October 2, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
On 6th October 2023, I received an update on an education project at the half-way point of delivery in the Gaza strip managed in partnership with a Palestinian NGO. Attached to the report were multiple photographs of smiling children, relaxed in each other’s company, enjoying their journey in education. Four hundred children were enrolled in the programme from Beit Lahia in the north, Deir al-Balah and Maghazi in the centre, and Rafah in the south. They are all places that have been burned into our psyches by endless atrocities over the past year. They have at times masqueraded as ‘safe zones’ as Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were already refugees from the 1948 Nakba, have been forcibly displaced multiple times. The world has discovered that there are no safe zones in Gaza.
I have lost contact with the children on our programme and have no way of knowing if they are alive or dead, have suffered bereavement or life-changing injuries, or are among the 17,000 young people unaccompanied or separated from their guardians. They are almost certainly in need of mental health and psychosocial support, living in tents or schools converted into make-shift shelters, malnourished, dehydrated and suffering from infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, jaundice and acute respiratory infections. They may count among the 10,119 students killed or 15,739 injured over the past year and definitely number among the 625,000 young people who were unable to access formal education for the second consecutive year in September 2024. I have received intermittent contact through social media from the Director of our partner in Gaza, who is still striving, in the most appalling of circumstances, to organise structured play and mental health programmes for displaced children.
A history of oppression
For many in the media, the historical starting point of the conflict in Gaza was the Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,139 people. History had in fact led us to that point. My organisation, the Centre for Global Education, was providing formal education classes to children in Gaza because nearly 200 schools were forced to double-shift, meaning that two school populations shared the same building, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Double-shifting became necessary because of Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007 which prevented the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from importing the construction materials to build the number of schools needed for Gaza’s 290,000 school students. Israel considered such materials to be ‘dual use’ with the potential to be co-opted for military purposes. This security imperative was repeatedly invoked to impose a blockade that decimated the economy and reduced the majority of Gazans to penury. By 2015, the World Bank found that Gaza had the highest unemployment rate in the world at 43 percent and UNRWA alerted the world to the fact that without ‘remedial action’, Gaza would not be a liveable place by 2020. The world instead ignored the warnings and Gaza’s crumbling infrastructure was unequal to the demands of its two million citizens. Living conditions deteriorated further when Israel launched four military campaigns on Gaza in 2008-09, 2011, 2014 and 2021 that followed Hamas’s taking control of the strip in 2007. Israel’s military described these campaigns as ‘mowing the lawn’, which involved periodically denuding the military capacity of Hamas but caused thousands of civilian casualties and deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure.
It was the former British prime-minister, David Cameron, who described Gaza as a ‘giant, open prison’ but such rhetoric was not converted into sanctions on Israel which blockaded Gaza with impunity and enjoyed lucrative trading relations with the European Union under the ‘EU-Israel Association Agreement’. And, of course, Israel’s largest donor and protector is the US which has just supplied an arms package of $8.7 billion at the same time as it is allegedly working toward a ceasefire in Lebanon and one year into a genocide in Gaza. That is additional to $3.8 billion given in aid to Israel annually. Small wonder that Israel continues to turn its face against meaningful negotiations toward a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon when it continues to enjoy the bountiful trade, arms, finance and diplomatic protection of its European and North American allies. Israel’s enablers have been recklessly prepared to set aside international law and, in particular, the July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, that declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, as unlawful under international law. The Reverend Dr Munther Isaac spoke for many when he delivered a devastating Christmas sermon in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. The ‘hypocrisy and racism of the Western world is transparent and appalling’, argued Rev Isaac while reflecting on the genocide in Gaza. Never again did he want to receive a lecture on human rights from the west and asked: ‘For those who are complicit, will you ever recover from this?’. That is a question the global North would do well to ruminate on as the ‘rules-based order’ lies in tatters.
Settler colonialism
Of course, the genocide in Gaza has been accompanied by an upsurge in human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank carried out by an emboldened Israeli military and colonist population. According to the UN, since 7 October, 676 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank with another twelve people killed by colonists. By comparison, 23 Israelis, including 17 members of Israeli forces and five settlers, were killed by Palestinians. Since 7 October 2023, 277 Palestinian households comprising 1,628 people, including 794 children, have been forcibly displaced in incidents involving colonists. In an interview with Lubnah Shomali, Advocacy Manager with the Palestinian NGO, BADIL, she told me there had been inadequate monitoring of where displaced Palestinians had taken refuge and how they were coping with the loss of their homes and livelihoods.
