The “death world” that is Gaza
Published
by
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
JVL introduction
NY Magazine has published a remarkable piece about Gaza by New York-based journalist Suzy Hansen, presenting the reader with a shocking and yet somehow poetic rendering of what she calls an “extreme and otherworldly catastrophe”.
She demonstrates how Israel, with the help of the U.S., has broken not only Gaza but the very foundations of humanitarian law.
“In fact,” she writes, “the term war crime is not even adequate for what’s happening in Gaza, in that it suggests that there is a war happening and there are some crimes in it. Gaza is different, the number of war crimes virtually incalculable, the war not really a war but rather the ceaseless pummeling of one side by the other.”
Citing American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod, Hansen speaks of “death worlds” – collective global experiences involving “the shared knowledge that people have made the extinction of mankind possible…Wyschogrod had the Nazi camps in mind; today, the death world we know is Gaza.”
The piece is very long and we have quoted from it rather than reproducing it in full. We thoroughly recommend going to the New York Magazine website via this link to read it all. You can also find it in the June 16, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.
NWI
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Excerpts from “Crimes of the Century”
By Suzy Hansen, New York Magazine
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In the 1980s, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod recognized that the Holocaust and Hiroshima and other crises in which huge numbers of people had died required a new language. In her 1985 book, Spirit in Ashes, she called them “death events.” These, she wrote, could be large-scale bombing campaigns, forced famines, or deportations. Most important, these manmade events were collective global experiences and involved the shared knowledge that people have made the extinction of mankind possible. In some cases, these events gave rise to something she called the “death world,” which had the “imagined conditions of death, conferring upon their inhabitants the status of the living dead.” Wyschogrod had the Nazi camps in mind; today, the death world we know is Gaza.
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It’s clear now that Hamas’s terroristic and sadistic attack on October 7, 2023, was meant to transform the region.
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That day was so vivid and enormous it’s difficult to remember now, almost two years later, that expert warnings of Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide came as early as one week into its retaliatory campaign. The Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal had called it a genocide by October 15, eight days after it began; 800 genocide scholars signed a letter warning of genocide soon after.
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On October 25, Israel, by then already flattening entire refugee camps and neighborhoods in one of the densest urban areas on earth, struck seven residential towers in Yarmouk in northern Gaza, including one in which more than 91 Palestinians, including at least 28 women and 39 children, died. The writer Atef Abu Saif said, “Last night was the worst so far.” His Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide is a rare detailed daily record of the first three months of Gaza’s ordeal, and what is harrowing about reading the book now is that the suffering was already unimaginable from the very first days: the constant terror of planes or drones overhead; the deaths of multiple relatives; the lack of food, water, and electricity; the digging in the rubble and finding fingers, heads, part of an arm. That was the first three weeks; it has now been 88 weeks.
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There was always more. That summer [2024], doctors returned from Gaza speaking of snipers shooting toddlers in the head. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, told the media. In 30 years working in conflict zones, he had never seen children who had been “incinerated” or “shredded” the way they were in Gaza.
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In November, an American doctor named Tanya Haj-Hassan testified at the United Nations that “everything needed to sustain life is under attack” and that Gaza is the “prelude to the end of humanity.” She relayed the testimony of a nurse named Saeed who had been detained and tortured by Israeli forces:
We are being buried, every minute we are being buried, every minute we disappear, every minute we are abducted, we are experiencing things that the mind cannot even comprehend. We die and don’t find anyone to bury us. I am asking you to share my story, my whole story, with my name. I want the whole world to know that I am a human being … I am a human being created by God.
Near the end of 2024, Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council said Israel’s campaign “is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of ‘self-defense’ to dismantle armed groups, or warfare consistent with humanitarian law.” By then, according to the United Nations, Israel’s bombing had displaced 1.9 million out of 2.2 million people. Former Israeli Defense Forces head Moshe Ya’alon called what was happening “ethnic cleansing.”
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Then, in January 2025, there was a cease-fire and images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets. Then Donald Trump took office. With him came the words “Gaza Riviera,” the most grotesque AI video ever made, and a baleful new euphemism: “voluntary emigration,” a public confession that the Israelis and the Americans wanted to force the Palestinians to leave Gaza entirely. “We will … allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.”
