Saturday 27th of April 2024
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genocide........

It’s 8 pm in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.

I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.

Before I made it across the Rafah-Egypt border, I read every bit of news coming out of Gaza or about Gaza. I did not look away from any video or image posted from the ground, no matter how gruesome, shocking or traumatising.

 

History will record that Israel committed a holocaust    By Susan Abulhawa

 

I kept in touch with friends who reported on their situations in the north, middle and south of Gaza – each area suffering in different ways. I stayed current on the latest statistics, the latest political, military and economic maneuverings of Israel, the US and the rest of the world.

I thought I understood the situation on the ground. But I didn’t.

Nothing can truly prepare you for this dystopia. What reaches the rest of the world is a fraction of what I’ve seen so far, which is only a fraction of this horror’s totality.

Gaza is hell. It is an inferno teeming with innocents gasping for air.

But even the air here is scorched. Every breath scratches and sticks to the throat and lungs.

What was once vibrant, colourful, full of beauty, potential and hope against all odds, is draped in gray-coloured misery and grime.

Barely any trees

Journalists and politicians call it war. The informed and honest call it genocide.

What I see is a holocaust – the incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.

Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza, where Israel crammed 1.4 million people into a space the size of London’s Heathrow Airport.

Water, food, electricity, fuel and supplies are scarce. Children are without school – their classrooms having been turned into makeshift shelters for tens of thousands of families.

Nearly every inch of previously empty space is now occupied by a flimsy tent sheltering a family.

There are barely any trees left, as people have been forced to cut them down for firewood.

I didn’t register the absence of greenery until I happened upon a red bougainvillea. Its flowers were dusty and alone in a deflowered world, but still alive.

The incongruity struck me and I stopped the car to photograph it.

Now I look for greenery and flowers wherever I go – so far in the southern and middle areas (though the middle increasingly became more difficult to enter). But there are only small patches of grass here and there and an occasional tree waiting to be burned to bake bread for a family subsisting on UN rations of canned beans, canned meat and canned cheese.

A proud people with rich culinary traditions and habits of fresh foods have been reduced and accustomed to a handful of pastes and mush that have been sitting on shelves for so long that all you can taste is the metallic rancidity of the cans.

It’s worse in the north.

My friend Ahmad (not his real name) is one of a handful of people who have internet. It’s sporadic and weak, but we can still message each other.

He sent me a photo of himself that looked to me like a shadow of the young man I knew. He has lost over 25 kg.

People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses.

Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.

Flour is scarce and more valuable than gold.

I heard a story about a man in the north who managed to get his hands on a bag of flour recently (normally costing $8) and was offered jewellry, electronics and cash worth $2,500 for it. He refused.

Feeling small

People in Rafah feel privileged to have flour and rice reaching them. They will tell you this and you will feel humbled because they offer to share what little they have.

And you will feel ashamed because you know you can leave Gaza and eat whatever you want. You will feel small here because you are unable to make a real dent to assuage the catastrophic need and loss and because you will understand that they are better than you are, as they have somehow remained generous and hospitable in a world that has been most ungenerous and inhospitable to them for so very long.

I brought as much as I could, paying for extra luggage and weight for six pieces of luggage and filling 12 more in Egypt. What I brought for myself fit into the backpack I carried.

I had the foresight to bring five big bags of coffee, which turned out to be the most popular gift for my friends here. Making and serving coffee to the staff where I’m staying is my favourite thing to do, for the sheer joy each sip seems to bring.

But that will soon run out too.

Hard to breathe

I hired a driver to deliver seven heavy suitcases of supplies to Nuseirat, which he ferried down a few flights of stairs. He told me that carrying those bags made him feel human again because it was the first time in four months that he had been up and down stairs.

It reminded him of living in a home instead of the tent where he now resides.

It is hard to breathe here, literally and metaphorically. An immovable haze of dust, decay and desperation coat the air.

The destruction is so massive and persistent that the fine particles of pulverised life don’t have time to settle. The lack of petrol made people resort to filling their cars with stearate – used cooking oil that burns dirty.

