Genocide is being ‘Normalised’

Bharat Dogra

For almost 11 months the world has been seeing documented evidence from Gaza–in the form of videos or ground-based reports–of the most horrible killings of innocent persons including a large number of women and children. Nearly 52,000 people have been confirmed by health authorities to have been killed in this violence or are buried in rubble, over 90,000 have been injured or disabled. Most of the houses and essential infrastructure have been destroyed. Traumatised people, grieving the loss of dearest ones are carrying the injured and the sick with them, exposed to extreme hunger, almost famine-like conditions, denied water and sanitation, facing many diseases, exhausted and tired beyond words, are being ordered time and again to move from one place to another on their own, but sometimes have been killed even in shelter places or on way to them, ultimately crammed in a small place in the most difficult conditions. There is also exposure to extreme pollution from shockingly large use of huge bombs and explosives. Medical facilities have been largely destroyed.

If it is accepted that such conditions can lead to the excess mortality of at least three times compared to the people killed directly in violence, (such assumptions have been made in the past for calculating war and conflict mortality by very credible studies) then it is likely that nearly 208,000 persons have died in this genocidal operation (52,000 plus 156,000) in 11 months, a figure close to the widely quoted number of 186,000 estimated number of dead people in a Lancet report. Hence the mortality per month during the last 11 months is likely to be close to 19000 per month or 600 per day, while the number of those sustaining injuries is about half this number. All this is for a population of nearly 1.9 million. In other words, nearly one-tenth of the population has perished due to the direct and indirect impacts of war and conflict in just 11 months.

In normal times if an incident happened of about 100 people, a majority consisting of women and children, getting killed or seriously injured and disabled in any part of world on any single day in very cruel and arbitrary ways by any armed forces, which also imposed very painful conditions on other remaining people such as denial of food, what would be expected is a huge world level outcry against such a massacre, this has been happening time and again in Gaza, has been almost routinised in the course of the actions of the armed forces of Israel, yet has failed to bring forth the kind of response that is needed–for example, the world getting together to bring immediate peace, or at the very least, the main suppliers of weapons to Israel like the USA and Germany announcing an immediate stoppage of all weapons and military help to Israel.

“Genocide, something the world vowed would never happen again after the Holocaust, is being normalized.

“What Israeli soldiers are doing can be done in other countries as well. People seem to sleepwalking into a new age of barbarity.”

The so-called international community will daily make a statement of some peace efforts and of their commitment to peace, and then hasten to arm the Israeli forces further.

In these extremely difficult times it is important to re-assert that despite all the great sufferings, the future agenda must be defined not by revenge or blind violence, but only on the basis of uniting more and more people with more and more commitment to a future of peace and justice.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 13, Sep 22 - 28, 2024