understanding. It presents a whole that obscures the specifics: the figures conceal the personhood of the countless individuals who have died painful, particular deaths.
At the same time, the unfathomable scale of the massacre in Gaza makes it impossible to comprehend through the stories of individual victims. Journalists, street cleaners, poets, homemakers, construction workers, mothers, doctors, and children, a multitude too vast to be narrated. We are left with faceless anonymous figures. Among them are more than 12,000 children. Probably a lot more.
Please pause and say this aloud, word by word: over twelve thousand children. Killed. Is there a way for us to take this in and move beyond the realm of statistics to grasp the horrific reality?
The cold blunt numbers also veil hundreds of obliterated families, many of them completely erased—sometimes three, even four generations, wiped off the face of the earth.
Overshadowed by these figures are more than 67,000 people who have been injured, thousands of whom will remain paralyzed for the rest of their lives. The medical system in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed; life-saving amputations are being carried out without anesthetics. The extent to which infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed surpasses the Dresden bombings at the end of the Second World War. Nearly two million people—roughly 85% of the population of the Gaza Strip—have been displaced, their lives shattered by Israeli bombings as they shelter in the dangerously overcrowded south of the Strip, which the Israeli government falsely pronounced “safe,” yet continues to pummel with hundreds of 2000-pound bombs. The hunger in Gaza, which was created by Israeli state policy even before the war, is so severe that it amounts to famine. In their despair, people have resorted to eating fodder, but now even that is running out.
About a month ago, an acquaintance of mine who fled to Rafah from Gaza City after his home there was bombed told me that he and his family had already been forced to move from one temporary refuge to another six different times in their attempts to escape from the bombs. In despair, he said, “There is no food, no water, nowhere to sleep. We are constantly thirsty, hungry, and wet. I’ve already had to dig my children out from under the rubble twice—once in Gaza and once here in Rafah.”
These rivers of blood must breach the walls of our apathy. If only time could stop long enough for all of us to process our grief. But it will not. It continues passing as more bombs fall on Gaza.
Decades of injustice have paved the way for this. Some 75 years have passed since the Nakba—75 years of Israel’s settler-colonialism—yet its defenders continue to deny the facts. Even after the the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asserted that there is indeed cause to fear that genocide is being committed in Gaza, the US and many of Israel’s other Western allies have effectively remained silent.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the court’s mere willingness to discuss the case “a disgrace that will not be erased for generations.” Indeed, the ruling is a disgrace. Despite everything being laid bare in plain sight, the court did not order Israel to cease fire. This is a disgrace to the court itself and to the very idea that international law is supposed to protect the lives and rights of those being crushed by the military force of nations.
It will undoubtedly be said that the law, by nature, is meticulous and that it considers the forest not as a whole but as individual trees. To that, we must answer that reality, facts, common sense must be above the law, not beneath it. Israel dedicates considerable resources to a legalism of the battlefield, intended to give cover to its murderous acts. This approach involves carving reality into thin slices of independently legally-approved observations and actions. A military target was present in high-rise X, justifying the deaths of over two dozen uninvolved civilians; apartment tower Y was the home of a Hamas-employed firefighter, legitimizing, according to the principle of proportionality, the decision to wipe out three neighboring families. But this practice cannot turn genocidal water into legitimate wine. This is legal gaslighting that shreds reality to pieces in order to conceal a pattern of indiscriminate mass murder.
If the slaughter of 1.5% of the population in four months is not genocide; if Israel’s acts are not deemed grievous enough for the court to order it to immediately stop the killing, not even in light of open incitement to exterminate Palestinians by prominent Israeli politicians and members of the press, not to mention Israel’s president and Prime Minister; when lack of punishment for such incitements and such acts is accepted rather than branded as genocide in the simplest of terms—then the words we use to describe reality have lost all meaning and we are in dire need of new language beyond the confines of legalese.
Leaving the butcher’s knife in the butcher’s hand—leaving Israel unhindered, unimpeded—means letting the slaughter in Gaza continue. This is the absolute ongoing failure of international law and the institutions entrusted with keeping it.
This failure passes on the responsibility of forcing an end to the ongoing catastrophe, so that it falls on the shoulders of civil society. This ought to compel us to move beyond the empty liberal paradigms of human rights, which have replaced liberation as the dominant discourse in leftist politics.
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Please don't get me wrong, I am as antiwar as anyone else, but...
Ya know what's sad?
People calling the genocide that is the Israel v Palestine war 'irrelevant,' especially in regards to what Israel is doing to the Palestinian peoples. Granted, a majority of the people that are pro-Isreal are also pro-Russia in regards to the war in Ukraine, but I digress.
This war is not irrelevant. This war is, like the Ukrainian war, deserving of respect and consideration. To ignore any mass destruction- be it war, famine, or anything like that- is cruel. Not only is it cruel, it is also inhuman.
Where is your empathy?
Where is your sympathy?
People are dying and unlike in the past, there is something we can do about it, even if it small.
Unfortunately, donating money to Gaza at the moment is going to be very difficult, especially considering that Israel blocking that stuff. If you want to donate money, perhaps try to donate to a charity that is currently working to save lives in Gaza?
That might not be the best way for some, so another thing that you can do is contact (if you're in America) a head of congress. If you're not American (like me), you can contact someone in parliament/government and ask them to call for an immediate ceasefire.
Another way you can do your part in this war is raising awareness. Via using #ceasefire and #freepalastine, you can help get more and more to understand the truth of this war and raise their own voice. You can also join in marches, if that's your thing.
Again, if you want to donate to a charity, I highly suggest doing research on them first, as it can be a very blurry line lol.
Please remember that this goes for Ukrainian too.
Stay safe, drink water and spread awareness.
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