May 31, 2024
As Amal Nassar
lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in
northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all
around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled
hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should
have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear,
surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her
family had experienced for months.
“I was muttering
to myself, ‘I hope I die,’” she recalled.
Though
gut-wrenching, Amal’s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers
in Gaza today. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50,000
pregnant women are barely surviving there, while having babies at the rate of
180 births a day. Many of those women (especially in the north) are acutely
malnourished and few received any medical attention before their labor pains
began, often weeks ahead of schedule.
According to a
bleak report released in March by UNICEF, the thousands of infants born in Gaza
over the previous two months (and ever since) are at great risk of dying. Many
already have, although numbers are hard to come by.
“There are
babies who died in their mothers’ wombs and surgeries were performed to remove
the dead fetuses,” said Dr. Muhammad Salha, acting director of Al-Awda
Hospital, where the situation couldn’t be more dire. “Mothers are not eating
because of the conditions we are living in, and this affects the infants… There
are [cases] of many children suffering from dehydration and malnutrition,
leading to death.”
Western
healthcare providers who have returned from Gaza describe genuinely horrific
scenes. Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, a Philadelphia-based doctor and the medical director
of the humanitarian aid group MedGlobal, left Gaza in late March, her second
time on the frontlines since Israel launched its assault nearly eight months
ago. What she witnessed has changed her forever.
“There’s not
enough space for us to work closely with the mothers to help them start
lactating again. We can’t even access them. And to be able to do that, you have
to have day-to-day activities with those women, and that is not something
that’s possible for us right now. Those children need to be breastfed. If they
can’t be breastfed, they need formula,” Dr. Ahmed told Democracy Now! host Amy
Goodman. “What we’re talking about is women who are squeezing fruits, dates
into handkerchiefs, into tissues, and feeding — drip-feeding their children
with some sort of sugary substance to nourish them.”
Being born amid
the rubble, amid a horrifying offensive, will undoubtedly scar future
generations — if, that is, they’re lucky enough to survive the constant
bombings and the denial of basic necessities like food, fuel, and medical aid.
And as yet, despite mounting international pressure, threats of war crimes
charges, and claims of genocide, Israel has shown no signs of relenting.
Onslaught of
Revenge
From early on,
Israeli leaders have been remarkably clear about their intentions in the
Palestinian enclave. Israeli Colonel Yogez BarSheshet, speaking from Gaza in
late 2023, put it bluntly: “Whoever returns here… will find scorched earth. No
houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”
It’s as if
Israel’s leaders knew that, while it was impossible to actually destroy Hamas,
they could at least obliterate Gaza’s infrastructure and murder civilians under
the guise of hunting down terrorists. After seven long months of Israel’s
onslaught of revenge, it’s clear that this has never been about freeing the
hostages taken on October 7th. Along the way, Israel could easily have accepted
multiple proposals to do so, including a ceasefire resolution brokered by
Egypt, Qatar, and the U.S. in early May. Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and crew shot down that plan, in which Hamas had agreed to release
all living hostages taken in its October 7th assault on Israel in exchange for
Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The sticking point, however, had nothing
to do with the release of those captives rotting in Gaza under who knows what
kind of stressful conditions, but Israel’s refusal to accept any resolution
that includes a permanent ceasefire.
Immediately
after nixing Hamas’s offer to release the hostages, Israel began bombing Rafah,
home to more than a million refugees. Hundreds of thousands of them have since
fled the city, displaced yet again. And despite Netanyahu’s now-discredited
claim that he only had to destroy Hamas’s last four “battalions” in Rafah, the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soon found themselves back at it in the north as
well, attacking areas where Hamas was once again said to be operating.
In response to
protests that spread quickly on college campuses in the U.S., President Biden
paid lip service to the outrage and paused shipments of U.S. military aid to
Israel, only to reverse course a week later with a new $1-billion arms deal for
that country.
Depending on how
Israel’s post-October 7th blood-soaked incursion into Gaza is evaluated, the
military operation has either been a complete disaster or a monumental success.
If the destruction of Gaza and the slaughtering of Palestinians was the intent,
then Israel has certainly succeeded. If the return of the hostages and the
destruction of Hamas was the goal, then it failed miserably. Either way, Israel
has quickly become a pariah of its own making, something that never had to
happen, and from which there may be no turning back.
The Damage Done
The specter of
death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our
understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in
the establishment media. The official count, consistently cited by mainstream
outlets, comes in at around 35,000 deaths.
In May, the New
York Times and other outlets jumped on a report from the United Nations, which
had apparently revised Gaza’s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve
its total of women and children who had died, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It
simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have
died and those it could definitively confirm to be deceased. The totals,
however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on
information provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel
reality on the ground. U.N. officials also fear that at least 10,000 more
Gazans lie buried under the rubble in that 25-mile strip of land.
