Don't forget Gaza
Hideous new data underlines the scale of this abomination
Imagine one extended family was violently killed in Britain, which has a population of around 69 million. The grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, teenagers, toddlers, and newborn babies.
If that one extended family was killed in Britain, it would be regarded as one of the great crimes of the post-war era. It would be splashed on every front page, it would lead every news bulletin. Politicians would deliver grief-stricken speeches. Social media would abound with ordinary citizens sharing their fury and horror. It would go down in the history books as a crime remembered with shock for generations.
Gaza had a pre-genocide population of around 2.2 million.
According to a new study, Israel wiped out more than 2,700 Palestinian families in Gaza. The youngest victim was a one-day-old baby. The oldest victim was a 101-year-old man.
Each family - their own memories, their own histories, their own traditions, their own secrets, their ups, their downs, their celebrations, their tragedies.
All gone, erased from the earth. All those precious shared moments - a child’s first word, family celebrations, days out at the beach - all gone, as the families are wiped from Gaza’s civil registry, with no one to remember their shared memories, as if they never happened.
If, anywhere else, especially in a territory with just over 2 million people, 2,700 extended families had been violently exterminated in the space of 2 years, there would be no debate or discussion or controversy about whether that constituted genocide. It would be deemed outrageous to even deny it.
As well as every single member of 2,700 families being wiped out, there are another 6,000 families with just one survivor remaining. Imagine being that sole survivor, the only one remaining from your bloodline. Maybe some are young, able to have other families, keep their lineage alive. Others will be older, knowing that when they are gone, no one will remain. The last of their clan, walking the earth knowing that when they die - maybe when they are bombed or shot or starved or die of a treatable illness - their bloodline too will be wiped from Gaza’s civil registry.
Israel’s genocide has not stopped. According to the figures, at least 477 Palestinians have been killed since the so-called “ceasefire” began in October, with another 1,300 injured. Imagine just one Israeli civilian had been killed by Hamas in that time. That one civilian would lead our news bulletins and be splashed on front pages, and there would be fiery condemnations from politicians and pundits, it would be offered as evidence of the unique evil of Hamas. The ceasefire would be declared over, and Israel would use it as an excuse for even more violence, though as we can see, they hardly need a pretext.
Last Wednesday, for example, the Israeli army killed at least 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including two 13-year-old boys, three journalists, and a woman.
One of those 13-year-olds was killed alongside his father and another 22-year-old man. The other 13-year-old, named Mo’tasem Al-Sharafi,was killed as he was collecting firewood. There is footage of his father weeping over his body.
Again, just imagine one 13-year-old Israeli civilian had been killed by a Palestinian militant. Imagine the outrage, the uproar, the coverage, the denunciations. But I would imagine for most of you, this is the first time you have heard of this Palestinian boy, and it will almost certainly be the last.
According to UNICEF, Israel has attacked Gaza on 92 of the 108 days of the "ceasefire” that took effect on October 10. Of the hundreds killed, over a hundred are Palestinian children. That is three times the total number of Israeli children killed on 7th October. And yet there was more outrage over the fictional, nonexistent, made-up beheading of Israeli babies than there has over a single Palestinian child - or indeed the tens of thousands of Palestinian children.
As the slaughter continues, it is obvious that it remains the ambition of the US and Israel for no Palestinians to remain in Gaza - and for Donald Trump to build a holiday resort for oligarchs, tanning themselves above the skeletons of Palestinian children.
For those of us in the countries which have facilitated this historic abomination, we have a responsibility to speak out.
I often think the media is even more responsible for this genocide than the political class, because if the justified furore had been raised as Owen spells out in this article, those spineless politicians would have had no choice but to react against the criminal Israeli Ziionists instead of aiding and abetting them. Media silence has made them complicit in this genocide.
It is quite unbelievably terrible. There are no consolations, no accountability, no pushback. The present is almost worse than the past. It is a great, ineradicable, frightful crime against humanity that will burden the Jewish people for ever, just as the crime committed against them still burdens the people of Europe. But the crime is still ongoing, the day of atonement is far far ahead.