Pearls and Irritations

Israeli leaders insist that all the people of Gaza are Hamas. In the same breath, Prime Minister Netanyahu boasts that victory in his war depends on the complete annihilation of Hamas, by which he presumably means a whole people?

Finance Minister Smotrich claims to halve Gaza’s population within two years, calls for permanent military occupation of the Strip and says the same should happen on the West Bank and in Lebanon. He also insists that Palestinians do not exist, a claim bolstered by the charter of the Israeli ruling party Likud which declares there will be no Palestinian state.

Since 1948, Palestinians have experienced ethnic cleansing, destruction of their infrastructure and large scale massacres, a process of genocidal-like annihilation which has been speeded up since October 2023. Such annihilation shows threats to the lives of all Palestinians, but before listing evidence of atrocities committed against them, let’s ask, what is meant by survival as a people?

To have identity recognised by other populations, a people must be able to speak, be heard, be taken seriously, act on their own behalf and in that way experience treatment as equals. A capacity to take initiatives, to maintain agency, requires an assertion of identity unhindered, never stifled, not destroyed. Survival as a people, let alone their development and flourishing requires speech and action, hence philosopher Hannah Arendt’s argument that if a people live without entitlement to speech and accompanying action, they become isolated, lose the experience of a human life, are denied the chance to live among others as equals. If that happens, she argues, they are ‘literally dead to the world.’

Denial of recognition, experience of conquest compounded by a world willing to accept a people’s annihilation, illustrate the threats to Palestinians’ survival. Three specific issues loom: Israel’s perception and labelling of an Indigenous people; Gazans’ and West Bankers’ experience of beyond belief death and destruction; the emergence of a cancerous international relations culture ready to accept that these developments be regarded as normal.

Labelling and ignoring Palestinians

Once people are labeled unworthy, as less than human, even as animals, history shows how stigmatisers give themselves a moral blank cheque to deport, destroy and kill. Stealing of lands, deportations, torture, destruction and killing usually depend on cruelty as policy being legitimised by governments even if strenuously denied despite overwhelming evidence.

Less dramatic cruelty occurs when Indigenous people are not consulted about their future, as largely happened during the years of the British Protectorate of Palestine 1920-1948, in the UN partition of Palestine in 1947 when Palestinians are estimated to have owned approximately 94% of the land but in the Naqba, the 1948 tragedy of destruction and expulsion, all this had been taken from them. They became refugees, of little consequence, not taken seriously unless they would speak and act.

In deliberations about the future of Gaza after Netanyahu’s bloodlust has been satisfied, it appears that this future task concerns only Israel, its partner in crime the US and even prospective real estate developers. Palestinians are not allowed agency. They should not be consulted.

Into this trap falls an Australian government which refuses to recognise a Palestinian state. Stigmatise. Don’t recognise. Collude with forces wanting to ensure that Palestine need not survive.

Genocidal destruction

Figures about slaughter in Gaza are too familiar. They show an Israeli government intent on genocide despite the ICJ ruling that steps be taken to prevent genocide occurring. If rules derived from the Hague and Geneva conventions to protect civilians are of no consequence, a people’s entitlement to survival and to other human rights is limited.

‘Scientists for Global Responsibility’, estimate that 45,000 Gazans have been killed by Israeli forces, 72% of the casualties women and children. They also say that even if half of remaining men were Hamas operatives, the civilian death rate would be 86%. Added to direct military murder is Israel’s determination to use starvation as a weapon of war. The Euro-Med Monitor documents that with the arrival of winter weather, Israel denies conditions for survival by blocking entry of blankets, clothes and shoes, by limiting entry of aid trucks so that only 6% of Gazans’ food needs can be met. The cruelty stays horrendous, the international collusion shameful.

The extent of bombing on Gaza makes it even more difficult to refute evidence about a people’s survival.

Euro Med Human Rights Monitor record Israel dropping 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, including the use of cluster and phosphorous bombs in densely populated areas, ‘the single greatest threats to civilians in modern armed conflicts’ The journal ‘Responsible Science’ of March 2024, documents Gaza being bombed with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs in an area of of only 360 square kms, far smaller than the 900 square kms to which the people of Hiroshima were subject in 1945.

Survival? Two million Gazans have been displaced many multiple times due to their homes being destroyed, a destruction then followed by intense bombardment of alleged safe tent encampments. A week ago in Beit Lahiya in the north of Gaza, Israeli forces lay siege and continued air strikes in an apparent bid to kill, starve and expel the remaining inhabitants, all part of their proud Dahiya Doctrine to use overwhelming force to destroy civilian infrastructure and create fear among surviving civilians.

A process of normalisation

The outside world’s attitude towards Israeli slaughter in Gaza and on the West Bank contributes to a fatalism that nothing can be done, that awful events will have to be ignored, other pressing demands must take priority.

If steps towards normalisation of atrocity occur, survival of a people is even more at risk.

The arrival of a Trump administration wedded to a so called defence of Israel’s right to do what it likes is imitated in Australia by the excruciating grovelling of Coalition spokesperson Sussan Ley whose understanding of the colonisation of Palestine is limited to her repeat of the cliché that Israel has a right to defend itself. The Labor government does the same, though it has just managed a slight change of direction by a recent decision to recognise Palestine sovereignty over resources in their own lands.

In Western democracies, by concealing, denying or disguising oppression by Israel, mainstream media’s cowardly reluctance to confront establishment interests, makes the survival of vulnerable peoples even more difficult. Respected American journalist had witnessed such conduct. In his memoir ‘Reporter’, he concluded, ‘the powerful prey mercilessly on the powerless up to and including mass murder, the powerful lie constantly about their predations, the natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.’

Political and media acceptance that Israeli apartheid, racism and genocide could be regarded as normal, would have flow on effect in citizen understanding and in the operation of public institutions. A normalisation culture can build in state bureaucracies, within the top echelons of private corporations, in military and scientific establishments and within the cabinets of democratic and authoritarian governments.

Survival threatened ?

Over and above consternation that international humanitarian law is ignored, that a Trump administration will continue the Biden policy to arm Israel, threats to the survival of the people of Palestine look ominous. But the abolition of such threats should or at least could become the priority for any groups or individuals concerned to challenge destructive power, who want to champion human rights, express life enhancing, non destructive uses of power.

In Australia’s forthcoming Federal election, political grandstanding about ‘the cost of living’ will be repeated ad nauseam. That claim could be given another interpretation. Threats to the survival of Palestine are about the costs of not living. How do politicians standing for election respond to that issue? Across the nation, they can and must be held accountable for their answers.

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