But death
figures can also impart meaning, as the long-time consumer-rights activist
Ralph Nader recently pointed out. He happens to believe that Israel could have
killed at least 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a mind-boggling figure, but worth
examining. So, I called on him to elaborate.
“The undercount
is staggering,” said Nader, whose Lebanese parents emigrated to the United
States before he was born. “The U.S. and Israel want a low number, so they look
around. Instead of themselves estimating — which they don’t want to do — they
cling to Hamas’s [figures], and Hamas doesn’t want a realistic number because
they don’t want to be seen as unable to protect their own people. So, they
developed these criteria: to be counted, the dead must first be certified by
hospitals and morgues [which barely exist].”
He has made it a
habit to reach out to writers and editors. Like so many others, I have a bit of
a phone affair with that 90-year-old thinker and activist. We discuss politics,
baseball, and journalism’s rapid, insidious decline. I’ve certainly heard him
animated in the past, but never more indignant than when he addresses the
situation in Gaza. “The whole thing is one death camp now. It’s easily 200,000
deaths in Gaza,” he insisted, citing the number of bombs dropped, which have,
by some estimates, exceeded 100,000. We know that at least 45,000 missiles and
bombs had been used in Gaza within three months of the beginning of Israel’s
military campaign. As a result, as many as 175,000 buildings have been damaged
or destroyed by Israel. So, he seems to be on to something.
“Eventually [the
real number of the dead] will come out,” he adds. “They’ll do a census, whoever
takes over. The one thing the extended families in Gaza know is who’s been
killed in their families.”
Of course, his
assertion is circumstantial and he knows it, but he’s making a point. With so
much of the Gaza Strip facing imminent starvation, nearly all hospitals out of
commission, just about no medicine left, and very little clean water or food,
35,000 deaths are likely, in the end, to prove a drastic undercount.
“Not in Our
Name”
The Holocaust,
in which Nazis murdered 11 million people, six million of whom were Jews, was
quite literally the textbook genocide. Yet, as ghastly and systematic as it
was, at least one other genocide may have claimed a larger death toll. In her
latest book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains that the largest genocide was
inflicted on Indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of European
settlers. Hitler’s Holocaust, Klein writes, actually took a page from
colonialists in the Americas and was deeply influenced by the Western frontier
myth.
“I think it is
important to say that every genocide is different,” was how Klein put it to
Arielle Angel of the Jewish Currents podcast On the Nose. “There are
particularities to every holocaust, and there absolutely were particularities
to the Nazi Holocaust. This was a Fordist Holocaust. It was quicker and on a
much larger scale and more industrialized than had ever been seen before or
since.”
Klein is correct
that the Nazi Holocaust was born out of Hitler’s colonialist aspirations and
ought to be framed as such. It’s also worth noting that the 1948 Genocide
Convention, which was a response to that atrocity, makes clear that classifying
an event as a genocide is dependent neither on the number of victims killed nor
even on the percentage of a given population slaughtered. This means that the
number of people killed in Gaza makes little difference in the court of
international law; legally speaking, that is, Israel is already committing
genocide.
In one of the
saddest twists of modern history, in the wake of the October 7th Hamas assault,
the trauma of the Holocaust is being used to exploit Jewish suffering and fear
for safety and so to justify the slow evisceration of Palestinians. It’s this
tragic irony that’s turned so many young American Jews against Israel’s
policies.
Amid a mounting
international backlash, support for Israel among Jewish Americans has never
faced such intense division. Many of the protests against the war in Gaza here
have, in fact, been led by young Jews fed up with Israel’s claim on their
Judaism and cultural history. In response, the ranks of the Jewish-run IfNotNow
and the Jewish Voice for Peace have swelled, helping to spawn a newly
invigorated antiwar movement in this country.
The threat this
poses to Zionism’s future is unlike anything the movement has faced since the
Six-Day War, according to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “We have
a major, major, major generational problem,” ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt
said in a panicked donor call last November. “All the polling I’ve seen…
suggests this is not a left/right gap, folks. The issue of [the] United States’
support for Israel is not left and right. It is young and old.”
Greenblatt is
correct. Gen Z and Millenials, Jewish or otherwise, are much less likely to
accept Israel’s rationale for the slaughter of Palestinians than the
generations that came before them. Poll after poll shows that ever more young
Jews in the United States are distancing themselves from the tenets of Zionism.
Why wouldn’t they? They’ve seen the dead bodies on social media, the screams,
the bloodshed, the flattened cities, and they want no part of it. Support for
Israel among the young is now at a nadir.
