By Sara Ghanawi | Staff Writer
After over three months of atrocities in Gaza, more than 30,000 martyrs, thousands still under the rubble, millions displaced and unsheltered, and total destruction of the city, political experts in the West still find it hard to call genocide for what it is.
One might think that just the next thousands of deaths would be enough for them, just the next Human Rights Watch statement reporting the starvation and spread of infectious diseases, just the next evidence of organ harvesting and illegal usage of white phosphorus. Perhaps it would take just the next bombing of a school, hospital, place of worship, ambulance, or NGO. However, these still couldn’t make the cut to account for genocide, and it still seems confusing for some Western politicians, scholars, lawmakers, experts, and humanitarians to recognize and acknowledge the textbook case of genocide in Gaza, let alone work towards ceasing it.
The West has put in every effort to avoid referring to what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, misspelling it as an “Israel-Hamas conflict” or “a war on Hamas” and even attempting to utilize a new watered-down language that has replaced words like ethnic cleansing and genocide with empty abstract phrases such as “lives found ended”. This deliberate restraint from using the right language is crafted to shape their denial as nuance, conveniently portraying the calamity in Gaza as a matter requiring impartial analysis, that even overwhelming evidence wouldn’t suffice to name it as a genocide.
What’s ironic is that while Western politicians go above and beyond with their denialism, the public expressions of Israeli officials have been explicitly reflecting the genocidal intent of the military attacks. These include expressing their goals of “creating a severe humanitarian crisis” which is a necessary means to make Gaza “a place where no human being can exist” and “erasing Gaza strip from the face of the earth”.
This, however, shouldn’t take us by surprise at all. Genocide denialism is just in line with the West’s policies, statements, and most importantly, their imperialist history and denial of the Nakba. We’re talking about countries like the United States, United Kingdom, France, and other European countries whose whole existence relies on the same colonialist imperialist strategies and logic.
Colonizers are going to naturally commend colonizers, aid them, and cover their war crimes. They are going to fiercely defend and put down any effort to condemn and call out the obvious terrorism that Israel is inflicting. They’re going to refer to facts as disputable, internationally verified evidence as questionable, and our documented footage of dead and mutilated bodies as doubtful. Otherwise, they’ll be rendered inconsistent and morally hypocritical because they have done the same. They have used the same strategies of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, starvation, propaganda, and racism.
If they were to put any mark on the war crimes of Israel, that would mean raising question marks on their legitimacy for existence and status of global power. They’ll be faced with their century-long colonial projects. That’s because they didn’t cease to be colonizers after they got hold of the lands, rather the tentacles of their imperialism continue to manifest in their economic and political systems. As such, their whole system would be delegitimized dare they delegitimize that of Israel.
This is part of the reason they’ve long denied the Nakba. Essentially, the denial of the genocide in Gaza is rooted in, tied to, and fed by the denial of the Nakba. How would we expect those who don’t recognize the 75-year-long occupation, apartheid, and brutal violence against Palestine to call out the most recent genocide? If they thought the Nakba was a legitimate means to create an ethno-state for the Jews, a Nakba that resulted in the deaths more than 15,000 people, displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, and the destruction of more than 350 Palestinian villages, then any subsequent massacre would be rationalized within this same framework of denialism.
Since its inception, Zionism has been a settler colonial movement that survives on the racial annihilation of Palestinians. This movement sustains itself through crimes like the genocide in Gaza right now, making these crimes natural progressions and links in the chain of the ongoing Nakba project. The West that failed to acknowledge the start of this illegitimate project would naturally fail to recognize its extensions, especially when these extensions fulfill objectives that they work in conjunction with the Zionist state.
For the West to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide is to call out their shared colonial logic that forms the foundation for their world hegemony. In other words, what’s happening in Gaza is only explicable through language that accuses the whole West and forces them to confront the global truth of their colonial violence. A language that is so concrete, clear, and concise, very simply put because the truth of terrorism speaks for itself. Yet, they will keep escaping the truth with euphemisms, tongue twists, silenced lips, and misspelled words. And as such, the denial persists, perpetuating with it the unlawful killings and destruction.
The question remains as to how long this denial will carry on. For how long will their interests mute their ability to call the violence in Gaza for what it is? For how long will they stutter before being able to articulate the word Gaza Genocide? Will it only be named as such after its successful completion, and after the urgency for recognition has faded with the smell of aches and bloodshed?
Sources:
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/10/25/gaza-is-out-of-fuel-out-of-time-under-israels-bombardment
https://ground.news/article/lives-found-ended-washington-post-unveils-new-euphemism-to-avoid-naming-the-dead-or-the-ender
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/12/white-phosphorus-israel-gaza-strike-video/
https://www.euronews.com/2023/11/27/israel-stealing-organs-from-bodies-in-gaza-alleges-human-right-group
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/epidemics-and-infectious-diseases-used-israel-intensify-its-genocide-gaza-enar
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6064/Nearly-30,000-Palestinians-killed-during-82-day-Israeli-genocide-in-Gaza
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza