The origin of the Palestinian plight is no secret to the world today. There may be a slight difference of opinion depending on the narrative you follow; some state October 7, 2023, as the flashpoint of this genocidal upending in Gaza, while others point out that it was the day Israel declared independence and denied the Palestinian refugees access to their own lands in May 1948, officially willing the Israeli ethnostate into existence.
The history buffs may trace the issue back to the cursed 1917 Balfour Declaration, or ponder over the 1905 Zionist rhetoric produced by the British-Jewish author Israel Zangwill with his statement, “Jews must drive out the Arabs or grapple with the problem of a large alien population”, or the 1901 establishment of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) formed for the purpose of land acquisition in Palestine, or even date back as far as 1878 when the Petah Tikva — first Jewish-only colony — was set up in Palestine. The usurping of Palestinian land, and with it the rights of its people, was a slow, scathing and cruel process. Britain, come 1947, washed its hands of the ‘Palestinian Problem’ by handing the matter over to the United Nations.
The UN Resolution 181 in turn divided the land into inequitable shares, allocating 55%of the land to the 33% of the smaller population who were Jewish, and 42% land to the 67% of the larger population being Arabs. This blatant injustice led to the 1948 Arab-Israel War, which concluded with the formation of the Israeli ethnostate of terror. This short history lesson was just so the readers understand how long the Palestinians have been corralled by Israeli Zionists and backed into an inescapable corner, held in place by bombs and blight.
The genocide in Gaza was openly announced by the Israeli authorities from the get-go, and yet it took 14 months of unbridled devastation and unimaginable human suffering, till Amnesty International became the first of the many human rights organisations to recognise the Israeli government’s illegal actions in the region for what they were — war crimes. The reason is that Israel has cultivated massive political and economic clout in the global arena that influences international organisations and states alike. Following suit with Amnesty, every humanitarian organisation started calling Israel out for committing genocide in Gaza.
The UN Commission, however, took its sweet time and declared this war a genocide 23 months after the fact. The irony here is that, as mentioned earlier, Israel never hid their genocidal intentions. An Israeli historian and genocide scholar, Raz Segal, wrote in the Jewish Currents on October 13, 2023 — a week into Israel’s excessively disproportionate retaliation — an article titled, “A Textbook Case of Genocide” with the preamble that read, “Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?” Following the UN Commission, major Israel allies and genocide-facilitator states also recognised the right of statehood of the Palestinian people, invoking Omar el Akkad’s almost-prophetic book, “One day, everyone will always have been against this.” One does not need to be Nostradamus to infer that the recognition of statehood by these governments only took place due to the national outrage they faced from the brave citizens and their unflinching demands for justice; nonetheless, it became a major stepping stone in the fight for Palestinian freedom from Zionist propaganda.
Meanwhile, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, presented a conscientious report uncovering Israel’s major benefactors in this genocide, ranging from tech firms, banks, insurance companies, to tourism and construction sectors. Albanese called for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel and accountability for the corporations capitalising on the large-scale displacement and suffering in the region. The Trump Administration, the strongest Israeli ally to date, instead placed sanctions on Albanese, rather than holding Israel to account, proving the latter’s sheer hold on the foreign policy of the United States, the current global superpower.
The Israeli agenda to cause the complete erasure of the Palestinian people from their homes meshes perfectly with the Zionist occupier mentality. To expand their ethnostate, they must eradicate the original owners of the land, no matter the cost. Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister, is on record announcing his vision for ethnic cleansing of the Gazans as, “Israel will conquer, cleanse and stay in Gaza. We are going to leave the place in piles of rubble and annihilate everything.” Kofi Annan, in his Nobel Prize speech, said, “A genocide begins with the killing of one man — not for what he has done, but because of who he is.” The killings of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, children and newborns today are also merely because of who they are.
The mainstream media keeps quoting the number ‘more than 60,000’ deaths in Gaza, while the reality on the ground is far harsher, vile and repulsive than that. A research paper titled “The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead” by Dr Richard Hil and Dr Gideon Polya estimates the number of civilian deaths in Gaza to be around 680,000, out of which 380,000 are children under the age of five. Gaza’s Health Ministry, reporting on these numbers, is shut down by Israel’s “Hamas propaganda” slogans. This is a nation shameless about its aims and agendas, and they will not stop, no matter how many ceasefires are in place, until they’ve quenched their bloodlust for innocent Palestinian lives or the complete occupation of every piece of their land.
The recent peace plan that has been agreed on provides temporary relief to the battered and beleaguered civilians; however, persistent pressure and checks need to be placed on the Israeli government, which is notorious for its long trail of lies and violations of promises to uphold regional peace.
Israel’s virulent attack on a group of people solely due to their ethnic identity has illuminated the moral decay of an entire global community of world leaders and corporate heads. It has disrobed the Zionist plan of violence, and the political and economic entities facilitating the resulting injustice, proving that history, indeed, has taught us nothing. I am, therefore, reminded of a passage from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, “…and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards avagery.”