Foreign Policy: How Gaza Shattered Western Myths

Israel's genocide of Gaza, financed by Western democracies, has imposed a psychological ordeal for months on millions of people, making them forced witnesses to an act of political evil, and realizing with shock, as they hear the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in a school bombed by Israel, that anything is possible, that remembering past atrocities is no guarantee that they will not be repeated in the present, and that the foundations of international law and morality are not at all secure.

These sentences sum up the article that Foreign Policy magazine quoted - as it says - from the author of "The World After Gaza" by the Indian novelist and writer Pankaj Mishra, who started from the memory of the Warsaw Holocaust in 1943, when a few hundred young Jews in the Warsaw neighborhood took all the weapons they could find and fought back against their Nazi persecutors. This was nothing more than an attempt to save some dignity and choose a way to die, as their leader says.

After recalling the scars of the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel, and its wars with the Arabs, the writer pointed out that October 7, 2023, was a new reason for reviving the fear of another Holocaust, which the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history will not hesitate to exploit.

Indeed, Israel's leaders claimed the right to defend themselves against Hamas, but as Amir Bartov, the leading historian of the Holocaust, has acknowledged, they sought from the beginning to "render the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to weaken its population to the point that they would either die out or seek every possible option to flee the area."

The West did nothing.

Billions of people thus witnessed an extraordinary assault on Gaza, whose victims, as Blaine Ní Gralay, the Irish lawyer who argued on behalf of South Africa at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, “were broadcasting their destruction in real time in the desperate and vain hope that the world would do something.” But the world, or the West in particular, did nothing.

Although victims in Gaza predicted their deaths on digital media hours before their executions, and their killers broadcasted their actions on TikTok, the tools of Western military and cultural hegemony obscured the liquidation of Gaza, from US and British leaders who attacked the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, to New York Times editors who instructed their staff to avoid the terms “refugee camps,” “occupied territories,” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The awareness that hundreds of people were being killed or forced to watch their children being killed - while we continued our lives - poisoned the lives of millions, and the pleas of the people of Gaza, their warnings that they and their loved ones were about to be killed, followed by news of their own killing, increased the humiliation and the sense of physical and political helplessness.

The war will eventually recede into the past, the article notes, and time may even settle the towering pile of horror, but the signs of the catastrophe will remain in Gaza for decades, in the wounded bodies, the orphaned children, the ruins of cities, the displaced, and the awareness of collective grief. Even those who watched from afar as tens of thousands were killed and maimed on a narrow coastal strip, and saw the applause or indifference of the powerful, will live with an internal wound and trauma that will not go away for years.

The dispute over how to characterize Israel's violence as legitimate self-defense, just war in difficult urban conditions, or ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity will never be resolved, but it is not difficult to see signs of Israel's ultimate atrocity and moral and legal wrongdoing in the explicit and routine decisions by Israeli leaders to wipe out Gaza.

It would not be difficult to see it in the public’s tacit approval, in the characterization of victims as evil when most of them were completely innocent, in the scale of the destruction that was greater than the Allies’ infliction on Germany, in the pace and methods of killing and filling mass graves across Gaza, in the denial of access to food and medicine, in the torture of naked prisoners, in the destruction of schools, universities, museums, churches, mosques and even cemeteries, in the childishness of evil represented by Israeli soldiers dancing in the clothes of dead or escaped Palestinian women, in the popularity of such entertainment on TikTok in Israel, and in the meticulous execution of journalists documenting the genocide of their people in Gaza.

There is no disaster that compares to Gaza

Much has happened in recent years in terms of natural, financial and political disasters, but none compares to Gaza, with the immense grief, bewilderment and dead conscience it has left behind. Nothing has produced such shameful evidence of our lack of enthusiasm, our discontent, our narrow-mindedness and our feeble-mindedness, which has brought a whole generation of young people in the West to moral maturity because of the words, actions and inaction of their elders in politics and journalism.

The stubborn hatred and cruelty shown by US President Joe Biden towards the Palestinians, according to the writer, was among the horrific puzzles posed by Western politicians and journalists, as it was easy for them to withhold unconditional support for the extremist regime in Israel while acknowledging the need to pursue and bring to justice the guilty on October 7.

Why did Biden claim to have seen videos of nonexistent atrocities, why did British Prime Minister Keir Starmer claim that Israel has a “right” to withhold energy and water from Palestinians, why did Jurgen Habermas jump to the defense of self-proclaimed ethnic cleansers? And what prompted The Atlantic to publish an article claiming that “killing children is legally possible”?

The writer wondered how the Western media would explain all of Israel’s actions in the unknown, why did American billionaires support the brutal crackdown on campus protesters? Why were academics and journalists fired, artists and intellectuals banned from work, and young people barred from work simply because they challenged the pro-Israel consensus? Why did the West exclude Palestinians from the community of humanitarian commitment and responsibility, while defending and protecting Ukrainians?

The author concludes that regardless of how we approach these questions, they force us to look squarely at the phenomenon we face, the catastrophe caused jointly by Western democracies, which has destroyed the necessary illusion that arose after the defeat of fascism in 1945 about a common humanity supported by respect for human rights and minimal legal and political standards.

Source: Foreign Policy