OPINION | PALESTINE | RACISM | INTERSECTIONALITY
Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Should Terrify You
Perhaps our very helplessness is the intended consequence? Perhaps Gaza is the example — what they’d do to any part of the world that dares rise against the corporations?
120 Days. That, still, no one can stop the genocide in Gaza should terrify you — wherever you are on Earth. The message to each of us is clear. You puny, ordinary human being are worth nothing. “If we decide to kill you, we will, and the world will watch, unable to do anything.”
If you are not shaking, if your mind lulls you with “It-can’t-happen-here”-s, think again.
Our helplessness is the point!
What is it with a few countries that are actively assisting the genocide? What are they gaining from snuffing the lives of the most miserable people on the planet?
You know who I’m talking about: the US, the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, mostly, and maybe Canada. They’ve expedited weapons shipments to Israel, voted against and vetoed a ceasefire, downplayed the ICJ ruling on genocide, and are attacking other countries in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf. Germany and France even banned protests in support of Palestine, and the UK tried. As if that’s not enough, they’ve defunded the largest humanitarian aid agency operating in Gaza, UNRWA, to make sure that Gaza’s growing population of orphans starve.
What is it about those particular countries, so-called “liberal democracies”? Yes, we heard about the weapon shipments — business — and where there’s business, there’s bound to be kickbacks and future board memberships for interested parties. And yes, we heard about Gaza’s gas fields, reputed to be worth over $500 Billion, and the lust for contracts. We know about these countries’ genocidal pasts in Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere.
Are these enough justifications for the smugness with which leaders of those countries cry “self-defense” as the bodies of 30,000 Palestinians, 13,000 of whom are children, pile up?
There is yet another thing these countries have in common. They all have sizeable “minority” populations — amongst shrinking white majorities that have spawned growing white nationalist movements. All these countries have seen a rise in anti-immigrant laws and actions. Children in cages at the US-Mexican border, flights to Rwanda, and capsized immigrant ships that drown in oblivion — these were the symbols of the world order before Gaza.
Remember the Paris protests this past summer, or the BLM ones in 2020?
Perhaps our very helplessness is the intended consequence? Perhaps Gaza is the “show,” the example — what they’d do to any part of the world that dares rise against the corporations? Gaza is their demonstration of weapons and damage-inflicting cruelty, coming to a community near you the next time hungry masses raid your local Costco.
I’d like to think they wouldn’t flatten Milwaukee, but then again, they did send the US Marshals to Portland. As I was writing this, two leading newspapers in the US, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, sported racist and dehumanizing language against Arabs and Arab-Americans, reminiscent of the genocidal speech of Israeli leaders:
In America, we live under electoral Apartheid, a “liberal democracy for whites only.” Besides gerrymandered districts and the constitutionally-embedded racism of the electoral college, the two-party system marginalizes minority votes. One party openly spouts white nationalist rhetoric; the other advances the same agenda while claiming to “save democracy from fascism.” It’s either the KKK or blackface on the ticket. The Gaza genocide is how an apartheid system in its last throes defends its hegemony against pluralism and true democracy.
Palestinian Americans today are being pressured to vote for the person killing our relatives in Gaza because the other guy would deport us.
I don’t know about you, but I’m voting third-party like my life depends on it.
With love,
Ramsey Hanhan
Author, Fugitive Dreams
