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This week in the Gaza Strip, now "a grave yard for children" according to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, a new and harrowing acronym has been born out of necessity by medical professionals – 'WCNSF' (Wounded Child No Surviving Family). Such an acronym should not exist in a post-Holocaust world.
My days have recently been intensely devoted to sifting through the deluge of information and misinformation coming out of the situation in Palestine. I've been absorbed by the constant news coverage, and what I'm seeing can only be described as a genocidal massacre in Gaza, and a simultaneous ethnocide in the West Bank. The Western media and political establishment, seemingly in lockstep, have amplified the drums of war, echoing Israel's brutalities, fully financed and diplomatically shielded by U.S and European allies.
The scale of devastation in Gaza since Israel's bombardments began last month is staggering. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps—no place is sacred nor life spared. As of the time of writing, the death toll stands at a haunting +11,000 with many still under the rubble, and 30,000 wounded, the majority of whom are children, not sparing them from Netanyahu's branding as "the children of darkness" or from being coldly labelled "collateral damage" by U.S. officials.
Abstract figures belie the story of each individual life brutally snatched away, of entire family lines erased in mere seconds, of a traumatised generation who themselves descend from a traumatised generation. On the periphery of a neighbourhood that now look like a scene from The Walking Dead, you find a sole standing solar powered house where all neighbours charge their phones and laptops to hear from their famiy and friends, hoping that today Israel does not shut down the networks. A mother writes the names of her children on their legs, with each stroke she etches a desperate hope that, when the next bomb falls, at least their small, lifeless bodies might be reclaimed from the indiscriminate wrath of the next bomb. A car, not meant for more than five, now a vessel of hope for dozens of now homeless families fleeing to the south, no time to mourn their dead. Others forced to march miles on foot and donkey carts amidst the dead lying unattended by the roadsides. They are made to move humiliatingly through their killers' checkpoints and tanks. After all that, they find that the Israeli bombs are raining just as much in the south. 'At least if we stayed put', they say to themselves, 'we die in our own homes'. They were always malnourished but never have they found themselves desperate enough to scavenge amidst the ruins for anything that could be considered food, queuing for hours to receive mere bread rations. Some take to drinking seawater, trying to convince themselves that it's safe, while their bodies disagree and wither away to disease. As night falls, they huddle together en masse in make-shift tents and abandoned U.N. schools. Try as they may to fall asleep amidst the unrelenting noise of bombs and the gnawing fear that nowhere is safe, that the next bomb could very well be for them.
Those who wake up do so in utter chaos. Children pulled from the rubble, with severe trauma and wounds, shaking uncontrollably while still dusted with the debris of their shattered homes, considered lucky to be brought to a barely functioning hospital where doctors perform surgeries on the floors without anaesthesia. Those who survive through the constant bombardment, the hunger, disease and malnutrition, the loss of loved ones, the unending uncertainty of life that the relentless noise of drones and explosions—what will their lives be like from now on?
As if pulled straight from a supervillain scene, in the middle of this carnage, Netanyahu appears in a televised address, saying that Israelis were "committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world", then finally adding his motive for a divinely mandated genocide: "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember", referencing 1 Samuel 15:3 in the Hebrew Bible, which are among the most violent verses in the Bible and have a long history of being used by Israelis on the far-right to justify killing Palestinians. The Bible verse in question: "Now go and smite Amalek, utterly destroy all they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ax".
