Where are the anti-racists now? Pt 2: Genocide denialism as racism
The de facto position for anti-racist liberals is to argue that the situation in Israel/Palestine is complex. One cannot come to a conclusion about the situation that puts blame squarely on one side or another, because, as I’ve heard directly, even though Israel does bad things too, Hamas is Evil with a capital Beheaded Baby’s Evil Eye. This indecisiveness is due largely to the idea that the settler colony of the United States is a redeemable project, even as a force of good in the world. But understanding Israel’s genocidal actions and intent against its Indigenous population and the US’s full-throttled support of Israel’s aggression against Palestinians will allow us to look deeper into America’s (and Canada’s, etc.) ongoing genocide against its Indigenous and indeed Black peoples.
We must understand that the root and most aggressive form of racism is genocide — it is where racism originates from and where it heads. Israel, as a settler colonial nation-state, is at heart a racist nation, and support of it is at heart racism.
Let us investigate the facts, as they stand:
Just in Gaza, over the last 80 days or so, Israel:
· fatally bombed at least 21–30,000 humans in the first two and a half months, including the half-week “Humanitarian Pause.”
o While much of that bombing was in the north, around Gaza City, those who fled to the south were also discriminately and randomly bombed and bulleted.
o Half of these numbers are children, of course, as half the population in Gaza is children.
· bombed most homes, leaving 2-out-of-2.4 million Gazans displaced and homeless.
·permanently injured at least 55,000 more[1]
o These injuries cannot be cared for, as Israel has also…
· destroyed the health infrastructure.
o Israel bombed or otherwise closed nearly every hospital in Gaza, including al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals.
o Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, said Israel has “declared an unrelenting war” on Gaza’s health system[2]
o This includes children’s hospitals, maternity wards, cancer wards, ambulances, and health clinics.
— § At least 190 ambulances have been attacked[3]
o The closing of these hospitals has been under the racist lie that the “terrorists” do not value human life and thus a supposed place for health and healing is just the volcano top above their evil underground lairs.
o Surviving hospitals are deprived of materials, staff, and supplies to care for patients.
— § Medical supplies and medicines, including but not limited to antibiotics, painkillers, oxygen…
— →· antifungals, anesthesia,
— →· water, antibacterials,
— →· vaccines, clean needles, antiallergics, antidotes
— →· immunomodulators,
— →· water, antidepressants, therapeutic foods,
— →· cancer drugs, medicines affecting the blood and heart,
— →· antiseizure drugs, disinfectives, plasma,
— →· antifungals, water, hormones,
— →·all medical supplies, all medicines[4]
— →· However, Israeli soldiers threw around a couple of empty boxes marked “Medical supplies” in English for show. So it’s all good, right?
— § Cleaning supplies
— § Water for drinking or use, in case I haven’t gotten how important they are
— § Workers and administration
— →· Israeli agents have assassinated health workers who tried to treat victims
— →· They also tortured workers and administrators to compel them to false testimonies
· has deprived Gazans of clean water, except for water they can extract from wells, which require electricity to pump. Alas, Israel…
· has deprived Gazans of electricity. Of course, there are generators, but those generators need gas, and yet Israel…
· has deprived Gazans of gas and oil.
· has dropped chemical weapons such as white phosphorus on Gazans (and Lebanese).[5]
o While Israel claims it only uses white phosphorus as a smoke screen, multiple outlets have reported that its use in Gaza and Lebanon was for incendiary purposes. It can burn down buildings and burn inside of flesh; it also cannot be put out with water.
· regularly bombs refugee camps, such as Maghazi and Jabalia, killing hundreds of entrapped civilians.
· has kept food and daily supplies at non-existent levels.
o International non-governmental organizations have confirmed “that tens of thousands of families in the Gaza Strip spend their entire day and several days without a meal and that they share crumbs of the little that’s available.”[6]
· intentionally murdered at least 90 journalists[7] covering the war.
o Dozens of others have been injured, missing, and arrested.
o Reporters were also threatened, censored, and cyberattacked by Israel.
o Media offices were attacked.
o Several of these killings were targeted assassinations; many of them included family members during intentional air strikes.[8]
· intentionally killed scholars and teachers.