“We are disassembling Gaza and leaving it as piles of rubble,” his Cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May. “And the world isn’t stopping us.”
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On March 18, the Israeli government unilaterally broke the cease-fire and dropped so many bombs that it killed 436 people in one night, including 183 children and 94 women, according to the Gaza health ministry. Israel imposed a complete siege for 77 days, preventing all food, fuel, and medical aid from getting in — the longest of Israel’s many acts of deprivation — which meant “not a grain of wheat, not a drop of water, no medical supplies, no vaccines for children,” Juliette Touma, the director of communications at UNRWA, told me. The Israelis cut the electricity, disabling life-sustaining medical machines and desalinization plants in an area that has sandy, undrinkable water. Almost all the farmland has been destroyed, as have the local fishing industry, the sewage system, nearly all the schools, and more than 90 percent of the housing, so that people must live in tents or on hospital floors or in collapsed buildings. All 2.2 million people in Gaza, trapped and unable to flee, are at risk of manmade famine. “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. “Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”
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In May, Netanyahu launched an operation he named “Gideon’s Chariot,” sending in ground troops again. He also said he would end the siege but take over aid distribution through the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which turned out to be run by ex–American military contractors. It replaced the U.N.’s 400 food-distribution sites with four. When the malnourished people rushed to the sites with buckets and pots, the Israelis opened fire, killing 27 on one day and 31 on another, according to health officials in Gaza. (Israel has admitted only to firing warning shots.) The siege has essentially continued with barely any aid getting in, while the total number of deaths at the distribution sites has surpassed 200.
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In its annihilative force and ambition, the Israeli campaign is unique among modern conflicts. In fact, the term war crime is not even adequate for what’s happening in Gaza, in that it suggests that there is a war happening and there are some crimes in it. Gaza is different, the number of war crimes virtually incalculable, the war not really a war but rather the ceaseless pummeling of one side by the other. “If what we are seeing in the Gaza Strip is the future of war,” Pierre Krähenbühl of the Red Cross said in April, “we should all be very concerned, terrified.”
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Unlike the Holocaust, whose horrors were properly understood by the outside world only after the fact, the evidence of Gaza’s horrors is immediately known and ubiquitous thanks to smartphones, despite the lack of on-the-ground reporting from western journalists barred from the Strip. The postwar legal order established to prevent the atrocities of World War II has failed, and worse, the U.S., which nominally took on the responsibility of preserving that order, is abetting the killing and abandoning any pretense of adhering to the law. “It’s not that huge numbers of potential incidents of war crimes don’t happen in places like Ukraine or Congo,” Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, told me, and he could have added Sudan or China. “What has brought a lot of attention to Gaza is that it’s a very sophisticated military backed by the United States, which is essentially bombing and starving at will. The outrage is about the relentless and very one-sided nature of the conflict.”
The reemergence of Trump has underscored that the U.S. and the world are in a legal crisis. Trump returned to office ready to abuse the Constitution, the presidency, and common decency. He has added a sleazy carelessness to the destruction of Gaza as well as a terrifying ruthlessness to the persecution of pro-Palestinian protesters on U.S. university campuses. And he is supporting Netanyahu as the Israeli leader strikes Iran as part of his own maniacal bid to remain in power. But the onslaught against Palestinians that began with Biden has been just as damaging to the rule of law. It was the Biden administration — with the support of both the Democratic and the Republican parties and the complicity of many media organizations and millions of indifferent Americans — that finally shattered the postwar legal order and allowed the death world to flourish. Only by our first recognizing this terrible fact can the law’s spirit ever be reclaimed, and with it the baseline respect for human life that the world spent nearly a century establishing.
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The core of IHL is the Geneva Conventions — which were ratified in 1949, then updated with further protocols in the 1970s in response to the rise of armed groups and other non-state actors — and the older Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. This realm of international law also includes the 1948 Genocide Convention, as well as treaties and laws like those that regulate land mines and chemical weapons. In 1998, a group of states issued the Rome Statute, which established the jurisdiction of a permanent legal entity, the International Criminal Court, that has since convicted mainly African militants from places like Uganda and Congo. The International Court of Justice was also established after World War II; it regulates disputes between states. For example, in 1984, Nicaragua brought a case, which Nicaragua won but the U.S. refused to recognize, against the U.S. for arming the Contras in its dirty war. Other famous conflicts have been judged at bespoke tribunals, like the International Criminal Tribunal, which tried Slobodan Milosevic; the Rwandan Tribunal after the 1994 genocide; the Nuremberg trials; and the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, all of which inform what is called “customary IHL.”
