Gaza: The Reckoning

The debate on whether Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide is now closed, and has been closed for a while. The International Court of Justice, all the major historians of genocide, the United Nations, all the major human rights organisations, the mainstream Hollywood star Jennifer Lawrence and even a former Israeli Prime Minister all call the Gaza “war” a genocide. Public opinion across Europe and even the United States increasingly agrees. Israel supporters such as Representative Hank Johnson in the United States Congress now prefer to argue that a genocide has indeed taken place, while blaming Hamas for provoking it.

The important question is not whether a genocide has been taking place in Gaza, but how it happened and how it was allowed to happen. Whether we are able to stop it and whether accountability is more than a mirage critically depends on a full reckoning with the enormity of what Western democracies have brought about in Gaza.

I write “brought about” advisedly. What distinguishes the Gaza genocide is the West’s direct responsibility. These were not events happening far away, barely reported in the global media, or of little interest to citizens of Western democracies. No, they were and remain the focus of intense interest. The killing in Gaza continued when the focus was on Iran, when the focus was on a hundred other things, when the focus was on nothing at all and even when the focus was on the killing in Gaza. Information about Gaza was not censored because people were distracted. It was censored because people were laser focused on censoring it. More than two years after the bombs started to rain on Gaza, Western reporters are still banned from the Strip. This is not through lack of interest but through a sense that an accurate coverage of what has happened would have unpredictable political consequences and undermine many of the narratives dominant in Western democracies.

The main way the genocide has been actively supported by our democracies is less the flow of weapons and intelligence to Israel, important as these are, than the organised repression and punishment of everyone who dared to call attention to events in Gaza or offer criticism of Israel and its conduct. For the duration of the Gaza “war,” there has hardly been a week when I did not hear from a journalist or writer or politician confessing his or her fears of speaking their mind about Gaza. For two years, attention has been singularly focused on Gaza, not to prevent what happened but to bring it about.

The difficulty is to recall all the gruesome atrocities that together give shape to the Gaza genocide. I will start with those I wrote about in the New Statesman: young children deliberately shot in the head by Israeli snipers or the young girl who saw from Cairo as her classmates, young girls like her, were killed in Gaza. There were the poets and journalists assassinated by Israel. The photos of endless and hellish landscapes of rubble where not a single building had been spared. There was Hind Rajab, trapped in a car under fire, asking for help, surrounded by bodies of her relatives. And then killed. 355 bullets were fired at the five-year old. There was the food aid program turned into a death trap. Israeli soldiers told Israeli media it had been intended as a death trap. There were the children dying of hunger, a hunger imposed by Israel, and openly defended by Israel. There were the reports that children in Gaza now face “genetic harm” for generations to come. Yes, the war has also been a genetic experiment. There was the general in charge of the first two years of the war who told an audience in Israel that more than 200,000 Palestinians had been killed or injured, and that “not once” in the course of the conflict were military operations inhibited by legal advice. I could very easily fill dozens of pages with equally shocking facts. Throughout the whole process, Western democracies did all they could to protect Israel and ensure Gaza’s complete destruction. Even after the current formulaic ceasefire, atrocities continue more or less unabated. On December 18, a young baby died at Nasser hospital, southern Gaza, from hypothermia, amid harsh winter weather and Israel’s continuing refusal to allow tents and shelters into Gaza.

How and why was this possible? I have spent many days trying to answer this question, in a way that can at least help me process the horror. I have concentrated on three explanations.

Propaganda is no doubt part of the explanation. In case we did not know that already, Gaza has once again proved what propaganda can accomplish in a modern society. In the case of Israel and Palestine, we are witnessing the effects of decades of propaganda. Excluding those who have visited Gaza or the West Bank, everyone is more or less vulnerable. Childish tales and empty sentences are regularly repeated. Every victim of propaganda immediately becomes its tool by repeating those same inventions and sentences. And propaganda also makes life harder for those who want to provide an accurate account of the facts. When propaganda is present everywhere, those speaking the truth risk sounding crazy themselves. And that makes them vulnerable to attack. Which takes me to my second explanation.

The images of destruction in Gaza were a mirror. What they reflected back were glimpses of destruction in Europe and the United States: images not of physical rubble but of destroyed democracies. How were the horrors of Gaza possible? Quite simply, because those who tried to stop or expose them quickly discovered that our political systems were committed to the genocide and there simply was no way to give voice or power to a different politics. Often, one person would be ritually punished for their dissent in order to intimidate everyone else. In my visits to American universities during the genocide, I discovered that almost everyone was too afraid to mount a decisive opposition. Those who were not afraid were quickly punished or silenced. Today, in Western societies, democracy stops when an issue becomes too central to the political regime. Unconditional support for Israel just happens to be one of those issues.

I wish I could stop here because my third explanation is even more troubling. Slowly, however, I have come to think that the first two accounts are not sufficient. After all, propaganda can be fought. Why does it feel like a lost battle? And why is the sense that our democracies no longer work not giving way to a general movement of citizenry resistance?

My sense that something deeper is at play first arose in the few debates on Gaza that I accepted to join. Often I would get distracted contemplating the people in front of me. They seemed like children. People thirsting for authority, they needed only an implausible story to believe what they were told about Israel. It seemed that the most absurd the story, the better for them. The story could even change, and it did. Israel would never bomb a hospital. Or maybe it would if it had some tunnels underneath. Or maybe no tunnels were needed, just the presence of some presumed Hamas fighter, or a camera, even if it was a Reuters camera. By the end, Israel had destroyed every single hospital in Gaza.

Those people were also singularly devoid of empathy. Worse, it seemed that they prized cruelty as a kind of status signifier: to enjoy cruelty was a sign of belonging to the strong, the winners, while sympathising with the children in Gaza just indicated, as Trump likes to say, that there might be something Palestinian about you.

They are people obsessed with their careers, their professional success, but they are also obsessed with having their opinions coincide with the social consensus. In their pursuit of these goals, they accept no moral restraints of any kind. Their psychology is the psychology of the mob, willing to do anything provided their leaders assure them they are good little boys and girls. Those defending Israel have no courage, no curiosity, no sense of duty, no character. They are far from adults or fully formed individuals. And they are infinitely proud of that. Their personality leaves no room for intellect or superego. I noticed the pattern where, like the television star Van Jones, they laughed happily when talking about dead children in Gaza.

If there is a collapse in Western societies, it is not merely a collapse of media or political structures. It is much worse. It may well be a collapse of the human personality. Human beings do not emerge fully formed from the earth. Always and everywhere, they are social creations, but what our societies are creating no longer seem like human beings.

Often during the last two years I felt that to point out the facts was to miss the point. I felt like someone in a movie theatre who insists on noting the physical impossibilities in some science fiction movie, while everyone simply wants to enjoy the thrills, all the thrills of violence and cruelty. Gaza has become our Westworld: the place where hidden fantasies of violence and cruelty are given free rein. What are these personalities, who are these monsters we seem to have created all around us, people so ready to use other human beings as objects for their most primal and animal desires, having previously transformed them into videogame characters? What has gone wrong in our societies that we no longer seem able to create or raise human beings? That is the most important question we can ask in the world we now inhabit, the world after Gaza.