· refused entry of donated supplies including water, food, and medicine.
· repeatedly lied about Palestinians and Palestinian resistance to confuse allies and portray Palestinians as “animals”, despite repeated debunking and no shred of evidence of their charges, whether those be:
o the debunked “40 beheaded babies” that the White House retracts every time Forgetful Joe lies about seeing videos of;
o mass rapes despite no evidence, no witnesses, no military objective for the al Qassam Brigade, and no time;
o indiscriminate killings when Hamas has been vocal that it sought to tame political prisoners and not shoot or kill civilians, an activity they decry as Haram, against Islam.
o “terror tunnels” and other indicators that hospitals are just fronts for terrorist activities;
o “human shields.”[9]
· relayed intent to genocide Palestinian “human animals”, declared there are “No civilians in Gaza” (Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman as recounted in Shahd Abusalama) loudly proclaimed they will not stop the siege on Gaza until Hamas is gone, despite making no military or political gains on Hamas nor any fellow members of the al Qassam Brigade.
o More recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as the Amalekites, a tribe the ancient Israelites were supposed to have fully eradicated according to the Torah book of Samuel.
Each of these bullet points taken on its own is a war crime. Each and every one qualifies as genocide. When Jewish scholar Raz Segal declared that Israel’s siege on Gaza is “A Textbook Case of Genocide”[10] in October, just days after the offensive was launched, he pointed out that Israel was committed to the first three of the five acts of genocide according to the UN’s definition:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[11]
Yet, while Israel has yet to transfer Palestinian children to other groups as far as I’m aware, it’s clear that bombing hospitals, killing doctors, forcing the death of incubated babies, destroying maternity wards, and dropping white phosphorus on civilian populations are all acts intended to prevent Palestinian births. But Israel already admitted to its racist genocide in early October when its defense minister, Yoav Galant, declared
We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.[12]
No electricity.
No food.
No water.
No fuel.
Everything will be closed.
We are fighting human animals.
It’s been three months of intentional, purposeful, bold genocide.
These are not actions “nearing genocide” but actual genocide. Taken together, there is no justification possible on the planet for what Israel does to Palestinians, nor is there justification for the kind of power Israel has over Gaza or Palestinians in general. No one government should have the right to or the ability to deny a people access to water, food, medicine, or energy. When the mass media and our governments encourage us to minimize these crimes against humanity, they create a reality wherein we deny the humanity of the affected people group.
And yet what the West hears about Gaza is nothing but debunked and frankly projectionist Atrocity Propaganda meant to stoke bloodlust. Even the original justification for the attacks is, to say the least, incomplete. Israeli tanks shelled their own citizens and their cars, then blamed Hamas and the al-Qassam Brigade for it.[13]
Yet, not only are Hamas not the ‘human animals’ mainstream news and officials depict them as, but they also have a right to fight. After all, don’t those who are oppressed not have a right to fight against their ethnic cleansing? How does it sound to make the Indians the villains while the genocidal cowboys are seen as the heroes of the story? Oh, that’s right, Americans…
Indeed, the genocide of Palestinians did not begin on Oct 8, 2023, but at least 75 years prior. Let’s contextualize with a partial list of Israel’s genocidal crimes against Palestinians preceding 8/10/23.
· The Nakba, 1948
o This Original War on Palestinians killed 40,000 and displaced over 50%, 750,000, many of whom became international refugees. Israel forced remainers into smaller areas which would eventually become Israel-dominated reservations or concentration camps such as Gaza, wherein 67% of the population was originally from outside of Gaza while simultaneously Gaza was reduced to a strip, a fragment of its original size.[14]
o Palestinians believe that the Nakba, the suffering, has not ended, but has continued unabated, and will continue until they are free to return to their homes (the meaning of the term “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is interestingly enough, anti-genocidal).