The number of Palestinians incarcerated in the West Bank since 7 October has surpassed 10,000, of whom nearly 5,000 are imprisoned under administrative detention orders meaning that they are held indefinitely without trial. In a report called ‘Welcome to Hell’, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’tselem gathered testimonies from Palestinian prisoners on their treatment in Israeli jails which revealed a regime that included:
“unrelenting physical and psychological violence, denial of medical treatment, starvation, withholding of water, sleep deprivation, and confiscation of all personal belongings. The overall picture indicates abuse and torture carried out under orders, in utter defiance of Israel’s obligations under domestic law and under international law”.
Meanwhile, Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank continues apace with between 600,000 and 750,000 colonists living in 290 illegal colonies and outposts devouring Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The West Bank has been in lockdown for much of the past year and there have been regular incursions into Palestinian refugee camps, particularly those in the northern West Bank such as Jenin, Tulkaram and Al Far’a. A total of 793 obstacles in the West Bank, including 89 permanently staffed checkpoints and 196 road gates, heavily restrict movement and deny access to services, an increase of 23 percent since June 2023. This fragmentation of the West Bank is exacerbated by Israel’s ‘separation barrier’ – deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice in an advisory opinion in 2004 – as it breaks up contiguous Palestinian urban and rural areas and severs community ties. B’tselem estimates that it has resulted in the annexation of almost 10 percent of the West Bank. These facts on the ground make a mockery of the two-state solution repeatedly proposed by the US as the only means to ending the conflict in the Middle-East.
A year of genocide
As we approach the first anniversary of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has claimed 41,000 Palestinian lives, it will echo through history as another example of Western powers prioritising selfish strategic interests above the rights of people in the global South. In the case of Palestine, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain pledged to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, to Western complicity in the occupation and accelerated colonisation of Palestinian land, we have witnessed the disposability of peoples of the South. Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, recognised in the Gaza genocide, a warning: “What we see in Palestine will also be the sufferings in the world of all the peoples of the South”. Picking up on this, Naomi Klein identified Israel’s “unending campaign” as a message: “that the gilded bubbles of relative safety and luxury that are dotted across our cruelly divided and fast-warming world will be protected at all costs. Up to and including with genocidal violence”.
And, now, Israel has turned this genocidal violence on Lebanon where there have been 1,600 deaths since 7 October 2023, 65 percent of whom have been killed in the past two weeks. We have seen the same pattern of mass displacement in Lebanon as witnessed in Gaza, with 150,000 internally displaced persons taking refugee in 800 shelters, mostly public schools, as another student population is denied access to education. Nesrine Malik, correctly identifies that “in terms of real and grave threats to regional stability, Israel is the pugnacious out-of-control force”. Hamas’s allies, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, have pledged to stand-down when there is a permanent ceasefire in Gaza which would also result in the release of Israeli hostages. The road to de-escalation is a clear and obvious one but has been consistently rejected by Israel’s far-right government.
Since the Nakba in 1948, Palestinians have repeatedly resisted the erasure of their political, social, and cultural identity. South Africa’s application for proceedings against Israel under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice, documented the extent of Israel’s scholasticide and attempts to erase historical memory in Gaza. Cheikh Niang, Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, argued that Israel no “longer hides its true intentions of ‘a second Nakba’, leaving the Palestinians [in Gaza] with three options: displacement, subjugation, or deaths — in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide”. “The Nakba, thus, is an ongoing process affecting the Palestinian people over generations”. Only courage and resilience have prevented the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Abu Rushdi, a 64-year-old grandfather from Gaza, speaking for many, said “We can build another house. But we can’t have another land that we can call home. We only have one, and that’s Palestine”.
Drawing upon this courage, activists across the world have tirelessly campaigned for a ceasefire and taken non-violent direct action to support the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement from student encampments for Palestine to the Belgian trade unionists who refused to handle arm shipments to Israel. We have witnessed the emergence of a powerful international solidarity movement for Palestine that rejects the craven complicity of Western states. As we approach the first anniversary of the genocide, we should sit upon the inspiring words of Irish novelist, Sally Rooney, “not to turn away, not to give into despair or fatigue, to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war. It is the least that we can do”.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education, Belfast, and editor of the journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review. He is the author of Global Learning and International Development in the Age of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2022).
On 6th October 2023, I received an update on an education project at the half-way point of delivery in the Gaza strip managed in partnership with a Palestinian NGO. Attached to the report were multiple photographs of smiling children, relaxed in each other’s company, enjoying their journey in education. Four hundred children were enrolled in the programme from Beit Lahia in the north, Deir al-Balah and Maghazi in the centre, and Rafah in the south. They are all places that have been burned into our psyches by endless atrocities over the past year. They have at times masqueraded as ‘safe zones’ as Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were already refugees from the 1948 Nakba, have been forcibly displaced multiple times. The world has discovered that there are no safe zones in Gaza.