The term 'unprecedented' has been oft-repeated yet aptly fits the current onslaught which has gone above and beyond Israel's usual policy towards Gaza of periodical bombardments, what it calls "mowing the lawn" and "taking out the trash". On October the 7th, the situation escalated alarmingly. Hamas fighters, breaching the 16-year-long siege killed hundreds of Israelis and capturing some 240 captives. Hamas has stated its intention to negotiate an exchange deal, highlighting the plight of an increasing 10,000 Palestinians, including 160 children, held in administrative detention without trial, subjected to military court proceedings based on their identity as Palestinians. Israel refused any such exchange as of yet. Instead, the Israeli president, in a live broadcast, casted collective blame on the entire Palestinian population for Hamas' actions, saying "It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. It's not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved". Meanwhile, the Israeli Minister of Culture Otzma Yehudit proposed that "nuking Gaza" where Israeli hostages are also present "is an option", and to "blow up and flatten everything". At any rate, it is clear that millions of Palestinians will be permanently dispossessed again, in what commentators, including Israeli officials, have called the second Nakba. There might eventually be relative peace, perhaps in months or years time, but justice will likely never be obtained.
Outside of Israel, the hundreds of thousands across the world who had the gall to protest a ceasefire have been labelled by the UK Home Secretary as “hate marches” and framed as anti-semitic terrorist sympathisers by much of the Western media. In the U.S., a rabid McCarthyite backlash has been unleashed on any criticism of Israel, helped by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most prominent pro-Israel lobby group in the U.S and the biggest donor to the Democrats 2020 election campaign. The House of Representatives, most of whom accepted money from the AIPAC during the 2022 election, voted to censure one of its own, the only Palestian member in Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), over "promoting false narratives" about the Israeli war on Gaza. Meanwhile, anti-Zionist student groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are being suspended from U.S. campuses and journalists from the BBC, APC, NYT and other lesser known outlets were recently sacked over Palestinian support. Wall street firms have already published lists of names of students they deem 'unemployable' due to their stance on Israel. Pity the activists for speaking out against occupation and war crimes.
Germany's guilty insecurity in antoning for the Nazis has assumed a more frantic tone. Palestinian flags, pro-Palestinian speech and the Palestinian keffiyeh headdress have been banned in the name of anti-semitism and the government is drafting laws to make unconditional support for Israel a condition of living in Germany (obviously targeting Muslims). Similar measures were taken all over Europe.
On the international stage, Israel continues to act with impunity and its offensive show no signs of abating, with the UN Security Council's impotence ensuring continuous U.S. veto support for Israel and no ceasefire. Yet, when put to democratic vote, the General Assembly did adopt a resolution with an overwhelming majority vote from most States calling for an immediate ceasfire and an end to the collective punishment of Gazans via Israel's blockade of fuel, water, medical aid and electricity. The U.S, of course, voted against, while Israel called the resolution 'despicable' and a day of 'infamy'. At least the Israeli former UN permanent representative was more honest, saying "I'm very puzzled about the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people, for these horrible inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen". Essentially, no mainstream media outlet in the U.S. even bothered to cover the resolution; not a single one. It was the wrong story to publish. Meanwhile, when the U.N. held a vote denouncing the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the U.S.
One might consider this as double standards, but US foreign policy-makers do not see it that way; contradictions are easily dissolved by invoking the readily available collection of abstract concepts devoid of human elements: "security", "nations," "strategic objective", "interests,", "deterrence" and "influence". Talking about suffering or the human impact of decisions is seen as a weakness or a lack of rationality for the US policy establishment; one must be 'tough-minded' in order to be a US foreign policy-maker. Of course this is never admitted in public, some half-hearted Manichiean narrative of 'good guys' vs 'evil terrorist guys' is always spun. But in private, they are utilitarian calculators. Funding Israel's war crimes 'strengthens US presence in the Middle East', while condemning Russia's war crimes counters Russian geopolitical influence. There is no contradiction in supporting war crimes in one breath and condemning it in another because war crimes are not statements of fact based on consistent legal standards, but are rather performative speech acts, declared into existence based on whether or not they further US hegemonic interests, whether or not the the calculation is borne out by U.S. policy-makers. A specific interest, namely U.S. interest, is cloaked as a universal value, recast in a more palatable 'international' discourse with its own vocabularies rather than being explicitly acknowledged as 'colonial' and 'civilising' in nature. Thus we get 'responsibility to protect' as a mandate to destroy Libya, 'self-defense' to invade of Afghanistan and Iraq, 'humanitarian intervention' in the Balkans, and so on. Yet, not a peep is heard from the Security Council on the Saudi-led war crimes in Yemen. Thus, too, Russia's annexation of Crimea becomes a violation of the U.N. Charter’s articles on territorial integrity and self-determination, but no such violation occurs when Israel annexes the Golan Heights and expands settlement across the West Bank. In fact, the U.S. actively uses its veto power in the Security Council to shield Israel from international condemnation and sanctions. Above all, the principle endures: U.S. interest is international law.
