Salma Tahir
It brings me no pleasure to compare what Israel is doing in Gaza to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Because how can we not? Because we have things like ghettos, we have things like starvation, we have things like concentration camps, we have things like the systemic planned extermination of people. Palestinians are killed while seeking food at distribution sites. They have endured 710 days of absolute horror with 65,000 dead out of which 75% are women and children. 1,581 is the number of health workers, and 252 is the number of journalists killed in Gaza. 346 is the number of UN staff killed in Gaza. Hundreds, including children, are shot while trying to access food. Homes, shelters, hospitals, schools, mosques continue to be destroyed. Over 85 percent of Gaza lies in ruin.
To Gazans, death is cheaper. For Gazans, nowhere is safe and they have vowed to stay in their homes. Behind every statistic is a life, a story cut short, a family broken. Bibi Netanyahu and his right-wing, deeply Zionist, anti-Muslim government have no respect and regard for international law, or for the image hit that its only benefactor, the US, gets internationally and domestically from their rogue behaviour. Israelis have dehumanised Palestinians. They have proclaimed that the entire Palestinian nation was responsible for the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Palestinian martyrs are not faceless figures. They are fathers who will not return, mothers who will not hold their children and classrooms where empty desks wait for voices that will never come back.
The Israeli leadership’s words that “we are fighting human animals” are matched by deeds: indiscriminate bombardment making Gaza uninhabitable, the blocking of humanitarian aid, sexual and gender-based violence and a siege designed to starve the population to death. Together these constitute a pattern that demonstrate genocidal intent. In January 2024 the International Court of Justice put all states on notice that there was a serious risk that genocide was being committed in Gaza. Since then, the evidence has only deepened and the killings have multiplied.
Pakistan too has proposed a seven-point action plan:
a) Hold Israel accountable for war crimes
b) Create a joint Arab-Islamic task force
c) Pursue suspension of Israel’s UN membership
d) Implement punitive measures by member states
e) Demand the UNSC to ensure an immediate and permanent ceasefire and prisoner exchange
f) Ensure unrestricted humanitarian access to and inside Gaza; and
g) Revive the two-state solution through a genuine political process.
The trauma and grief of this genocide will last generations. We cannot afford to look away from it and normalise it while those who oppose it are silenced, beaten, criminalised, and smeared. What does this genocide mean for the international community? Every state has an obligation to prevent this genocide. This obligation requires action by halting the transfer of weapons and military support used in this genocidal act as well as using diplomatic and legal means. To do nothing is not neutrality. It is complicity. History will judge how the world responds.
No crime, however grave, justifies genocide. To respond to atrocity with atrocity is to abandon the very values international law was created to protect. Meanwhile, far too many states continue to look away, normalise the suffering.
A United Nations commission of inquiry says Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. A new report says there are reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law have been carried out since the start of the war with Hamas in 2023: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group, and preventing births. Today the international community is failing to act in Gaza. The UN Security Council must not be the graveyard of conscience. Israel’s brazenness and US’s bipartisan support has reduced international forums like the UN, Security Council, EU, etc. to mere rubber stamps. The rule-based order has become a ‘might-based disorder’.
The world has always respected power, brute and naked. Arms, trade, and diplomatic engagement with Israel continue unabated. And this is not just morally wrong. This is unlawful. Netanyahu sees Trump’s inaction as a free pass. The lesson should not be lost on us that rule-based order, human rights and international legality should not be reduced to clichés.
The Genocide Convention was born from the ashes of the Holocaust with a solemn vow: “Never again.” This vow is meaningless if it applies to some and not to others. What will we say when our children and grandchildren ask what we did while Gaza was burned to the ground? Every act of genocide is a test of humanity that binds us. Our common humanity demands action. Complicity with Gaza genocide is the shame of our time. May we as a people, choose compassion, wisdom and peace above all else. Silence is certainly not a virtue when it emboldens wrongdoers to continue injustice and oppression. Like bubbles from a straw, condemnations come a dime a dozen but like bubbles, no sooner are they issued than they burst; they are not meant to make a difference. When more than 62,000 people including 19,000 children have been killed in the past 22 months, and children are reduced to skeletons draped in fleshless skin, world leaders’ condemnations appear merely perfunctory, if not appallingly farcical, however well-meaning they claim to be. The future of millions demands justice, equality, and freedom, and is still within reach if we act now. Netanyahu’s security cabinet has voted to escalate a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal. Where is the action to stop it? People do not stop to think of the fact that every number was a human being, with all the hope and fear and feeling, all the love, curiosity and imagination that that entails. Israel’s ability to act without the slightest sanction has accelerated the erosion of international law and human rights norms.
For nearly two years, the world has witnessed a genocide live on its screens. We have seen children pulled from rubble, families starving in tents, hospitals turned to dust. We cannot say we did not know. Every image, every cry, every number has reached us in real time. Yet the killing goes on, the silence goes on, life goes on. The liberal democracies of the West, who preach human rights, tolerance, and justice are the very powers arming the genocide.
One day, the bombs will stop, the rubble will be cleared, the dead will be counted. And history will ask us a question more terrifying than any image we have seen: Where were you when Gaza was erased? What did you do? Where is the ‘never again’ for Gaza? Almost 80 years ago, the world made a pledge not to let the horrors of the Holocaust repeat. Yet, they are repeating today in Gaza.
The writer is an ex-banker and a freelance columnist. She can be reached at tbjs.cancer.1954 @gmail.com
