How not to despair as Israel’s genocide rages on

You follow the news day in and day out – and you despair.

Soon, it will be two years since Israel unleashed its latest round of genocidal savagery against defenceless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The question is no longer how a decent human being could call themselves an “Israeli”, let alone a Zionist, but, more urgently, how we, humanity at large, can manage to live with ourselves as this ferocious mass murder continues at the hands of a heartless, remorseless regime.

The numbers are staggering – in the tens of thousands, if not more. The crime is overwhelming, and the coalition of European and American states aiding and abetting – indeed joining – in the barbaric act leaves no room for hope.

How do we survive with a sense of morality, of right and wrong, in the face of such sadistic brutalities: war crimes and crimes against humanity, including mass murder, mass starvation, total occupation, targeted assassinations, the killing of journalists and medical professionals and the deliberate targeting of children – lured to places in search of food and then murdered – not to mention the systematic eradication of all signs of social life and the very infrastructure of civic existence?

This is Israel: a genocidal state. How would humanity live with that fact?

Metaphors and similes no longer suffice. It is wrong to call Zionists Nazis. They are not worse than the Nazis, nor better. They are not Nazis. They are Zionists. Evil comes in many forms: Nazis, the Islamic State group, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, Ratko Mladic, Adolf Hitler, Benjamin Netanyahu, Meir Kahane, Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, ad nauseam.

These are different forms of evil. We must keep them separate, box them inside different cages and allow for a precise anatomy of their evil deeds.

But as we bear witness to the unrelenting horrors emerging from Gaza – helplessly and hopelessly consuming daily reports, tallying the dead, doomscrolling video after video of unbridled cruelty – we inevitably ask ourselves how not to give in to the exhaustion of having to counter lies and distortions for so long, and in their most grotesque and insidious forms.

As we bear witness to the unrelenting horrors emerging from Gaza, we inevitably ask ourselves how not to give in to the exhaustion of countering lies and distortions for so long

And still, we are confronted with the obscenities of The New York Times, cataloguing the endless ways in which columnists like Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman chase after their own tails to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

However discredited it may be, the so-called paper of record and official organ of the Israeli settler-colonial project continues to shape the narrative of power.

For decent human beings – including countless Jews around the world who are horrified at what is being done in their names – the world today stands in a deep moral crisis.

A garrison state embodying a genocidal culture is carrying out an extermination campaign while powerful western states stand by, or worse, lend their support, helping to kill more, starve more children, even praising Israel for doing their “dirty work”. 

Meanwhile, the vast sea of humanity cannot even send a single small boat through to aid the people trapped in their own occupied and brutalised homeland.

This is where a profound sense of anomie, of moral fatigue, may creep in and set in.

Moral bankruptcy

You read The New York Times and fume with anger and loathing.

Since 8 October 2023, every day has brought grim stories of defenceless Palestinians killed and maimed – only for deranged Times columns and news reports to twist and massage, or outright deny, the facts of atrocities the world has already seen in 4K, all to make them palatable to its imperialist and Zionist readership.

Enter Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who recently devoted nearly two hours of his show to parsing whether the ongoing slaughter in Gaza constitutes “genocide”.

Why Gaza genocide denial should be criminalised worldwide

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All the while, he was utterly oblivious to how grotesque he would sound if the roles were reversed and Palestinians were slaughtering Jews in their tens of thousands.

Even Israel’s own classified military database shows that 83 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians, a casualty ratio “with few parallels in modern warfare”. Would he and his learned guest still be quibbling over distinctions between “genocidal rhetoric” and “genocidal intent”?

Consider Klein’s colleague Bret Stephens, the genocidal journalist whose unhinged 22 July column was headlined “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”.

He argues that for the term to apply, far more Palestinians would need to be killed. By this perverse logic, the systematic destruction of Palestinian life, culture, and society somehow does not count as genocide simply because the body count has not climbed to an arbitrarily higher threshold.

That leading medical and human rights groups have long established the actual death toll to be exponentially higher than official figures from Gaza seems irrelevant to his denial.

He writes:

If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry… has cited so far in nearly two years of war?

