Humanity’s Greatest Failure: Turning Genocide in Gaza into a Spectator Sport

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In Gaza, the world is watching a genocide play out in real time, like a vast public spectacle, or, to provide a more current analogy, like the most gruesome reality show.

Over the last month, as the State of Israel has relentlessly bombed the 2.3 million civilians trapped in the “open air prison” of the Gaza Strip, killing over 10,000 people, including over 4,000 children, the world has watched as, via its mainstream media, neighbourhood after neighbourhood has been destroyed and the dead bodies of children and adults are dragged out of the wreckage, with barely a whisper of official dissent.

Political leaders in the west openly support it, news readers talk blandly of those who have died, as though it was some sort of unfortunate but natural occurrence, generally refusing to acknowledge that they have actually been killed, and almost always refusing to name the perpetrators, while armchair genocide supporters, in significant numbers, cheer it on via social media.

Rarely reported are the additional uncomfortable truths that, although voices from within Gaza regularly state that “nowhere in Gaza is safe”, they are unable to leave, even if they wanted to, because Israel has controlled all entry to and exit from the Gaza Strip since 2007, and they are also subjected to a “complete siege”, as promised by the defence minister Yoav Gallant on October 8, whereby supplies of water, food, fuel and medical supplies have been cut off.

These are all war crimes that are now adding to the death toll as hospitals shut down because of lack of fuel, as starvation bites, and as the lack of water forces people to have to drink contaminated water just to survive, which is leading to diseases like cholera emerging, and beginning to kill children and the elderly.

From the very beginning, ministers in the Israeli government have openly declared their intentions, even though they openly contravene international humanitarian law, and, in many cases, also display genocidal intent. When Yoav Gallant promised a “complete siege” on October 8, he also stated, “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly”, while Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, fully endorsed the collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza — also a war crime — on October 14, when he stated, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”

Other politicians and pundits have openly supported genocide, with the journalist Shimon Riklin stating that “Gaza should be wiped from the face of the earth”, and Moshe Feiglin, a former Likud MP, saying on Israeli TV, “Annihilate Gaza now!”

Genocide isn’t meant to be on open display like this, 24/7. The extermination, or the intent to exterminate an entire population is meant to be a dirty secret. As the vilest manifestation of the darkest impulses of humanity, it is meant to be hidden.

When the most recent genocide took place in Europe, in which, as part of the Bosnian War, Bosnian Serbs and Serb forces murdered 8,372 Muslim men and boys in a 72-hour period between July 13 and July 15, 1995, they didn’t invite news channels to watch, and line up pundits to debate whether or not it was a genocide.

Similarly, if the technology had been available, it is unthinkable that the Nazis would have been as complacent as Israel is now with regard to Gaza, about the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto, trapped and starving to death, sharing videos of the horror of their lives with the outside world, or of livestreamed broadcasts of genocide taking place in its concentration camps.

Defining genocide

In a world in which human atrocities are all too common, and human leaders’ appetite for war never seems to show any sign of diminishing, genocide is a unique demonstration of evil, of the erasure of all human decency in the single-minded pursuit, by one group of people, of the annihilation of another.

The first codification of genocide took place after the horrors of the Second World War, when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide became the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, on December 9, 1948.

It states, unambiguously, that genocide “means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — “killing members of the group” (generally through mass killing), “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and/or “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

While the last point doesn’t apply to Gaza, it seems abundantly clear that the first four indicators of genocide have been fulfilled — horrifying and abundantly — over the last month in Gaza, and in due course I fully expect that UN experts, who have already warned, on November 2, that “the Palestinian people [in Gaza] are at grave risk of genocide”, will formally declare it a genocide, to add to Israel’s many other war crimes and crimes against humanity in this month-long murderous assault, which is unmatched in modern history.

These include collective punishment, via the indiscriminate levelling of residential blocks housing civilians, the deliberate targeting of doctors and journalists and their families, of hospitals, ambulances, places of worship, schools, refugee camps, refuges and shelters, the cutting off of water, food, fuel and medical supplies, the evacuation orders followed by attacks on those evacuating, the attacks on the extremely limited humanitarian supplies allowed to enter Gaza, and the complete erasure of any notion that anywhere in the entire Gaza Strip is safe.

