Desensitised politics is a gift for Israel’s genocide in Gaza

The US government’s hypocrisy is a bottomless pit that matches Israel’s penchant for the cruel and macabre. “The images and video of what appear to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israeli air strike are deeply disturbing, and we have made our concerns clear to the Israeli government,” an unnamed White House spokesperson for the US National Security Council told the Times of Israel. To dispute the images by using the words “appear to be” lets Israel off the hook, and grants it even more impunity to carry out its genocide.

The US, which has supplied Israel with weapons and aircraft to be used in the genocide, is attempting to cast doubt on video footage that clearly shows displaced Palestinians burning to death.

This illustrates how desensitised politics has become.

One can only hope that reports by human rights organisations will not attempt to dilute such horrific crimes with the same kind of neutralised and politicised jargon, as has happened on numerous occasions before to avoid making any possible direct link between Israel and war crimes. With this in mind, at the very least we should remember that Israel has no fear about either committing genocide or being seen to commit genocide, so we must fight this impunity with justice. Not the neutral “justice” promoted by international institutions, I might add.

READ: World will be complicit in Israel’s ‘crimes’ if they don’t stop them, Israeli rights groups warn

At the time of writing, a Google search for the news about Israel burning Palestinians to death in Deir Al-Balah does not turn up a single official statement or press release from any international entity, government or organisation.

Does burning Palestinians to death also fall under Israel’s purported right to “self-defence”?

In his speech at the UN General Assembly, Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned hypocritically, “The level of impunity in the world is politically indefensible and morally intolerable.” What Guterres failed to mention is that the current impunity did not happen in a vacuum. It is a result of the Zionist movement getting unqualified support from former colonial powers for the colonial project in Palestine. For world leaders and diplomats not to foresee what would happen was clearly not a genuine oversight; it was a premeditated decision that has other precedents which Israel has adapted according to what the international community has normalised.

The colonised may not be able to speak freely, but the historical evidence of mass slaughter, rampages, theft and land appropriation are well documented. There simply is no excuse. Allowing Israel’s colonial enterprise to exist is a crime in itself, dependent as it is on ethnic cleansing and illegal settlements.

Meanwhile, UN experts are warning that international law is on the verge of collapse. This is what Israel and its accomplices both need and want. Palestinians have been clamouring for attention but their cries were never loud enough, or important enough, for the international community to act.

Even as Palestinians burn to death in Israel’s genocidal actions, with witnesses not even having access to water to at least attempt to douse the flames, their voices go unheeded; thousands of lives have been permanently extinguished. Instead, world leaders focus on the symbolism of the Nobel Peace Prize, for example, as EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen did, without even a nod to the genocidal attacks Israel is inflicting on Palestinians. “We have the duty to remember,” von der Leyen wrote on X, speaking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How about your duty to remember Palestinians? Your duty to coerce Israel into decolonisation? The international community’s duty not to have allowed Israel to exist at all? Colonialism proved its evil time and time again; the international community has gradually succeeded in enabling Israel to stretch those parameters into previously unimaginable horrors. When genocide and self-defence become interchangeable under the auspices of human rights, the point of no return is no longer an elusive metaphor. Desensitised politics is a gift for Israel’s genocide.

Desensitised politics is a gift for Israel’s genocide in Gaza