Designated starvation and collective punishment is what characterises specifically the treatment in Gaza, in addition to the conditions of detention: it can cross the threshold into genocide.
It took 60 years to take it to the ICC. I don’t want to die before hostilities cease and I see the case. Palestinians deserve a state, deserve peace, deserve safety, and deserve self-determination. Most importantly, they are entitled to all of these things. Let me repeat. Entitled.
Israeli civilians and foreign nationals currently being detained, injured and killed are damage caused by Netanyahu’s lifelong commitment to eradicate the Palestinian cause and its survivors. His government has, just like Russia before it in the face of the Ukraine invasion, criminalised protest, imprisoned dissent, and ripped out the courts. Consolidating power, he triggers Hamas’ violence and traps his own citizens under their guns.
Hamas does not represent Palestine, but Palestine has no way to obtain representatives. Palestinians can’t go back home, they do not have a right of return. Palestinians can flee, but they’re already the largest refugee population in the world, making up a two digit percentage of the populations of both Lebanon and Jordan. Palestinians were in the largest Syrian refugee camp, Yarmouk, before the Syrian uprising. Yarmouk, since 2015, is the definition of hell on earth. I’ve been there. Hell. Hell you can’t comprehend. Hell I hope you never can.
Mandatory drafts, denial of access to civil rights for the non-Jews, refusal of mixed marriages, and forced religious education makes Israel an oppressive theocracy. I am urging everyone on the Palestinian cause to reach out to Jewish voices for peace and Israeli activists fighting against the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, which, I have to remind everyone, have borders fixed in 1967. Anything else is a crime of aggression. Israelis are scared because they have no say in how their government treats Palestinians; and how they will be made guilty.
Politics are too complex for war, and that has always been the case. The law is not silence in time of war, this idiom no longer exists and in fact, ignores just how old the regulation of conflict is. Politics are silent, because politics is about dialogue, debate, and discourse. War doesn’t just suspend those, it destroys them. You can only argue with the living; and those who made it back have lost the capacity to do so. Trauma, once inflicted on that scale, also defines the political silence of future generations, for whom opposition will be the only way to create identity and community.
There can be no peace without justice, and justice would demand that the current US budget of military assistance to the IDF - $3.9 billion as of 2019 - is suspended. Justice would mean treating Israel the way we would treat any other state that would commit such crimes, for so long. Justice would be granting Palestine statehood. But statehood demands three criteria. One of them is territorial definition.
This conflict proves humanity at its worst. It illustrates how little we invest in the principles we claim to uphold because everything becomes an ideological fervor to end all the previous worships. Israel and Palestine, the most fertile and holy ground of our entire civilization, are now where such lofty ideas of development and morality die in abject circumstances.
We are all responsible for this conflict. And we are all responsible for calling an end to it and demand action. Without Islamophobia, without antisemitism. Because we must. Because the Palestinian cause is everyone’s cause. Its asks are everyone’s asks. Its resistance is everyone’s hope. Its endurance is everyone’s perseverance. And Israel’s fascism should be everyone’s anxiety. Because its self preservation at all costs is our isolation. Because its hunger for control is our submission. Because its manipulative foreign policy becomes our burden of arms trade.
It’s about and for all of us.
It took 60 years to take it to the ICC. I don’t want to die before hostilities cease and I see the case. Palestinians deserve a state, deserve peace, deserve safety, and deserve self-determination. Most importantly, they are entitled to all of these things. Let me repeat. Entitled.
Israeli civilians and foreign nationals currently being detained, injured and killed are damage caused by Netanyahu’s lifelong commitment to eradicate the Palestinian cause and its survivors. His government has, just like Russia before it in the face of the Ukraine invasion, criminalised protest, imprisoned dissent, and ripped out the courts. Consolidating power, he triggers Hamas’ violence and traps his own citizens under their guns.
Hamas does not represent Palestine, but Palestine has no way to obtain representatives. Palestinians can’t go back home, they do not have a right of return. Palestinians can flee, but they’re already the largest refugee population in the world, making up a two digit percentage of the populations of both Lebanon and Jordan. Palestinians were in the largest Syrian refugee camp, Yarmouk, before the Syrian uprising. Yarmouk, since 2015, is the definition of hell on earth. I’ve been there. Hell. Hell you can’t comprehend. Hell I hope you never can.
Mandatory drafts, denial of access to civil rights for the non-Jews, refusal of mixed marriages, and forced religious education makes Israel an oppressive theocracy. I am urging everyone on the Palestinian cause to reach out to Jewish voices for peace and Israeli activists fighting against the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, which, I have to remind everyone, have borders fixed in 1967. Anything else is a crime of aggression. Israelis are scared because they have no say in how their government treats Palestinians; and how they will be made guilty.
Politics are too complex for war, and that has always been the case. The law is not silence in time of war, this idiom no longer exists and in fact, ignores just how old the regulation of conflict is. Politics are silent, because politics is about dialogue, debate, and discourse. War doesn’t just suspend those, it destroys them. You can only argue with the living; and those who made it back have lost the capacity to do so. Trauma, once inflicted on that scale, also defines the political silence of future generations, for whom opposition will be the only way to create identity and community.
There can be no peace without justice, and justice would demand that the current US budget of military assistance to the IDF - $3.9 billion as of 2019 - is suspended. Justice would mean treating Israel the way we would treat any other state that would commit such crimes, for so long. Justice would be granting Palestine statehood. But statehood demands three criteria. One of them is territorial definition.
And Palestine’s borders already exist. They were drawn. They’re drawn on the UN HQ walls, where every year, we have a reminder of how much we fucked up in handling the end of British colonialism of the area mixed with the aftermath of the Holocaust.
- The Nakba compounding existing trauma.
- A genocide to respond to a genocide.
- A crime against humanity to balance a crime against humanity.
- Programmed dehumanisation to face annihilation.
This conflict proves humanity at its worst. It illustrates how little we invest in the principles we claim to uphold because everything becomes an ideological fervor to end all the previous worships. Israel and Palestine, the most fertile and holy ground of our entire civilization, are now where such lofty ideas of development and morality die in abject circumstances.
We are all responsible for this conflict. And we are all responsible for calling an end to it and demand action. Without Islamophobia, without antisemitism. Because we must. Because the Palestinian cause is everyone’s cause. Its asks are everyone’s asks. Its resistance is everyone’s hope. Its endurance is everyone’s perseverance. And Israel’s fascism should be everyone’s anxiety. Because its self preservation at all costs is our isolation. Because its hunger for control is our submission. Because its manipulative foreign policy becomes our burden of arms trade.
It’s about and for all of us.
➽ Sarah Kay is a human rights lawyer.
