There are at least 45,000 unanswerable reasons why all New Year celebrations should be cancelled in this part of our world. There is simply nothing to celebrate. We have forfeited that right, and done so spectacularly.
Our collective 2024 class report reads: Politics – fail; Diplomacy – fail: Security – fail, and by contrast: Hypocrisy – distinction; Killing – distinction and, Denialism - distinction. Given such metrics, how can we possibly justify celebrations?
Just how many times must we report the numbers (and endure the denials)? At least 45,500 Palestinians have been killed and 108,000 injured, very many horribly so.
A recent and detailed assessment by the UN Human Rights Office found that 44% of the verifiable fatalities were children. Not Hamas fighters, not political leaders (as if assassinations are now selectively approved) but entirely innocent children, whose sole crime was being born Palestinian. UNICEF now reports that one child has been killed every hour since October 7th .
Approximately 1.9 million Palestinians, or 90% of Gaza’s total population, have been dangerously and viciously herded about in their own country, many of them several times over, by an occupying military significantly out of control and unaccountable.
The Biden administration and US state apparatus continue (with, in the words of Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, stubborn malice) to defend every Israeli action and lie about the nature of its war. The US weapons trade is having one of its best years.
All at the expense of innocent Palestinians.
Meanwhile, a majority of European states remain effectively silent or complicit. The UK, for example, while suspending a small percentage of its arms exports, still insists that it is a ‘staunch ally’ of Israel, despite the mounting evidence of war crimes. Germany and Italy also continue to supply the machinery of death. France says Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be prosecuted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
The US continues to effectively claim that Palestinians, and those who seek to defend them, are liars. European politicians and commentators intone an unrestricted ‘right to defend itself’ to justify Israel’s expansionist agenda. Media in both Europe and the US speak in passive tones while the world watches an industrial-scale slaughter in real-time.
EU states that have openly criticised Israel’s war on Gaza – Ireland, Norway and Spain – have been aggressively and dishonestly attacked by Israel for being ‘antisemitic’.
All of this reinforces a grizzly irony. The very framework of international norms and laws that were promoted following the Holocaust to tackle the devastating realities of anti-Semitism are now being actively undermined by this Israeli regime. As argued by many Israeli and Jewish human rights commentators and activists (as well as survivors), opposing extremist Zionism is not, and never can be equated with anti-Semitism.
Those important values, norms and laws are in imminent danger of being obliterated in the rubble that once was Gaza, in the complicity of states such as the US and in the guilty silences of the ‘international community’ including it must be said powerful leaders of the EU.
Despite the initial and fully understandable reluctance to rush to judgement on genocide in the wake of the Hamas orchestrated crimes of October 7, there is now a growing consensus that the charge is justified.
This month Amnesty International concluded that Israel has a legal case to answer on the claims of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide for its actions in the occupied Gaza Strip, a view shared by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières and Pope Benedict. And this on top of the International Court of Justice case brought against Israel by South Africa and the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Netanyahu, Gallant and the now assassinated Hamas leader Mohammed Deif.
In such circumstances there can be no possible rationale or justification for celebrations. 2024 has been a moral disaster and 2025 is not looking much better, compounded by the arrival of Trump 2.0 in the US cockpit.
Rather than celebrate, we should retreat to a quiet corner and reflect on the meaning of ‘bearing witness’.