By John Pickard
21 May 2024
It is hard to look at social media reports about Gaza, on X, for example, and not feel a visceral, boiling anger. Videos posted show Israeli soldiers vandalising the property of Palestinians who have fled their onslaught. They show wanton destruction, where entire neighbourhoods with no stragetic or military value are blasted to rubble, for no other reason than to render them uninhabitable.
They show IDF soldiers regularly posting their own videos of the abuse and humiliation of prisoners and Palestinians in general. We are now seeing pictures of tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing, cowering, and sometimes – when it’s safe – just standing in large crowds waiting for food relief to arrive [top picture taken from a video on X].
The total Palestinian death toll in Gaza must now be near 40,000, including those still missing and unaccounted for, the overwhelming majority women, children and non-combatants. All of the infrastructure of everyday life is destroyed. According to the UN, there is around 40 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza, where once there were schools, colleges, clinics, hospitals, mosques, roads and homes.
On the West Bank, life is increasingly hazardous for any Arab, where they are in relatively isolated villages, subject to regular physical assaults, casual brutality, vandalism and pillaging by Jewish settlers. See here, and here. But even in larger towns and cities, since October 7, the IDF has been on a mission of revenge, given more or less free rein to intimidate residents, destroy homes or batter their way into homes and arrest Palestinians without charge. IDF troops frequently shoot to kill without provocation, using snipers to kill children. Here, too, roads and infrastructure are destroyed as a matter of policy, to make areas uninhabitable.
Jewish settlers torching relief convoys
Apart from driving Arab farmers off their land, in the last week Jewish settlers have on several occasions destroyed and torched food relief lorries on their way to Gaza from Jordan. Sometimes those committing these attacks are in IDF uniforms or they are protected by the IDF standing by. Israeli soldiers know they can get away with it, because since October 7 they have a ‘free pass’ to do almost anything.
The weasel words of IDF spokespersons about ‘law’, ‘army regulations’, ‘inquiries’ and ‘investigations’ are strictly for the world media, while in practice they are meaningless, as IDF personnel know they can act with complete impunity: there will never be any come-back, however appallingly they behave.
The behaviour of the IDF in Gaza, described by the International Court of Justice as a ‘plausible’ genocide, has fuelled the largest global protest movement in generations. No matter how much the mainstream media in the West do their best to limit the damage to Israel – propaganda by omission – the tidal wave of news, videos and postings on social media is far too great to suppress. The videos and pictures linked above, all of them from X, are not faked: they are all genuine videos and some of them are horrific and they will all get tens of thousands of views and shares.
The two and quarter million residents of Gaza, have been bombed out of their homes, forced to move, sometimes four or five times, to seek safety, deliberately denied medical aid, water and food. It may be little consolation to them, but the Israeli military ‘victory’ has been accompanied by a political and diplomatic defeat on an historic scale. Except for a handful of Western politicians, Israel is now a pariah state, reviled by millions of workers and youth internationally for what it has done to Palestinians and what it continues to do.
Gaza is as bad as World War Two city bombing
Within Israel itself, we are entering an entirely new era, characterised by division, acrimony and conflict between and among Jews. There is a growing perception in Israel that the war in Gaza is only being prolonged by Netanyahu to prolong the life of his coalition government, and in this, he has the backing of far right ministers.
Both in Gaza and in the West Bank they are taking the politics of Zionism to its logical conclusion. An apartheid state, with Arabs as second class citizens devoid of rights, is not enough for these people: they are seeking the complete destruction of the Palestinian nation, by driving out the population of Gaza today and the Palestinians of the West Bank, if they can, tomorrow.
In the part of the population they can influence, including Jewish schoolchildren and youth, they imbue a fanatical, almost medieval racist ideology, one in which Arabs are subhuman sometimes explicitly so. For the Israeli far right, it is as if the Nazis and the Holocaust never happened, except when they needs to be invoked to shout down critics of Israel.
What is different about this war is not only its scale – in the intensity of the bombing and the civlian casualites, it compares with any bombing campaign in the Second World War – but by the fact that news, video footage and reporting is instantly transmitted around the world.
Western mainstream media outlets are overwhelmingly biased in favour of Israel, but they have been largely be-passed by social media, which is today far more effective and influential. The anger is not only mine; it is shared by tens of millions around the world and the supporters of Israel’s policies in Gaza will not be forgiven or forgotten.
All of the links in this article are from ‘X’
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