· The Expansion of 1967
o Israel saw the defeat of ragtag, disorganized groups of Arab resisters as justification to swallow the entire land of Palestine, forever ending the viability of a “two-state solution”. It transferred most remaining Palestinians into one of two reservations: the West Bank or the Gaza Strip with Israel retaining ultimate rights in the land. Palestinians and human rights NGOs recognize these settlements as open-aired prisons and concentration camps.
· Right of Return
o While the UN declared that the Nakba turned Palestinians into “permanent refugees”, to this day Palestinians believe they have a right to return to their homes.
o To mark the Nakba and to claim their internationally recognized right to return to their ancestral homes, every so often tens of thousands of Palestinians march within their makeshift concentration camps outside of the guard towers that make up the Israeli borders. It is simply a gesture, a nonviolent act of defiance and resistance. Yet, this march so inflames the Israeli government and military that it sends snipers to maim and kill hundreds of demonstrators each time.
· Assassinations, harassment, and targeting of journalists such as Shireen Abu Akleh[15] and Ghufran Al-Warasneh
o In 2022 alone, the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate counted 52 bullets into journalists by IDF and Israeli military, 316 incidents of detaining crews and preventing them from their work, 95 injuries resulting from tear gas, stun grenades, and wastewater, while 68 were suffocated from illegal tear gas[16]
o Israeli undercover agents also impersonated journalists.
· Mowing the Lawn
o A term used by Israeli leaders to describe the trimming of Palestinian life through random military actions that occur roughly annually since Hamas won Gaza in 2007 and kill dozens to hundreds each go.
o “Just like mowing your front lawn, this is constant, hard work,” barfs David M Weinberg, of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. “If you fail to do so, weeds [Palestinian resistance to genocide] grow wild and snakes begin to slither around in the brush.”[17]
o On-the-ground attacks:
— § 2008–2009: Operation Cast Lead claimed 1,400 Palestinians in under a month, leaving tens of thousands homeless in Gaza. Israel began counting calories and banning books, mail, wood, and most raw materials[18]
— § 2012: Pillar of Cloud, at least 101 civilians were killed, hundreds injured, and more lost their homes.
— — >· According to a report by the United Nations Human Rights Council, “Throughout the crisis, airstrikes by the IDF targeted and damaged farmlands, residences, other civilian property, and other infrastructure, in the course of which civilians lost their lives and were injured. Hospitals and schools were damaged. Some of OHCHR‟s concerns related to the apparent failure of the IDF to respect the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions, as required by international humanitarian law.”[19]
— § 2014: Operation Protective Edge killed 2,104.
· Lack of movement
o Checkpoints
— § In 2018, the UN’s OCHA recorded 705 permanent obstacles in the West Bank that restrict or control Palestinian vehicular and pedestrian movement.[20]
— § The frequency and placement of the checkpoints mean that it takes hours to move a couple of miles, and all day or longer for what should be a half-hour trip.
— § Regular sexual assault at checkpoints
— § Difficult-to-impossible to go from one region in the West Bank or Gaza, let alone between the two areas and East Jerusalem.[21]
o Regular denial of visas or international travel. And there is no guarantee leaving home won’t mean the home won’t be taken over by new Israeli settlers.
o Different highways for Arab and Jewish citizens.
o Curfews for Palestinians.
· Calorie counting
o The Israeli government had determined that the average Palestinian should intake 2,279 calories. They limited the food and aid truck deliveries to 106 per day to meet that goal, whereas 400 trucks made such deliveries a day before the blockade.[22]
· Kidnapping random children and adults as hostages (or prisoners) without cause or charge and torturing them.
o Many of these grabs happen in the middle of the night.
o It was for these hostages that al Qassam invaded in October, expecting to do a prisoner swap. This likely would have gone without a glitch if the IDF hadn’t killed its own people, bringing the death count up by hundreds, and killing Israeli children and unarmed civilians in the process.
· Israeli law allows settlers to shoot and kill Palestinians without recourse, to dump their trash into Palestinian houses and yards with impunity.
· Arbitrary house bombings.
· Arbitrary school bombings.
· Arbitrary hospital bombings.
· Arbitrary refugee camp bombings.