The road to genocide: the history of Israel and Palestine

So how is that we’re watching a genocide unfold in real time, and yet no one with the power to do anything about it — the leaders of the US, in particular, but also the UN Security Council, the EU president Ursula van der Leyen, and the leaders of the countries of the EU, the UK, Canada and Australia — is even calling for humanitarian ceasefire, despite it being demanded the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, by UN human rights experts, by countless other NGOs, and by a clear majority of the populations of these countries?

The answer is that the State of Israel, the Zionist State of Israel, has, since its bloody foundation in 1948, regarded itself as beyond reproach, and has sought to hide its genocidal impulses behind a persistent projection of itself as a victim, using the Holocaust, the single greatest genocide of the 20th century, in which the Nazis killed up to six million Jews, as its shield, and playing on western guilt about their own long histories of persecuting Jews.

The Holocaust, however, had nothing to do with the Palestinian people, and yet it is they who, for 75 years, have been treated by the Israelis just as the Nazis treated them, as the abused has become the abuser.

After the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when Britain’s foreign secretary promised to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, to fulfil the aims of the Zionist movement, which had emerged in the late 19th century in central and eastern Europe, the number of Jews in Palestine, who constituted less than ten percent of the population at the time, increased massively, as 376,415 Jewish immigrants, mostly from Europe, arrived in Palestine between 1920 and 1946.

In 1936, tensions between the new colonialist settlers and the Palestinians led to the Arab Revolt, in which, as I described it in an article a month ago, “the seeds of Palestinian oppression were first established.” Under the British military, as Al Jazeera explains, “Villages were bombed by air, curfews imposed, homes demolished, and administrative detentions and summary killings were widespread”, and the British also supported settlers as they built up a military presence.

It’s important to note, I think, that the Arab Revolt preceded the Nazis’ Final Solution, because the timing shines an important light on how the violence of the Zionist colonial settlers came before the supposed later justification of the Holocaust as imbuing them with an unimpeachable victimhood.

In 1947, as Britain prepared to relinquish its Mandate for Palestine, established after the First World War on the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the newly created United Nations attempted to implement a two-state solution for Palestine, but it was turned down by the Palestinians, because, although the Jews now made up a third of the population of Palestine, the proposals would have given them 56 percent of the land.

Instead, when Britain’s Mandate ended, the Zionists violently established the State of Israel by destroying 500 Palestinian villages, killing up to 15,000 Palestinians — often in ways that would shock the conscience, as much as Hamas militants’ actions on October 7 this year — and driving 750,000 Palestinians out of Palestine altogether, leaving them and their descendants “in 58 squalid camps throughout Palestine and in the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt”, as Al Jazeera describes it, where their six million descendants still live, despite a UN resolution in December 1948 calling for their right of return.

At the end of all this violence, Israel ended up controlling 78 percent of what had been Palestine, with the last 150,000 Palestinians crammed into the remaining 22 percent, divided between the Gaza Strip, controlled by Egypt, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, administered by Jordan from 1950. In 1967, however, when Israel defeated a coalition of Arab armies in the Six-Day War, they ended up occupying and controlling the whole of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which have been internationally recognised as Occupied Territories ever since.

Following the occupation, more Palestinians were expelled from the Occupied Territories, and Israel began illegally establishing settlements in the Gaza Strip, on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. In 1987, after 20 years of what the Palestinian American clinical psychologist Mubarak Awad described as repression that included “beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions … deportations, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial”, the First Intifada (“shaking off”) began, as a popular movement, with demonstrations, strikes and street battles, ending in 1993, with around 1,200 Palestinians killed, compared to 160 Israelis. In addition, up to 120,000 Palestinians were injured, and another 120,000 were arrested.

After the Intifada, in 1994, Israel imposed further controls on the Gaza Strip by building a fence along its border, which, in 1996, was replaced with a barrier, known in Israel as the ‘Iron Wall’ — actually a wire fence with sensors — thereby beginning a policy of controlling all entry and exit to and from Gaza into Israel.

As tensions continued, a Second Intifada was declared, which took place from 2000 to 2005, and was an even bloodier affair, as what is widely perceived as a disproportionate military response by Israel led to popular resistance (the hallmark of the First Intifada) becoming an armed rebellion instead. Throughout the conflict, around 3,000 Palestinians are estimated to have died, and around a thousand Israelis, mostly soldiers, In response, at the start of the Intifada, Israel began confining the people of Gaza to the Gaza Strip, refusing to allow anyone to work in Israel, and, also began building a 440-mile long barrier in the West Bank, completed in 2005. Allegedly built for security reasons, it has broken up Palestinian communities, and, as critics have argued, actually represents yet another ploy to further annex Palestinian land for settlements under the guise of security.

