Atrocity after atrocity after atrocity. Denial after denial after denial. Lie after lie after lie.Silence after silence after silence.
We’ve been here many times before but let that not detain us, we’re busy being busy.
Do not believe what your eyes see and above all, do not mention those words – war crimes, crimes against humanity and that deadliest claim of all, genocide.
Say to yourself, ‘Surely that couldn’t be happening now? That was in the past, and elsewhere, wasn’t it? By these people to those people? Impossible’.
Might the unthinkable have become possible yet again? And in plain sight, again? To even pose the question (however difficult) is now deemed to be absurd and antisemitic (Israel’s official response to the arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court) and, according to the armourer-in-chief outrageous.
‘Outrageous, absurd or antisemitic’ to even question the use of the weapons? To even highlight their monstrous inhuman impact? It is a world truly turned upside down and inside out.
Console yourself (and us) by saying ‘it’s just the bloody Middle East’ and it’s just those impossible Palestinians’. We have far more pressing issues before us.
Then say that ‘they’ do not share ‘our’ values, do not cherish their women and children as we do ours, do not believe in democracy, prefer authoritarianism, insist on clinging to past myths, thrive on emotionalism, that they ‘voted’ for violence and ‘are all guilty’.
Ignore the staggering death toll – conservatively estimated at 44,000 in Gaza (and 1,200 in Israel and now, heading for 3,800 in Lebanon) and the fact that the vast majority are women and children.
Those numbers don’t even countenance the horribly maimed and injured or forcibly made homeless and displaced. Or the victims of ‘scorched earth’ or slow ‘starvation’ strategies. All those are just ‘unavoidable’ collateral damage.
The World Food Programme now estimates that the entire population of Gaza (over 2 million people) face crisis food levels with at least one in four households facing extreme hunger.
Ignore the indiscriminate bombing of camps, hospitals, medical infrastructure, water and electric systems, schools, mosques, churches, residences, archives and historical sites. And the 80,000 plus explosives unleashed on the area, damaging three-quarters of agricultural land and contaminating previously exhausted water systems.
Ignore also the renewed killings in the West Bank, especially those of children which have reached new levels in recent weeks and the entirely illegal actions of the growing and aggressive settler movement now annexing land with official sanction.
Roads and military bases now occupy 26% of Gaza. The powerful political and religious right in Israel is now openly anticipating the seizure of Palestinian land for settlement. And then there is that ‘General’s Plan’ – the proposal that the Israeli government’s wider goal should be to annex large parts of Palestinian territory, something already underway elsewhere. A strategy that credibly raises the issue of ethnic cleansing.
For many inside and beyond Israel, such a strategy implies, as does so much else, that this Israeli regime is trying to erase the presence of Palestinians now and in the future. Many argue that the decision of the Israeli Knesset to ban UNWRA is an element in that strategy.
While a majority of Israelis remain shielded from the full extent of the violence (and even from effective knowledge of it), it is overwhelmingly Palestinians who die, who are herded and who flee, who are maimed, and deliberately starved.
While all of this is happening, Palestinians also have to endure the nauseating handwringing of the Biden administration, the at best half-hearted statements of ‘leading’ EU leaders and officials and now the ominous re-arrival of Trump in the White House.
At the risk of being accused of revisiting history, our basic humanity and morality simply must address the question ‘how are we allowing this to happen once again?’