By Panchami Manjunatha
On 13th October 2023, a UN Spokesperson announced that the Israeli military has directed the evacuation of Northern Gaza, a region that is home to 1.1 million people – about half the territory’s population – within 24 hours. Evacuate to exactly where? Nobody knows. In summer 2014, the Israeli military launched a deluge of airstrikes that killed over 535 Palestinian children in Gaza over the period of 50 days. In October 2023, the same military killed over 600 Palestinian children in Gaza in just six days. The bodies are piling up faster than we can count. Entirety of Gaza is surrounded in complete darkness as healthcare systems collapse and the occupying forces give warnings to evacuate residential complexes in minutes before carrying out indiscriminate bombings, if these warnings are ever given at all. Human Rights Watch has confirmed the usage of white phosphorus by the Israeli military, putting civilians at risk of serious long-term injuries in clear violation of international law. To put things in context, the white phosphorus used burns at nearly 1500 degrees Fahrenheit – high enough to melt metal. It burns humans to the bone and is illegal to use in civilian areas.
The violence in Gaza visible to the media’s clamor now is neither sudden nor unanticipated. It shouldn’t faze us for anything but its brutality, which now finds its mention in the headlines. For nearly two decades, the world has overlooked over 2 million people living in Gaza, caged in an open-air prison with its airspace, borders and the sea under Israeli Control. Nearly half of Gaza’s population comprises people under 18 years who have grown up with no sense of safety or security. They have lived with their families being wiped out in bombardments, schools being indiscriminately attacked, and the lack of economic and social mobility within their own society. Most Palestinians have nothing to do with Hamas, but that doesn’t matter for people who speak the language of genocide and have sanctioned the fleeing of tens of thousands of Gazans on foot towards nowhere. The arming of radical, ideological settlers in settlements who have indiscriminately shot Palestinians across their settlements have nothing to do with Hamas. But it doesn’t matter as long as the same can be justified within a language of self-defense. The 6000+ bombs dropped in the last week on besieged Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, is the direct result of 75 years of global inaction towards the Israeli system of apartheid and occupation. It doesn’t matter whether the Hamas violence exists or not, the brutal dehumanization of Palestinian lives for decades has and continues to be sanctioned by the international community in plain sight.
The greatest irony of our times is how, despite this sheer dehumanization of human lives, we continue to find ways to condone the brutality of the occupation – effacing its criminality by emphasizing its victimhood. It remains much easier for us to recognize Palestinians as mere victims than to acknowledge that they have continued to resist the sixteen-year solitary confinement of an entire population in Gaza, and decades of military oppression and dispossession. They have done so by refusing to give up the erasure of their history and humanity. Everyday life in the besieged Gaza strip is a heroic act of resistance. They have taken the streets, written poems, and painted the military check posts that watch their house. They have sung songs and laid down their history in blood for the world to witness.
Yet today, as 1.1 million Gazans are ordered to evacuate to nowhere, and white phosphorus bombs are dropped on an entire population in complete darkness, cut off from electricity, healthcare and food, we look away. We call the bombs raining down on a dehumanized population ‘self-defense’. The terror that emanates from the violence that we have witnessed at this critical juncture will forever keep us captive, should we choose, yet again, to not recognize the systemic dispossession, displacement and murder of Palestinian lives as the name of this very ‘battle against terror’. To grieve violence without questioning the system within which the violence has been produced is to aid, abet, and sanctify that violence.
The very fact that people who support or call for the simple recognition of Palestinian right to dignity and freedom are constantly silenced by being called Hamas supporters lays bare the power of the narrative written by those who have amassed unaccountable power. This is the very power that has shielded 75 years of the occupier’s impunity at every juncture. The narrative is hijacked so brutally that those who question the settler military occupation that occupies an entire population and subjects them to a system of apartheid are instantaneously accused of being terrorist sympathizers. Those who question the shackles of the brutal reality within which we witness the production of this violence are accused of pandering to its spectacle and coming to its defense. This twisting of the narrative is not accidental. It is intended to silence any voice that calls for an end to Israeli occupation and apartheid, recognized by the leading international human rights organizations and scholars to be illegal under law. Under law.
