There is no end in sight for the massacre in Gaza. Nearly two years after the start of Al Aqsa Flood, the United Nations Human Rights Council has – finally – declared Israel’s war in Gaza genocide. Seventy-two pages, with hundreds of footnotes, and a litany of atrocity stories catalogue the devastating human destruction. The details are gruesome. Extermination, torture, sexual violence, and starvation are not outliers but the systematic instruments of genocide.
And yet, anyone with an internet connection and a conscience is witness to these horrors in real time: videos, livestreams, photos, and eyewitness testimony streamed straight to our palms. The evidence was always there.
So why did it take this institution to speak in plain terms? Why, after months of slaughter and daily images of devastation, did this international body only now name what many already knew for so long?
So far, the United Nations has been unwilling and unable to stop the genocide. Member states have also seen what we have seen., And yet, notwithstanding the actions of the Palestinian resistance, including Iran and Yemen, there has been no direct military intervention to stop it.
The United States has led a campaign to normalize and obscure the violence – politically, rhetorically, and materially – while others have moved between active intervention and quiet, or sometimes loud, acquiescence. The world has cleaved into two camps: those trying to stop the killing and those doing everything in their power to let it continue. Those in the second group encompass a wide range of activities, from doing nothing to actively promoting and engaging in the genocide or by attacking and killing those who are opposed to it.
“The colonial world is the Manichean world,” wrote Frantz Fanon. Split into stark binaries, nuance is excised by force. Those are the conditions not of the Native’s own making but brutally thrust upon them. War ends nuance. Bombing a hospital ends nuance. Shrapnel tearing children apart ends nuance. Systemic sexual violence and torture end nuance. Genocide ends nuance.
That is why I have come to see Gaza as more than war, and even more than genocide. What is unfolding is ritualized violence: collective, ceremonial, enacted like a grim sacrament. Ritual human sacrifice may sound archaic or sensational. But if we understand ritual as patterned, public, and meaningful violence – performed to communicate power, to terrify, to extinguish life – then the term clarifies what otherwise seems senseless.
Chinese professor Jiang Xuechin described the Palestinian genocide as ritual human sacrifice in a recent YouTube lecture. While I agree with his definitions, his historical example of the Aztecs doing human sacrifice obscures more than it illustrates the kind of colonial violence practiced in Gaza.
Excerpted: ‘How the West Normalizes the Crimes of Zionism’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org