The Final Solution is Here: The Obliteration of Gaza's Humanity
A young Palestinian mother's horrific story of rape, child murder, and dehumanizing abuse by Israeli soldiers personifies the moral depths to which the Western-backed Gaza assault has plunged.
By Karim
The depravity of Israel's assault against the Palestinians in Gaza strips away the mendacious fiction of Israeli “democracy”, “civility”, and “human rights”. The systematic violence, the frenzied bloodletting, the industrial-scale impoverishment, starvation, bombing, raping and deprivation of the Palestinian people expose the racist rot, genocidal madness, and brutal inhumanity at the core of the Zionist project.
On Katie Halper’s show, a Palestinian woman recounted the harrowing story of a young Palestinian mother whose children and husband were gunned down before her eyes by Israeli forces. The grieving mother was then forcibly taken by nine Israeli soldiers who subjected her to continuous rape and sexual torture over three agonizing weeks before finally releasing her. Her horrific ordeal represents a singularly visceral atrocity that forces us to pause amid the cold statistics of mass death and destruction, and reckon with the profound individual suffering being inflicted upon each Palestinian civilian.
It exemplifies the depraved violence Palestinians are facing, even as Israeli officials repeatedly raise unsubstantiated claims about rapes of Israeli women by Hamas militants - invoking an abhorrent myth for which not a shred of proof has ever emerged.
As is so often the case, Israel's lurid accusations toward its Palestinian victims appear to be admissions of the state's own profound moral turpitude and inexcusable crimes against an oppressed population. Reports have also emerged of orphaned Palestinian children allegedly being abducted by depraved Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers after their parents were killed.
Western society, which mouths platitudes about dignity, freedom, and the sanctity of life, responds to the crushing of Palestinian civilians with callous indifference. Visual evidence of innocents massacred, of children's corpses eviscerated by Israeli munitions, homes and neighborhoods bombed into ruins, does not cure Western soul-sickness. Because the mutilated bodies, anguished wails, and rubbled landscapes belong to the wrong peoples - the unwanted, the powerless, the ragged and unwhite - the machinery of industrial slaughter motors forward unimpeded.
In this dispossessed slip of Gaza, Israel seeks to consummate the annihilation of a conquered people. Its apartheid regime has turned the strip into an open-air abattoir, a sprawling graveyard where nearly 2 million human beings are entombed under oppression's merciless weight. Crammed into one of the most densely populated zones on earth, the Palestinians of Gaza have endured a seven months long Israeli siege that has reduced their open-air prison to a UN-certified humanitarian catastrophe.
The Final Stage
As I write these words, the Israeli military is raining death down upon Rafah, the last refuge for the Palestinians who escaped earlier onslaughts. Having spent months bombarding the northern regions, reducing Jenin and Khan Younis to apocalyptic landscapes of flattened homes and mass graves, Israel now turns its sights on those who fled south believing they would find safe haven. For the Palestinian families huddled in UN shelters and makeshift camps, there is nowhere left to run.
Yet the world watches in silence, shifting uncomfortably, swallowing its disgust and complicity. Conditioned to recognize Palestinians as something less than human, Western societies avert their eyes from the systematized horrors inflicted by their Israeli sugar baby. The scale of death in Gaza, already among the highest densities of slaughter witnessed in history, garners no outcry beyond the expected theatrics of diplomatic hand-wringing.
White Tribes of the Imperial Capitals
The US, UK, and European Union mouth hollow bromides about "proportional response" and "Israel's right to self-defense," as if the heavily militarized Israeli state was under existential threat from the besieged, colonized, impoverished, and commercially blockaded residents of Gaza. They denounce the flagrant atrocities in the safety of press conferences and public statements, assured their words require no sacrifice of weapons contracts, diplomatic ties, or complicity in Palestine's strangulation.
This abject abandonment of human solidarity, this global apathy toward unrelenting Palestinian suffering, is a remarkable marker of our common ethical bankruptcy. How severe must the scale of atrocity become before the veneer of Western humanist pretenses finally ruptures? In a world where might still privileges the white tribes of the imperial capitals, where concepts of personhood are still casually revoked from populations of the wrong color, religion and geography, the evisceration of Gaza's children barely raises an eyebrow among the privileged classes of the Western citadels.
History's ledger books contain countless volumes of such unconscionable cases of abandonment, but few match the contemporary West's obliviousness to the Palestinian genocide for sheer, malign hypocrisy. The hollow, oh so hollow words of solidarity from Western leaders when minorities or women suffer violence on non-Western soil are crass moral exhibitionism - empty gestures because the victims belong to the bulk of humanity outside the boundaries of western, white-defined civilization. For the Palestinians of Gaza, facing an industrialized campaign of ethnic eradication and societal destruction, there are no tear-stained presidential statements, no vigils or memorials from the cultural capitals of the enlightened world.
Instead, there is deafening silence - the sound of the West's purported values crumbling amid the blood-soaked rubble of Gaza's decimated neighborhoods. Israel's pathological violence is facilitated, armed, and diplomatically shielded at every turn by the very nations whose high-minded rhetoric once enshrined human dignity as an inviolable, universal ideal. Yet that rhetoric has been exposed as soulless propaganda, evaporating in the face of Gaza's anguished cries for mercy.
Settler Colonial Mentality
Western societies are culpable, morally bankrupted by their investment in the racist ideologies that birthed the settler-colonialist horror now consuming Gaza. When the media studios of New York and London train audiences to view Palestinians as something between uncivilized brutes and pitiful wretches, is it any surprise that their cataclysmic suffering is processed as a regrettable, but understandable consequence of their lesser status?
