In other words, let the horrors continue, come what may, and let the
rest of the world be damned, as the US and its few remaining allies buy
more time for Israel to achieve its purported goals.
Through the fog of propaganda, disinformation and all kinds of
coercion (not to mention the huge UN veto stick wielded by the US), can
there still be any doubt about what those goals actually are?
As the Overton window
of what has become normalised continues to expand exponentially on the
ground in Gaza, it would be difficult not to understand the intent of
Thomas-Greenfield’s phrase, "final solution", and the whiplash sense of
cognitive dissonance it was meant to inflict.
Unfathomable cruelty
The Gaza weapons testing, population control and surveillance
laboratory, open to global consumers since at least 2007 and the Israeli
imposition of a total blockade on the Gaza Strip, has clearly moved
into a new phase.
While there are instrumental political implications of great import
in this "new phase”, there is, as well, a direct affront to our very
sense of what it still might mean to be human in the digital age of
immediate global communication and the almost full lockstep
consolidation and docility of mainstream western media sources.
What are we to make of the US enabling of the relentless Israeli
killing and destruction machine, along with the almost unfathomable
daily cruelty accompanying it? Is it simply in order to kill and
terrorise as many Palestinians as possible, particularly children and women?
Is it to destroy all existing institutions and structures? Roads,
water systems, power stations, agricultural capacities, homes, schools,
universities, hospitals, libraries, mosques, churches, bookstores,
bakeries, pharmacies and even so-called designated “safe zones” to the
point of making Gaza completely uninhabitable?
Or is it in order to take over and exploit the offshore gas fields
that Palestinians have a right to benefit from but have never been given
access to? Might there also be other messages directed at the world?
In the days immediately following Thomas-Greenfield’s delaying tactic
of yet another US veto to a ceasefire resolution, and her “final
solution” utterance, Israeli occupation forces built a road cutting
northern Gaza off from the south, while bombing Unrwa facilities and a
Doctors Without Borders staff shelter.
Food and medicine supplies continue to be blocked and stalled by
Israeli occupation forces. Following one of the first recorded cases of
an infant dying from starvation, 10,000 more children are in imminent
danger of starving from malnutrition, and after them, of course, many
more children and elderly are likely to follow.
Some half-a-million people are close to famine in northern Gaza, even
as Israeli snipers strafe Palestinians desperately trying to reach the
little aid that trickles in.
With a precise level of genocidal cruelty that becomes ever more
evident, Israeli forces carried out precision strikes in Beit Lahia and
Jabalia to destroy rescue and sanitation machinery and vehicles.
This has increased the chance of disease spreading in those areas,
while forcing residents to search through the rubble for survivors or
the bodies and body parts of loved ones with only their hands and basic
tools, even further exhausting the already malnourished.
Cynical US policy
At the same time, Egypt - inexplicably not yet having torn up its peace agreement with Israel - continues apace in building
some vaguely referred to “area” in the Sinai Desert at the border with
Rafah. Most recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released
his first sufficiently vague post-assault “plan” for control of Gaza.
Meanwhile, many Israelis remain displaced, the economy has taken a
serious hit, and - other than pure destruction and death - things are
not going so well on the ground regarding Netanyahu’s purported “aims”
of the assault: repatriating Israeli hostages and destroying Hamas.
How, at this point, can anyone doubt that mass expulsion is not only possible but plausible?
And, as both occupation and settler marauders continue their deadly
rampages throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem, can anyone still
seriously doubt the possibility of the actual destruction of the Al-Aqsa
Mosque, something constantly alluded to and even gleefully taught in some Israeli schools?
Clearly, the surround-sound blather spouted by various political
figures is one of the prime means to contain our imagination, to refer
to things only within certain parameters, making other things
unthinkable, unimaginable, even as they stare us directly in the face.
On the broader geopolitical front, the continuing expansion of Nato
as a means to maintain US hegemony in the face of Brics and the
multi-polarity championed by the Russian-Chinese alliance has put the US into panic mode.