And that, as
polls already suggest, could affect the coming election. “Biden’s going to lose
the election just by people staying home,” Ralph Nader predicted. “He thinks
properly that Trump is worse on this issue and everything else, so he’s got
this attitude, so does the entire Democratic Party, ‘Hey you protestors, grow
up, you’ve got nowhere else to go.’ Yeah, they’ve got somewhere to go. They can
just stay home.”
We’re still
months away from the November election and things could change drastically, but
you can’t resurrect the dead or turn back the clock on genocide. Thanks, in
part, to those American bombs and missiles, the damage is already done.
Israel’s collective punishment is now simply a fact of life and President Biden
remains culpable for those deaths in Gaza, too, whether the human toll is now
35,000 or 200,000. The White House’s continued denial that Israel is committing
genocide means very little when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Back in the
desperate and overcrowded Nuseirat refugee camp, Amal Nassar held her
three-month-old as an April spring day arrived early in Gaza. She wondered what
the future would hold for her little baby girl.
“I looked at
Mira and thought: Did I make the right decision to have this baby in a war?“
It’s a painful
question without an answer, but the outlook remains grim. In mid-May, an
Israeli fighter jet launched missiles at residential buildings in Nuseirat,
killing 40 Palestinians, including women and children. Many more were injured.
The rockets missed Amal’s family this time, but the longer Israel’s callousness
endures, the closer death creeps.
Nikki
Haley writes
‘Finish Them!’
on Israeli bomb
bound for Gaza
Ramona Wadi
May 30, 2024
UN resolutions did not stop Israel’s
colonial expansion or its violence. And neither will they stop Israel’s
genocide in Gaza. As long as the international community fragments Israel’s
violations into separate events in the same manner as news reporting, nothing
will stop the genocide.
On Tuesday, Algeria proposed a draft
resolution to end Israel’s attacks on Rafah, demanding an immediate ceasefire.
The US has vetoed resolutions before and there is little reason to think it
will alter its track record, given that despite all that has happened in Rafah,
the US still insists that Israel has not crossed any red lines. Not just in
Rafah, for that matter. In the entire Gaza Strip, even after more than 36,000
dead Palestinians, thousands tortured, wounded and detained, and almost the
entire population forcibly displaced. Nothing Israel does oversteps the US
mark: killing two Hamas members justifies Israel killing 45 innocent people in
the same attack. This is the same reasoning that the US has applied to the
36,000+ Palestinians killed and 80,000+ wounded by Israel since last October
alone.
While citing the International Court
of Justice’s ruling, the draft resolution specifies Rafah. Israel will ignore
any resolution, of course, but the diplomatic game remains steady: ask Israel
to stop one particular violation, for a specific timeframe, or its violations
in one particular area. The entire context of the apartheid state’s
settler-colonialism and genocide is conveniently ignored. The same happened
when the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire for
Ramadan. That was a mockery, if ever there was one. Give some respite to a
population from being bombed while fasting, and then bomb them again when the
fasting ends.
Is the international community
taking up the Israeli narrative of its purported end game in Rafah? If Israel
stops bombing Rafah, what stops the occupation forces from bombing other areas
in Gaza? Refugees keep fleeing from one area to another and Israel bombs
anything that moves, even in the supposed “safe zones” that it has itself
designated.
As long as Israel’s narrative
remains unchallenged, there is no hope for Gaza. Each resolution targeting a
specific violation only leaves Israel more room for manipulating the rest of
the scenario, while still acting with complete impunity.
The US, predictably, objected to
Algeria’s resolution, calling it unhelpful. US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood
said, “Another resolution is not necessarily going to change anything on the
ground.” It is ironic that it fell to the US to point out the truth for a
change, while doing nothing to alter the intolerable situation “on the ground”.
On the other hand, Palestinian
Deputy Ambassador Majed Bamya perceived the draft resolution to be important
“to force Israel to halt its military offensive and to withdraw its occupation
forces and to ensure an immediate ceasefire.” Palestinian officials are keeping
to the illusory international narratives of stopping Israel, despite knowing
that there is only on way to stop Israel, and that is to force decolonisation
upon what is a settler-colonial entity.
Of course, Palestinians need
international help, but resolutions are not helping. They are only helping
Israel, whether they are adopted or not.
Israel’s right to exist in someone
else’s land is a claim made by Zionists. The world has not only accepted that
claim, but now also endorses Israel’s right to commit genocide, because
international institutions protect the war criminals. The world can’t afford to
have such institutions which developed international law treating it with the
same contempt as Israel does by not enforcing it.
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