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Within this world of IHL are specific acts considered “war crimes”: the willful killing of civilians, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction or appropriation of property not justified by military necessity, depriving prisoners of war of their rights or compelling them to fight, unlawful deportation or transfer, the taking of hostages, and intentional starvation or denying humanitarian assistance to civilians. War crimes can be committed against civilians and combatants, but the concept of “crimes against humanity” concerns more systematic and widespread crimes that specifically target civilians and can also happen outside of a war. Ethnic cleansing has never been defined by international law but was recognized by a U.N. commission of experts after the war in Yugoslavia as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
And then there is genocide, defined by the Genocide Conventions as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” through killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and transferring children of the group to another group. That “as such” is tricky because it requires proof that the destruction was perpetrated against not individuals but a group.
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The May 2024 ICC prosecutor’s applications for arrest warrants of Israeli and Hamas leaders concern war crimes, not genocide. They were brought by the prosecutor Karim Khan against three leaders of Hamas for a wide range of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, hostage taking, and outrages on personal dignity, and two Israeli leaders, Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts related to the policy of starvation and deprivation.
…. [ICC prosecutorial teams]do their own research but can draw on a whole world of foundations, individuals, and experts collecting and documenting incidents of potential crimes in many conflicts around the world.
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Al-Haq, for example, submits reports to U.N. bodies as well as to the ICC and ICJ. It currently has two field researchers in the Gaza Strip. “Both have been forcibly displaced many times and had some of their family members killed,” said Al-Haq’s Tahseen Elayyan. “A third colleague who is based outside of the Gaza Strip had 80 members of his extended family killed.” In such conditions, these researchers document violations based on firsthand information given to them by victims and witnesses, as well as open-source intelligence. “We used to document every single case of killing and destruction in the Gaza Strip,” Elayyan said. “But considering the high scale of killing and destruction and the constant displacement of our field researchers,” they have had to work with witnesses outside their organization.
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Medical personnel, who have special protections under IHL, have also suffered in prison. Currently, there are 160 Palestinian doctors from Gaza in prison, according to the World Health Organization.
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Attacks on specially protected civilian places like schools and hospitals can be another war crime
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One study found that Israel has launched 654 strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities, and another found that enormous bombs have fallen within range of more than 80 percent of the hospitals. In the fall of 2024, the U.N. called the assault on the medical community a crime against humanity. More than 1,000 health-care workers have been killed. A recent New Yorker article by a doctor mentioned “a large storage room in the corner of the I.C.U. which was crammed with medical devices: ultrasound machines, I.V. pumps, dialysis machines, blood-pressure monitors. Each had apparently been destroyed by a bullet — not in a pattern one would expect from random shooting but, rather, methodically.”
The killing of journalists can be a war crime as well because journalists are civilians protected by the Geneva Conventions. In an unprecedented move for a purported democracy, Israel prevented all foreign journalists from entering Gaza after October 7 and has targeted the Palestinian journalists who have continued to report from there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. More than 200 journalists have been killed, pursued by drones and burned alive in fires. When the Israelis killed the Al Jazeera reporter Hossam Shabat in March 2025, they claimed he was a terrorist, as they have often done in the past. “Don’t let the press vest confuse you,” the IDF’s official account posted.
A lot of evidence for potential war crimes comes from the social-media accounts of Israeli soldiers, who have posted videos in which they blow up houses, vandalize shops, or call for Palestinian expulsion. The demolition of crucial civilian infrastructure has been broadcast across the internet; Israeli forces have also destroyed mosques, universities, and landmarks. Often, the videos are accompanied by hip-hop music and the soldiers are smiling, bobbing their heads, or celebrating. The Israeli historian Lee Mordechai has a website called Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, a record of thousands of reports and evidentiary documents, much of which he found simply by browsing and collecting Israeli videos online. One activist has uploaded more than 12,000 of these videos to a website called TikTok Genocide.
IDF soldiers bragging about their exploits is “indicative of their sense they can get away with anything,” said Roth.
