The scenes of 300,000 Palestinians returning to northern Gaza a week after the ceasefire are poignant and bittersweet.
On the one hand, they speak to the rebuffing of a key element of Israel’s strategy in its 15-month genocide in the Gaza Strip—to depopulate these areas permanently through besiegement, starvation and relentless bombing, and to possibly even re-colonise these areas with Jewish settlers in the future.
On the other hand, everyone knows that a lunar landscape awaits these communities, where entire neighbourhoods, let alone individual homes, are unrecognisable. For those able to identify their personal heap of rubble, the task now becomes one of sifting through an estimated 50 million tons of debris to salvage what might be redeemed, while disentangling decomposed bodies from twisted rebar.
Ten thousand people are expected to be picked from the rubble in this way across the Gaza Strip. These are the missing persons yet to be formally added to the toll of 47,000 corpses already tallied. This presumes of course that these bodies haven’t yet been eaten by wild animals or vaporised entirely by high-explosives from U.S.-Israeli missiles.
A broken global order
One Gaza mother was filmed kissing the skull of her son, as she cradles it like an infant. “Gather his bones for me. Gather everything of him,” she said.
I swear I’m not afraid of you, Hasan [..] I’ve come to take you my son. I couldn’t sleep or find joy until I found you, my son.
Who listens to the cries of Gaza’s mothers?
I posted the video of this chilling scene to my Facebook page but the invisible algorithms that curate our feeds have long ensured posts like these barely get an audience.
Of course, social media never fails to amplify the reach of sensationalistic videos in awe of the munitions that collapse multistorey buildings like a house of cards. Rarely are these videos ever linked, however, to the families and communities who lived there, to say nothing of their memories and afterlives.
But the images emerging from across Gaza in the shadow of the ceasefire speak to something far larger than the decimation of a historical city. Indeed, they testify to a completely broken and dystopian global order.
With the tenuous ceasefire now a week into implementation, a window has opened to begin reflecting on long-delayed matters of the past fifteen months. Indeed, one historian has already suggested that Israel’s destruction was “one of the worst genocides in modern history” equivalent to the dropping of five atomic bombs on a thin strip of land the length of a marathon—albeit without the radiation.
Let’s not forgot that this carnage was unleashed against the people and infrastructure of a long-besieged, de-developed ghetto, filled to the brim with multiple generations of multiply-displaced refugees—a territory acknowledged to be an open-air prison, and declared unfit for living by the UN well before Oct 7.
Accountability
Existing vocabulary and law are inadequate to capture the venality of what Israel just did.
I’m open to discussing this point, but somehow the effort to combine genocide, ethnic cleansing and starvation with occupation and apartheid, while denying millions of UN recognised refugees—the right to refuge, seems like it should qualify as a new category of juridic evil.
Legalistic musings aside, one thing no one can deny is the extent to which Israel was clear from the start regarding its intentions in Gaza, with the entirety of the Israeli Jewish political and military class cheering it on.
The ‘Gaza Nakba’ is what they called it, and now we see what they meant.
When concerns arose within this class, it wasn’t regarding the genocide per se, but rather its efficacy in bringing about Israel’s declared goals: to return captives and dismantle Hamas as a political and military actor governing the territory.
The open nature of the ‘total war’ debate within Israel, which was also reflected in the very open way Israeli soldiers documented their own crimes through social media—is precisely what contributed to the emergence of divergent trends within Israeli society. The price Israeli society began paying in blood, security, finance and reputation, combined with the question of who was to ‘pay’ for these, resulted in the broad political tendencies we see in Israeli politics today: between those who prioritised ‘total victory’ and ‘finishing the job’ at all cost, and those who called for prioritising a ceasefire, lest more captives perish and Israel sink deeper in ‘Gaza mud.’
But the sacred right to commit a genocide was never raised by any Israeli Jewish political blocs.
Complicity
In his final interview, outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden disclosed that during his visit to Israel eight days after 7 October, he reminded the Israeli prime minister,
but Bibi…you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.
Netanyahu of course, knew what to retort:
Well, you did it […] You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.