It wasn’t until after the Intifada, however, that, back in Gaza, the very particular seeds of today’s conflict were sown.

Gaza: collective punishment by Israel for 16 years

Firstly, under a negotiated disengagement plan, 21 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip were dismantled, and Israeli settlers and soldiers banished, and then in 2006 Hamas, founded in 1987 as a militant alternative to the perceived failures of the Palestinian Authority, won an election in the Gaza Strip, and in 2007 took control after a civil war with their political rivals Fatah (originally the Palestinian National Liberation Movement), leaving Fatah solely in charge of the West Bank.

In response, Israel imposed a total blockade on the Gaza Strip, which remains in place 16 years later, and which, as Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, explained in a report to the Human Rights Council in July 2020, has “turn[ed] Gaza from a low-income society with modest but growing export ties to the regional and international economy to an impoverished ghetto with a decimated economy and a collapsing social service system.”

Above all, he found, as previous UN reports had also established, that, in seeking to contain Hamas, whose rockets and suicide bombings, condemned by international experts, had allegedly provoked Israel’s blockade, and its designation of the Gaza Strip as “hostile territory” and an “enemy entity”, “the actions of Israel towards the protected population of Gaza amount to collective punishment under international law. The two million Palestinians of Gaza are not responsible for the deeds of Hamas and other militant groups, yet they have endured a substantial share of the punishment, intentionally so.”

As he stated in his conclusion, “Collective punishment is a tool of control and domination that is antithetical to the modern rule of law. It defies the foundational legal principle that only the guilty should incur penalties for their actions, after having been found responsible through a fair process. Prohibitions of collective punishment are found in virtually all legal systems across the globe. The deeds of a few cannot, under any circumstances, justify the punishment of the innocent, even in a conflict zone, even under occupation, even during times of popular discontent and security challenges. Like torture, there are no permissible exceptions to the use of collective punishment in law. And, like torture, the use of collective punishment flouts law and morality, dignity and justice, and stains all those who practice it.”

Crucially, although Israel has always pretended that its withdrawal from Gaza meant that it was no longer the occupying power, “the overwhelming consensus in the international community [is] that Gaza remains occupied, the Fourth Geneva Convention applies, and Israel retains its obligations towards Gaza as the occupying power commensurate with its degree of control”, as Lynk described it.

As he added, “Israel exercises comprehensive control over Gaza’s land crossings (except for the Rafah crossing with Egypt) and its waters and airspace, it controls the Palestinian population registry (which allows it to determine who is a resident of Gaza), it controls taxes and customs duties, it supplies much of Gaza’s electricity and fuel, its military re-enters at will, it has created substantial no-go zones on the Gaza side of the frontier, and it controls who and what enters and leaves Gaza.”

As he further explained, “this meets the ‘effective control’ test under international humanitarian law, establishing that Israel remains the occupying power”, and, in one particularly startling example of this control, he referred to “an internal Israeli government report released through court litigation in 2012 which detailed how many calories Palestinians in Gaza would need to eat to avoid malnutrition.”

As he also explained, in passages that are of particular relevance to what is happening in Gaza right now, “Punitive fuel cuts made by Israel in response to security challenges periodically interrupt medical care, clean water, sewage treatment and power to homes to the entire population, with no valid security rationale”, and, in addition, “The supply of drinkable water in Gaza has reached a desperate stage: only 10 percent of Palestinians in Gaza have access to safe drinking water through the public network (down from 98.3 percent in 2000), and more than 96 percent of the Gaza aquifer — the only natural source of drinking water in the Strip — is deemed unfit for human consumption because of seawater and sewage contamination.” He also noted that its healthcare system — “notwithstanding the dedication of its professionals” — had been “brought close to collapse.”

The attacks of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021

All of the above deals solely with daily life in the Gaza Strip over the last 16 years, without even considering that its inhabitants have also had to endure repeated and sustained bombing, which, though often shockingly destructive, now looks like mere rehearsals for the genocidal endgame currently taking place.

