We have heard for months of the terrible suffering in Palestine. Nearly two million Gazans have been displaced, tens of thousands have been killed, infrastructure in Gaza has been razed to the ground by Israeli militants, Palestinians have been starved by a man-made famine authorized by the Israeli regime, doctors in Gaza have been forced to make amputations en masse with Civil War-era equipment, and the Palestinian nation has plummeted to its lowest state since the catastrophe of 1948 where it was forced out of the land by Jewish militias.
In good faith, it cannot be said that Israel’s massacres and brutal campaigns of mass murder, bombing, famine, and torture are “self-defense”. In good faith, it cannot be said that Palestinians do not have a right to return to their homeland. In good faith, it cannot be said that they are undeserving of human rights. In good faith, it cannot be said that the occupation must continue.
It is clear: the ongoing Israeli siege over the Gaza Strip is a genocide that is being carried out by the Israeli and American administrations.
According to the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide includes various acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. This definition includes five parts: (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
According to Palestinian-American lawyer Lara Elborno, Israel is clearly guilty of the first three acts: killing members of the group, causing bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. A case could even be made for the fourth act, considering Israel’s record of sterilizing its Jewish Ethiopian immigrants.
Despite claims of being unbiased or impartial, it is obvious that the popular Western media supports Israel and, more broadly, the US-led “rules-based order”. Despite clear admissions from the Jewish supremacist state in their intent to target innocents, civilian killings by the Israeli army are portrayed as a series of one-off mistakes that happen to be made thousands of times, while civilian killings by Palestinians are portrayed as “part of their belief system“, typically alongside racist musings about how Muslims and Arabs are inherently violent. Sometimes these publications even go far enough into mental gymnastics where they blame it on the Palestinians themselves, or sweep away accusations of ethnic cleansing by downplaying the importance of civilian lives.
For Americans, especially young people, the US-backed genocide in Gaza exposes a dent in the prestige of the liberal West, who has always portrayed itself as a beacon of freedom and human rights. The senile American president Biden’s support of a Nazi-style siege has contradicted the thin veil of “spreading democracy” the US uses to justify its state of endless war with the rest of the world. The Romans also argued that they spread civilization to all those they conquered. The current genocide in Gaza is showing young people in America what those in the Global South and Palestine have known for decades — that Israel and America pick on the weak in their wars of aggression.
The truth is on the side of every Palestinian, whether they be in Gaza or the West Bank or Egypt or the US or Colombia.
