Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Gaza just endured one of its worst days of bombing since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal onslaught, with the IDF ramping up aggressions as it prepares for the full military capture of the enclave.
On Thursday the United Nations rejected the US-Israeli plan for delivering aid to the besieged Palestinian territory. The plan has been slammed as a transparent attempt to use food to lure Gaza’s starving population southward into a concentrated area to prepare them for deportation, i.e. ethnic cleansing.
If Gaza was populated by Jews and the people massacring its inhabitants were Muslims, nobody would have any trouble calling this thing what it is. The words “genocide” and “Holocaust” would’ve been appearing in the news every single day for the last 19 months.
Except we all know it wouldn’t have gone on for 19 months. In the eyes of the western empire, there are some people who may be murdered with mass military violence, and others who may not be. There are some types of children who can be photographed with their ribcages sticking out because of deliberately inflicted starvation without causing much of a stir, and there are other types of children for whom such photographs would shake the earth.
In the eyes of the western empire, Jews are considered fully human, while Muslims and Arabs are not. A massacre of Jews is a terrible, unforgivable atrocity which cries out to the heavens for limitless vengeance, while Israel’s daily massacres of Palestinians merit nothing more than a footnote.
If Gaza was populated by Jews and the people conducting these daily massacres were Muslims, the western empire would have long ago intervened to stop this. Instead we get swamp monsters like Steve Witkoff recycling the bogus Biden administration line that “the Israeli government is a sovereign government; they can’t tell us what to do and we can’t tell them what to do,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying he’s “concerned” about the humanitarian situation in Gaza but doesn’t see any alternatives — just like his predecessor Antony Blinken constantly did.
It’s so glaringly, painfully obvious what we’re looking at. So completely blatant and undisguised. The only thing keeping people from seeing this genocide for what it is and calling a spade a spade is the fact that its victims happen to belong to a religion and an ethnicity that has been systematically dehumanized for decades in order to justify the acts of mass military violence that have been aggressively normalized in our collective psychology. Westerners have been indoctrinated by domestic propaganda into seeing Arabs and Muslims as less than human, in much the same way Israelis themselves have been.
It’s so gross and uncomfortable to have to keep finding new ways to say “Imagine if this was happening to a population you actually care about,” but it seems like that’s the only way a lot of people are going to open their eyes and look at this thing. Until you begin to entertain the possibility that the people suffering in Gaza might actually be similar to you and the people you consider human, it’s just going to be a big blind spot for you.
It should not be necessary to do this. It should be obvious to all of us that humans are humans regardless of their race or religion or any other way they might show up as a bit different from us. We should all have been taught this as young children.
But that’s where we’re at as a civilization right now. A genocide happening right in front of us, and people like me going “Imagine if they belonged to a religion that you HAVEN’T been trained to fear and despise!”
It’s undignified, and it says ugly things about our society that this is still one of the most effective ways to get this message across. But we can only begin the journey toward a healthy world from where we are standing here and now.
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Feature image by UNRWA via Wikimedia Commons.
