A brutal Nakba-II is underway in Gaza. “The human animals” — as described by the Israeli defence minister — face imminent annihilation or eviction without distinction between children, women, critically injured patients on life support, rescue workers or journalists.
Before explaining the real cause of the current misery of Palestinians, let us first refresh what Nakba is about? Palestinians around the globe mark the Nakba to reminisce systematically designed ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The word means catastrophe and is synonymous with racial discrimination, displacement and disempowerment of Palestinians.
“Having secured the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, on May 14, 1948, as soon as the British Mandate expired, Zionist forces declared the establishment of the State of Israel, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war,” says an Al-Jazeera article (May 15, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/15/nakba-mapping-palestinian-villages-destroyed-by-israel-in-1948).
Why does the Nakba Day (May 15) remain a watershed in Palestinians’ struggle? On this day, the Zionist military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and captured 78 per cent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 per cent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.
Back first to media casualties. Immediately after the Palestine TV journalist Mohammad Abu Hattab was killed with his family in an Israeli airstrike, his colleague Salman Al-Bashir removed his protective gear marked PRESS on air, and said: “We can’t take it anymore, we are exhausted. We are victims. The only difference between us is the time of death. We are killed one after another. And no one cares about the catastrophe or the crime that we endure in Gaza,” Hattab said on air.
According to latest figures by the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 33 journalists and media workers have been killed since Israel launched its offensive on Gaza after the Hamas attack on Oct 7. They include 28 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese. Moreover, UNRWA, the multilateral body’s relief agency, has reported loss of 70 staffers in Israeli bombings.
Amid this Craig Mokhiber, Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, dropped a conscience-jarring letter to his boss, saying he was quitting over UN failures in Palestine and elsewhere.
His heart-wrenching description of how geopolitical interest and allegiance to the Israeli lobby trump morality and human rights is worth reproducing: “In recent decades, key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the US, and to fear of the Israel Lobby, to abandon these principles, and to retreat from international law itself.”
“We have lost a lot in this abandonment, not least our own global credibility. But the Palestinian people have sustained the biggest losses as a result of our failures. It is a stunning historic irony that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in the same year that the Nakba was perpetrated against the Palestinian people,” Mokhiber wrote. “This is a textbook case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine,” he underlined.
Mokhiber then went on to encapsulate the role of the collusion among global political, financial and corporate actors in abetting Israel’s occupation and brutalities.
“What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities,” he wrote.
But not many — ensconced in the privileged environment of the UN headquarters — would dare call out supporters of Israeli aggression, or those refusing to support a ceasefire i.e. Israel apologists.
Even the media belongs to the large Western body of these apologists. Name any outlet, and they would equate the Israeli genocide with Hamas’s violent campaign including the attack on October 7. No one condones terror against civilians and non-combatants. But looking at this attack in isolation of the litany of Israeli aggression, occupation of Palestinian lands, systematic disempowerment and the state of siege it has laid around Gaza and the West Bank, is grossly unfair, if not racist.
Instead of frantic calls for ceasefire, publications such as The Economist (Nov 2, Why Must Israel Fight on) peddle the same apologetic argument that the “only path to peace lies in dramatically reducing Hamas’s capacity to use Gaza as a source of supplies and a base for its army. Tragically, that requires war.”
It is a direct endorsement of war that would eventually displace nearly two million Palestinians and morph into Nakba-II, burying all the advocacy for democratic rights, morality and rule of law as well as calls for end to racial discrimination.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 7th, 2023.
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