· The destruction (though never the full elimination) of Palestinian agriculture, self-sufficiency
o Palestine has been practicing sustainable agriculture of diverse foods such as sesame, citrus, cotton, sugar, grapes, watermelon, and of course olives for thousands of years. While most of the farming was subsistence, for the community, Palestine also engaged in exporting to areas such as Italy and England (Asmaa Abu Mezied, “Lost Identity” in Light in Gaza). Yet, Israeli myths would lead one to believe the region was a wasteland before the occupation. There are Countless stories of torn-down centuries-old olive trees, fig groves, and grape vines to make way for Israeli cash crops whose foreignness to the land destroys the soil. Countless stories of farmers being shot in cold blood and their land taken from surviving family
The creation of a completely dependent economy.
o Most of Gaza’s food and supplies come from aid.
o Palestinians must get work permits to work in Israel, where most of the few jobs are. Thus, they must appease and please Israeli government officials, the same ones killing their people.
o They do not own hospitals, banks, schools, factories, construction companies, or much of anything because Israel, with the assistance of the UN, has turned the Palestinian economy into a dependent economy.
· Painting any resistance to the occupation of Palestine and their methods of brutalization as antisemitic and terroristic — somehow ignorant of the fact that Arabs are also Semitic peoples. But we will cover this — and the racist sin of antisemitism — later.
Counted separately and of course summatively, these acts are also genocidal. Genocidal in intent and genocidal in action.
If we are to apply the term terrorist to what we popularly believe is a terrorist rather than its political utility, then the Israeli government is the terrorist here. Israel targets and kills random civilians en masse. Like the US, its Big Brother of Settler Colonialism and international terrorism, it exists as an intrinsically violent state.
Yet, whenever these facts are brought up, the liberals raise their hands in muted or fierce objection:
It’s complex!
There is context!
We need to acknowledge BOTH sides ARE GUILTY!
But it is not complex. Hamas and Palestinians did not attack Israeli or Palestinian hospitals. They do not have water rights and cannot shut off water to Israel even if they want to. They haven’t forced Israelis out of their homes. It is the other way around.
Do settlers have the right to defend themselves from the people they have victimized? Does a home invader have the right to kill the person whose home he has occupied? If this happened to your town, village, suburb, or city; if you lost countless brothers, nieces, next-door neighbors, parents, children, aunts, and grandparents to bombs and diseases brought by the invading power; if you couldn’t work except for the invaders; if the invaders regulated your movement and your caloric intake; and if you were forced to betray the neighbors who took up arms against the invaders, would you?
I hope not.
Would you believe one single word that comes out of their mouths knowing what they do and how they speak of you and your people? You’d be foolish to.
It’s only complicated if one takes a racist viewpoint where Palestinians, by nature of their ethnicity, their nationality, and their race, are presumed guilty, and are thought to be worthy of these regular, daily assaults.
We’re watching a genocide on a scale not seen in the West since the Holocaust and we’re ok with it because it doesn’t have the same targets Hitler had? As if the entire Western mind said the “Palestinians probably deserved it anyway.”[JD1]
The question we must ask is not “What level of deservedness should Palestinians be subject to?” For even if we believe that Hamas did what the Netanyahu and Biden regimes claimed they had, there is no excuse for holding the people of Palestine responsible for what a party in it did, even if they support the party, even if they gave aid to it. It doesn’t matter, it’s a war crime. In fact, it’s a genocide.
Amid this century of ethnic cleansing, Palestinians have not given up; they have not forgotten their homes or given up the struggle. Even when the UN and every Western NGO and media outlet tell them to, argue that the resettlement is permanent, that they are, to paraphrase Shahd Abusalama[23] in a permanent state of temporality, Palestinians continue to believe in the freedom of the land and the people from occupation.
Who am I to deny them this? Who am I to be silent? Who do I have to fear? We should not cower from those who deny or encourage genocide.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
[1] Usaid Siddiqui, Stephen Quillen, Nils Adler and Edna Mohamed. “Israel-Hamas war live: At least 20 killed near hospital in Khan Younis.” Al Jazeera, 27 Dec 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/12/27/israel-hamas-war-live-israel-vows-to-intensify-gaza-fighting#:~:text=The%20casualties%20resulting%20from%20Israeli,24%20hours%20and%20325%20injured.