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Roth thinks the ICC will also take on the question of indiscriminate attacks, or attacks that fail to distinguish between military and civilian targets, noting that Khan has said it is wholly inappropriate to send 2,000-pound bombs smashing into civilian areas. More difficult to prove is disproportionality — i.e., that the number of civilians killed is disproportionate to the value of a military target, such as a Hamas militant or alleged Hamas tunnels — which would need to be proved for an indiscriminate attack to rise to the level of a criminal legal offense. Hamas does, after all, live and hide among the urban population in Gaza, and in a statement the IDF emphasized that “a central feature of Hamas’s strategy is the exploitation of civilian structures for terror purposes.” Using civilians as human shields is considered a war crime too, even if international lawyers and other experts believe the concept of human shields is overused and doesn’t justify the high civilian cost.
“Israel seems to have this kind of almost rote justification: ‘Oh, it was a Hamas command center,’” Roth said. “But when you look at that, things tend to fall apart.”
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Though the evidence of war crimes may appear overwhelming, few experts believe Netanyahu or Gallant or their allies will ever be brought to justice by the ICC, not least because they will not surrender to the court. “People don’t fully grasp how permissive international humanitarian law is,” the legal scholar Samuel Moyn has said. “After all, it is a body of law that permits not only killing but intentional killing of civilians, at least in some number.” Israeli lawyers may argue civilian deaths are acceptable as long as they can prove necessity or that the deaths won them a significant military advantage.
“The expected military advantage here,” Eylon Levy, an Israeli-government spokesperson, told the BBC, “is to destroy the terror organization that perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Yale Law School’s Oona Hathaway has pointed out that this is an unusual approach, since “by weighing any single instance of harm to civilians against a perceived existential threat, Israel can justify virtually any strike as meeting the requirements of proportionality; the purported benefits always outweigh any costs.” The Biden administration supported such arguments, claiming the point of the war in Gaza was to “prevent another October 7,” the same forever-war justification the Americans put forth during the “War on Terror.”
It is good legal cover. “The issue is not with the lack of evidence or weak cases,” Elayyan of Al-Haq told me. “Over the course of time, Israel has succeeded in convincing many people around the world of its propaganda. It has successfully manipulated international humanitarian law to justify its crimes, especially when it comes to principles such as military necessity, proportionality, and distinction.”
And as the legal scholar Neve Gordon has said, “If your ally is the United States, and if your ally can veto any U.N. Security Council resolution, and if your allies are the European states, then the chances that the ICC will bring you to justice are very, very slim.”
Whether what’s happening in Gaza is genocide as defined by international law has become the inevitable question hovering over the operation. After South Africa brought charges of genocide against Israel at the ICJ in December 2023, the court voted 15-2 that Israel must take measures to prevent genocide and 16-1 that Israel must punish those inciting genocide. In other words, genocide was plausible.
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Even if esteemed experts — including the Israeli historian of genocide studies Omer Bartov, Human Rights Watch founder Aryeh Neier, and U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese — have argued Israel’s crimes qualify as genocide, any such case is exceedingly hard to prove in court. That’s because genocide has two parts to it: act and specific intent. “The acts are clearly sufficient — there’s roughly 55,000 dead now, let’s say, very conservatively, two-thirds of those civilians,” Roth said. “Those numbers are much higher than the 8,000 killed at Srebrenica, which was deemed to be genocide. And similarly, the starvation strategy and the deprivation strategy that are the subject of the ICC prosecution are genocidal acts and are very well documented.”
Specific intent is harder, even if eliminationist statements by Israeli officials are not difficult to find. Al-Haq has published an archive of these statements, as have Human Rights Watch and others. On October 28, 2023, as Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, Netanyahu invoked a line from the Torah exhorting followers “to wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens” — often understood as a perpetual commandment to kill any descendants of the Amalekite people, or the Israelites’ enemies. In April 2024, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “There are no half-measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation.” A year later, Moshe Saada of the Likud Party proclaimed, “I do intend to starve the Gazans — that’s our duty. Our duty is to expel the Gazans.” And on and on.
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The expansiveness of the Israeli campaign would not be possible without the constant supply of U.S. weaponry. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli major general Itzhak Brik said in late November 2023. “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” The Biden administration also consistently protected Israel by vetoing four U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding a cease-fire.