I have lost contact with the children on our programme and have no way of knowing if they are alive or dead, have suffered bereavement or life-changing injuries, or are among the 17,000 young people unaccompanied or separated from their guardians. They are almost certainly in need of mental health and psychosocial support, living in tents or schools converted into make-shift shelters, malnourished, dehydrated and suffering from infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, jaundice and acute respiratory infections. They may count among the 10,119 students killed or 15,739 injured over the past year and definitely number among the 625,000 young people who were unable to access formal education for the second consecutive year in September 2024. I have received intermittent contact through social media from the Director of our partner in Gaza, who is still striving, in the most appalling of circumstances, to organise structured play and mental health programmes for displaced children.
A history of oppression
For many in the media, the historical starting point of the conflict in Gaza was the Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,139 people. History had in fact led us to that point. My organisation, the Centre for Global Education, was providing formal education classes to children in Gaza because nearly 200 schools were forced to double-shift, meaning that two school populations shared the same building, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Double-shifting became necessary because of Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007 which prevented the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from importing the construction materials to build the number of schools needed for Gaza’s 290,000 school students. Israel considered such materials to be ‘dual use’ with the potential to be co-opted for military purposes. This security imperative was repeatedly invoked to impose a blockade that decimated the economy and reduced the majority of Gazans to penury. By 2015, the World Bank found that Gaza had the highest unemployment rate in the world at 43 percent and UNRWA alerted the world to the fact that without ‘remedial action’, Gaza would not be a liveable place by 2020. The world instead ignored the warnings and Gaza’s crumbling infrastructure was unequal to the demands of its two million citizens. Living conditions deteriorated further when Israel launched four military campaigns on Gaza in 2008-09, 2011, 2014 and 2021 that followed Hamas’s taking control of the strip in 2007. Israel’s military described these campaigns as ‘mowing the lawn’, which involved periodically denuding the military capacity of Hamas but caused thousands of civilian casualties and deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure.
It was the former British prime-minister, David Cameron, who described Gaza as a ‘giant, open prison’ but such rhetoric was not converted into sanctions on Israel which blockaded Gaza with impunity and enjoyed lucrative trading relations with the European Union under the ‘EU-Israel Association Agreement’. And, of course, Israel’s largest donor and protector is the US which has just supplied an arms package of $8.7 billion at the same time as it is allegedly working toward a ceasefire in Lebanon and one year into a genocide in Gaza. That is additional to $3.8 billion given in aid to Israel annually. Small wonder that Israel continues to turn its face against meaningful negotiations toward a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon when it continues to enjoy the bountiful trade, arms, finance and diplomatic protection of its European and North American allies. Israel’s enablers have been recklessly prepared to set aside international law and, in particular, the July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, that declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, as unlawful under international law. The Reverend Dr Munther Isaac spoke for many when he delivered a devastating Christmas sermon in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. The ‘hypocrisy and racism of the Western world is transparent and appalling’, argued Rev Isaac while reflecting on the genocide in Gaza. Never again did he want to receive a lecture on human rights from the west and asked: ‘For those who are complicit, will you ever recover from this?’. That is a question the global North would do well to ruminate on as the ‘rules-based order’ lies in tatters.
Settler colonialism
Of course, the genocide in Gaza has been accompanied by an upsurge in human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank carried out by an emboldened Israeli military and colonist population. According to the UN, since 7 October, 676 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank with another twelve people killed by colonists. By comparison, 23 Israelis, including 17 members of Israeli forces and five settlers, were killed by Palestinians. Since 7 October 2023, 277 Palestinian households comprising 1,628 people, including 794 children, have been forcibly displaced in incidents involving colonists. In an interview with Lubnah Shomali, Advocacy Manager with the Palestinian NGO, BADIL, she told me there had been inadequate monitoring of where displaced Palestinians had taken refuge and how they were coping with the loss of their homes and livelihoods.
The number of Palestinians incarcerated in the West Bank since 7 October has surpassed 10,000, of whom nearly 5,000 are imprisoned under administrative detention orders meaning that they are held indefinitely without trial. In a report called ‘Welcome to Hell’, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’tselem gathered testimonies from Palestinian prisoners on their treatment in Israeli jails which revealed a regime that included:
“unrelenting physical and psychological violence, denial of medical treatment, starvation, withholding of water, sleep deprivation, and confiscation of all personal belongings. The overall picture indicates abuse and torture carried out under orders, in utter defiance of Israel’s obligations under domestic law and under international law”.
