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I fear what is happening in Gaza is a bloody portent of the future for billions of people

7 Apr 2024

The genocide unfolding in Gaza shows, in technicolour horror, the hypocrisy of the West, shines a withering light on the international rules-based order, but most importantly reminds us (as if this was needed) that the lives of some people are worth considerably less than the lives of others.

We are now a quarter of the way through 2024, and I feel a deep weariness and melancholy. A despondency of the kind that fills one’s mind with thoughts of flight, a desire to hide, or to disappear for a time.

Of course, there is much to feel weary about. I suspect that many of us, even in 2024, are experiencing a lingering pandemic fatigue. And of course we have our criminally incompetent government, load shedding, Cabinet minister idiocy and an economic meltdown.

But the root of so much of this exhaustion is the horror unfolding in Gaza. And more specifically (for me) is the wanton slaughter of its children.

All genocides begin with vilification. The first step is dehumanisation when the other is described as a “savage race” (as the Germans did with the Herero and Nama people before the Namibian genocide of 1904-1908); as the Hutus did in Rwanda in 1994 by positioning the Tutsis as “dangerous, inferior and as less than human”, and of course the Nazi dehumanisation of Jews to facilitate the Holocaust.

Soon after 7 October 2023, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said “we are fighting against human animals”. Later, Rami Igra, previously the head of division with Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) stated that there “are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza over the age of four, and any child over the age of four deserves to be starved”. In another interview he displayed his genocidal worldview even more openly when he declared that the entire population of Gaza should be considered “combatants”.

I have no hesitation in condemning what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023. Peace activists were slaughtered, children murdered and kidnapped. It was an atrocity.

But what do we make of the orgy of racist bloodlust that has followed, led by the corrupt and murderous Benjamin Netanyahu and his messianic and genocidal cabinet?

Of course, some people have always been dispensable. Slavery and apartheid are but two examples.

The death and destruction have occupied my waking and sleeping hours. At the time of writing, more than 15,000 children have been killed. But even that unfathomable number does not come close to painting the full picture – the bodies that remain in rubble, the children who have suffered catastrophic injury, those whose limbs were amputated without anaesthetic, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of children experiencing chronic and severe trauma.

There are countless stories and narratives that try to paint a picture that moves us beyond the sterility of statistics. Al Jazeera’s “Know Their Names” scrolls the names of the first 10,000 children killed. The list would fill 150 pages.

But for me, the story that I am unable to chase from my mind is that of Hind Rajab. On 29 January 2024, an Israeli army tank killed Rajab’s aunt, uncle and four cousins in the car in which they were travelling. Only Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, survived the initial attack.

Layan called the Palestinian Red Crescent Society for help, and then was heard being shot by machine gun fire, shouting that a tank was right next to the car. Hind continued to plead for help. She was found dead 12 days later, alongside the bodies of her family and two dead paramedics.

We live in a world where misery and destruction have become ambient to the lives of millions.

Hind was traumatised, pleading with the world to help her. And the response of the Israeli forces? Murder the paramedics trying to reach her. She died alone, alongside the bodies of her cousin and family, possibly watching her paramedic rescuers being murdered on their way to help her.

According to the International Court of Justice, what is happening in Gaza today is plausibly genocide. That it is an actual genocide seems increasingly incontrovertible. The latest Israeli strategy of forcibly starving two million entrapped people is itself evidence enough.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War

But for me, beyond this horror lies another concern. I fear that what is happening in Gaza today is also a bloody portent of the future for billions of people. The genocide unfolding in Gaza shows, in technicolour horror, the hypocrisy of the West, shines a withering light on the international rules-based order, but most importantly reminds us (as if this was needed) that the lives of some people are worth considerably less than the lives of others.

Of course, some people have always been dispensable. Slavery and apartheid are but two examples.

But there is a broader and more worrying trend. The art and film of an epoch are often an accurate measure of our moral moment. Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable film, Zone of Interest, is a case in point. The film tracks the idyllic family life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in his family home which shares a wall with the camp.

There are no images of gas chambers or emaciated prisoners in the film. The camp is portrayed mostly via sound and rising smoke. The utter horror has to be intimated. Glazer has written (and Naomi Klein has echoed this) that a key part of what he was trying to do was to show how “genocide [became] ambient to their lives”.

We live in a world where misery and destruction have become ambient to the lives of millions. When the president of the US, Joe Biden, casually licks at a mint ice cream while answering questions about a ceasefire in Gaza, the murder of more than 15,000 children has become ambient.

When the only mention of children in Gaza at an entire Oscar ceremony – Glazer’s – attracts controversy, with vacuous celebrities vying for attention wearing $10,000 dresses, genocide has become ambient.

If you are poor and live in the Global South, please do not harbour any illusions that what is happening to the children of Gaza will not one day happen to you.

How is it that the slaughter of 15,000 children by an occupying force running an open-air prison has not provoked widespread outrage? I fear that the capacity of so many to feel so little for the slaughter of the children of Gaza is a worrying portent.

Currently there are about 200,000 children in the Darién Gap, the jungle region between Colombia and Panama, a region characterised by disease, snakes and gangs of kidnappers.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, US politicians spoke of how Covid was rather useful due to the way in which it “culled people” – the elderly and those with weak immune systems (see Naomi Klein in her recent book Doppleganger).

On the Serbian border earlier this year, migrants were stripped of their clothes in freezing temperatures. Recently, a Republican politician in the US made a joke about dropping migrants out of helicopters into the sea. And as we have seen, the random shooting of migrants at borders has already begun.

This is my plea. If you are poor and live in the Global South, please do not harbour any illusions that what is happening to the children of Gaza will not one day happen to you. You are already partly dispensable.

But as the crises mount and you begin to threaten the moneyed political elites of the Global North, you will rapidly become fully dispensable, perhaps even vermin.

The billionaires are already feeling beleaguered. So, imagine what is going to happen when climate breakdown really wreaks its havoc, and the pampered “mint ice cream” lives of those in the Global North becomes increasingly tenuous?

In her wonderful book, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, the Palestinian author Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian speaks of how “our existence is upsetting them”. This is true for the Palestinians, for the Roma people, for indigenous people, for trafficked children, for modern-day slaves, and it is increasingly becoming true for migrants.

The lives of the poor and marginalised have always “upset” the moneyed and the powerful. Expect, as the sun will rise in the east, that eventually you too will be treated like the children of Palestine. Dispensable. Less than human. Vermin.

You are already (or certainly will become) Palestinian. DM

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