The world has been watching a live-streamed genocide in Gaza for 130 days. Despite the media blackout Israel tried to impose, the world has been witnessing daily and hourly sheer destruction of lives and entire neighborhoods: watching gruesome videos of children pulled from under the rubble, families decimated, babies starving and hospitals bombed. Yet, it goes on, supported by billions of our tax dollars and abetted by our government. Despite the genocidal statements by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Biden administration has repeatedly said, “There are no red lines for Israel to cross.”
The double standards maintained by our media and politicians are sickening. For them, Hamas killing a thousand people, including 40 children, is horrific. But Israel killing thousands of people, including 13,000 children (before and after Oct. 7), is not. Hamas taking hostage 250 Israelis is cruel, but Israel imprisoning thousands of Palestinians, many of whom are children — with no charges or trial and often with torture —is not.
In the United Nations (UN), too, there is a double standard when it comes to Israel, as Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned from the UN, explains. For instance, the UN took action to end South African apartheid but has done nothing to end Israeli apartheid. Similarly, “there has been a stunning inconsistency with the rapidity” with which the International Criminal Court “was able to move with regard to Ukraine and the years upon years in which it has dragged its feet with regard to Palestine.”
Alongside a double standard, the media and politicians maintain a false historical narrative: It is presented as if Arabs and Muslims hate Jews, want to kill all Jews and don’t want peaceful coexistence. In reality, Jews flourished in Arab and Muslim societies while they were being persecuted all over Europe. It is the Zionist project, which was born in Europe in the 19th century, that broke centuries-old peace in Palestine. To create a majority Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionist project uprooted, killed and expelled as many Palestinians as possible. The ethnic cleansing project is ongoing, and the war on Gaza is part of that. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s “Ten Myths About Israel” debunks such myths well.
As I write this, Israel, after months of displacing more than a million Palestinians repeatedly, is now attacking Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza. Palestinians have nowhere else left in Gaza to flee, except to be expelled from Gaza, which is what Israel wants.
Norman Finkelstein, an expert on Gaza, notes, “The serial ethnic cleansings of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother once said about her experience during the Nazi holocaust: ‘It was not a war; it was an extermination. We were like cockroaches, scurrying this way or that whenever the light shone on us.’”
We are seeing a genocide, an ethnic cleansing, unfold before our eyes. As Reverend Munther Isaac powerfully reminded us in his Christmas sermon from Bethlehem, no apologies will be accepted afterward. A peaceful future for all is possible if only we give up double standards now and say, “never again for anyone.”