In February 2008, after Hamas fired rockets into Israel, several hundred Palestinians were killed in air and ground operations that were criticized as “excessive and disproportionate” by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and as a “disproportionate use of force” by the European Union, which also urged Israel to halt activities that endangered civilians, noting that they were “in violation of international law.”

After a ceasefire brokered by Egypt, Israel increased its bombing in December 2008, in what was known as ‘Operation Cast Lead’, when, over 25 days, which also involved incursions by ground forces, up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including 926 civilians, compared to nine Israelis.

Up to 230 Palestinians were killed, and more than 700 injured, on the first day of the air strikes, which was, at the time, the deadliest one-day death toll in more than 60 years of conflict. A subsequent UN report accused both the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, also accusing Israel of violating the Fourth Geneva Convention by targeting civilians. The main author of the report, Richard Goldstone, later, and contentiously withdrew this particular claim, although his fellow authors disagreed with him.

Further violence erupted in 2012, when over a hundred Palestinian civilians were killed in Israeli air strikes, as militants in Gaza once more fired rockets at Israel. Although Israel was criticised in the Muslim world, a fault line became evident with the west when western countries, including the US and the UK, wheeled out the familiar mantra — still the default position of western powers, even today — that Israel had an apparently unqualified “right to defend itself.”

In July and August 2014, the most severe conflict, lasting 50 days, until a ceasefire was negotiated, took place in what Israel called ‘Operation Protective Edge’, again launched in response to rocket attacks. According to the UN, 1,483 Palestinian civilians (of whom a third were children) were killed, compared to six Israelis, and up to 10,895 Palestinians were wounded, including 3,374 children. In addition, between 7,000 and 10,000 homes were destroyed, 89,000 homes were damaged, as well as 73 mosques, and 220 factories in various industrial zones.

Although the EU criticized both sides for the conflict, as did Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who criticized Hamas militants for violating international humanitarian law, while also criticizing Israel, declaring that there was “a strong possibility that international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes”, and specifically calling Israel’s actions “disproportionate”, President Obama’s response prefigured what is happening now. He endorsed Israel’s “right to defend itself”, while urging restraint by both sides, and at the same time Congress almost unanimously agreed to provide $225 million to Israeli for missile defence.

So indiscriminate was the damage to Gaza’s infrastructure that it seems reasonable to conclude that it was the first major manifestation of what is known in Israel as the ‘Dahiya doctrine’, initially developed in 2006 to justify the wilful extinction of civilian life in the bombing of an alleged Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The ‘Dahiya doctrine’ specifically advocates and endorses deliberately disproportionate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, even though that is absolutely prohibited under international humanitarian law.

Ironically, the existence of the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ had been noted in the Goldstone Report, despite its main author’s later reservations about Israel’s actions, via a quote from Gadi Eisenkot, the head of the IDF Northern Command, who stated, “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” Swap “villages” for “the whole of Gaza”, and you can see that the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ is now being inflicted on 2.3 million people, and that it drives Israel’s actions much more convincingly than its repeated efforts to claim that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, or that every hospital, school and refugee camp is miraculously hiding a Hamas command center.

The most recent major outbreak of violence, before these last four weeks of unprecedented bombing, took place in May 2021, when hundreds more Palestinians, including 128 civilians, were killed in the Gaza Strip after bombing attacks by Israel on residential buildings and warehouses, and the destruction of the al-Jalaa Building, home to Al Jazeera and Associated Press journalists, who demanded an explanation that was never forthcoming about why Israel allegedly suspected that a journalists’ base was also home to Hamas military intelligence. We now know, I think, as at least 41 journalists have been killed in what the Press Gazette has called “the deadliest [conflict] for journalists since casualties began being tracked in 1992”, that this is to try and silence scrutiny of its actions. This is truly unforgivable, of course, but for Gaza’s journalists, what makes it even more sickening and repulsive is that Israel — using its control of the Palestinian population registry, as noted above — has sometimes targeted these journalists’ homes, often wiping out their entire extended families.

Genocide now

And so to now, and the ongoing and seemingly endless slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, via the relentless bombing that has now been taking place for 32 days, in response to Hamas militants’ undoubtedly horrendous, and universally condemned attacks on October 7. The deadly attacks took place after they broke out of their “open air prison”, and killed over a thousand Israeli civilians and over 350 Israeli soldiers and police, also taking over 200 hostages back to Gaza, with the intention of exchanging them for some or all of the 5,200 Palestinians held in largely open-ended military custody in Israel (a number that has doubled in the last month).

