‘Break Their Bone’

The Israel-Gaza war has already entered into its seventh month with all possibility of further expansion in the near future as Israeli killing machines continue to roll over the innocent Palestinians. In the span of last seven months, around 35,000 people in Gaza, often described as the largest open-air prison, have been killed, and hundreds of thousands are either wounded or maimed, which is the continuation of Yitzhak Rabin’s “Break Their Bone” doctrine experimented during first Intifada in 1988. According to one estimate, one Palestinian has lost a limb every three minutes since the war broke out on October 7, 2023. Perhaps the Gaza genocide is the first such massacre in history, which is being broadcast live uninterrupted through numerous social media forums, while many are enjoying it as a horror TV drama while the rest are showing their grief. In any violence, the first death is counted as the real death, and what follows is merely the numbers, and this epithet is aptly reflected in today’s Gaza.

The world is not witnessing the Muslim massacre for the first time, as history is laden with such genocides of Muslims. One can recall the killing of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the last decade of the 20th century, and again, the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingyas by the Myanmar Junta is not a secret. The atrocities against millions of Uighur Muslims in Chinese internment camps are not so different from a genocidal act. Bitter memories of French colonial rule still hound Muslims in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Iraqis and Afghans are still struggling to elude the image of the fearful presence of the U.S. The French colonial masters normalised the colonial conquest of Algeria and subsequent genocide by depicting it as a return of the Roman Empire and recovery of Roman land, which today resonates in the Zionist dictum of return to their Promised Biblical Land and call by the Israeli Rabbi for the killing Palestinian men, women, and children to fulfill the teaching of Jewish law book, Halakha.

Today, Gaza seems to have become an epicenter of Muslim cleansing, which is not only rooted in historical and religious hatred of Zionist Jews and Christian Zionists toward Muslims but has been further galvanized by the rise of Islamophobia, which is reflected in the killing of Palestinians.

Demonising Palestinians as human animals by Israeli Défense Minister Gallant is an expression of a genocidal mindset, and a further call by Israeli minister Ben Gvir for an all-out execution of Palestinian prisoners in Israel jails can only be seen through the prism of the genocidal design of Israel and its Western collaborators. The animal metaphor and metaphor of virtue versus evil are deeply rooted in Zionist philosophy, which sees Palestinians as a source of all evil.

French President Emmanuel Macron, soon after Israel began bombarding Gaza, called for the mobilisation of the anti-ISIS-like coalition to eliminate Hamas to shift the focus from the death of thousands of innocent children and women.

One can see how the sites of hospitals tuning onto graveyards and missiles ripping into infants and accompanied by the global outcry against Israel and its supporters failed to shake their conscience. Today’s ghastly silence on the part of the Western countries is another reinforcement of the statement of late U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when she had remarked that ‘the price is worth’ when asked about the death of half of a million Iraqi children due to Western sanction. Meanwhile, it is also worth noticing how the death of seven aid workers of World Central Kitchen in an Israeli attack in Gaza was followed by an all-out criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu by all right-to-left governments. Still, the death of 40,000 Palestinians is the embodiment of the right to self-defense. Presider Biden even called the founder of World Central Kitchen and offered his condolence and no world of remorse for the massacre of innocent men and women in Palestine as if the extermination of Palestinians is forgivable as long as the killers are Israelis. Palestinian non-violent marches and protests are entirely ignored or demonised by Western powers. On the contrary, the use of phosphorous on civilians and the burning of villages belonging to Palestinians receive protection from Western countries in many tangible and intangible ways.