We are still debating whether what is being perpetrated in Gaza constitutes genocide, observes Dimitris Politakis in Lifo, citing excerpts from an article by Israeli historian and Holocaust scholar Dr Omer Bartov.
The article published in The New York Times is titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” For Bartov, there is no longer any doubt: “…A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide”.
What opinion can one truly hold when hearing that dozens of people were killed whilst queuing for a bit of food? That children were killed by bombing whilst trying to secure water? A fact that Israel has not denied but attributes to error.
Imagine the scene: in the summer heat, hungry and thirsty children trying to get water and being murdered. What else could this be but genocide?
Even when they are not being bombed or shot, they are packed into a small space where panic is created, resulting in them being trampled, dying from suffocation, with no one to blame.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has recorded at least 875 deaths over the past six weeks in or near aid distribution points and humanitarian convoys in Gaza, most of them near Israeli-backed GHF centres.
The BBC broadcast footage showing people trying to take cover behind a sand dune as the army opened fire just metres away from the food queue. What could be more sadistic?
Concentration camps, perhaps, or gas chambers? How can a people who suffered such horrors subject another people to similar horrors?
“I don’t think that they [those who react] are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks. This is a painful but normal reaction of people who say: ‘Hey, you guys have crossed every possible line’,” says Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Prime Minister, who characterises the plan to relocate 600,000 Palestinians to an area built on the ruins of Rafah as a “concentration camp”.
“If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing,” Olmert told the Guardian regarding the plan presented by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz.
“When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have, at least”.
All this is broadcast live, without any serious reaction. The only thing left to us as citizens is not to stop speaking about this horror. Not to become accustomed to it.
