Julie Webb-Pullman, October 13th 2023
(Majed Abusalama, 13 October, 2023)
Women with children in Gaza (Photo: Al Manar)
What will we respond, how will we answer, now, tomorrow, next year? A genocide is being committed as I write, a genocide of growing proportions under the noses of every corrupt western politician, every African, Asian and Arabic leader, even at the behest of some of them.
Depraved and demented Biden pouring weapons into “Israel” by the planeload, massing gunboats in the Mediterranean to eradicate more, more, more Palestinian women and children. Shameless Sunak, cheering on the slaughter from the sidelines. European countries criminalising anyone daring to stand up in the street and say YA BASTA - or even those saying nothing, just holding a Palestinian flag. The weak and self-interested Arab countries shaking the blood-soaked hands of Palestine’s oppressors without flinching, without a second or even first thought for the now-thousands of Palestinian dead, let alone doing even one concrete thing to prevent more deaths and suffering in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks…
What can be said, when hospitals, refugee centres, homes and entire streets are being bombed into oblivion? When health, civil defence, media workers are literally dying to do their job? When dozens of entire families have been utterly eradicated from the face of the earth? When “child’s play” is not pick-up-sticks, but “pick up the severed limbs of your friend/mother/sister” following an Israeli air-strike? How are we letting this happen? How are WE letting this happen?
Because we are. We have collectively allowed the cancer of Zionism to metastasise, until it has normalised and its grossness now threatens the very notion of humanity. The tentacles of colonialism and fascism are strangling not only Gaza and Palestine, but also any fanciful western illusions of our “civilisation”: equality, human rights, freedom, dignity.
There is no dignity in standing by while our governments fail to hold the Zionist apartheid state accountable, not only for this current genocide but also for their past atrocities, the impunity for which has led us here. There is no dignity in failing to hold our own governments accountable for their complicity.
There is no equality in insisting that “Israel” has the right to self-defense while denying Palestinians, whether Hamas or otherwise, that same right.
There is no freedom for any of us, until and unless Palestine is also free.
In the face of the horror, the hell unleashed on Gaza by the Zionist warmongers and their US, European and Arab enablers we must take to the streets, the ballot boxes, wherever we can and scream YA BASTA!
End the carnage, the wanton annihilation not only of a people but also of the thin veneer of our so-called civilisation. International law is being trashed in our faces, the institutions charged with upholding it are silent, impotent spectators - often deliberately so.
Where is the ICC? Four days after Russia began a special operation in Ukraine, the ICC Prosecutor had already announced an investigation, condemning its actions. No such condemnation has come for this week’s Israeli massacres of a trapped and brutalised population under illegal occupation, illegal siege, and who are about to be driven into the sea or the Sinai, starved of the very basics of life in a well-publicised, premeditated deliberate war crime: the collective punishment of Gaza through the cutting off of water, electricity, food and medical supplies.
No UN Peacekeepers in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine enforcing United Nations resolutions, protecting Palestinian civilians, upholding Palestine’s right to self-determination. Not a sniff of mercy for the Palestinian victims, let alone apologies for the UN’s willing participation in the seven-decade programme of Zionist oppression, in breach of their own UN Charter as well their obligation to enforce the conditions of Israeli UN membership – conditions “Israel” has NEVER met.
The racism and hypocrisy redolent in the difference responses of the international community – governments, institutions, media, politicians of all stripes, ordinary people – to the Palestinian people, the appalling dehumanisation and labelling of Palestinians fighting back as terrorists and animals to be exterminated, while Ukrainians doing the same are called heroic freedom fighters; all of these undermine ANY claim that Palestinians are accorded even the most basic of human rights, including that to life itself.
This genocide against Palestinians is not being done in secret. Nor is it an aberrant event. It is merely the latest in a decades-long series of increasingly brutal, premeditated and systematic bloodbaths wreaked on Palestinians by Zionist apartheid Israel, knowingly and wilfully enabled by sequential North American, European, Australasian and now Arab regimes. And it is still happening RIGHT NOW.
Every single government, organisation, regime that is enabling and complicit in this Israeli genocide against Palestinians must be held to account. Every. Single. One.
We have 80 years of evidence that this will never happen through existing organisations and mechanisms.
It is up to us, every person of good conscience, to drown the screams of dying Palestinians with our own screams: from our doorways, from the rooftops, in the streets, and the halls of power: YA BASTA! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
Stop the genocide.
End the siege.
Free Palestine.
Hold “Israel” and its enablers accountable for their unconscionable crimes against humanity in Palestine.
Every single one of us is responsible for what happens next in Gaza.
Every. Single. One. Of. Us.