The Manichean narrative spun this time by Western media and political figures systematically begins on October the 7th. This selective chronology that obscures history and human complexity, has fashioned a dangerously orientalist trope: the acts of desperate aggression from Hamas is amplified as inherent to the Palestinian character that is naturally inclined to terroristic acts without any antecedent context. This narrative is so pervasive that when Palestinians who have family members killed by Israeli bombardments are interviewed, they are invariably asked to denounce and condemn Hamas, as if one is assimilated into the other by default and thus declared guilty by association until proven otherwise. IAgain, we get a genocide cloaked under international law discourse where Israel is merely invoking its 'right to defend itself' in killing more than 11,000 Palestinian civilians, so long as a handful of militants are killed, too. This insidious logic, echoed unquestioningly in the media, effectively renders these lives as expendable, their deaths mere footnotes instrumental to the occupying force's ends. The language of news headlines is equally telling: Palestinians merely 'die' whereas Israelis are 'killed', Palestinian deaths are mere statistics whereas Israeli deaths are personalised.
We are then told by the same media and officials, including the U.S. President, that Palestinian deaths tolls are 'not to be trusted', while simultaneously and uncritically accepting any assertions by Israeli officials, such as repeating baseless claims that Hamas "beheaded babies", that hospitals in Gaza are Hamas HQs and that Palestinian journalists are Hamas operatives. Even when Palestinian figures were later validated by agencies like the CIA, the discourse swiftly pivots to the 'risk of potential future radicalisation' of Palestinians, rather than confronting their immediate and tragic massacre. In other words, the only risk of massacring Palestinians is the impact it might later have on Israelis.
I watch as pundits, experts and officials are repeatedly allowed to engage in anti-Palestinian hate speech totally unchallenged by journalists. They continue to dehumanise Palestinians—“human animals” as the Israeli Defence Minister put it—while presenting an unctuous narrative of Israeli victimhood that is disconnected from reality and undettered by history. Full of contradictions and flat-out lies, the overpaid legion of clueless and lost foreign reporters, unable to access Gaza, have taken to swallow the standard propaganda served up by the occupying force, in contrast to the detailed and raw pictures and videos seen directly by the eyes of Palelstinan journalists on the ground in Gaza that is distended to depict the extreme situation they find themselves in. Yet, the Palestinian reporters, the one's not yet killed, have today been dismissed as Hamas operatives, likely as a justification for the 40 reported journalists already killed according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And when I speak to many audiences in the West who rightly stood up against Russian aggression in Ukraine, they shrug and appeal to exceptional complexity, as bombs continue to rain down on besieged Palestinians with unprecedented force.
For over a month, Israel has been engaged in a desperate endeavor to preserve its image in the Western world, attempting to deflect from the genocidal nature of its actions and to ensure the continuation of diplomatic and financial support. This effort has centered around an intense campaign to label each of its targets as tainted by Hamas, thereby justifying their destruction as necessary and just. The question that arises from this narrative is profound and unsettling: Can any evidence justify the cold-blooded killing of 6,000 children? And in doing so, at what point does nodding acquiescence to such justifications erode our very humanity?