Read that again. How many more, exactly – prithee do tell – 10,000 more, 100,000, a million? How many corpses must pile higher? How many more Palestinians must be maimed and murdered en masse, or starved to death, before this clean-shaven propagandist would deign to name what murderous Israelis are doing?

Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Not that anyone is waiting for Stephens, Klein or anyone affiliated with the abomination known as The Times to acknowledge anything beyond what their apologetics for Israel’s genocide already confess. These denials stand as evidence of complicity, preserved so the world does not forget.

For such barbarism to be not only written but published, without shame, as Palestinians endure what the UN has called a “humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions” and a “worst-case scenario” of famine imposed on Gaza, only further exposes the depths of The Times’s moral bankruptcy.

But beware: if you were merely to breathe any of this out loud, the self-anointed guardian of truth might smear you as an “antisemite”.

Merchants of lies

The scandal of genocide denial is not limited to The Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, or any number of other shameless tabloids at the full service of Israeli hasbara.

It is endemic. The notorious Islamophobe and born-again Zionist Sam Harris has reemerged with a vengeance, endorsing the US and Israeli bombing of Iran and cheering his Israeli allies to press forward with their genocidal project.

He continues to demonise Muslims, erase the fact that Palestine is the birthplace of Christianity, and blame Palestinians simply for being Muslim and for trying to liberate their homeland from their vicious occupiers.

Harris has built a lucrative career on his pathological hatred and ignorance of Islam and Muslims. And just when it seemed he had retreated to the margins of Substack, he resurfaces to rattle the same sophomoric sabres against Muslims, blaming them for the genocide his fellow Zionists are perpetrating in Gaza.

Worse still, Harris has never had an original thought and simply regurgitates the tired claim that people around the world are “picking on” Israel while ignoring atrocities elsewhere.

But who says the world is disregarding Sudan or other catastrophes?

Such apologists are pathologically monolingual. They don’t read another language and don’t look beyond their own narrow feeds. Instead, they scroll their iPhones, see the stream of protests worldwide against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and sneer: why don’t these people look the other way so Israel can slaughter more Palestinians, to the delight of Harris and Stephens?

Overcoming despair

The world is tired. Ordinary people are drained by watching helplessly as Israel murders, maims and starves Palestinians with total impunity. There is nothing anyone can do but cry quietly, scream loudly and remain desperate.

In the face of this monstrosity, we are no longer Muslims, Christians, Jews or any other denomination. We are all Palestinians: facing the total annihilation of any and all sense of right and wrong

For nearly two years, we have been witnesses to a relentless genocide perpetrated by a psychopathic leader of a psychopathic garrison state. We are all tired. Our senses have become dangerously numb. We are running out of metaphors to come to terms with the evil that is Israel, whose advocates have completely erased the word shame from their lexicons.

This is not a time for moralising or lectures on how to defy the murderous savageries of the Israelis perpetrating a live-streamed genocide. By now, moral despair has turned into moral outrage, and that outrage has become a deeply rebellious force that rouses you each morning – determined and defiant.

The world is on the edge of a new moral dispensation beyond the inherited metaphysics and certainties of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and other faith traditions. 

For some, faith remains a source of strength – as it does for Palestinians in Gaza and for others in Lebanon and Yemen who resist in its name. For others, despair has made it harder to reconcile faith with the atrocities carried out under its banner – from Israel branding Palestinian prisoners with the Star of David or carving it into Gaza’s ruins with bulldozers to Muslim rulers allying themselves with Washington and Tel Aviv while Palestinians starve.

As a Muslim, I am utterly disgusted with the cowardice of Muslim regimes, whose complicity and silence have made them partners in this genocide.

But out of such betrayals – of faith, conscience and humanity itself – emerges the urgency of a new moral dispensation, rooted in the struggle and sacrifices of Palestinians and the noble cause of their liberation. Exposing genocide denial and confronting its defenders is what gives me strength and wakes me early every goddamn morning to fight back.

In the face of this monstrosity, we are no longer Muslims, Christians, Jews or any other denomination. We are all Palestinians: facing the total annihilation of any and all sense of right and wrong.

Fighting for the Palestinian cause is the only straight path to saving our fragile humanity, with a clear moral conscience guiding our way.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.