The world’s silence on Gaza’s genocide marks a failure of humanity and justice
If the Gaza war has taught us anything over the last 15 months, it has taught us how far the unbridled evil of genocide will go when the world fails to confront it. And we all know that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph, as the 18th century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke put it, is for good men to do nothing.
In this case, indeed good men chose to do nothing.
The fact we should ponder this new year — a stark, painful fact that figured prominently in the public discourse worldwide last year — is that the international community had failed to stop the perpetration of genocide in Gaza.
And that community fails in its legal and moral duty when it fails to uphold its commitment under its own law, in this case its obligation under the Right to Protect (R2P), a global commitment endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005 to prevent genocide, effectively to stop war crimes, mass atrocities, human rights violations, widespread suffering, ethnic cleansing and other similar horrors.
Not unless, that is, R2P is a mere concept, not yet a policy; a winsome aspiration not yet a reality. Or not unless, perhaps, there is a structural flaw in the global framework meant to uphold international law when it comes to the prevention of crimes against humanity.
Force of arms or persuasion
There has not been a war in modern times such as that in Gaza, where the perpetrators of genocide committed their genocidal acts while staring the international community in the face, daring it to authorise, by force of arms or persuasion, to implement its own resolutions on the ground — and where the first to blink was not the perpetrator. This takes, as they say, chutzpah, does it not?
The truth is that there is not absence of proof that Israel has committed — and continues, as we speak, to continue — war crimes but absence of will by the international community to stop it in its tracks. The proof is there in spades, provided by, among sundry other sources, South Africa’s team of lawyers to support their case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), charging the Zionist state with genocide, evidence that documents the unspeakable violence inflicted by that state’s military forces against all aspects of civilian life, from the destruction of schools and hospitals, marketplaces and mosques, agricultural land and water wells to the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, and also documents how all these acts, when taken together, represent calculated genocide.
Nearly 15 months after that blood-and-fire war was launched, and Gaza today is a rubble-filled wasteland, with more than 90 per cent of its 2.3 million inhabitants driven from their homes (driving Palestinians from their homes is a skill that Israel has honed well and become quite adept at since 1948) with most of them now sheltering, huddled together, cold and hungry, in tent encampments in South and Central Gaza. If that is not a crime against humanity, I don’t know what it is.
When this international community is unwilling or unable to enforce its own laws and implement its own resolutions, then a heedless regime like that of Israel’s, backed as it is by a big power like the United States. will not worry that there may be consequences for its genocidal action or even worry what others may think of it, knowing all the while it can scoff at an international body whose pronouncements will mean little at the end of the day.
Since the horrors of the Second World War, the notion of genocide has justifiably carried a profound meaning for the world we live in. Never again, stated representatives of our global village in a declaration at the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of War Crimes, a declaration later endorsed then ratified by UN General Assembly Resolution 260 A in 1948, shall we allow those horrors to recur in our world.
Sharing one’s own humanity
But they are recurring before our eyes today in northern Gaza, where Israel launched a vicious military campaign two months ago, during which its troops have burnt down hospitals, used starvation as a weapon of war and ethnically cleansed the region of tens of thousands of its residents — troops who have morphed from being, one imagines, well-integrated, terrifyingly normal young men into genocidal maniacs, wallowing in violence (you’ve seen the videos, no?), sucked into a bell curve of hate, a vortex of myth and deception about the Gazan ‘other’ who now belongs, in their minds, to a lower species of human beings, not worthy of sharing one’s own humanity with.
But, at the end of the day, it was the international community that stared through the abyss of genocide in Gaza yet opted to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the images of destitution it saw and the sounds of anguish it heard.
History will indubitably remember the shame of it.
Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
Sign up for the Daily Briefing
Get the latest news and updates straight to your inbox