This is genocide

By  Andrew Mitrovica

The cataclysm that you and I are witnessing in Gaza is a genocide in the awful making.

It is not an “onslaught”. It is not an “invasion”. It is not even a “war”. It is a genocide.

The apocalyptic scenes and sounds in Gaza are proof that a cruel, occupying army is intent on achieving its overarching aim: the annihilation of what remains of an already shattered slice of land and the indiscriminate killing of helpless, exhausted children, women and men.

Over decades, a succession of immune Israeli governments and their useful proxies, the rampaging settler militias, have waged incremental genocide, bit by bit, with the explicit approval, consent, and encouragement of Western governments – who, in a predictable show of performative solidarity with a ruthless ally – have bathed their tourist attractions in blue and white or the Star of David.

Go ahead, you craven enablers, show the world your true and rank colours. We will remember.

Make no mistake: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – along with his racist gang of brutish (by nature, temperament, and vernacular) cabinet ministers – have been aching, for a long, frustrating time, to abandon the let’s-teach-Palestinians-a-lethal-lesson spasms of violence in favour of the much more satisfying wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip.

The monstrous plan is as plain as Netanyahu’s wretched character: Be done with Gaza by erasing Gaza.

Anyone, anywhere, in any forum who denies this fact is either a liar, blind – or willfully, happily, and comfortably both.

This is not “righteous” payback or vengeance. It is – I repeat, for the legion of complicit hacks and stenographers who, remarkably, have never noticed, let alone given a damn, about the perpetual suffering and trauma of Palestinians – a genocide.

If my blunt indictment stings, I challenge any of the historically illiterate columnists and American TV news celebrities who have rushed to Israel to burnish their credentials as “foreign correspondents” – with their hairstylists, makeup artists and writers in tow – to disabuse me, and much more importantly, the Palestinian diaspora and their allies, of our belief that a murderous genocide is unfolding in that besieged enclave.

These insufferable hypocrites are again tarring Palestinians as “evil predators” while praising Israelis as “solicitous saints” for warning grateful Palestinians in Gaza that they’re going to kill them en masse.

These fawning Israel loyalists have likely not once stepped inside the barbed-wired walls and fences that encircle Gaza or interviewed any of the millions of human beings who, for generations, have endured the loss, theft, deprivations, indignities, humiliations, and, of course, lethal ferocity committed by an apartheid state.

It is a familiar, surreal minstrel show that reduces an old, complex story into a pat, easy-to-digest clash between black and white for countless equally callow, geography-allergic Americans who are convinced that carrying a passport is “woke”.

The white hats – the Israelis – are always the innocent victims. The black hats – the Palestinians – are always the guilty perpetrators.

Hence, the cavalier disregard for the almost incomprehensible human consequences of Israel’s blatant annulment of that, by now, silly, anachronistic term: international law.

Stop the stuff of life – food and water – from getting into captive Gaza. Fine.

Stop fuel and electricity from being delivered to homes and hospitals. Fine.

Bomb United Nations schools sheltering desperate Palestinian families from the incessant carpet bombing. Fine.

Attack ambulances to bar them from ferrying mangled children to darkened hospitals where they require urgent care. Fine.

Unleash white phosphorous to burn Palestinians to the bone. Fine.

Dispense with the canard of “precision strikes” to prevent “civilian casualties” and revel, instead, in turning Gaza into Fallujah, circa 2005. Fine.

Seal the prison that is Gaza tighter to make escape and hope impossible. Fine.

Then demand that 1.1 million people move to nowhere within hours or face, in all likelihood, a certain death. Fine.

On appalling cue, the usual gallery of preening presidents and prime ministers has deplored the atrocities committed by the black hats – while applauding, as a necessary and welcomed rebuttal, the atrocities committed by the white hats.

So please, would fantasists stop imploring the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague to do something, anything, to hold “both parties”, including, Israel, to account?

It has not happened and will not happen because the ever-compliant ICC knows that it must not offend, and will not offend, the powers that be in Washington, DC who run the whole fraudulent farce.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu – who, just a few weeks ago, was excoriated for being an indicted crook facing a corruption trial on a slew of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust charges as well as having an authoritarian’s DNA – has been rehabilitated by US President Joe Biden and obsequious company as the Middle East’s shining avatar of resolve, resilience and morality.

Such is the diseased “moral” compass of Biden and his pedestrian confederates in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Canberra and Ottawa.

Still, it’s hardly surprising that feral colonial powers – given their hideous record of killing and disfiguring so many innocents, in so many scarred places – would offer their blanket endorsement to another colonial power responsible for killing and disfiguring so many innocent Palestinians in Gaza and beyond yesterday, today and tomorrow.

But know this: Biden et al do not speak for millions of citizens who they purport to represent, but who will continue to stand steadfast with unbowed Palestinians and their just and humane cause.

Despite all the nonsense and posturing by the “international community” about “resolving the crisis through diplomacy”, this dystopian-like horror has been the “end game” all along: pulverise every square inch of Gaza and its people into dust and memory.

The risible “two-state” solution is a sick illusion promoted by slick, Ivy-league-educated diplomats like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the other Israeli war-crime apologists who preceded him – fused, as they were and are, to their “partners” in Tel Aviv like conjoined twins.

Blinken has travelled to Israel at the behest of his boss to “greenlight” genocide. We will remember that, too.

A malignant regime, motivated by a poisonous combination of ultra-nationalism and fanaticism, knows that its sinister goal is in tantalizing sight.

There will be more horrors to come. But Palestinians will not be broken. They will persevere and prevail. It will be hard and take time, but they will rebuild.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.