It emits a peculiar foul smell and film that stick to the air, the hair, clothes, throat and lungs. It took me a while to figure out the source of that pervasive odour, but it’s easy to discern others.

The scarcity of running or clean water degrades the best of us. Everyone does their best with themselves and their children, but at some point, you stop caring.

At some point, the indignity of filth is inescapable. At some point, you just wait for death, even as you also wait for a ceasefire.

But people don’t know what they will do after a ceasefire.

They’ve seen pictures of their neighbourhoods. When new images are posted from the northern region, people will gather to try to figure out which neighbourhood it is, or whose house that mound of rubble used to be. Often those videos come from Israeli soldiers occupying or blowing up their homes.

Erasure

I’ve spoken to many survivors pulled from the rubble of their homes. They recount what happened to them with a deadpan countenance, as if it didn’t happen to them; as if it was someone else’s family buried alive; as if their own torn bodies belong to others.

Psychologists say it’s a defence mechanism, a kind of numbing of the mind for the sake of survival. The reckoning will come later – if they survive.

But how does one reckon with losing your entire family, watching and smelling their bodies disintegrate around you in the rubble, as you wait for rescue or death? How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world – your home, family, friends, health, whole neighbourhood and country?

No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed. All this while the most powerful forces and voices vilify and blame you for your wretched fate.

Genocide isn’t just mass murder. It is intentional erasure.

Of histories. Of memories, books and culture.

Erasure of potential in a land. Erasure of hope in and for a place.

Erasure is the impetus for destroying homes, schools, places of worship, hospitals, libraries, cultural centers, recreational centers and universities.

Genocide is intentional dismantling of another’s humanity. It is the reduction of a proud, educated, high-functioning ancient society into penniless objects of charity, forced to eat the unspeakable to survive; to live in filth and disease with nothing to hope for except an end to bombs and bullets raining on and through their bodies, their lives, their histories and futures.

No one can think or hope for what might come after a ceasefire. The ceiling of their hope at this hour is for the bombing to stop.

It is a minimal ask. A minimal recognition of Palestinian humanity.

Despite Israel cutting power and internet, Palestinians have managed to livestream a picture of their own genocide to a world that allows it to continue.

But history will not lie. It will record that Israel perpetrated a holocaust in the 21st century.

 

Republished from The Electronic Intifada, March 6, 2024

 

https://johnmenadue.com/history-will-record-that-israel-committed-a-holocaust/

 

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SEE ALSO:

the image you might not see in the australian liberal press...

good bad germans....

 

GUSNOTE: THOUGH THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT ISRAEL, I USE "GOOD BAD GERMANS...." AS A HEADING BECAUSE THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT IS SUPPORTING THE PRESENT ZIONIST GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS, AS NOT TO OFFEND THEIR GUILT DUE TO THE HISTORY OF THEIR OWN GENOCIDE AGAINST THE JEWS....

 When good people do bad thingsBy Roslyn Ross

 

What does it mean when good people do bad things?

This has been an eternal question and one raised yet again as the world watches Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians and the cheering Israelis, most of them, calling for more and more blood, slaughter, and atrocities to be committed against civilians. Not only are they calling for more bombs and bullets, some of them are actively preventing food from reaching the Palestinians, even though they are starving.

How could they do that? How could they let it happen? What sort of a monster commits such atrocities?

There are no simple answers but there are simple truths. Those who commit atrocities are not monsters, they are just ordinary human beings doing monstrous things because they believe they are acting for good. Usually for a greater good which inflates their sense of purpose and righteousness and dims their ability to recognise the evil of their actions.

And in truth, the greater the capacity for denial, the greater the ability to deny the most obvious and clearly demonstrated facts. That is how humans survive when their world revolves around fear. Protect the self, the society, the system, the beliefs regardless of anything and anyone else.

An important first step for committing atrocities, is to either define the group to be killed or hurt as ‘other,’ thereby creating an instant disconnection which enables humans to commit atrocities. That, when combined with a belief that the actions are toward a greater good, diminishes the capacity for objectivity.