This is the pernicious psychological apartheid that inoculates Western audiences, inures them to scenes of hellish barbarity that would ignite volcanic outrage if committed against those coded as white, European, American - those permitted full admittance into the supremacist clan of the entitled.
But Gaza's Palestinians, like the aboriginal populations ground underfoot by earlier campaigns of racial imperialism, are otherized into a subordinate caste, an entire people transformed into subhuman abstractions unworthy of empathetic identification.
In the moral universe of the colonial westerner, where specters of civilizational hierarchy still linger longingly, Gaza's agony resonates as the brutal but necessary cost of mastering the savage frontiers of earth's darker dominions. The Israeli killing machine is positioned as the iron guardian of enlightened, progressive values - the Middle East's bulwark against a teeming, benighted wilderness of religious fanaticism and sectarian terrorism. That this garrison of "Western civilization" systematically depopulates the very lands it claims to civilize is among the foundational Orwellian paradoxes of colonial mythology.
Yet the graphic visuals pouring from Gaza's ground zeroes shred these racist pretenses. The leveled homes, where families lie shredded under Israeli ordnance. The UN sanctuaries bombed, revealing the burned, dismembered remains of children seeking refuge in these theaters of Western humanitarian “emancipation” projects. The malnutrition, stunted bodies and empty stares of youths raised under medieval conditions of military siege. These devastating tableaus of human wreckage belie Israel's secularist, democratic facade. There is no enlightenment ideal, only the boot of oppression on the neck of a disfavored minority.
Ending Racist Supremacy
The only path forward from this moral abyss is to reject the racist supremacist ideologies that create human hierarchies and render whole populations as eligible for extermination or forcible subjugation. Rather than clinically denouncing Israeli actions as "disproportionate" or diplomatically regretting the "loss of innocent life," Western societies must own their complicity in enabling, arming, and incentivizing the machines of Palestinian destruction. Only a full-throated condemnation of Israel's settler-colonial apartheid regime, and its backers in Western capitals, can begin reckoning with the full malignancy of the crimes being committed.
As long as the Israeli genocide proceeds unobstructed, as long as the deaths of Palestinian children are weighed against stock prices or electoral fortunes, the vaunted "values" of Western civilization will stand maliciously and inescapably exposed. For if the children of Gaza do not trigger the ethical foundations of universal human rights, then those rights exist only as public relations mythography - falsely professed to override supremacist loyalties never truly exorcised from their hosts.
Yet in the cremated innocents of Gaza, the West faces its final examination in the academy of human decency. The world bears witness as the thin veneers of “Enlightenment” humanism peel away, revealing the brutal racial hierarchies and systemic dehumanization that birth such harrowing returns to medieval barbarism.
Will the deaths of these children, their fragile bodies preyed upon by the velociraptor talons of Western-armed militarism, finally awaken a reckoning with the racism and colonialism rotting the core of the imperial enterprise?
Or will Gaza's agony dissipate into the ether, yet another forgotten endeavor in that ceaseless colonial curriculum teaching the world's majorities their cosmic disposability? If the past is precedent, then the horrors visited upon the blockaded open-air prison of Gaza will join the ledgers of atrocities deemed too provincially unpalatable for the West's paladins of human rights to expend their capital of concern.
The burned youths of Vietnam's villages were once relegated to the periphery of Western consciousness, regarded as unfortunate but acceptable casualties in the fervent capitalist mission to insulate Asia from the encroaching Marxist ideologies. Similarly, the internment camps and killing fields that decimated generations of America's First Peoples were neatly encapsulated within the settler narratives of civilizing a wild continent. Across the ocean, the Dutch Empire’s extensive involvement in the slave trade manifested a brutal commodification of human life, with countless Africans forcibly transported under dire conditions to labor in the New World. In the 20th century, the apartheid system implemented in South Africa and Indonesia, under Dutch influence, further entrenched racial segregation and inequality, showcasing a stark disregard for basic human rights.
In each epoch, the violence that glutted Western affluence through the expropriation of resources and the immiseration of the world's devalued lives coheres into twisted self-justifications. The indigenous survivors of these apocalyptic onslaughts are not considered worthy of empathy or solidarity from civilized circles, their plight deemed the cruel but necessary casualties in the glorious forging of Western ascendancy. Little has changed in the Age of American Primacy, save for the more advanced public relations machinery coating the plunder in flattering humanist drag.
Wretched of the Earth
Palestine's dispossessed masses are the wretched of the earth in the new imperium, subject to the very colonialism of subjugation, removal, and extermination that carved the world's racial geographies under earlier European regimes. Theirs is to be the next cultural memory allowed to fade into the ambient haze of inconvenient histories best forgotten - at least until the next wave of oppressed raise their forgotten banners and rekindle cycles of struggle against the West's beastly mythologies of white supremacy and cultural exceptionalism.
As Gaza's resilient survivors stare down their tormentors with the unbreakable defiance of a people who have beheld the very depths of modern savagery, the world can turn its sympathies elsewhere, allowing Gaza's agony to seemingly pass like a forgotten fever dream. Or it can look upon the singularly iconic barbarity of the Gaza genocide and finally recognize the barbarism found not in the wailed mournings of Gaza's refugees - but in the cold glare of the Western gunships reducing their shelters to rubble.
We must decisively break away from the corrosive myths of human hierarchies born from Western callousness and rise to affirm the universally bonded family we have long claimed to cherish. It is through this transformation that we can begin to bridge the vast chasms of our ethical potential, fostering a world where empathy and justice are not just ideals, but realities.