By SUSAN ABULHAWA*
Gaza has been rightly described as “a graveyard for children,” but Gaza will also be the graveyard of Western hegemony, along with the slogans and institutions that sustain it.
United Nations Resolution 3379 defined Zionism as “a form of racism” because at its core it is a supremacist ideology that seeks to privilege Jews to the detriment, even to the detriment and death, of non-Jews (the resolution was passed in 1975 and was repealed in 1991 under pressure from Israel and the United States). Regardless of how one defines Zionism, it manifests, among a myriad of other forms, the subjugation or displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population.
For the past 12 years, Israel has been implementing a long-held colonial fantasy of not only “finishing the job,” but has done so with a gleeful sadism that echoes the social media posts of Tzipi Navon, Sara Netanyahu’s closest adviser and chief of staff, who called for Gaza residents who participated in the October 7 massacre to be tortured on live television: “First by removing their fingernails and toenails… cutting off [their] genitals and letting [them] watch [their testicles] frying in canola oil and [forcing them] to eat them… Keeping their tongues until the end so that they can satisfy us with their screams, their ears so that [they] can hear [their] own screams, and their eyes so that [they] can see us smile.”
Opinion polls from the Israel Institute for National Security Studies suggest that most Israeli Jews do not think soldiers accused of torturing Palestinians should face criminal charges.
In a rare moment of candor, the newspaper The New York Times reported the UN’s finding of systematic torture, including sexual torture. According to the UN report, Israeli soldiers have allegedly held Palestinian captives in extremely overcrowded prison cells, subjecting them to sleep deprivation and forced nudity, threatening them with gang rape, and penetrating or electrocuting the genitals and anuses of male and female prisoners with batons and other objects.
Freed Palestinian hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza have reported being attacked and sexually assaulted by trained dogs. A lawyer who was granted rare access to Palestinian captives inside a detention center reported having a fire extinguisher activated inside the body of a 27-year-old man through a hose inserted into his rectum.
Many of those who were kidnapped, including prominent doctors such as Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopedics department at Al-Shifa Hospital, may have died after torture. Some emerged from the Israeli gulags so traumatized that they apparently suffered memory loss; some were left unable to speak; all were broken by unspeakable torments in Israeli captivity. And these were the ones who were lucky to get out.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and trauma surgeon from North Carolina who volunteered to be an emergency room doctor in Gaza, said that “every disaster I’ve seen … 40 missions, 30 years, Ground Zero [World Trade Center site], earthquakes, all combined, it doesn’t compare to the level of carnage that I’ve seen against civilians in just one week in Gaza … almost exclusively children. I’ve never seen that before. I’ve seen more children incinerated than I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I’ve never seen more children crushed in the first week.” He said children are “definitely” being targeted by snipers.
The raw footage and sounds of carnage are undeniable – entire families buried alive en masse in the rubble of their homes, over and over again; twisted bodies; torn bodies; broken bodies; burned bodies; dismembered bodies everywhere; blood and violent images in the city squares and streets; rotting bodies lying unreachable in the streets, devoured by hungry stray dogs, themselves burned and broken; the intentional destruction of everything in the entire Gaza Strip.
Yet what I witnessed on the ground, even for a short time in just one small area of Gaza, is infinitely worse than the worst video broadcast around the world. The enormity of the evil is hard to believe. We still don’t have a language to describe it. As I watched exhausted families flee from place to place, hungry, thirsty, dirty and disoriented, I kept reflecting on the words of Israeli General Rafael Eitan, who promised in 1983 that after the land was colonized, “All the Arabs will be able to do is to spin around like dizzy cockroaches in a bottle.” The current state of Palestinians in Gaza is this vision manifested in Israel.
The near-total degradation of a highly functional society in just a few months is impossible to comprehend. The lack of adequate food and sanitation, combined with incessant terror, the spread of diseases (from hepatitis and polio to mysterious and painful skin rashes in children), the testing of new weapons and an AI-driven death industry, has made Gaza the most macabre imperialist experiment.
I conducted a short study that estimated the true death toll in Gaza because I knew that the ability to continue calculating it had been decimated. My study, published in Electronic Intifada, found that the true number was between 190.000 and 500.000. It included those martyred directly by the attacks, as well as those with chronic illnesses who died from lack of access to medication; those killed or dying from hunger and dehydration; those who went missing; and those killed by the spread of communicable diseases that arose due to Israel’s destruction of sanitation and water treatment services.
As is often the case when Palestinians speak out, my article was met with skepticism and rejection. But 10 days after its publication, The Lancet, the venerable peer-reviewed medical journal, published a “conservative” number of “up to 186.000 or more deaths,” corroborating the lower end of my estimate—which I consider a gross underestimate.
Israel dropped the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs in explosives on an area less than half the size of Hiroshima. The statistics themselves are unfathomable. But what is horrifying is the pleasure that Israelis – across almost every sector of their society – seem to take in witnessing the unimaginable misery, pain and terror of the Palestinians. Their soldiers have set their acts of cruelty to music and posted them on Tik Tok. Families across Israel dress up as Arabs to mock Palestinians mourning their dead and bloodied children. People across Israeli society are calling for greater violence, or even a nuclear strike to wipe out all the Palestinians in Gaza.
Ram Cohen, a school principal in Tel Aviv who has spoken about Israeli culture in relation to Palestine, describes it this way: “Arabs are inferior to us. That’s why we kick Palestinians and slap them. That’s why we shoot them. They are nothing.” In July, many Israelis and some of their own lawmakers in sympathy rose up to demand the right to tear apart the bodies of Palestinians through gang rape in their homes. gulag in the torture facilities at the Sde Teiman military base.
Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and it is doing so in front of the seemingly indifferent world.
Gaza has been rightly described as “a graveyard for children,” but Gaza will also be the graveyard of Western hegemony, along with the slogans and institutions that sustain it—from the myth of so-called “international law” to the Olympic Committee that allowed members of a genocidal army and a state of apartheid compete, while tolerating France's ban on the use of hijab by pioneering Muslim women.
*Susan Abulhawa is a journalist, writer and human rights activist. Author of, among other books, David's scar (All time lap record). [https://amzn.to/4e3dLqz]
Translation: Débora El-Jaick Andrade
Originally published on the portal Novara Media.
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