This weekend I saw a group of Gazans gather around a child whose arms had been shredded so badly by gunfire that they did not know how to pick them up to rescue them. As people gathered to try to help, they were hit by an Israeli airstrike (Warning: Graphic video here). I am increasingly at a loss for printable words over this genocide, as every day a new horror is authored by Israel, all while American politicians and diplomats pretend they care about Palestinians when their actions prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do not.
The situation is rapidly deteriorating in north Gaza, as former co-founder of The Intercept and current co-founder of the new Drop Site News, Jeremy Scahill, reported on MSNBC, “no food or medicine of any kind has reached most parts of the north.”
This is genocide. It’s ethnic cleansing. Anyone denying this at this point is no different from someone who denies that my relative died in Auschwitz.
תיעוד: עזתים עוזבים את ג’באליה@roysharon11 pic.twitter.com/sT9en1Ngsu
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) October 21, 2024
Israeli occupation forces continue ethnically cleansing the north. Today, they attacked a school in the Jabalia refugee camp and forced people out of it. Then they lined them up and shot anyone who dared to move. Any male over the age of 16 is being detained, tortured, and… pic.twitter.com/pLOLMRDC2L
— حسام شبات (@HossamShabat) October 21, 2024
You either leave or die. pic.twitter.com/YJnE54eHBC
— Hind Khoudary (@Hind_Gaza) October 21, 2024
After US sent a letter asking Israel to follow international law & after killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, top Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich says IDF will control Gaza “for years” & he’s going to a conference dedicated towards a “Zionist and pioneer settlement” in Gaza. https://t.co/G63qpdV5Bv
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) October 21, 2024
Jabalia |
Israeli soldiers force under gun threat displaced families to leave the camp.
Picture from a UN school near Birkat Rashid pic.twitter.com/B2r5nsixD3
— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) October 21, 2024
UPDATE: A nurse at Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza shared news this morning (5:46 am Gaza time): “The army is burning the schools next to the hospital, and no one is able to enter or leave the hospital.” https://t.co/LVxPYPXofM pic.twitter.com/2m3WLiI6OU
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) October 21, 2024
Israel has restricted food and aid to north Gaza for 21 days and counting now, making it clear for even the thickest skulls dulled by Western and Israeli government propaganda that the starvation of the people being bombed and sent on death marches is intentional.
We have known for some time that Israel has designated “kill zones” in Gaza where they shoot on site and declare anyone shot a terrorist (well, people who read Israeli sources like Haaretz know this—American mainstream news consumers have been fed a different world, one that has mostly resembled the one Benjamin Netanyahu wants to portray). Israel is now effectively making all of northern Gaza one of these kill zones, forcing people out in a mass bombing campaign that massacres scores of people every single night as they escalate their violent attacks in the north. Israeli assaults have been so sadistic that there are now multiple reports that IDF soldiers are becoming demoralized by the horrors they are perpetrating on Gaza, calling into question whether they even have a fighting force capable of achieving their ambitions of invading and occupying parts of Lebanon.
Like Ronald Reagan calling Israel’s relentless bombing of Lebanon a “Holocaust” in 1982, I use the term Final Solution intentionally to get the attention of my fellow Jews still lost in the desert and worshipping a golden calf, because the intentional starvation of Gaza by Israel can only be interpreted as such. Israel’s bombing campaign has been downplayed as supposedly complicated by a litany of powerful actors protecting the forward operating base of Western empire and many of their followers who are propagating what is now an acceptable kind of antisemitism, but 83 percent of food not making it into Gaza before the intentional starvation of north Gaza is what it looks like. As Ta-Nehisi Coates so elegantly stated to the New Yorker, “‘Complicated’ was how people had described slavery and then segregation. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said, ‘when you want to take something from somebody.'”
Coates made the point in his new book that no one people have a monopoly on being an oppressor or a victim, and Israel is a cautionary tale. Us Jews should know this as much as anyone given how many different oppressors we have faced throughout history. To believe that we cannot become like any other people in the world is to take the “chosen people” moniker to a disturbing point. A point that enables one to dehumanize others, and do to them what so many have done to us.
Which is genocide.
How much longer does north Gaza have? Kamala Harris pledges to do something to end the war should she win the presidency, but she wouldn’t take office for another 85 days. Can north Gaza go without food for 106 days? Is anyone in the United States executive branch going to enforce international law now that Israel’s top minister Bezalel Smotrich has made its ethnic cleansing ambitions unambiguous? This is genocide, and no one in the United States government has any urgency to ameliorate the suffering of the Palestinian people. Years from now, when history makes it clear who the monsters of this age were, don’t forget who enabled and cheerlead this. North Gaza is on the brink of something truly horrific that there is no coming back from, and the powers that be have ensured that all we can do is watch.