[2] United Nations. “Gaza: UN expert condemns ‘unrelenting war’ on health system amid airstrikes on hospitals and health workers.” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 07 Dec 2023.
[3] ibid, United Nations. “Gaza: UN expert.”
[4] For a comprehensive list of necessary medicines, cf. the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines. I consulted the 23rd list (2023).
[5]Philbert Slibert and Marija Ristic. “Israel/OPT: Identifying the Israeli army’s use of white phosphorus in Gaza.” Amnesty International Citizen Evidence Lab, 13 Oct 2023, https://citizenevidence.org/2023/10/13/israel-opt-identifying-the-israeli-armys-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-gaza/
[6] Al-Haq. “Widespread hunger in the Gaza Strip, and families are becoming increasingly desperate in their search for food.” 15 Dec 2023, https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/22370.html.
[7] “Is Israel Deliberately Targeting Journalists in Gaza?” Al Jazeera, 16 Dec 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2023/12/16/is-israel-deliberately-targeting-journalists-in-gaza, and Khalil Abu Shammala, “ Al Jazeera cameraman made me coffee just before Israel killed him.” The Electronic Intifada, 20 Dec 2023, https://electronicintifada.net/content/al-jazeera-cameraman-made-me-coffee-just-israel-killed-him/42991.
[8] Committee to Protect Journalists. “Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War.” CPJ, 23 Dec 2023, https://cpj.org/2023/12/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
[9] To see more of Hamas’s perspective, cf. Rania Khalek with Osama Hamdan. “Hamas Rep Responds: Will There Be a Ceasefire, or is Regional War Coming?” Breakthrough News, https://www.patreon.com/posts/hamas-rep-will-91415177.
[10] In Jewish Currents, 13 Oct 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide.
[11] United Nations. “Genocide.” UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml.
[12] “Israeli Defence Minister Orders ‘Complete Siege’ on Gaza.” Al Jazeera, 9 Oct 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza.
[13] Cf, Ali Abunimah, and David Sheen. “Israeli general killed Israelis on 7 October then lied about it.” The Electronic Intifada, 24 Dec 2023, https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-general-killed-israelis-7-october-then-lied-about-it/43176 and “Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says.” The Electronic Intifada, 16 Oct 2023, https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861.
[14] Cf, Jehad Abusalim, “Introduction.” Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Haymarket Books, 2022.
[15] Alice Speri. “Israeli Forces Deliberately Killed Palestinian American Journalist, Report Shows.” The Intercept, 20 Sept 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/09/20/shireen-abu-akleh-killing-israel/.
[16] “Palestinian Journalists Syndicate: 902 crimes, violations and punishments by Israeli occupation during 2022.” PJS, 18 Jan 2023, https://www.pjs.ps/?p=2173&lang=en.
[17] “Netanyahu enjoys boost in poll after deadly ‘mowing the lawn’ in Gaza.” Middle East Monitor, 15 May 2023, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230515-netanyahu-enjoys-boost-in-poll-after-deadly-mowing-the-lawn-in-gaza/.
[18] cf, Refaat Alareer. “Gaza Asks, When Shall This Pass?” Light in Gaza.
[19] Addendum to the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council, Agenda items 2 and 7, annual report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General on 14 June 2013. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.35.Add.1_AV.pdf
[20] United Nations. “Over 700 road obstacles control Palestinian movement within the West Bank.” UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 8 Oct 2018, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/over-700-road-obstacles-control-palestinian-movement-within-west-bank.
[21] Said Zeedani. “A Palestinian Perspective on Checkpoints.” Palestine-Israel Journal, vol 13, #4, 2007, https://www.pij.org/articles/980/a-palestinian-perspective-on-checkpoints.
[22] “Israel Gaza Blockade Study Calculated Palestinians’ Calories.” Reuters, 17 Oct 2012.
[23] “Breaking the Vicious Cycle” in Light in Gaza.
