Gaza and the Scandal of Double Standards

Author: د.مصطفى البرغوثي

The Israeli occupation army has begun its brutal attack on the city of Gaza by bombing residential towers and erasing them from existence, in a scene reminiscent of what happened to the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. This incident became a justification for the United States to launch successive wars, occupy countries, kill millions, and shatter and restructure the global economy. As of the writing of this article, the number of victims of the Israeli genocide in Gaza has exceeded 235,000 Palestinians, including 50,000 children, which is over 10% of the population of the Gaza Strip. If we applied this percentage to the United States, the number of dead and injured would exceed 33 million Americans in less than two years. Imagine what the United States would have done if one million Americans were injured, not 33 million. It is likely that it would have destroyed the world.

Despite the horrific scale of the crime faced by the residents of the Gaza Strip and the dreadful number of victims—five-sixths of whom are unarmed civilians and innocents, according to both British and Israeli press—U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his president feel no shame in continuing to blame the victim, the Palestinian people, while continuing to support the aggressor both politically and militarily. They not only encourage the criminal brutality against Gaza and its people but also promote the desecration of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, through colonial settlement and the terrorist settler gangs.

Thanks to unconditional American support and the cowardly silence of many rulers and countries, Benjamin Netanyahu does not hesitate to blame Egypt for not opening its borders to displace all the residents of the Gaza Strip and assist Israel in committing the most dangerous act of ethnic cleansing in modern times.

There is no international law, international humanitarian law, or human rights that Israel has not trampled under the boots of its soldiers or crushed under the chains of its tanks and armored vehicles. There is no divine law that it has not desecrated while it brutalizes the valiant residents of Gaza, who have endured pain, suffering, death, and torment that no mountains can bear, and that no humans in history have endured. Today, Netanyahu and his fascist government openly declare their goals without reservation: the complete ethnic cleansing of all residents of the Gaza Strip, while they are implementing a process of annexation and Judaization of the West Bank and Gaza, after the annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

By attacking Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, and his insolence in overstepping the bounds with Egypt and Jordan, Netanyahu, suffering from a delusion of grandeur reminiscent of Hitler, acts as if he were the imperial ruler of the Middle East, openly declaring that he lays out a map of the region every day to decide where to extend the arms of his air force and in which country to carry out the next assassinations.

After all this, and after the brutal oppression of the people of Gaza through genocide, starvation, and ethnic cleansing, are there any justifications left for continuing normalization with Israel? Is there any reason to continue hesitating in cutting ties with it, expelling its ambassadors, and joining the globally rising campaign to impose sanctions and boycotts against it? What are the governments of the 57 Arab and Islamic countries waiting for to send a message to the U.S. President stating that its interests, its promised investments, and its relations with it have become conditional on his immediate intervention to rein in Netanyahu and stop the ongoing brutal massacre in the Gaza Strip? What is the European Union waiting for, after all that has happened, to abandon its inaction and betrayal of the values it claims to uphold and begin imposing sanctions on Israel, imposing a complete ban on military dealings with it and supplying it with the weapons it uses to kill Palestinian children?

Those being slaughtered in Gaza, in full view of a supposedly civilized world, are not just the Palestinian people, but also everything that is called international law, international humanitarian law, and human rights charters. If silence continues, all the peoples of the earth will understand that the world is governed by the law of the jungle, and that we have returned to an era of fascism that can only be stopped by the force of resistance, regardless of the sacrifices involved.