People from Gaza are fearful of what’s to come

In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,300 Israelis and abduction of 199, and therefore deserve what is coming to them, has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders. But the dehumanizing language spilling out of Israel and from some of its supporters abroad is of a type heard at other times and places that helped create a climate in which terrible crimes take place.

For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. Opinion polls show that significant numbers of Israelis view Arabs as “dirty”, “primitive”, and as not valuing human life. Generations of Israeli school children have been imbued with the idea that Arabs are interlopers and merely tolerated through the beneficence of Israel.

In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the occupied territories”.

In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs”. The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren. Some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill. And some will be headed into Gaza.

Today, Gaza is being bombarded.

Almost a thousand children have died. 50% of Palestinians are kids. The vehemently anti-Israel response from some parts of the left reflects a significant ideological evolution on the issue, especially among younger generations.

According to Spain’s Minister of Social Rights, given the attempted genocide carried out by the State of Israel, Netanyahu should be taken to an international criminal court for war crimes. And this opinion is now shared by many countries.

The foremost concern of western governments as the Israel-Hamas war enters a murderous second week is not the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. It is the alarming prospect of a swiftly spreading conflict pitting Israeli and US forces against Iran and its militia proxies. But Israel will not be stopped. A high-risk, full-scale ground offensive into northern Gaza is imminent, and most western leaders surely wish it wasn’t happening.

Israel is now pulverizing the Gaza territory

The Israeli government’s mass evacuation order from northern Gaza is an ostensibly humanitarian act done in an utterly inhumane way. The order requires 1.1 million people to flee their homes in northern Gaza in advance of an imminent Israeli ground invasion, the next step in the Israeli response to the horrendous Hamas massacre and abduction of Israeli civilians on 7 October.

Warring parties, if possible, are supposed to give “effective advance warning of attacks”. Yet the Israeli order will compound the suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. It may also begin an illegal process of ethnic cleansing.

The threat in northern Gaza is plenty real as Israeli bombers pulverize neighborhoods in attacks that appear designed less to pinpoint Hamas fighters than to collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza, the same population that has endured years of Hamas’s military dictatorship and had no say in Hamas’s decision to slaughter Israeli civilians.

There is nothing utopian about insisting that the Israeli military abide by the requirements of international humanitarian law. These requirements are not a concoction of human rights groups. They are rules agreed to by all governments including Israel’s.

For the sake of Palestinian civilians, the Western governments that are embracing Israel’s unquestionable right to respond to Hamas’s vicious assault should also insist that Israel abide by the same rules that make Hamas’s targeting of civilians an unlawful way to fight against Israel’s occupation.

JMD

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J. Michael Dennis, ll.l., ll.m.

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