Meanwhile, Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank continues apace with between 600,000 and 750,000 colonists living in 290 illegal colonies and outposts devouring Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The West Bank has been in lockdown for much of the past year and there have been regular incursions into Palestinian refugee camps, particularly those in the northern West Bank such as Jenin, Tulkaram and Al Far’a. A total of 793 obstacles in the West Bank, including 89 permanently staffed checkpoints and 196 road gates, heavily restrict movement and deny access to services, an increase of 23 percent since June 2023. This fragmentation of the West Bank is exacerbated by Israel’s ‘separation barrier’ – deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice in an advisory opinion in 2004 – as it breaks up contiguous Palestinian urban and rural areas and severs community ties. B’tselem estimates that it has resulted in the annexation of almost 10 percent of the West Bank. These facts on the ground make a mockery of the two-state solution repeatedly proposed by the US as the only means to ending the conflict in the Middle-East.
A year of genocide
As we approach the first anniversary of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has claimed 41,000 Palestinian lives, it will echo through history as another example of Western powers prioritising selfish strategic interests above the rights of people in the global South. In the case of Palestine, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain pledged to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, to Western complicity in the occupation and accelerated colonisation of Palestinian land, we have witnessed the disposability of peoples of the South. Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, recognised in the Gaza genocide, a warning: “What we see in Palestine will also be the sufferings in the world of all the peoples of the South”. Picking up on this, Naomi Klein identified Israel’s “unending campaign” as a message: “that the gilded bubbles of relative safety and luxury that are dotted across our cruelly divided and fast-warming world will be protected at all costs. Up to and including with genocidal violence”.
And, now, Israel has turned this genocidal violence on Lebanon where there have been 1,600 deaths since 7 October 2023, 65 percent of whom have been killed in the past two weeks. We have seen the same pattern of mass displacement in Lebanon as witnessed in Gaza, with 150,000 internally displaced persons taking refugee in 800 shelters, mostly public schools, as another student population is denied access to education. Nesrine Malik, correctly identifies that “in terms of real and grave threats to regional stability, Israel is the pugnacious out-of-control force”. Hamas’s allies, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, have pledged to stand-down when there is a permanent ceasefire in Gaza which would also result in the release of Israeli hostages. The road to de-escalation is a clear and obvious one but has been consistently rejected by Israel’s far-right government.
Since the Nakba in 1948, Palestinians have repeatedly resisted the erasure of their political, social, and cultural identity. South Africa’s application for proceedings against Israel under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice, documented the extent of Israel’s scholasticide and attempts to erase historical memory in Gaza. Cheikh Niang, Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, argued that Israel no “longer hides its true intentions of ‘a second Nakba’, leaving the Palestinians [in Gaza] with three options: displacement, subjugation, or deaths — in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide”. “The Nakba, thus, is an ongoing process affecting the Palestinian people over generations”. Only courage and resilience have prevented the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Abu Rushdi, a 64-year-old grandfather from Gaza, speaking for many, said “We can build another house. But we can’t have another land that we can call home. We only have one, and that’s Palestine”.
Drawing upon this courage, activists across the world have tirelessly campaigned for a ceasefire and taken non-violent direct action to support the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement from student encampments for Palestine to the Belgian trade unionists who refused to handle arm shipments to Israel. We have witnessed the emergence of a powerful international solidarity movement for Palestine that rejects the craven complicity of Western states. As we approach the first anniversary of the genocide, we should sit upon the inspiring words of Irish novelist, Sally Rooney, “not to turn away, not to give into despair or fatigue, to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war. It is the least that we can do”.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education, Belfast, and editor of the journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review. He is the author of Global Learning and International Development in the Age of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2022).
Source: Al Jazeera
This feature length investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year long conflict.
The I-Unit has built up a database of thousands of videos, photos and social media posts. Where possible it has identified the posters and those who appear. The material reveals a range of illegal activities, from wanton destruction and looting to the demolition of entire neighbourhoods and murder.
The film also tells the story of the war through the eyes of Palestinian journalists, human rights workers and ordinary residents of the Gaza Strip. And it exposes the complicity of Western governments – in particular the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus as a base for British surveillance flights over Gaza.
“The west cannot hide, they cannot claim ignorance. Nobody can say they didn’t know,” says Palestinian writer, Susan Abulhawa. This is “the first livestream genocide in history … If people are ignorant they are wilfully ignorant,” she says.
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