The continuing expansion of Nato as a means to maintain US hegemony
in the face of Brics and the multi-polarity championed by the
Russian-Chinese alliance has put the US into panic mode
The utterly cynical US policy of paying for a proxy war in Ukraine as
a means of effecting regime change in Russia has proven to be an utter
failure, and seen so by more and more US taxpayers, asked to foot the
massive bill, even as allegiance to this same war policy impoverishes
Europe as well.
In the minds of neocon policymakers and the war-mongering uni-party
alliance in Washington, this failure - and the geographic imperative to
maintain control of certain shipping routes to assure US dominance - has
almost made the opening of a new front in the Middle East inevitable,
and it is the expendables, the Palestinians, who are being forced to pay
the price.
Add to all this the fact that, following years of orchestrated
cognitive dissonance in the US across a myriad range of issues - from
purported Russian collusion, election fraud, Covid treatment,
vaccination mandates, the summer of George Floyd, 6 January 2021, the
war in Ukraine, the Twitter Files, to so many others - an ideal situation for those in power has been created.
Those once outraged at being censored or shadow-banned for views
identified with the right are now all too ready to ban pro-Palestinian
speech. And those now harassed, doxxed or even fired for airing their
views can’t understand what all the fuss was about when Twitter banned
President Donald Trump.
We now have an evenly divided population, at each other’s throats
over almost every issue, with little or no ability left to stand on
principle about anything. This can be seen most clearly in questions
centred on free speech, and through the media and social media
landscape, the very realms through which the atrocities taking place
daily in Gaza are filtered or presented.
Information saturation
We have moved far from the courageous revelations of Julian Assange, who is now appealing against a court ruling to extradite him to the US, where the same political and media class crying crocodile tears for recently deceased Russian dissident Alexei Navalny utter not a word in favour of Assange.
While the work of Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and others
involved the exposure of information held in secret from the citizenry,
we are now at the stage of unending information saturation in which
secrecy no longer seems to matter.
With almost everything out in the open and available, the task has
become about verifying, rather than uncovering, reality. And in doing
so, “narratives” are built.
Despite various forms of censorship and disinformation, we have never
lived through such a genocidal attack in which so much information is
not only readily available but can often be seen in real-time. How,
then, as both consumers and producers of information, as well as
political constituents, can we respond to the present situation?
From this perspective, it is hard not to see the prolongation of this
agony delivered upon a particular people, the Palestinians, and its
broadcasting of their most vulnerable moments, as some kind of further
testing ground of the very category of the human and humans, and it
also brings into sharp relief just how limited our political powers
are, even in ostensibly representative democracies.
The significance of South Africa bringing the charge of genocide
against Israel to the International Court of Justice, along with the
ICJ’s initial findings, cannot be underestimated, but it remains only a
tool that we must learn how to use in order to expand the grounds upon
which we think and act in the world.
As we watch the core institutions in our societies rot and
disintegrate from within, due to an inability to name what is happening
in Gaza and the world, positions once deemed principled ring more than
hollow.
With every minute that passes, new lessons in cowardice and cruelty are given by the Israelis and their US enablers
As mothers in Gaza can barely give birth or feed their babies, as fathers cannot protect their children, as doctors cannot heal,
and as many cannot even retrieve the bodies of their loved ones for
burial, we can only conclude that this poisonous cruelty is aimed at the
very idea of being a child, a mother, a father, a healer, a mourner.
We are up against a regime that has taken direct aim at humanity.
With every minute that passes, new lessons in cowardice and cruelty are
given by the Israelis and their US enablers. At the same time, we must
stand in humble awe of the resistance and humanity shown by the people of Gaza.
But in continuing to expose this genocide, we must ask more of
ourselves. We must find ever more useful ways to resist and stay human
in pursuit of a just political solution to one of the world’s most
exposed and festering wounds, whose time for healing has long been
evident.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.