The Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip have been through twelve months of killing, destruction, displacement and starvation in a genocide unprecedented in modern history. It has played out live on social media, witnessed by the whole world.
It has been a whole year of betrayal and silence from countries in the Middle East; silence apart from some meaningless denunciations to maintain their image, while the normalised states did not care at all. On the contrary, they utilised all means to support the Zionist entity to complete its illegal and immoral mission.
A year in which they used all means to support the occupation state’s crimes in pursuit of this claim, provided it with all kinds of lethal weapons, used their bases and warships to protect the occupation, and shared intelligence and aerial photographs with the Israeli regime for use in its war of extermination.
Failure of UN Security Council
In this bloody year, the UN Security Council failed to issue a single resolution obliging the occupation to stop its massacres. The supposed world police force — rendered toothless by the US veto — turned into a platform for speeches devoid of meaning.
During this year, the General Assembly held several sessions under the United for Peace resolution to take the kind of measures that the Security Council failed to take. However, General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, so they remained unimplemented like others passed over many decades regarding Palestine-Israel.
During the year of what the International Court of Justice declared was "plausible genocide”, its rulings were ignored by the occupation state of Israel. There was no legal judgement for a ceasefire, as there was with Ukraine. Israel’s killing, destruction and displacement of the Palestinians continued unabated.
During this year, and with the expansion of massacres throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, an advisory opinion was issued by the ICJ declaring Israel’s occupation of Palestine to be unlawful. This was followed by a General Assembly resolution that the occupation should end within 12 months.
Over at the International Criminal Court, the chief prosecutor requested the pre-trial chamber to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Months later, they have still not been issued. Again, the contrast with the legal action taken over the Russian invasion of Ukraine is startling.
Western media
During this year of genocide, the Western media has followed the Israeli narrative to a tee, spreading lies and misinformation to portray the apartheid state as the victim, whitewashing its crimes and covering up the extent of the killing, destruction, displacement and starvation of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli propaganda and the Zionist narrative of events has been uppermost. The truth of the atrocities committed by the occupation state and the suffering of the Palestinians have been drowned by this narrative, whereas when an Israeli is injured or suffers a panic attack due to hearing gunfire, the story is front page news.
The countries that push democracy have been exposed for their hypocrisy: Israel has a right to self-defence (when, in fact, it can’t claim such a right against the people living under its military occupation); the Palestinians have no rights. Israel can invade and bomb its neighbours, treating international law with contempt; Palestinians who exercise their legitimate right under international law to resist occupation are called "terrorists”. Israel can kill Arab-Semite Palestinians; people who denounce such killing by the occupation state are denounced for being "anti-Semitic”. The West can supply arms and ammunition to Israel for use against the Palestinians; those who oppose such complicity in genocide and stand in solidarity with the Palestinians face dismissal from their jobs, arrest and intimidation for "hate speech”. There is no logic to any of this hypocrisy by the West in its haste to defend the indefensible.
What we have seen over the past twelve months, therefore, are actually two contrasting years: a year of shame with the international silence, political cowardice, traitors and support for the criminal occupation state; and a year of pride for the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip who have shone a light in the darkness with their patience, their steadfastness and their courage. The Palestinians have put the world to shame. All we can say is, history records everything. And we can rest assured that the Palestinians are on the right side of history.
(Muhammad Jamil is director of the Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK)