Politicians want to normalize what’s going on in Gaza. Our moral indignation will not allow it.
The more shocking the carnage becomes, the more those who are expressed are sanctioned. This shows how an issue is.
By Nesrine Malik
Shocking images. Unbearable videos. Blurned posts that only a consent button will view. For a year and a half now, “sensitive image” warnings have been suspended that the world has seen Gaza. Sometimes these scenes interrupt my daily life, coming back to me suddenly, like a forgotten nightmare, which we remember as if it were real. But without the relief that all of this was just a dream. Last week, I looked at images that showed what seemed to be the broken and headless corpse of a baby. I have seen shredded body parts gathered in plastic bags. I heard the cries of the dying and the silence of the dead, certain by whole families while the cameras spun them. The Israeli assault against Gaza challenges immunization. Over time, even though the threshold of what is considered intolerable increases, the different styles and forms of murder continue to surpass all levels of numbness.
Meanwhile, politicians do one of these two things: either they lessen this historical calamity by using the bland language of encouragement to return to the negotiating table, as if all this was only a regrettable quarrel which could be resolved if only the heads were cooling a little; Either they reversed the disaster. Calling at the end of the massacre, rather than being the most natural of human instincts, is now a momentum which, in some countries, causes arrest or expulsion. This story makes the population of Gaza, however constantly present on our screens and our calendars by its daily massacre, so distant and so isolated. Gaza has been deported to another dimension in which no rule applies. Geographically, it was locked up and then torn from the earth. Journalists and foreign politicians are not authorized to enter it. Local journalists. International aid is blocked. Local humanitarian workers are murdered. International courts and human rights organizations speak with one voice of the criminal nature of what is happening. They and they are briefly ignored or attacked by Israeli sponsors.
And yet, despite the efforts to prevent from entering the foreigners and silencing those who are inside, the evidence of the illegality and the disproportion of the Israeli campaign in Gaza continue to increase. Last month, Israeli defense forces killed the Red Crescent Employees and buried them with their vehicles. Images recovered from a mobile phone show that the assertion of Israel, according to which the team’s activities were suspect, was false. The employee who filmed the video was found with a ball in the head. Before dying, he asked for forgiveness from his mother for his death, because he had chosen a dangerous job. How many of these crimes have taken place, committed and buried in the Darkness of Gaza, without images to contradict the assertions of Israel?
It may seem that Israel succeeds in taking the places of judge, juror and executioner and that he succeeds, with the support of the United States and the West, to exclude the Palestinian.Nes from the rest of humanity. But it is a task that now requires repressing. War intensifies and exceeds any justification, so that it can only be standardized by force. This force could be effective in the short term, but it is damaging over the long term. It requires resources, clashes and instability. By targeting students who mobilize against what is happening in Gaza, the American government has entered war with its own universities and triggered a conflict within them. By deporting students and academics, the Trump administration has embarked on a battle with its own legal system. Germany’s maneuvers to expel people involved in pro-Gaza demonstrations further accentuate this disturbing authoritarianism. It has become necessary to start the whole aircraft of the state because the extent of the mobilization in the face of the crisis in Gaza can no longer be broken by the repression alone.
This mobilization and the associated conflict only serve to highlight what Israel has resulted in the rest of the world. This only highlights personalities among demonstrators, such as Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University and holder of the green card which, through his lawyer, made overwhelming statements on what his detention reveals the war and the American immigration and justice system. This strengthens the links with the Palestinians that their opponents would like to break. And by lifting the challenges of the protest, it shows how these challenges are those of each – the right to freedom of expression and a fair trial, protection against state abuses and access to the very bases of humanity. What you are asked, if you don’t want to undergo repression is that you snatched your eyes. Instead of leaving Gaza from their internal policy, the allies of Israel brought the war home.
Combine this with death and famine that continue to intensify in Gaza, and you have the recipe not intimidation, but rather growing appetite for moral pressure and testimony. With political abdication, the type of conviction and alert which should come from the leaders did not take place, but it was transmitted. Just last week, the video newspaper and an interview with a traumatologist surgeon on BBC Newsnight revealed even more murders of innocent. In London, a demonstration stopped traffic. In Washington DC, during another demonstration, a banner bearing the names of the deaths was deployed. At Columbia University in New York, the Jewish students went to the doors to protest against the detention of their comrades by the customs police agency and the border control of the United States. The account of the murders of the Red Crescent employees has gone from the corpse, to the UN official, to the media. The responsibility of a ghost government, made up of people who no longer have any confidence or hope in political infrastructure, is built on Guingois. The opposite of discouragement, unlike which one could reasonably expect after a year and a half, has settled.
One might have the impression that life continues, just like the war in Gaza. One might have the impression that a failure is being occurring, with Israel and its allies which push the public and the whole of the world order to war. And the presidency of Donald Trump floods the region of multiple shocks, from economics to politics. But it is a reluctant and turbulent status quo, because what happens to a lot is simply unbearable. And if the demonstrations, the testimonies and the confrontations can save even one life or to advance the end of the one minute war, the mobilization will continue.
Each corpse, each city reduced in the field of ruins, each child covered in blood is not in the distance, on a desperate land, but rather in the depths of the human race. Because it is impossible for a world to show the daily ravage of a people and to be intimidated or exhausted by addiction. Some may choose to ignore it, or justify it, or even support it, but they can never normalize it.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
Translation: LG for the
Source: The Guardian
