10/8/2024–|Last updated: 10/8/202401:22 PM (Mecca time)
As the war expands to Lebanon, Western societies remain extremely passive in the face of the massacres against the Palestinians, to the point that they are unable to force their leaders to impose sanctions on Israel, as if they refuse to see their crimes in the mirror of colonialism that Israel broadcasts to them.
With this introduction, the Media Part website opened an article – written by Karen Foto – in which she said that the hellish cycle of reprisals quickly resurfaced, after the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)’s unjustified attack – as it claimed – on southern Israel, with “unconditional” support. “From a number of Western countries, including France, although the use of military force was random and disproportionate.
In the name of Israeli “self-defense”, more than 40,000 Gazans were killed under bombs, making it one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century, and here we are seeing a people dying before our eyes as we look away from it, a year after the Hamas attack, and here it is. The Middle East is burning on an unprecedented scale, says the writer.
The writer believed that it was necessary to evaluate the specificity of this disaster, as lives were lost, but also memory, culture and the future, with the destruction of schools, hospitals, water and electricity networks, humanitarian aid, museums, fields and shops, so that the International Court of Justice recognized the existence of “a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm” to the population. Gaza, and ordered Israel “to take all measures within its authority to prevent the commission of any act of genocide.”
In the same context, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced in May that he had submitted a request to issue an international arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Galant, on charges of “committing war crimes” and crimes against humanity.
In June this year, the United Nations Special Commission of Inquiry, which was formed after the May 2021 war, accused Israel of committing “crimes against humanity of genocide, murder, gender-based persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, forced deportation, and acts of targeting women and children through torture and cruel inhuman treatment.
Despite international law, the mobilization of the countries of the South, and the protests of some of the youth, the international community did nothing to stop the massacre even though it could have done so, because if the United States and the European Union countries had stopped supplying weapons to Israel, the war would have ended, and if they had suspended economic relations and reviewed their diplomatic approach, even if They unanimously recognized the State of Palestine, demonstrating their desire to find a just solution.
The writer believed that it is wrong to say that these forces are powerless, but rather they allow what is happening to happen, and thus Israel’s crimes remain unpunished, and from a position of military superiority it continues its disastrous work, and the war expands greatly in Lebanon, killing hundreds of civilians within two weeks and forcing a million people to… To flee their homes.
Holocaust historian Omar Bartov says – in an article in the Guardian newspaper – that the people of the Middle East are “prisoners of the dynamic of regional destruction into which their leaders have dragged them.” Since the raid on the displaced in Rafah on May 8, he has described the Israeli attack as “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” and systematic acts of genocide.”
Causes of blindness
If the international community has become complicit in these crimes due to its inaction, then what about Western civil societies? Why do they ignore the genocidal process taking place, and what prevents them from mobilizing on a large scale, especially those who are not descendants of the colonizers?
The author believes that the Israeli authorities prevent the West from knowing what is happening by preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza, for fear of documenting Israel’s crimes on their full scale. The West only receives what is reported by Palestinian journalists who are targeted by the Israeli army, and portrays them as potential combatants. Thus, Israeli propaganda It makes civilian casualties invisible and justifies targeting an entire people.
Israel also relies on its allies to silence Western societies. In France, for example, and in a renewed form of McCarthyism, solidarity with Palestine is punishable by calling the police, a criminal conviction, or a prior ban.
The truth – as the author says – is that Westerners are not only prevented from seeing what is happening, but they do not want to see it, and in order to understand this blindness we have to go back to the past, to the racism inherent in our societies, which in itself is the fruit of the European colonial history that… It was never repaired, according to the author.
After listing examples of colonial racism, the author saw that this historical responsibility of Western societies could explain the abundance and implicit consent to the conflict itself determined by the logic of domination, even though equality between human beings is at the heart of all the basic texts that govern them.
Justify the worst
There is no doubt that the forms taken by colonialism in history differ from one experience to another, and placing the Israeli issue on European precedents does not allow us to understand the present or prepare for the future, because the only political result worthy of attention is the invention of a framework that allows the two peoples to coexist, according to the author.
The fact remains that Israel, whose creation was an injustice to the Palestinians, was established to compensate others and was born from the horror of the Nazi camps. It is a colonial state that has been condemned by the international community for its policy of occupation and confiscation since 1967, when there were less than 10 illegal settlements in the West Bank, but today there are 145 settlements, all contrary to international law.
By approving a basic law in 2018 that defines Israel as “the national homeland of the Jewish people,” this state committed discrimination against the Arab and Druze minorities within it, and violated the Declaration of Independence in 1948, according to which the state guarantees “complete equality in social and political rights to all its citizens, without discrimination on the basis of belief.” Or race or gender.”
The October 7 attacks seemed to the (Israeli) authorities to be the final justification for the validity of their separatist policy – according to the author – and the racist depths of Netanyahu’s government immediately resurfaced from the darkness. After imposing a “total siege” on Gaza, the Defense Minister fiercely explained that “no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel, everything is closed (..) We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly” and this can only be explained by “the annihilation of all these people.” “Savages”, as in Joseph Conrad’s novel.
Without Western societies’ comprehensive recognition of their mistakes, while imagining themselves as the enlightened vanguard of the world, without dismantling the still deeply rooted signs of racism, and without a real desire to make amends for the victims, they will continue to overlook the seriousness of the crimes they committed.
The author concluded that at a time when a people is being wiped off the map, the absence of a massive uprising calls into question Western societies, and should lead them to a collective examination of conscience, because their past crimes, rather than facilitating acceptance of current crimes, should help them see the mechanisms at work. Clearly hoping to put an end to it.
Without comprehensive recognition of their wrongdoings, while imagining themselves as the enlightened vanguard of the world, without dismantling the still deeply rooted signs of racism, and without a real desire to make amends for the victims, they will continue to overlook the seriousness of the crimes they committed.