This strategic narrative shift is designed to offer a palatable story for supportive media outlets to disseminate. The narrative shifts from the unspoken reality of 'Israel massacring thousands of children and destroying countless homes as a form of collective punishment' to a more digestible version: 'Israel targets Hamas base situated under a hospital/school/refugee camp.' While the Israeli government is indifferent to the latter narrative (they openly tout the idea of collective punishment), yet it strategically employs it in international circles, providing a veneer of legitimacy to audiences less swayed by zealous rhetoric.
Cross-culturally and outside the realm of philosophical thought experiments, there is barely a context that regards the killing of thousands of children as acceptable. Yet, it is always possible to argue: we do not know exactly the children's ontological status; what form of children are they, really? They are human shields and their deaths necessary for 'our' greater good. Or: they are future terrorists, their deaths is therefore, all things considered, good for 'our' future. In this sense, the elements that usually constitutes the class 'children' are striped from that identity. Once this frame of reference has been invoked, one can dissolve the contradiction; one can maintain that, generally, killing children in times of war is unacceptable, but—after a bout of complicated rationalisations—that such killings do not fall under the class 'children'. The killing of 6 thousand children simply does not count as that because their bodies has been conceptualised as mere instruments for the greater good.
This is the power of narrative. Winning over the 'normies'—the majority of the U.S. population that does not strongly identify with either the left or right political spectrum—is crucial. Israel's strategy relies heavily on these 'normies' either remaining disengaged from U.S. foreign policy or accepting a narrative that seems prima facie reasonable to them. This audience is not inclined to support blatant collective punishment, especially one involving the massacre of thousands of children. This time, however, Israel's propaganda efforts appear to be floundering catastrophically.
Consider the following instances of bizarre propaganda:
The most significant ongoing propaganda debacle involves al-Shifa hospital. On October 13, the IDF released an elaborate illustration claiming to show Hamas' main headquarters. The subsequent IDF takeover of the hospital, however, revealed a lack of substantial evidence to support these claims, drawing parallels to the unfounded assertions of weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq War.
Israeli society, meanwhile, seems to experience collective amnesia about the initial expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, the ongoing settlement expansion, the frequent closures, the expropriations, humiliations, collective punishments, and arbitrary difficulties. These realities are overshadowed by an extended layer of narrative where Israel's kind hearted generosity in permitting a drop of autonomy to the Palestinians in a besieged strip and an apartheid-ruled land with a puppet government should somehow make them grateful and indebted. On X, the spokesperson for the Jewish Settlers of Hebron stated, "The great Gaza giveaway, the disengagement, was the fruit of the two-state way of thinking. Gaza was evacuated of Jews, handed over to the PA, and soon taken over by Hamas, leading to the October 7th massacre." This sentiment was echoed by Israeli legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich, who opined, "Imagine the consequences of statehood. There could have been 100 times more deaths."
In this discourse, the autonomy afforded to Palestinians is perceived as the catalyst for Hamas's attacks where any degree of self-governance granted is directly proportional to an increased likelihood of Palestinian aggression. This frame of thinking leads one to believe that the Palestinian is a figure barely restraining a primal urge to destroy, innately anti-Semitic, driven by a compulsion to kill for the mere thrill of it. It dehumanises the Palestinian into a monstrous entity, an unpredictable, ferocious beast, whose only deterrence is the firm hand of those who 'understand' his nature—a hand that must confine and chain, lest he unleashes his base, destructive instincts. Thus, to accord Palestinians the status of rational, benevolent beings who deserve statehood is a fundamental empirical mistake. Governance, therefore, must be exercised in a manner that forestalls any potential for Palestinian violence. It envisages an armour, a metaphoric straitjacket, restraining this so-perceived lunatic from executing his deep-seated, destructive desires. This is the prevailing mode of thought for many in Israel today, a lens through which the Palestinian identity is not only understood but also managed and controlled,
On the other hand, it is much more clear that military domination over Palestinians have failed to achieve security for Israelis. They are baffled that ruling with sieges and martial law—intermittent air raids, unending drone surveillance, invasive searches at discriminatory checkpoints at every corner, sniper fire at protests, and detention without trial—has bolstered military resistance among the young generations of those born into the legacy of the Nakba, who have grown weary of hollow diplomatic promises unkept for 75 years. Instead of acknowledging the long-standing and oppressive Israeli military occupation as a catalyst for October 7, as cause and effect, there's now a disturbing sentiment among many Israelis favoring a reoccupation of Gaza. This perspective alarmingly advocates for the expulsion of Palestinians to Sinai, treating them not as people with rights and histories but as mere nuisances to be disposed of, a problem to be shuffled, and a logistical inconvenience. Rather than individuals with distinct identities and histories, they are instead seen as interchangeable with the broader Arab population, easily uprooted and relocated en masse because after all, they are subsumed under a generic, essentialist 'Arab' label, a swarm of annoying bees who cannot possibly have any qualms in migrating to the other hive where other bees of a similar breed are present.
