THE GHOSTS OF GAZA
Vaishna Roy
They say history repeats itself. But one did not imagine it would come full circle in less than 80 years, when our memories are still leaching shock at the extent of the horror unleashed during the Holocaust when more than six million Jews were exterminated.
And yet, here we are. Watching as the West enables yet another blood-crazed monster to wreak death and destruction, this time on Palestinians in Gaza. The ghosts of the thousands of children killed by the bombs that Washington and, ironically, Germany, ship copiously, unconditionally to Tel Aviv will haunt the Western world for many years to come. Their dead eyes will ask: How are we different from the white children in Ukraine for whom Western hearts bleed so readily? As Amery Browne, the Foreign Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, said at the United Nations General Assembly in September, there is a clear message here: that “there are some powerful people in this world who are of the view that a Palestinian child is less worthy of defence than another child.”
In an act of vicarious guilt, the West created this suppurating wound 76 years ago, handing over Palestinian land to the Zionists for a new nation. Even at that time many objected, not because they did not have enormous sympathy for the Jewish cause but because the West was conveniently exporting a European problem with origins in European antisemitism to West Asia, one that would go on to disfigure a region where Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived amiably for centuries. Millions of Palestinians were displaced; they became landless refugees or second-class citizens in the new Israel. Without this context, the brutal Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, cannot be understood.
While the attack justifies the subsequent Israeli retaliation on Gaza, the monumental disproportionality of the response, Benjamin Netanyahu’s evasion of all ceasefire proposals, Israel’s deliberate expansion of the scope and theatre of war, and its methodical targeting of civilians, women, children, even UN personnel, have broken not just every international law but also every humanitarian law. Yet, Israel’s permanent state of self-absorbed victimhood continues to demand total empathy and total impunity. So far, some 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, entire villages and towns razed, hospitals and schools destroyed, and a shattered populace is being hounded around like hunted deer. Yet, it is Israel that is still the victim. Its media buys this narrative, its people buy it, the US, the UK, and Europe buy it.
As Michel Foucault wrote, power can produce reality and truth; it can create morality and meaning. And power allows the decimation of Gaza to be photographed and televised, a Debordian spectacle that need evoke no compassion or remorse because it has been crafted as the new morality. The bloodbath need attract no accountability because the meanings of right and wrong have been rewritten. Place and race have shifted the goalposts of international justice. Israel’s right to defend itself is hoisted as a greater reality than Palestine’s right to exist.
Of date, Israel has killed some 17,000 children, including toddlers and infants. Homes, orchards, and roads have been wantonly destroyed, food and medicines blocked, water points and UN workers targeted. This is not self-defence, it is barbarity. Even the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has not sated Israel’s bloodlust. Instead, the war crimes rage on, while Western nations watch, send arms, and label protesters “antisemitic”.
In 1983, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Israel Shahak wrote: “The process of Nazification [of Israeli Jewish society] is a danger to humanity as a whole, including Jews themselves.” That creeping process has led us to this day. If the world will not call it by its name even now, it won’t be able to stop another Holocaust from happening.