Our origins were tribal and survival rested with the tribe, which contained the family, for most of our human history. Perhaps all of it. We may be less divided into obvious tribes but there are systems which still encourage tribalism and religion is one of them. A religion which sees itself as other, as persecuted, as rejected will be more tribal in nature. Judaism has woven persecution, common to all humans and all religions, into its theology.

The other factors which allow, enable, encourage humans to inflict death or pain on others include the human desire to belong, to be good, to remain accepted, to be retained by a group or society and to obey those who are deemed to know better. We have had thousands of years of experience of what happens to those who are shunned by the group. Obedience or the desire to comply will also make it easier to get good people to do bad things.

A famous experiment, done by Stanley Milgram, in 1963 demonstrated the surprising if not shocking, capacity for humans to inflict pain on others.

Milgram concluded: The individual explanation for the behaviour of the participants would be that it was something about them as people that caused them to obey, but a more realistic explanation is that the situation they were in influenced them and caused them to behave in the way that they did.

Israel is a particular example because the State, society and culture are almost cult-like and always have been. What this means is that the citizens are locked into the society and the State far more powerfully and are therefore more easily brainwashed and led. Fear will always create more vulnerable people and Israel was founded on fear, has functioned on fear, is invested in fear, and works to be feared.

The invention of Israel was sourced in a belief, as much imagined as real, that followers of Judaism, Jews, were at risk in the world at large and could only be safe in their own State where they retained total control. Such an ethos demanded obedience from the citizens to those they believed would keep them safe. Most people will believe anything if they think it will keep them safe. And Israelis have believed this for nearly 80 years.

This meant that ‘others,’ largely the native people of the land the Zionists invaded, occupied, and colonised, the Palestinians, would be and would have to remain an eternal enemy. This added another level of fear to Israelis because while the reality of the Palestinians could be ignored, it could not be completely denied.

Zionist Israel was founded in fear, hatred, and a need for eternal domination of all those deemed to be other. What could go wrong?

Israelis are a military society where most serve in the military, many remain reservists, and a state of constant war is both necessary and a reality. Brainwashed from birth to believe that the Palestinians are subhuman and a dire enemy, the capacity for Israelis to dredge up ethics, integrity, morals, honour, and common human decency for the Palestinians has always been slight if non-existent.

There are exceptions because there are always exceptions but they are few. Brave, admirable, honourable, impressive but few in number and ostracised by the ‘cult’ which cannot allow questioning of its dogma or Zionist theology.

Why is it important to try to understand why people do what they do? Because only with understanding can we condemn the acts but not the individual and provide a foundation to work for change, growth, enlightenment, and human evolution. It is a part of our development as human beings to make connections, develop understanding and to come from a place of compassion not judgement. There is a difference between making judgements and being judgemental. That difference elevates us above animals and base, instinctive behaviour.

If people live in a State founded in fear and follow a religion sourced in the same fears, they are doubly bound to the society and its rulers as well as the religion. If as an Israeli you believe that safety can only ever be found in a State run by Jews, for Jews and totally controlled by Jews, then anything which challenges that ‘story,’ and it is a story, will trigger such irrational fears that reason becomes impossible and obedience to the State is the only option.

The problem with such a State of Fear is that nothing ever subdues the fear and it grows stronger and stronger, requiring greater violence and more and more acts of rage and aggression in a desperate attempt to destroy the ‘enemy’ and to maintain the delusion that safety can only ever lie in fear and violence.

And because the level of delusion is so great, the only way to bring them to their senses is for others to force them to stop. It cannot be done by reason because there is no capacity to be rational within Israeli culture – it can only be done when the world at large takes a stand, as it can, as it should, as it must, and forces the Israeli State to change; to become other than the horror that it is.

That is how, for Israelis anyway, we can understand how good people do bad things. And, when good people do bad things, they need good people to stop them doing bad things.

https://johnmenadue.com/when-good-people-do-bad-things/

 

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