The power they hold on the narrative to render us defenseless is not new. It is the cheapest trick in the history playbooks – the desire to paint every person who stands up to those in power as bloodthirsty terror mongers. We see this very narrative in play every time Palestinian civilians and journalists are called for interviews and immediately interrogated as to whether they support Hamas or not. But when the Israeli Defense Minister refers to the entirety of Gaza as ‘human animals’ who need to be obliterated, western governments arm the same military without batting an eyelid. The nuance dies its satiric death. Even then, those who refer to this as simple double standards do not do it justice. We must recognize it for what it is, as rightfully penned by journalist Hind Hassan, “a systemic and aggressive effort to ensure that Palestinian lives cannot be mentioned without mentioning terrorism and Hamas. It is an effort to sanctify racist dehumanization of Palestinian lives and suggest that they are somehow lesser victims paving way for the legitimization of indiscriminate attacks against them.”
The spectacle of Necropolitics is brutally clear – whose lives are dispensable and whose lives are not. When we refuse the narrative to cage us, we realize the absurdity of it all. It is baffling how we watch hospitals cut off from electricity, 1.2 million people being asked to vacate within 24 hours, civilians being ordered to evacuate their homes as neighborhood streets are being bombed, journalists being murdered in the hundreds, and impunity being safeguarded in open light in Parliaments and press conferences. Yet, we still believe that this war is about combating terror.
In the midst of all this, calling for all armed entities to adhere to the principles of International Humanitarian Law is necessary and imperative to attempt to salvage what remains of our common humanity. The rejection and opposition to the killing of noncombatants by all armed parties – Hamas included – is not being contested. Violence and loss of lives of civilians is not being celebrated, welcomed, and sanctioned. War crimes by any party cannot be justified. They demand accountability through just means. But what is being contested is using this attack to distort Palestinian right to freedom and use the “war on terror” narrative to decontextualize Palestinian lives. The struggle for Palestinian right to life, safety, freedom, and self-determination even when carried out through nonviolent civil disobedience movements like boycotts, strikes and protests for years, has been criminalized and termed as an illegitimate terrorism threat. As recently as June 2023, it was noted in a report to the Human Rights Council that rights of civil society are continuously being criminalized by Israeli authorities as a “part of the Israeli authorities goal of ensuring and enshrining permanent occupation at the expense of the rights of the Palestinian people.” The report found that the Israeli government is complicit in delegitimizing the Palestinian civil society organizations as “terrorists.” The simple existence of Palestinian lives has been termed as a terrorist threat in plain sight. Families have been dispossessed and settlers have been armed because the mere existence of Palestinians in their own land under brutal military occupation is certified as a terrorist threat.
As we watch the 2.3 million people in Gaza under a genocidal assault today, we must remember that the destruction of lives on ground is the direct result of 75 years of our pandering to the narrative written by the powerful. The peace we all pray for is caged within the deceit of our humanity. Recognition of the inalienable right of Palestinians to freedom and dignity is being rendered ‘contested’ and every voice that dares to oppose the brutal destruction of Palestinian lives is being criminalized and rendered suspect of pandering to violence. It is absurdly baffling that the only representation of Palestinian lives in the media today is either as victims or blood hungry terrorists. If we must fight terror, then we must learn to not sympathize with the Palestinian lives if we cannot recognize them as individuals entitled to be agents of their own freedom. If we must fight terror, we must recognize the right of every Palestinian child under rubble to resist the brutal dehumanization of their lives. If we must fight terror, we must resist the urge to look away every time those in power are allowed to legitimize their brutality in plain sight. If we must fight terror, we must have the basic humanity to call out governments across the world, particularly the United States and its allies, who continue to send weapons worth millions of dollars that wipe out hundreds of Palestinian lives and has sustained 75 years of military occupation and apartheid.
The 2.3 million people being ethnically cleansed in Gaza, the hundreds of people being arrested for raising the Palestinian flag on streets, and the thousands being apprehended for merely calling for the recognition of Palestinian right to freedom from occupation and apartheid do not require our sympathy. They require us to not be complicit in their erasure. They remind us to call upon what remains of our disappearing humanity. To not be complicit in sustaining regimes of apartheid and occupation that sanction the suspension of an entire population towards their imminent death and watch us with sadistic humor as they call it self-defense. Freedom remains an ironic rhetoric if its defense is that of a brutal system of apartheid and oppression. Our silence is our complicity. The neutrality of our spectatorship will not absolve us of its violence. Our words may be worthless to stop the genocidal assault on Palestinians today. But our silence will render this inhumane destruction legitimate, yet again. May we all have the courage to be Palestinians. May we all have the courage to look power in its eye and challenge its narrative for what it is. May we all be Palestinians and have the courage to not look away until they take their feet off our humanity.
Bio:
Panchami Manjunatha is a third-year law student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She is deeply passionate about defending human rights, standing up for the oppressed, and everything in between.
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