Netanyahu was of course correct. Israel didn’t need a moral lecture from Uncle Sam. But somehow Biden believed that in revealing this exchange with Netanyahu to his U.S. audience, he was writing his name among history’s righteous. Such narcissistic delusions of altruism hardly stick when, for each of the following 463 days, Biden not only watched a genocide unfold, but actively facilitated it.
The Biden administration repeatedly restocked Israel’s weapons cache to the tune of $22.7 billion in the genocide’s first year alone. An additional $8 billion was promised as its parting gift bag.
Europe and the UK followed suit as this morbid charade unfolded. With few exceptions across the Western bloc—notably Ireland, Belgium, and Spain—pretty much every Western capital lined up to oil the Israeli murder machine, while feigning concern for innocents.
The farcical optics of tossing humanitarian aid packages out of military transport planes above Gaza’s skies was a spectacle that should have been likened to throwing life jackets to drowning victims in a shark tank.
Let’s not forget how these powers were also backed by a veritable industrial complex of political parties, corporations, media establishments, and university administrations across the West that sang the chorus line to this genocidal opera.
One doesn’t need to have a doctorate to trace how recruitment into this choral came about.
Profit and interests
The Western bloc supporting Israel is chock-full of institutions, politicians, bureaucrats and administrators who are either ideologically wedded to imperialist / Zionist political agendas; are beholden to material profit-seeking and funding motives, or are a collection of mealy-mouthed, self-serving cowards hiding behind liberal doublespeak.
It was this toxic combination that enabled the killing to continue. New categories of Oscars should be created to reward the incredible gaslighting performances we all witnessed, with nominees from the UK and Germany in a bitter race to take the award.
How are we to make sense of these criminal displays of hypocrisy where genocide and humanitarianism coexisted so seamlessly?
Unfortunately, it’s still too early to actually answer this question. The killing spree isn’t over yet as the murderers and their minions still lurk at Gaza’s gates.
Israel didn’t sign on to the deal because the political tendency pushing for ‘total victory’ was overpowered by those prioritising a ceasefire. It happened because the incoming U.S. administration demanded as such for its own purposes, not least of which was to assert ‘who’s the boss’.
The U.S. empire works on Shabbat after all, and Bibi learned this the hard way. It is this disconcerting reality that overshadows the ceasefire, which in all likelihood, will be temporary.
Trump
One of the first acts of the Trump administration was to remove the embargo on the supply of 1700 one-ton bombs and 134 D9 bulldozers to Israel—the car keys to extermination the Biden administration tried to take away from its drunken ally. He also signed an executive order lifting sanctions on 30 Jewish settler groups, just as the Knesset voted to add “uprooting terror in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]” to its “war aims.”
Trump also began publicly musing that the most logical solution now is for the U.S. to complete the ethnic cleansing that Israel began, by relocating Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt.
Now Palestinians, Arabs and a great deal of the world (including the U.S.) have to figure out how to survive this wanton neofascist parade paved by the macabre dance that Western liberal internationalists twerked on the carcass of the post-WWII, rules-based order.
As humanity’s fate now teeters on its fateful fulcrum, and as hope and clarity seem few and far between, it is the people of Gaza who offer the most enduring source of inspiration, courage, strength and resourcefulness regarding how to build a better world. Their social solidarity, resilience, organisation, adaptability, and pluck were a lesson in many of the core principles rapidly being lost in the bloody nightmare of capitalist realism enveloping digital society.
Without romanticising the horrendous hardships Gazans have been put through to survive, it is equally offensive to deny recognition that these communities stood up to unimaginable odds and evils, and didn’t blink first.
In this, they were joined by millions—perhaps even billions—across the world, who responded to Gaza’s cries, and attempted to organise in their own stead. Without question, the genocide would have looked far worse had the global frontier to the Gaza resistance not mobilised as it did. With this said, everyone with any decency can agree that a genocide still happened and that the global pushback was woefully insufficient to stop it. A variant of ‘never again’ thus happened ‘again’, and could continue still.
Now is hence a time to remain vigilant, mobilised and organised, building upon the mass movement the Gaza struggle built for accountability, a free Palestine and to save what remains of elementary human decency.
Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American academic and author. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is the author of “Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory.” He has worked in various capacities across the OPT as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher, including in Gaza for several UN bodies since 1997, and was most recently the Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Jerusalem Branch—the Kenyon Institute.