The International Order and its laws with a focus on human rights emerged after the Second World War in the aftermath of the Holocaust with a promise of not letting ‘Crimes against humanity’ on such a scale happen again. It was the moment when the world said – ‘Never again.’ Today’s world seems to have failed on that promise in plain sight. There is a concerted effort to hide the injustices showered upon the Palestinians and neighbouring Arabs, to treat the Israeli war on Gaza as a conflict between two sides equally vile and equally violent.
There is a concerted effort to hide the injustices showered upon the Palestinians and neighbouring Arabs, to treat the Israeli war on Gaza as a conflict between two sides equally vile and equally violent.
Such portrayal hides the visible distinction between the powerless subjugated people devoid of state and the violent exclusivist state with a full-fledged army. It trivialises the Palestinian resistance against colonial subjugation and the war crimes that Israel has committed since its inception. Western media shares its culpable part in this false campaign which is ultimately responsible for the dehumanisation of Palestinian lives. The media narratives on Palestinian resistance have been distorted on the one end and falsified and heavily stigmatised on the other.
Ironically enough, this biased media environment expects the thinkers and vocal supporters of the Palestinian cause to be neutral, to see ‘the violence on both sides.’ It demands those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to condemn Hamas for killing Israeli civilians and taking them hostage to prove their ‘authenticity’. It shows its hideous nature by asking – ‘what do you think of October 7?’ In this very subtle way, one is demanded to condemn the people of Gaza who had celebrated the Hamas attack and hence rightly deserved the collective punishment that Israel has unleashed on the Gazans.
Arundhati Roy unabashedly blasted this trivialising trope in her momentous PEN Pinter Prize Acceptance Speech on October 10 in London, ‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.‘ As Roy sees it – this is a hideous trap. It portrays the entire struggle to make both sides look equally terrible and thus dilutes the difference between the oppressor and the oppressed – between a militarised apartheid regime and a resistance movement of people who are being starved to death. The people who have not been left with any means to fight for their liberation are morally burdened with the ethical responsibility of non-violence.
As she puts it without any ifs and buts, all this violence, including the 7th October attacks has its roots in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its persecutive apartheid regime. While the whole world is witnessing a genocide – from the United Nations to Human Rights groups making desperate calls to end the orchestrated famine, put an end to the apartheid regime, the harbinger of democracy and justice in the world, the United States can openly deny it, veto any proposal of ceasefire. It can deny the genocide. It can deny an ethnic cleansing so intentional and so visibly perpetrated.
This whole narrative clouds the realities on the ground – who is the oppressor and who is the victim in this situation? This makes it easier to label an armed resistance group as a terror organisation. The Palestinians have never been given equal space, voice or representation, as African-American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, ‘They have been completely pushed out of the story.‘ It is the Zionist rhetoric which has echoed and captured the entire media space. There has been a systemic effort to silence Palestinian voices and even erase them from the scene, from their land itself.
Erasure of the crimes of Netanyahu’s Israel
The Western world powers have for decades promoted Israeli interests while constantly undermining the Palestinian cause. From policymaking to peace negotiations – the entire international framework has been unjustly tilted in favour of the Zionist cause while throwing vague promises about Palestinian right to self-determination. One nation was enabled to build an armed arsenal with nuclear weapons in the name of self-defence while another was not even permitted to get humanitarian aid in situations of orchestrated famine and starvation.
The western world powers have for decades promoted the Israeli interests while constantly undermining the Palestinian cause.
Once depicted as equally tainted in bloody killings – that lens frees the perpetrator, in this case, Israel – from the burden of the atrocities it has inflicted on the innocents. It makes the horrific bombings, the starvation valid and even necessary. It makes it all justifiable. Ta-Nehisi Coates hammers a blow to this rhetoric – ‘this notion that violence committed by the people who have less power somehow relieves you of the burden of not committing war crimes, not wiping out the entire population is the most deceitful one.’
The late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer compared the situation of obliterated Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto in November 2023 who with his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in December. Queer rights activist Masha Gessen in their essay In the Shadow of the Holocaust puts weight to the claims that the Israeli state is intent on ethnically cleansing the Palestine of the Arabs through the same tactics that were employed by the Nazi regime against the Jews, ‘Presumably the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews in Eastern Europe. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto – Gaza – is being liquidated.’
The memory of the holocaust has been weaponised by the Zionists to turn Israel into a forever victim to make it difficult to see what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza and elsewhere. Thus, this constant drumbeat by the allied Western leaders of ‘Israel having the right to self-defence’ is as if Israel is facing a constant threat from Palestinians. If we care about ‘Never again’, this is the time, says Gessen, to save people in Gaza. For Indian Adivasi activist and poet Jacinta Kerketta, the violence against children in Gaza is the most horrific one and it is unforgivable that the world is even allowing it to happen. In a bold defiance against this violence, the poet turned down a US-backed literary award in September 2024 for her work on children’s stories.
Israel, US and South Africa: violence, segregation and apartheid
Coates, known for his work on racial segregation laws known as ‘Jim Crow‘ in Southern US states during the 19th and 20th centuries, draws a parallel between the racial apartheid against the Blacks in the United States and the Israeli apartheid against the Palestinians. As he puts it no matter what violent means the occupied people have sought to resist, it can never justify an apartheid. ‘The word we use for this – is occupation which does not accurately describe what is going on. In fact, on the West Bank, it really is apartheid. How a country that maintains segregation can be allowed to call itself a democracy – is a mystery to me.’
Coates also kneels the question of violence when raised in context of Hamas used to trivialise and dismiss the Palestinian resistance movement as a terror movement.
He also engages with the role of Israel in the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the secret relationship in which both regimes facilitated each other in the subjugation of other people. Coates also kneels the question of violence when raised in the context of Hamas used to trivialise and dismiss the Palestinian resistance movement as a terror movement. ‘I have had a long and contentious relationship with the idea of nonviolence among African Americans. We have endured so much violence from this country (United States). The Civil Rights movement is just a catalogue of violent acts committed against Black people. We never had the luxury to say violence of white racism destroyed our movement.’
The suggestion that the violence committed by Hamas gives Israel a blank cheque to commit atrocities, and bomb civilian areas is sickening at the very core. No amount of violence no matter where it is coming from, can justify what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades.
The history and the context in which all this violence emerged is important for Roy. She goes on to say that the point is not that Hamas and Hezbollah are retorting to despicable means but to see the reality that what they are facing is a lethal genocidal war machine willing to go to any extent to kill off the ordinary Arabs. And can a secular non-violent movement even stand a chance against the repression on such a scale? When the world has abandoned and almost forgotten them, when the superpowers are working against them, who else might they take refuge in but God?
Palestinians have seen the results of the peaceful efforts of PLO and the compromises they had to make. It is crystal clear that Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence but of aggression. It is a war to starve, to bomb, to assassinate, to ghettoise the Gazans and to eventually expel them.