The first thing that groups do in order to justify their actions to themselves and others is dehumanise their victims, to show that they are not like 'us' in the most fundamental ways. Australian military personnel had to dehumanise Afghans as ‘ragheads’ in order to murder 39 Afghan civilians in cold blood for sport. The Hutus in Rwanda had to refer to Tutsis as cockroaches and snakes in order to hunt them down with machetes and genocide a million of them, as one participant of the genocide later remarked: "We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps”. Similarly, the Allied forced in Japan had to dehumanise Japanese people in order to firebomb Tokyo and murder a hundred thousand innocent civilians, something which an Allied commander testified at the time in saying that "we are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin." The Japanese, in turn, had to dehumanise the Chinese in order for the Rape of Nanjing to occur, as one participant of the massacre later remarked when interviewed, “perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman . . . but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig”. Likewise, a Japanese private who was ordered to bayonet a Chinese civilian for practice gave the following testimony;
One day Second Lieutenant Ono said to us, “You have never killed anyone yet, so today we shall have some killing practice. You must not consider the Chinese as a human being, but only as something of rather less value than a dog or cat. Be brave! Now, those who wish to volunteer for killing practice, step forward . . . I plunged the bayonet into the petrified Chinese. When I opened my eyes again, he had slumped down into the pit.
The ‘Mere Gook Rule’ is also another case in point, a US military policy during the Vietnam war dictating that US military personnel can kill and rape anyone so long as they are ‘mere gooks’; less than animals. To further hammer the point, the Holocaust was made possible only because Jews were not seen as human in the yes of the nazis, who had to create propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew where Jews were portrayed as rats, and The Subhuman which remarked that “although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal”. A revealing quote from a participant of a pogrom in 1993 against Romani people moreover shows the precarity of ‘human’ as a universal criteria for moral consideration:
On reflection, though, it would have been better if we had burnt more of the people, not just the houses” . . . “We did not commit murder—how could you call killing Gypsies murder?” protested Maria. “Gypsies are not really people, you see. They are always killing each other. They are criminals, sub-human, vermin. And they are certainly not wanted here
Though the participant unconsciously refers to Romanians as ‘people’, she goes on to add that they are not ‘people’ par excellence, i.e., not ‘us’. Again and again history shows us that the category ‘human’ is reserved for the ingroup and is coextensive with ‘us’. Watch as any allegiance to an abstract ‘humanity’ quickly dissipates when you present them with specific faces secured to particular bodies.
This idea of a human-subhuman division is historically rehashed based on whatever happens to be the exclusionary fab of the time; nationality, culture, race, religion, ethnicity and other ways of dividing human beings into ‘our’ kind and ‘their’ kind.
To that end, the dehumanisation of Palestinians has not gone unnoticed. Ariel Kallner, a Knesset member for Likud, said "Right now, one goal: Nakba. A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948", and Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesperson, echoed this adding that the IDF would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and that Israel's “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in the bombardment of Gaza. Galit Distel-Atbaryan, another Knesset member, posted on X that Israelis should focus on: “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and forcing the Gazans either into Egypt or to the death. Amichay Eliyahu, a cabinet minister, and Tally Gotliv, a Likud parliament member, have both called for Israel to use nuclear weapons on Gaza, with Gotliv stating: “It’s time for a doomsday weapon. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza.” Israel's finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that he welcomed "the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world," adding that "the State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza."
