FLASH
Shkruar nga Ahmad Ibaais
Israel has violated every principle of international law: the prohibition of apartheid, forcible transfer, the destruction of cultural property, the targeting of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
Today I saw those children again, those who stood in front of the cameras at al-Shifa hospital on November 7, 2023. They spoke English, not their native language, but the language of those they thought could save them.
"We want to live, we want peace, we want to bring the child killers to justice. We want medicine, food and education. We want to live like other children," said one boy.
Even then, the children prayed. They had no clean drinking water, no food, no medicine.
Now, 21 months later, 60,000 confirmed Palestinian bodies are piling up, or in mass graves, as figures point to over 100,000 dead.
Western academics speak of “genocide” with new authority. Two Israeli human rights organizations issued reports stating what Palestinians have been screaming from under the rubble since October.
Why weren't our bodies enough? What makes Palestinian death so unconvincing to those who witness our carnage in real time? What is it about our breath, our blood, our bodies, that makes them so easy to suspect, so easy to ignore, so easy to destroy? It is not the eyes that are blind, but the hearts.
The answer lies not in our deaths, but in the way we are constructed as less than human from the moment we draw breath. Palestinian dehumanization is philosophical and intentional. We must become something other than human in order for our elimination to become necessary.
This same dehumanization allows the media to place the genocide of the Palestinians within the context of October 7, 2023, to act as if history began two years ago, but never to place October 7 in the context of 77 years of colonial dispossession and 17 years of complete siege.
When Palestinian experts appeared on television saying this was genocide, they were scolded, attacked, ostracized. Now it seems that only non-Palestinians can declare it genocide, as if they are brave, as if Palestinians have not been fired, arrested and imprisoned for portraying our killers as evil. Maybe they wanted praise for the soldiers who killed our children?
Christiane Amanpour and others like her speak of her epiphany about genocide only after Israeli writer David Grossman comes to his sad conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. Palestinians can only confess if they are accompanied by authority. But I don’t know of an authority who can’t feel the 22,000lb bombs that have killed a classroom of children every day for 670 days.
How sacred their concern sounds now, rising above a land emptied of the living.
These newly discovered experts, the same voices who spent 21 months debating whether witnessing mass murder constituted evidence of mass murder, now speak with such authority about our suffering.
They accepted genocidal acts while avoiding the issue of genocidal intent, the real element that makes genocide legally punishable. The media enabled this genocide from the beginning.
When Israeli officials announced they had seen “40 babies with their heads cut off” and the world was swept up in the war, no photos were requested, no verification was needed. Former US President Joe Biden repeated this several times, even after his staff admitted that he had never seen such images. The White House retracted his statements twice. Haaretz investigated and found that only one baby had died on October 7, shot, not beheaded. But the lie had already traveled the world, while the Palestinian truth still demanded to be heard.
When Israel killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in April 2024, precision-fisting their clearly marked vehicles in three separate strikes, they called it an “unintentional mistake.” When they systematically killed over 200 journalists, more than in any war in recorded history, each death was labeled an unfortunate accident.
The pattern never changes. Israel commits a war crime, promises to investigate itself, and, months later, concludes that procedures were followed correctly. Yet the world expects us to forgive and forget.
Does Israel have a right to defend itself? We are told that the occupier has a sacred right to violence. The occupied must earn the right to mourn. Israel’s so-called “defense” is never questioned, even though international law does not grant such a right to an occupying power against the people it occupies.
Israel has violated every principle of international law: the prohibition of apartheid, forcible transfer, the destruction of cultural property, the targeting of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon of war. And now genocide, the greatest crime. Western regimes expect us not to recognize this reality, perhaps because they have seen how the world did not act quickly to stop this genocide and they know they can commit it again.
Now I understand why the discourse is changing, why genocide suddenly becomes talkable after so many deaths. It is not because Palestinian voices gained credibility, but because Palestinian death reached a form that Western consciences can process.
Pictures of famine are better than bombs or a sniper's bullet in a child's chest. Skeletal children evoke sympathy that oppressed bodies never will. They can mourn our corpses without confronting the systems that created them. So Western nations can pretend to be concerned about the famine in Gaza, as if Palestinian mothers had not been carrying their dying children to hospitals for over a year. And suddenly politicians can offer conditional recognition of Palestinian statehood, but only if we promise to remain forever defenseless. They prefer us as martyrs because martyrs make no demands for liberation.
This change comes not from moral awakening but from calculated certainty. Famine sounds like disaster; genocide sounds like guilt. Famine allows them to send aid without acknowledging the harm, to mourn publicly without criticizing the perpetrators. They can express horror while avoiding the truth that Western bombs destroyed almost all of Gaza.
When photos of 18-month-old Mohammed al-Mutawaq, emaciated from malnutrition, went viral, pro-Israel voices found new ways to ignore Palestinian suffering. After it was revealed that the child suffers from cerebral palsy, journalists called the starvation story "a lie," branding it "propaganda."
But Palestinian voices are breaking out despite the oppression, because of the refusal to accept that some stories cannot be told, some deaths cannot be mourned, some truths cannot be told. Those who survived will tell the truth that others died trying to tell: that Palestinian blood waters the soil of our homeland, that our resistance grows from every grave they dig, that our liberation cannot be delayed by their comfort with the end of the Nakba. If you want to hear the Palestinians now, heed our call: immediate sanctions on Israel, stop the sale of weapons that continue to kill, and respect the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
The children at al-Shifa hospital understood what the world refuses to see. Many of them are probably buried now, killed by the same forces that dismissed their testimonies as propaganda. And yet, the only question that can be asked of their corpses is whether they condemned Hamas before Israel killed them. / Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "The Guardian".
Lini një Përgjigje