Air strikes targeting densely populated suburbs, communities and towns, funerals of loved ones attacked, disabled children murdered, families obliterated, buildings targeted, water and sanitation destroyed, journalists killed, and 220 UN staff also killed in Gaza since October 7 last year – the list is endless, brutal and inhumane on so many levels. There is no doubt that genocide is what all of this is and continues to be.
The deliberate and systematic historical persecution, discrimination and other forms of violence have unfolded before our eyes. What we are seeing from the Israeli state is the annihilation stage of genocide. In Palestine, displacing and erasing the indigenous Arab presence has been an inevitable part of the forming of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’. In 1940, for example, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Colonisation Department, stated: “There is no room for both peoples together in this country. The only solution is Palestine without Arabs. And there is no other way but to transfer all of them: not one village, not one tribe should be left.”
Israeli authorities have also characterised churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterised as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Regardless it is clearly genocide.
There is also no doubt that Israel and other nations and many individuals ‘who stand with Israel’ have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide on a frightening scale. All those involved must be held accountable and they must deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people.
Barry Fennell, Belfast BT11
