This week an organisation called B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied [Palestinian] Territories, published two words on the front of its website; our genocide.
The accompanying text reads, ‘For nearly two years, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, acting in a systematic, deliberate way to destroy Palestinian society there through mass killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm and creating catastrophic conditions that prevent its continued existence in Gaza.’
B’tselem goes on to say that, ‘Israel is openly promoting ethnic cleansing and the destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure for individuals and the group, with 2 million people starved, displaced, bombed and left by the world to die. The genocide must be stopped.’
B’tselem’s Director, Yuli Novak, said the report on genocide being committed by Israel was ‘One that we never imagined we would have to write’. It was published Monday 28th July, the same day as an equally devastating report, by Physicians for Human Rights Israel, this second one titled, A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide.
It’s hard for most of us to understand the courage of Israeli NGOs like B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, whose activism already makes them outliers. For Israel, or rather the Israeli state, to be condemned by its own people, albeit a tiny minority, as committing genocide, is a political rupture. These two reports have violated a deeply-embedded psychological taboo about Israel’s supremacy as a victim-state, which has never been more exploited than by the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights tell the BBC they fear their staff will be subject to verbal or physical violence in response to these reports, both of which have been written by teams of Palestinians and Israelis who work together. Already constricted by the state of Israel, regarding, for example, what funding they can receive, these and the handful of other Palestinian-Israeli activist groups operating inside Israel deserve international support as they continue to speak out about the genocide the state of Israel is committing.
I’ve lived in Israel and in Palestine, including in Gaza; during my time inside Gaza (inside seems the only word to describe being quite literally imprisoned inside a territory where entry by land, air and sea is utterly controlled by Israeli forces) I lived in a state of almost constant anxiety, always knowing the worst could happen. And never did I dare to think the worst could be as catastrophic as this.
I wonder whether the courage of Israel’s activists is so troubling to many Israelis because of the traumas wreaked by the bloody Hamas attack almost two years ago. The fifty hostages who hopefully remain alive inside Gaza scrape at Israel’s festering wounds, its ability to function as a healthy society; the original calls for revenge against Gaza were completely understandable, if based on the chilling premise that collective punishment of an entire people is justified. Yet it is clearly the role of leaders to see beyond vengeance towards what makes a country genuinely safer and more at peace with itself. Israel is paying a terrible psychological price for its war-mongering government intent on cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank, of Palestinians. And as Owen Jones puts it in the Guardian, ‘[Israel]couldn’t have done it without the West’s help.’
Yuli Novak and her colleagues held a press conference this week to expose their report to journalists, and to the world. Yuli Novak also wrote, an op ed for the Guardian, where she said, ‘Genocide does not happen without mass participation: a population that supports it, enables it or looks away. That is part of its tragedy. Almost no nation that has committed genocide understood, in real time, what it was doing. The story is always the same: self-defense, inevitability, the targets brought it on themselves……..[therefore] we must do everything in our power to stop it.’
Ask yourself, what am I doing?
Image; taken from the B’tselem website