While the scale of the attack (the largest loss of Israeli lives in a day since the founding of the State of Israel) and the apparent barbarity of some of the killings always meant that Israel’s response would be brutal, no one can quite have expected it to be as severe and sustained as it has been, and, shamefully, for the west to have indulged it, and to have continued to do so in spite of so much opposition from human rights experts and, reassuringly, a majority of people around the world who can’t believe the scale of human extinction that they are supposed to endorse.

As the Health Ministry in Gaza reports today, 10,569 people have now been killed in Gaza since October 7, including 4,324 children and babies and 2,823 women, and with “an additional 1,350 children missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings, most of whom are presumed dead”, as DCIP (Defense for Children International Palestine) explained yesterday.

To give this some additional perspective, this is almost twice the number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers over the previous 23 years — between September 2000 and October 6, 2023 — throughout the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, a figure independently verified by DCIP as 2,187 children in total.

Moreover as the graph below, compiled by Al Jazeera, shows, the death toll of children in the first 30 days of this conflict — 136 a day — is so much higher than in other recent conflicts (in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine and Iraq) that it can only confirm what I proposed at the start of this article: that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, that an immediate humanitarian ceasefire must be demanded, and that western leaders who refuse to call for a ceasefire ought to realize that one day they will be held complicit in knowingly facilitating a genocide.

Armchair genocide, and the growing global far-right threat

In parting, I’d just like to mention the armchair genocide supporters, and what they — as well as the Israeli government, the cheerleaders for genocide within Israel, and the complicit western leaders — also tell us about the dangerously debased state of humanity right now.

I don’t know quite what has gone wrong, although I’m pretty sure that the rise of social media and smart phones has had a major part to play in it, as has the right-wing ‘populism’ that has become so prevalent across the west in the last decade, cynically spread though the above and also via right-wing news outlets.

What I do know, however, is that violence is never the answer, and especially not when it slips so easily into genocidal intent and genocidal enthusiasm. The great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, the wisest critic of Zionism, identifies three reasons why so many Israelis aren’t troubled by their government’s persistent oppression of the Palestinian people for the last 75 years.

The first reason, he states, is because most Israelis “deeply believe that we are the chosen people, and that, as the chosen people, we have the right to whatever we want.” The second reason is the victim argument, previously discussed above, about which Levy says, “there was never an occasion in history in which the occupier presented himself as the victim, and not only the victim, but the only victim around”, while the third reason is “the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians … because if they are not human beings like us, then there is not really a question of human rights.”

While the most powerful voices right now are those of Israelis, and of Jewish people around the world who also oppose the supremacist malevolence at the heart of Zionism, the mass of humanity, of all backgrounds, who are also feeling sick, every minute of every day, at the genocidal death toll in Gaza, need also to be aware of those amongst us — many of whom no doubt describe themselves as Christians — who are cheering on the Zionist Holocaust because they too believe they are the chosen people, and they too don’t regard Palestinians — or Muslims in general — as human beings.

For those of us in the west, these people are everywhere — sometimes in government, like Suella Braverman in the UK and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and sometimes in the ether of populism’s rage — Trump supporters in the US, or racist Brexit isolationists in the UK. We must remove from politics those so-called ‘centrists’, like Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Keir Starmer, who cleave to Israel as part of their idiotic menu of traditional alliances, geopolitics and arms sales, while not being able to empathize with an entire population being slaughtered, but we must be ever alert to the fascists, and keep them out of power too, because they mean us direct physical harm.

On a final note, it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that the majority of Palestinians very evidently don’t support Hamas’s genocidal supremacism either, and to think about how deranged it is to suggest the opposite, because they, more than anyone on earth, would know that, given the endless cycle of violence over the last 75 years, Hamas’s actions on October 7 could only ever have been expected to rain down death on them and their families like never before, just as has happened, and as continues to happen even as I’m writing this.

Most Palestinians only want peace. Most Muslims want peace. And so too do hundreds of millions of other people around the world, myself included. It is the warmongers on all sides — and those cheering for genocide — that we must all shun and disempower.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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