Arab identity, as it developed in the post-war era, is complex and heterogeneous, characterised by variations of dialects, religious practices, cultural customs, and political and social views. Yet, amidst this diversity, there is a long and tightly woven thread that binds this fragmented identity together and precludes its fabric from being torn asunder, namely the Palestinian cause.
I attended an American school here in Doha, where many of the students were children of the Palestinian diaspora. These were the progeny of the Nakba, whose ancestors were forcibly displaced from their homeland—a homeland to which, even now, Israel denies their return. Stateless, their parents had adopted various nationalities, including American, yet when asked where they're from, my classmates consistently identified themselves as Palestinian, even if nomads in a world governed by inflexible borders. This adherence to Palestinian identity, undiminished by the vicissitudes of statelessness, stood in stark contrast to their immersion in an educational ethos often championed as the hallmarks of a Western liberal tradition — democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law, and human rights. Yet, this education, with its promises of enlightenment and liberation, paradoxically illuminated the profound contradictions at its heart. We, as students straddling multiple worlds, became acutely aware of the discrepancies and selectivity embedded in these proclaimed universal ideals. Our education and experiences have sharpened our perception of the inherent contradictions within a global order still imbued with colonial legacies, even if it does not speak in the language of the Belgian Congo or the British Raj. In Palestine, this brand of settler colonialism is deafening to our ears.
What are we supposed to make of the glaring differential treatment and selective empathy where Palestinian lives are less grievable than other lives? I can't help but reflect whether my life, in counterfactual geopolitical circumstances, would suddenly become less valuable; would I too be similarly dehumanised and transform into an instrumental statistic or an interchangeable Arab? By virtue of this line of questioning, and the links I draw between myself and my Palestinian classmates, under what conditions am I to claim otherwise? This is the colonial legacy at stake which upholds a principle of uneuqal vulnerability; the systemic and intentional creation of conditions where racialised and colonised groups are made more vulnerable to violence, oppression, and disregard, and their lives are systematically cheapened in favour of the colonisers' interests. This extends beyond physical vulnerability to include narrative vulnerability where the stories, experiences, and histories of the colonised are more easily dismissed, manipulated, or ignored.
Biden, in a rare Oval Office address, announced a plan to allocate $14 billion to Israel as part of the 'war effort', signaling what he termed an 'inflection point in U.S. history'. I speak for many Arabs who have witnessed the one two many when I say that this has been our own "inflection point", too. The struggle for Palestinian self-determination will persist beyond this genocidal conflict, just as it has endured since the first Nakba and throughout 75 years of continued occupation. The dispossession and uprooting of a people, the demolition of their homes, and subjugation under military rule cannot be expected to be passively accepted.
There needs to be a vision beyond Zionism, one that aligns with what Edward Said termed 'peace with justice'. This vision must begin by acknowledging the current suffering of the Palestinians and the historic injustices upon which Israel was established. Palestinians bear a deep-seated resentment and anger stemming from these unaddressed past wrongs that are only aggravated by their ongoing nature. If reconciliation is genuinely sought—a prospect that current actions do not seem to support—it necessitates grappling with these uncomfortable truths. Though a shockingly large number of the Western public have uncrititcally bathed in Israeli propaganda, an unprecedented dose of empathy for Palestinian liberation has been injected by dissenting voices, many of them Jewish. Even within Israeli society, there are extremely faint but hopeful movements. Brave activists, in the face of police intimidation and public hostility, are making their carefully hedged voices heard. In small but significant gatherings in Tel-Aviv, they are seen standing with signs opposing the war, offering a flicker of light in an otherwise relentless darkness.