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Room only for mass graves
THE Gaza ghetto is being obliterated. How else can you describe it, given that 2.2 million Palestinians live squeezed in the narrow Strip in subhuman conditions while their homes are wiped off the face of the earth and their children slaughtered?
‘Wiped off the face of the earth’ isn’t just a figure of speech. All you need to do to understand what has been happening for the past four weeks is to compare current satellite images of the Strip, particularly Gaza City, with pre-Oct 7 images.
The devastation is unfathomable, as Israel seeks retribution for the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7 in which Israeli government figures say 1,400 people including some 300 soldiers were killed. This has been cause enough for the entire US-led Western World to support Israel’s mass murder unconditionally.
Nobody in their right mind will condone and not condemn the killing of civilians. But as UN Secretary General António Guterres, while condemning Hamas, said the context of the Oct 7 atrocities was also significant and couldn’t be seen in isolation from the 75-year history of the region.
Wiped off the face of the earth’ isn’t just a figure of speech.
A former US official, ambassador Chas Freeman, put it in these words: “The Hamas attack on Israel was part jailbreak (from Gaza, the world’s largest prison since the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto) but more than that it was a revolt of the hopeless by the hopeless for the hopeless. Sometimes suffering becomes so unbearable that anything goes.”
The Israeli retribution and mass murder of the Palestinians was poignantly described by Israeli author and journalist Gideon Levy in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper after Jabalia refugee camp Block 6 was flattened by bombs.
“A Hamas terrorist was taken out of the debris, carried in his father’s arms. His face is covered with dust, his body jerking like a sack, his stare blank. It’s not clear if he’s alive or dead. He is a toddler of three or four, and his desperate father rushed him to the Gaza Strip’s Indonesian Hospital, which was already bursting with wounded and dead people. …
“A man in a tattered vest scribbles here and there, a white sheet folded like a shroud in his hands, covering an infant’s body, and he’s waving it in despair. It’s the body of his son, a newborn baby. This infant hadn’t yet had a chance to join Hamas’ military headquarters in the Jabalia refugee camp. He had only lived a few days — a butterfly’s eternity — and was killed.
“Dozens of youngsters continued digging in the rubble with their bare hands in a desperate effort to extract still-living people or the bodies of neighbours, raising destroyed walls from the hand of a child sticking out of the ruins. Perhaps this child was a terrorist in Hamas’ Nukhba force.
“All around stood hundreds of men, dressed in rags, clasping their hands together hopelessly. Some of them burst into tears. … Al Jazeera reported that six bombs had been dropped on Block 6, leaving a huge crater, into which a row of gray apartment buildings fell like a house of cards. The pilots must have reported successful hits. The sights were horrific. …
“Israel is at war, after Hamas murdered and kidnapped with barbarism and brutality that cannot be forgiven. But the children who were extracted from the debris of Block 6 and some of their parents have nothing to do with the attacks on Be’eri and Sderot.
“While the terrorists ran rampant in Israel, Jabalia’s people were huddled in their huts in Gaza’s most crowded camp, thinking how to pass another day in these conditions, which were worsened by the siege of the last 16 years. Now they will bury their children in mass graves because in Jabalia, there’s no room left for individual ones.”
In another Haaretz piece earlier, he had lamented: “Israel is going mad. The left is ‘wising up’, the right is growing more extreme, and McCarthyism and fascism reign. Wartime is always a time of silencing, uniformity of opinion, racism, incitement and hatred; absolute enlistment in service of propaganda, the end of tolerance and the persecution of anyone who dares step out of line. The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas in the south brought all of these manifestations to extreme levels, as if the atrocities justify the loss of all restraint. …
“For how long? Until the end. At what cost? At any cost. This left now thinks about Gaza exactly as the right does: Strike and strike, it’s the only option. Those who before the war underestimated the importance of addressing apartheid and the fate of the Palestinian people now think, to hell with everyone. They can go hang. Let them suffocate. Let them die. Let them be expelled. Those who before the war considered themselves enlightened now support consensus. …
“The situation is even worse outside of the left. Fascism has become the only proper position. The local TV stations aligned themselves with Channel 14; when it comes to Gaza there’s no difference. Reporters and anchors call Hamas Nazis in a repulsive display of Holocaust trivialisation and denial, and the crowd cheers. Hamas did abominable things, but they’re not Nazis. …
“The ransomed captive Yocheved Lifshitz gave a moving performance and mainstream journalists complain because she told the truth. … Journalist Zvi Yehezkeli urges Gaza’s destruction nightly. The entire Gaza Strip. And his Channel 13 News colleague Netali Shem Tov sees ‘too many buildings standing in Gaza’. Such is the distilled evil in the face of the Gaza catastrophe, the horrors of which are almost never shown to Israelis.
“This is the dark time. The time of the barbaric attack by Hamas and the time of the lost conscience and sense of reason in Israel.”
Dare I add lost conscience and the death of reason are not restricted to Israel? Just look at the Western ‘democratic’ governments as wells as the despotic rulers of the Muslim world.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, November 5th, 2023
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