More broadly, the two countries have laid the legal groundwork for what we are seeing in Gaza. After September 11, the U.S. looked to Israel as a model, using the legal-military concepts the latter had developed to maintain its decadeslong occupation of Gaza and combat insurgent groups. “Israel and the United States together ushered a lot of folks into a new world of normalized counterterrorism and counterinsurgency,” Moyn told me. “That is absolutely central to the whole moral world we live in today.”
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But as destructive as the U.S. was in the “War on Terror,” military and human-rights experts say Israel’s behavior in Gaza has been far worse.
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As Roth explained, “The U.S. obviously still commits war crimes, but the U.S. is guided by military lawyers who read the Geneva Conventions and make some kind of conscientious effort to abide. The Israeli government has pretty much ripped up the Geneva Conventions, has interpreted them out of existence.”
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The Democrats allowed themselves to be dragged into lawlessness by Netanyahu and his virulently racist Cabinet members like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Even as the U.S. undergoes a reckoning about Biden’s age, few have asked how his senility affected his direction of U.S. policy in Gaza. Instead, administration veterans keep repeating that the one area in which Biden remained engaged was foreign policy, as if those policies were actually good ones and not flawed, cataclysmic, or potentially criminal.
Explanations for the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel include geopolitical concerns about Hezbollah, Iran, and the possibility of a wider war. That might have been true in the beginning, but those concerns ring hollow now that Israel has aggressively bombed the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria and, most recently, struck Iran. The most common view is that Biden’s long-standing pro-Israel ideology single-handedly drove U.S. policy and officials executed that policy. At this point, after all those images and videos of maimed and dead children, such explanations feel inadequate. Other factors must have been present that are so powerful they disable people’s most basic human instincts, the natural reflex to look at a video of starving masses or wounded babies and know that what is happening is beyond the pale.
When Hala Rharrit resigned from the State Department in early 2024, she had been a diplomat for 18 years, most recently based in Dubai as a spokesperson for the U.S. assigned to communicate with Arabic media. Rharrit had previously been a “political officer” privy to classified information; had lived in Qatar, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries; and had sent detailed cables about those places back to Washington. She knew the Arab world and Middle Eastern history, and, perhaps most important, she followed Arabic social media.
On October 7, 2023, Rharrit received the State Department’s talking points, which were heavy on Israel’s right to self-defense but not much else. …. In the Arab world, the talking points were met with rage.
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Rharrit began to wonder if, in fact, her American counterparts were not seeing what the Arab world was seeing. Maybe they weren’t on the same social-media channels? Maybe they weren’t checking Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? She began sending daily reports to Washington, compiling photos and videos from Gaza into one readable document. She included “what was going viral, and often those were the most graphic, most gruesome images — of children, of babies,” she said. “I had the thought that if they only understood the implications of our messaging, then they would realize what they were saying was insane.”
But in January 2024, Rharrit was told her reports were no longer needed. “The devastation in Gaza is understood,” her superiors told her. She decided to resign.
“The words war crimes were never used when it came to Israel’s actions, even when we all knew what was happening was war crimes,” she told me. “In similar actions — for example, Russian actions in Ukraine, bombing civilian infrastructure — we always used the words war crimes.”
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Stacy Gilbert, who also eventually resigned from her State Department post, worked in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration and was involved in the research and writing of the report. “For the NSM report, what we were looking at was: Is Israel using U.S. weapons in a manner inconsistent with international humanitarian laws?” she explained.
“This was back in a time when you could list the number of incidents that were shocking,” she said. “It quickly became a situation where you couldn’t list this stuff anymore. It would cripple a database. You just couldn’t recognize these neighborhoods anymore. It became clear that that was the M.O. for all of this.” In other words, these bombings weren’t mistakes.
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Most infuriating to Gilbert was that as long as Israel said it was adhering to IHL and taking measures to mitigate civilian harm, that was enough for not only U.S. politicians but U.S. lawyers. “We take their word for it, and we use that to basically green-light more weapons for them,” she said. Israel never had to prove, for example, that a Hamas militant was living in an apartment building full of civilians it had destroyed. “We had a decision to make about sending them weapons, and we chose again and again and again not to use that leverage,” Gilbert said.
