Gaza – A Mirror

Israel has turned Gaza into a rubble, with 680,000 massacred; out of which 380,000 are children under the age of 5.  The infants and toddlers were specifically shot in their head and chest.  The adults have been burnt alive, starved and tortured to death.  The racism, the viciousness, the sadism, the cruelty, the torture and the unfettered inhumanity inflicted on the Gazans by the Israelis is probably unsurpassed in history.  Israeli purposefully poisoned the fertile lands of Gaza, burnt the centuries old olive orchards so that no means of sustenance remained for Palestinians.  As Palestinian children freeze and starve to death, living in tents without food in cold and rain, the relief trucks, with food, medical supplies and make-shift homes wait outside the border.  Israelis do not allow any relief to enter Gaza.  The special instructions are that no life-saving drugs are allowed inside Gaza.  The brutality pierces through the conscience of collective humanity, tears the numbness that has onset with the sham ceasefire.  Israel continues to kill Gazans every single day, only Hamas has ceased, Israel continues to fire.  A thriving city with educated population and established middles-class is now no more, reduced to nothingness, with a poisoned land hosting a vast sea of impoverished and emaciated populace.  For those who have survived or continue to survive the ongoing genocide, the memory of their better lives must haunt them day in and day out with piercing pain making the tragedy even more unbearable – both physically and psychologically.  The barbarity is unprecedented.

Israel is a country where its parliament discussed whether the Israeli soldiers had the right to rape the Gazan prisoners, a man, a woman or a child did not matter.  Over 9000 prisoners, or hostages still rot in Israeli jails subjected to worst inhuman torture day after day, night after night.  A few that were returned to Gaza were weak, starved, emaciated, with broken limbs, organs removed, eyes gouged or permanently crippled.  Contrast this with Israeli hostages, who came out all healthy, being treated and fed well.  Israel is a society where more than 80% of the populace thinks that rape, torture and ethnic cleansing of Gazans is fully justified.  It is a society where kids are brainwashed from kindergarten to hate Arabs and treat them like dogs.  This is how they grow up as adults.  The IDF where these young adults join are particularly skilled in women, children and unarmed civilians.  This is a society that is morally depraved, spiritually dead and a cancer to the rest of the world.  In the words of Norman Finkelstein, a prominent Jewish academic in the US, "The genocide in Gaza is not state project. It's a national project in which all of Israeli Jewish society participates."  Israelis believe in their mythical right over Palestinian land, when in fact British found them Palestine in 1917 through Balfour Declaration.  The first major Nakba or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians occurred in 1948, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were killed and displaced by the rising Zionist entity, with the full support of the US and UK.  Since then, it has never stopped.  Israelis just go in and occupy houses of Palestinians, evicting them from their houses, and gloating over their new real estate acquisition that came without any cost or consent.

Everybody, including the aggressors – the Israelis, and their partners in crime, like the US, UK, France, Germany and the EU bureaucrats, know very well that a genocide is taking place and the Gazans are being ethnically cleansed.  The so-called West, historically has never shied away from conducting genocide and ethnic cleansing to grab land and resources.  Americas and African continent are monuments of this colonial legacy.  So, for West it is nothing new.  The new and damning aspect of this genocide is that it has been live-streamed all over the world, the world saw it happening in real-time unlike other genocides.  This is also the most brutal genocide in which the rate at which Palestinians have been killed far exceeds the rate of killing in any other genocide.  In the small strip of Gaza, more bombs were dropped than the bombs in World War II.  And this is happening in 21^st century, a supposedly post-colonial world with international institutions in place to prevent such an event from ever happening.  Palestine is shrinking, Israel is ever expanding, and no nation, no institution is there to protect the erasure of the state of Palestine.

Why have Russia, China and Iran not tried to stop this genocide?  When a small country like Yemen single-handedly turned the US aircraft carriers away from Red Sea, was able to attack Israel with long-distance missiles, why these emerging powers could not do more?  It is simply the commercial and business interests that have prevented them to do so.  The dictates of capital have triumphed over human life.  Gaza provides no business benefits to these emerging powers, no markets to exploit and no population to subjugate.  The Gaza strip however is a prime piece of real estate, right by the sea, with excellent climate.  The vultures of humanity like the US President Trump, think of Gaza just as a piece of land to be acquired.  A faux peace plan formulated by Trump for Gaza, which just pulls wool over the world’s eyes to allow Israel to continue the genocide unchecked did not get vetoed either by Russia or China.  A refrain to defend Russia and China’s position is that they allowed whatever peace could be achieved.  But has there been any semblance of peace for Gazans?  None.  It was peace for Israel with all hostages returned.  

The biggest moral question of our times is where we stand on Gaza.  Gaza is like a mirror to our souls.  It forces us to see into that mirror, and find out if we have an ugly face complicit in the crimes against humanity or defending its perpetrator or we find out a humane face that stands with humanity of Gazans and unapologetically opposes this human carnage perpetrated by apartheid and genocidal state of Israel.  It is a question that determines our humanity, our clarity of conscience and our moral compass of life.  No one today can escape this mirror; one will be forced to confront his soul in this mirror and realize whether one is a monster inside or one has some shred of humanity left.