Gaza and the normalisation of genocide in our time

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atomic bomb. Theodor Adorno

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed tirelessly to be acting in the name of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In truth, the actions of his regime and military these past few months has placed them much closer to the guards than the inmates at Hitler’s death camps during this dark period in human affairs.

In other words, and put more simply, when your response to genocide is more genocide, you become precisely that which you claim to be against. This is precisely where we are now after nine months of the IDF’s murderous and wholly indiscriminate military campaign against the people of Gaza.

Throughout, and to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments in the region have stood by and offered nothing in the way of serious and meaningful intervention. Supine and tepid calls for humanitarian pauses, temporary cessations, ceasefires, the provision of humanitarian aid, all have dropped and evaporated like snowflakes on the ground, such has been their impotence.