Israel’s genocide of Palestine is an irreconcilable stain on humanity

There was another mass killing at another school sheltering mostly children just the other day. It has been called the ‘The Al-Tabieen school Massacre’. The victims were saying their morning prayer in the schoolyard. They were hit with such a brutal strike that relatives could not identify their loved ones strewn among the broken, charred and shredded remains. According to Dr. Yousef Abu-Al Rish, responders did their best: ‘If the missing person is a child, 15 to 20 kilograms of body parts are weighed, and if the missing person is an adult, 70 kilograms of body parts are weighed and delivered to the missing person’s relatives.’

We are at the ‘plastic bags filled with different people’s body parts’ chapter of Israels genocide in Gaza.

In the ten months since October 7, there have been many massacres, all of them involving the mostly underage civilian population of Gaza. The ‘The Al-Tabieen school Massacre’, added to the ‘Al-Awda School massacre’ barely a month earlier, along with the mass shooting of 112+ desperate civilians trying to access aid-trucks coined ‘The Flour massacre’, or an IDF airstrike that set fire to a Palestinian displacement camp (+45 dead) that was called the Tel al-Sultan massacre, and the devastating Israeli strikes that resulted in the carnage that was the ‘Nuseirat refugee camp massacre’ (+274 dead). The exhaustive use of overwhelming force has broken the flesh, mind and the spirit of the people in Gaza, the endless footage of innocent death and degradation has sucked the humanity out of the world, and I’m having trouble focusing on a work day during the bad weeks, along with a lot of other people. Sometimes it feels like nothing else really matters if something like this is going on. 

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has warned Palestinians to evacuate the Gaza Strip, calling for the “total annihilation” of the territory, saying “it may be just and moral” to starve the two million residents of Gaza. Smotrich has joined many in his coalition, including his Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in calling the Palestinians ‘Amalek’, referring to biblical directives to ancient Israelites from God to exterminate an entire people. It is this quasi-religious fundamentalism that has infiltrated Israeli society, delineating the cadence of the violence in Gaza, and defining a brutality that is blind with unreasonable hatred.    

After receiving dozens of standing ovations from the AIPAC seals inside US congress, and the jeers of thousands of protestors outside, Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu returned home to an MP-led mob of rioters storming government facilities, seeking to break out a group of IDF reservists that were in custody for sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners. The proudly democratic Knesset, faced with a civil war over the ‘right to rape’, debated the application of the sexual violence and torture on Palestinian refugees. “Yes, if he’s a Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do”, was the sentiment of an elected MP in a country where over two thirds of the population support their military’s aggressive approach in Gaza – including limiting humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

An apocalyptic ten-month spree of endless death has revealed an irreconcilable stain on humanity. Israel has revealed a pathological enmity for those it currently wages a biblical war of destruction upon, responding to the events of October 7 with such uncalibrated rage that the concept of proportionality has been ripped apart, along with the reason and humanity of its population, while the rest of the world stands by like deers in the headlights. 

As the white Apartheid government of South Africa fell apart, it lashed out in increasingly cruel ways, but it never flattened areas of urban resistance with enough ordinance to double the energy output of the Hiroshima bomb. When the British conducted military operations as it occupied Ireland through the worst of The Troubles, a time where Lords were being assassinated, hostages taken, and civilians blowing up in pubs, it didn’t decide to carpet bomb Dublin. Both these examples featured brutal occupiers, but they don’t seem to compare with what we see in Gaza today. 

Hundreds of days into this barbaric period of humanity being imposed by Israel, with hundreds of thousands of dead in a place where 60% of inhabitants are children, and with the callous blessing of both sides of the isle in Washington, the use of ‘free the hostages’ and ‘human shields’ runs out of steam, and morphs into ‘rape the prisoners’ and ‘there is no one innocent in Gaza’. The world doesn’t have the stamina that Israel has for ethnically cleansing the Gaza strip, ordinary people don’t have the energy for this kind of killing, at this kind of pace. People are tired, I’m tired. Too many innocent Palestinians are getting killed for someone to process over such a prolonged period, and any elected government that hasn’t suspended a diplomat or changed an economic arrangement is on the wrong side of history. 

In Canberra, just like the rest of the West, a cold bipartisan political machine hides behind thin cover to feebly justify an unjustifiable status quo. The Labor party rusted-on humanists in the membership ranks who took the recognition of Palestine to the last National Conference sit dumbfounded, and any dissent within the party has mostly been a storm in the teacup behind the opacity of caucus, gagging any dissent, spitting out a Fatima Payman as an example to all who stray.  

Recently, while the accusations of torture were coming out of prison walls, the dead babies piling up at their most unnecessary, Peter Dutton popped over to Tel Aviv, essentially saying that his party was ok with any number of Dante’s circles of hell that the Netanyahu government was prepared to conjure up. When he got back home, the leader of the opposition injected the most morbid and low-ball culture war he possibly could, while demonstrating his utter cravenness for human suffering – he called for a ban on Palestinian refugees fleeing this horror, citing ‘national security’ concerns.  

It is frustrating to hear the same words from captured bipartisan politicians, to see the worst thing you have ever seen in your life happen again and again every day to children huddled in schools, to see the unresolved terror in their eyes, to hear them plead “enough, enough”, to hear their voices remain unheard by people that claim they care. It’s exhausting for over two million Palestinians who are treated worse than livestock among the rubble of their homes, starved and degraded in a world that has left them to be devoured by an unhinged belligerent. It’s devastating to see a modern Labor government play politics on such a consequential moral catastrophe, a Coalition offering so much worse, and to see them both grant unconditional weapons permits, diplomatic cover and refer to any nation that could do something like this as a ‘friend’.  

Plastic bags of human remains, children dead with multiple high powered sniper wounds, the sanctioned abuse of detainees in jails, destroying reservoirs, killing leaders in political assassinations at presidential inaugurations abroad – you’d think that would be enough now. That something like this could happen for ten months straight. How could a people sustain such overt and total destruction on another? You would think in a modern world that these stories come out of some fictional dystopian tale about what humans need to remember to avoid something like this happening in the future – but it’s happening now – and it’s staining the hearts and minds of all who live on this earth. It has to stop, but it’s probably not going to.