“I would say every person in the Biden administration who signed off on policies, decisions, and statements on Gaza completely forfeits any right to critique the Trump administration for lack of morals, lack of adherence to law, lack of respect for facts, because they laid the groundwork for it,” she went on. “Trump and Elon Musk have absolutely terrorized government staff. But the undermining of trust of their own staff happened on the Democrats’ watch.”
When Rharrit returned to Washington after quitting in 2024, she met with members of Congress. Aides told her their offices had endured so much backlash after Biden paused delivery of shipments of a few 2,000-pound bombs in early May of that year — the only time he did so — that they knew they would never halt shipments of weapons again. In June 2024, the House even passed a resolution barring the State Department from publicly citing casualty data from the Gaza health ministry as an authority, in effect preventing them from acknowledging the Palestinian death toll.
Rharrit believes only the thorough dehumanization of the Palestinians could have allowed for such behavior. “It’s almost expected for people over there to get killed,” she said. “It has been normalized. There’s such embedded racism and dehumanization of Palestinians, to the point where they don’t even see it. They don’t even realize how racist they’re being.”
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What’s remarkable about the U.S. position in all this is its assumed passivity, as if somehow the most powerful country in the world were composed of people with no power. The dance of politics, the obsession with optics, the influence of lobbies, petty careerism, ambition — all of this has eroded something more fundamental: the government’s grasp of the seriousness of life. It has also destroyed any last semblance of accountability. “Elite impunity is the sole remaining area of bipartisan consensus,” said Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s former foreign-policy chief and the executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy. “They understand that whatever they do, it’s not going to really hurt them because, you know, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed.”
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The media has also often abetted Israel’s and the U.S.’s degradation of language, parroting their legal euphemisms and doublespeak to the extent that journalists and doctors are labeled terrorists, hospitals and apartment buildings are called militant hideouts, and what we see with our own eyes is constantly cast into doubt. But for some, social media has made war visible again; imagery has triumphed over language.
“I have to say that sometimes in Hebrew, or at least in Haaretz, we see closer-to-the-truth coverage than in the western-world media,” Shai Parnes of B’Tselem said. “The way the Israeli politicians speak in Hebrew — they don’t hide anything anymore. …“They said it’s going to be a total siege, and they’re doing it. They said it’s going to be a destroyed Strip, and they’re doing it.” Which is why he found it strange that western newspapers and networks still faithfully print Israeli talking points, excuses, and outright lies. What the Israelis and Americans do in the realm of the law, the American media mimics in the narratives it perpetuates.
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Omer Bartov has said it is crucial to understand when studying war crimes and genocide that those carrying out these actions usually believe them to be justified. Parnes of B’Tselem said Israeli leaders “used the true emotions of anxiety and fear and the sense of loss of personal security after October 7 and mobilized it to complete the dehumanization of all Palestinians in the region.”
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Gaza has by now become part of the American story, and it is not surprising that it mirrors the contradictions of U.S. history, with the protection of one minority group and the elimination of another. The Americans and the Israelis have created a world in which such hypocrisy is endemic: Children are terrorists, safe zones are killing fields, and the norms to protect civilians against violence are used to annihilate them. The U.S. might have long been on the same page as Netanyahu’s Israel, but, perhaps faster than it recognized, Netanyahu became Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, so the U.S. too is a far-right country, one that is fanatical and inured to death.
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But Palestinians do have some hope. …. “Things have become even worse,” Al-Haq’s Tahseen Elayyan wrote to me in May, “but our presence on this land is not transitory and precarious. Palestinians are fettered to this land and have their origins deeply rooted since thousands of years. What makes us hopeful is the changes in the public opinion, especially among the young generations, over the past few years. Al-Haq still believes that justice will one day prevail.”
“The peoples of the world need to know that the issue today is not only about the rights of the Palestinians,” he went on. “They need to know that the Palestinians are defending human values and trying to free the world.”
Read Suzy Hansen’s full article on New York Magazine’s website via this link.
This is not a war. A war is between an opponent’s army, navy and airforce. Palestine has none of these. Maybe a few homemade rockets but nothing against the big warlord Israel. Sickening.
Incredible statements, I wish they’d made a film of these people. We could use these at PSC film nights it would be a powerful piece of propaganda.