Gaza and the Failure of Civilization

The Lowest Point

Gaza is burning. The never-ending stream of apocalyptic images branded on the insides of our eyelids, are coming so thick and fast, it is hard to imagine the people of Gaza are actually living through it. Explosions wrought by mega tonne bombs meant for industrial level warfare and not for refugee shelters, tents; not for the tiny bodies of young children playing outside; not for a tired, starving, beleaguered population of 50% children that has no means of fighting back.

This is the lowest point of our “civilization”, because “never again” meant something very different from its supposed meaning. “Never again” was not a heartfelt and sincere manifesto rooted in people’s souls and arising from their internalization of history’s lessons. It may have started as a heartfelt statement for some, but it went the way of all slogans, losing its core and morphing into something else; in this case, endless absolution and impunity for the imperialist powermongers.

“Never Again” and Holocaust “Reparations”

It is a slogan that now sounds cheap and jingoistic, devoid of any real meaning and used as much for propagandist tours as for PR opportunities, demonstrated with excruciatingly tragic irony during Prince Charles’s recent visit to Auschwitz on January 25^th where he declared, seemingly oblivious, that: “The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task. In so doing, we inform our present and shape our future.” The theme of his address included the injunction never to: “be a bystander in the face of violence and hate”. By this time, “Never again” was happening in real time, and had been ramping up continuously, in a genocidal frenzy, for 16 months.

The true internalization of history’s lessons, with its expected resultant forward progress of true civilization, never happened. Instead, the world has regressed into a new world order where Western superpowers who seem particularly keen proponents of the “never again” slogan have cynically used it to further their own bloodthirsty imperialist ambitions.

What “Holocaust guilt” really is, is the West’s recognition that because the Holocaust represented the most barbaric episode of its own historic behaviour, that it will make a point of forevermore measuring its level of civilization by the degree to which it is prepared to “make amends” for those actions. And “making amends” here does not mean true sincerity for its past barbarism, it instead means, in true imperialist fashion, deceit and passing the buck. It means outwardly appeasing displays of “Holocaust reparations” - all the way to inverting and perverting “never again” to sanction the exact same upon what it has implicitly pronounced as today’s underclass – the Muslim world, and specifically, the Palestinians.

(The further perversion of “Never Again” is illustrated through its use by the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane in his Jewish Defence League, where its meaning applied only to Jews, and was used to legitimize terrorism against perceived enemies. In other words, “Never again” meant one group had full licence to exert violence and barbarity – of the type we have seen on full display in the past 17 months – upon anybody that it decided to paint as an “enemy”).

Europe and America have projected all that is unacceptable in their collective psyche, onto today’s “other”, the Muslim world, that they characterise in the same way that they did Jews in the 19^th century. A supreme twist of irony sees them supporting the Jewish supremacist state of Israel’s carte blanche to commit every atrocity under the sun, while they scramble to its defence and whitewash its crimes every day - all while professing to be a beacon of liberal enlightenment.

The Cruelty of Israel

Indiscriminate carpet bombing of a civilian population. Cutting off food, electricity, medical aid. Multiple forced displacements. Destroying schools, hospitals, all manner of civilian infrastructure. Stopping the entry of humanitarian aid. Using sexual assault and rape as a tool of war. Sodomizing innocent people in prison. Kidnapping and torturing medical staff. Killing all journalists. Using prohibited weapons and chemicals like white phosphorus, and high impact explosives, and then blocking and attacking ambulances. Sniping children. Bombing the population during Ramadan, killing 100 children a day.

Cruelty that is staggering in its sheer viciousness and bloodlust, a cruelty that can only be called demonic - and maybe it is. All aided by the superior and morally advanced West, with its anodyne statements bleated out from newsrooms, its detached impersonal passive language when describing Israel’s slaughtering of children, its covering up for war crime after war crime, and its total complicity in dehumanizing Palestinians so that the slaughter can continue wholesale.

Is this the meaning of civilization?

Sure, we know that Arab leaders stand by and allow this, “normalize” relations with a sick pathological animal – but we denounced those Arab leaders as being tyrants and rulers, unlike our own democratic leaders who purportedly represent the people, and who embody the liberal secular values of Western civilization.

But civilization has now done a 180 and is feeding the insatiable animal that it created in the Middle East as a means of protecting its own interests, while it utters half-hearted platitudes about “possible war crimes” and “plausible genocide” and with the other hand feeds bombs and military equipment to “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

Your Own Complicity

It will be no good to say afterwards that you didn’t know, or the situation was “complex” or there were “two sides”. There were never two sides – there was and is, only genocide. You speak up now – or you admit your total cowardice and complicity in the aftermath. Your desire to not cause ructions, your need to make “small talk” or polite conversation, your undefinable inkling that you’re not supposed to say anything bad about Israel at the dinner party.

And if you ever had any of these little thoughts and inklings, congratulations – you are that nice but dim neighbour who turned away and closed the curtains when somebody was being stabbed out in the street. You’re that brainwashed “Frau Lampshade” who pressed the gas chamber button, the person who delivered an electric shock of 450 volts in Milgram’s experiment, because somebody told you to. You got duped into wanting to believe marches for humanity were “anti-Israel”. Idiocy has many forms, and one is silent complicity.

Your silent complicity, your lack of anger, your reluctance to upset the “apple cart” by talking about it, by taking what you think might be the “wrong” side - is not a sign of your civilization, it is a sign that as a “human being” your core – the “human” part is missing, and you see no contradiction in going about your everyday life while thousands of people are being killed and little children are being blown to smithereens. If you still are not speaking up – I hope you are proud of yourself, and if you have children, that you can look them in the eye when they someday ask you what you did during the Gaza Holocaust.

Sobia Quazi