A legal genocide
Are we looking at this genocide wrong?
I saw a video of a man lifting a beheaded baby’ body. The tiny body didn’t have a head. The video was from Rafah. There was raging fire in the foreground and screams in the background. People were running helter-skelter. Probably to find survivors or out of sheer shock of being in the vicinity of thousand pound bombs that ripped through and seared their ramshackle plastic tents. Probably out of pain, having got injured badly. The pain sounded unbearable. I would never want to feel such pain. No one in their right mind would. I wanted to post that short clip on my Substack. I know it would induce a visceral reaction in anyone who sees it. I haven’t been able to get the picture out of my head. It’s there. I can still see it. I can’t stop seeing it. But I didn’t post it. I didn’t post it because it would be too graphic. I also didn’t post it because Substack might remove it and perhaps even put some sort of restriction on the stuff I post. I wouldn’t want it. That would be detrimental to my work here.
This intense reaction isn’t new. In just the second week of this ongoing depravity, I saw the video of a child shivering uncontrollably at a hospital in Gaza. A bomb had dropped in his vicinity and he was still in visible shock from its aftermath with his big beautiful eyes unblinking and still staring in horror for what they had seen. He was brought to a hospital where a doctor chatted with him to make him feel at ease. The child, who was probably 3 or 4, could only nod and barely speak. When the doctor pulled the child closer and hugged him, he burst out crying. On being asked if he wanted chocolate, the child replied he wanted his father. I don’t know if he found his father. I don’t know if the doctor who consoled him is still alive. I don’t know if the shivering child, whose face from that night I will never forget, is till alive. If he has been killed, he would be “a legally killed child” anyway.
I have seen countless shivering babies since then. And even more “legally killed” children over the following months.
Back in February, when the Israelis first attacked Rafah, their barbaric bombing produced the picture of a dead girl, with both of her legs blown off, hanging by her sweater from a protruding rebar. The photo was gruesome, as if from a horror film. Or from one of Dante’s circles of hell. That night over a hundred other people had been killed. Perhaps she was also “a legally killed child” among the dozens “legally killed” children from that night.
Instagram doesn’t let me open that hanging girl’s photo without a warning that reads: “Restricted Photo. You must be 18 years old or over to see this photo.” I couldn’t embed it here, as this message popped up: “There was an error fetching the Instagram post.”
This dilemma about posting and not posting that gruesome video from the latest Rafah horror made me think of this interesting timeline we inhabit. One in which it is perfectly okay to behead babies with the most incendiary weapons created by human hands and intellect, but it is an offence to post the handiwork of those weapons, such as beheaded babies, and dead babies, with their legs blown off, hanging from protruding rebars, on social media. An entire genocide has been launched on the back of propaganda about fictional beheaded babies and babies cooked in ovens. But it is unacceptable to share actual pictures of real beheaded babies and babies cooked alive in raging fires created by 2,000 pound bombs dropped on plastic tents.
We are living through a time when it is perfectly fine for prestigious, award-winning newspapers and magazines to ceaselessly publish articles that justify genocide and describe wholesale slaughter of thousands of babies as “legally killed” children, but unacceptable to call for an end to this human incinerator that has devoured over 36,000 people — including more than 15,000 children — in just eight months.
This is a timeline where the very hour that the International Court of Justice asked Israel to cease its barbarism, it dropped tens of bombs on a besieged civilian population that has already been displaced numerous times over the past few months. Amnesty International said that the court order should make the Israelis halt their Rafah incursion: “With this order the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the UN’s principal court – has made it crystal clear: the Israeli authorities must completely halt military operations in Rafah, as any ongoing military action could constitute an underlying act of genocide.”
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on to call the ICJ ruling “false, outrageous, and morally repugnant,” as he continued his outrageous and morally repugnant acts in Gaza based on false premises. After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and his War Minister, the US House Speaker Mike Johnson was unequivocal about the next steps his country should take: “America should punish the ICC and put [Chief Prosecutor] Karim Khan back in his place.”
International laws, which supposedly hold regimes accountable for their acts, have had their flimsy facade incinerated in Gaza like the countless Gazans.
Or perhaps we are looking at this whole thing wrong.
In his scathing book on modernity, The Impossible State, Wael Hallaq writes that due to the hegemonic nature of post-Enlightenment Western modernity and its imposition by force — both overt and covert — in all corners of the globe, everyone, everywhere in the world lives in the modern Western paradigm, irrespective of their actual geographical location. Moreover, this Western hegemony has made all traditional non-Western systems of governance, laws, and decency so redundant that, Hallaq writes, “[t]here is in effect no other history but that of Euro-America, not even pre-Enlightenment European history.”
We are living in the Euro-American modernity. There is no law or system of governance of international standing outside of Euro-American paradigm. It is under the purview of Euro-American laws that we live — some have even defined the ICC as the International Caucasian Court. These same Euro-American laws deemed colonisation and slavery, among other monstrosities, legal. Now, if Euro-America deems this unprecedented devouring of Palestinian babies as “legally killed,” and the unfolding barbarism in Gaza not to be a genocide (Biden: “What's happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that.”), then we have no other option but to take them for their word. It’s their world and their laws after all. We are living in a Euro-American jungle. And if this is a genocide, it is a legal genocide.
Who will be its next victim? This question should scare the living daylights out of us, like that scared child in the Gaza hospital with big unblinking eyes, if it hasn’t already. And even more importantly, it should spur us into action to dismantle this system brick by brick. And fast. Because in a jungle where genocide is considered legal, if it’s Gaza’s children today, tomorrow it could be our children being fed to the same insatiable incinerator.
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As a Palestinian-American who has lived most of my life in the belly of the beast, I felt on October 7 that the Palestinian people would pay a heavy price for the Gazan military breakthroughs inflicted on the IDF's famed "Gaza envelope."
That is to say, Palestinians would pay dearly in blood to throw off the US-Israeli hegemonic narrative that has dogged them for the last 75 years.
In this, Israel's fanatical Zionism could be expected to play an overt, detrimental role on both the Palestinians and Israel's narrative. Israel's Likudnik-settler expansionists could be counted on to seize the opportunity to expedite the ethnic-cleansing begun over a century ago. So, too, would be the IDF's need to reassert its hegemonic deterrence in the region.
Both imperatives would drive the fanatical settler state to expose the gruesome underbelly of its hegemonic narrative, revealing to the world some of the horrors Palestinians have experienced in near silence during their long encounter with the Zionist settler-movement and state.
Unlike genocides of the past, this one would be "televised" to the extent allowed by the duration and magnitude of the slaughter of innocents, the resoluteness of the resistance, and the ability of the narrative police to tamp down countervailing images and narratives.
Every breakthrough for the Palestinians will be paid for with the blood of innocents, mainly that of children. Like a Greek tragedy, the fate of the innocents was sadly and unavoidably set by imperatives beyond their control.
My hate of Israel is growing and growing.That is not who I am.I blame the ICC for not actually doing something to stop Israel.What a world where we are all watching a genocide and STILL discussing it.