Ethnic cleansing in Gaza as brutish global order returns

A wounded Palestinian woman and her child are wheeled into hospital following Israeli attack in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday. AFP

What is happening in Gaza is a violent act of ethnic cleansing. Period. It is happening in full view of the international community, while those who have the capability to prevent it are allowing it to happen despite claiming to be civilised.
As Israel continues its killing spree in Gaza, proving it is more monstrous than the baby-killing Pharaoh, a ceasefire is not on the lips of the Western nations, though they claim to promote international good behaviour. Not even a pause in the fighting is their wish, though billions of peace-loving people around the world plead for it.

Simply put, Western nations go along with the collective punishment Israel has been inflicting on Gazans since October 7 by raining bombs on them and denying them access to food, water, medicine, and other essentials. By yesterday, about 6,500 civilians had died in the Israeli bombing, the cumulative power of which is estimated to be a quarter of a nuclear bomb. About 2,500 children have been killed and about 5,300 have been wounded in what UNICEF has called the “growing stain on our collective conscience.”
The West’s complicity in Israel’s public display of savagery is setting the international order on a dangerous path to plunge it back into what political philosophers call the brutish state of nature.

An anarchical international order is in the making, with international law being pushed into the dustbin of history while a demonic thirst for the blood of the innocent takes the place of humaneness. Or is it the case of the drivers of the international order relaxing the rules only for themselves and their favourites to commit war crimes?
Only weeks ago, the same unscrupulous Western nations were shouting hoarse over Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory, its bombing of civilian utility facilities, and its alleged violations of international humanitarian laws and laws of warfare. But when war crimes are committed by one of them, the West has no qualms about endorsing deplorable behaviour. This raises a crucial question: do they belong to a species that lacks the capacity to sympathise with those in distress?

Returning to the nasty state of nature or the anarchical international order where every nation is at war with every other nation, with the survival of the fittest being the norm, is the antithesis of human progress. The savagery we witness in Israel’s killing spree in Gaza—and also now in the West Bank—is a prelude to the lawless world disorder that will see the war of all against all, a scenario English philosopher Thomas Hobbes explains in his book Leviathan.

In this unfolding anarchical international setup, even the United Nations and its Secretary General, who plucked up courage on Tuesday and called for an immediate ceasefire, are told to shut up and watch Israel’s crimes against humanity. The Western powers that control the world agenda will say nary a word or raise a finger against Israel even if the Zionist state they implanted to continue their imperial agenda by other means kills the entire 2.3 million people in Gaza or expels whoever remains in Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula after killing as many Palestinian children, women, and unarmed civilians as its firepower would allow it to do so.
Israel has become a murderous state because of the support of the West, which erroneously believes that Israel is the bulwark against the untrustworthy ‘barbarians’ who are all out to destroy Western civilization.

The West, especially the United States, uses Israel to further its economic interests in the Middle East. The West has made Israel its frontline soldier to deal with any Middle Eastern nation that has the audacity to challenge the Western dominance of the world order. The Suez Canal, the free flow of oil, the supremacy of the petrodollar, and lucrative arms deals are all part of the US national interest objectives in the Middle East.

No wonder the United States, which supplies weapons to Israel to kill children, women, and non-combatants in violation of international law, won’t call for a ceasefire. While Gaza children were being butchered by Israel, the US had the gumption to say that everything is fair in war. On Tuesday, explaining the Joe Biden administration’s stone-hearted stance on the Gaza war, White House spokesman John Kirby said the US opposed a full ceasefire. He added, “This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it’s going to be messy, and innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”

So here, the US, the champion of human rights and advocate of rule-based international order, is admitting that killing people is part of war. Sri Lanka, please take note of this. It was the same US that presented a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution in 2012, heaping war crimes charges on Sri Lanka. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But that is the nature of power politics. Hypocrisy and double standards are the norm. They commit every war crime that international law denounces but walk on the world stage as the promoters of human rights and justice.

The West wasted no time in condemning Hamas terrorism, in which more than 1,000 Israeli settlers and people attending a musical show were killed. History, however, reveals that what Hamas did was no better than what the US did in My Lai in 1968.
The two bloodbaths had appalling similarities in savagery. On March 16, 1968, a company of US soldiers raided the South Vietnamese village of My Lai after receiving information that Vietcong freedom fighters were hiding there. When the soldiers arrived there, they found no Vietcong fighters. Instead, women, children, and elderly men were preparing for their breakfast. Their houses were searched. Women and young girls were raped. Then the soldiers went on a killing spree. More than 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed on the orders of Lt. William Calley.

The barbarity was hushed up until American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed it. Calley served only ten years in prison for the war crime. Most of the other soldiers were acquitted.
Be that as it may. Israel’s unwillingness to stop its carnage in Gaza indicates that its expansionist policy has been fast-tracked.
Expansionism is the very nature of Israel. In his 1948 diary, citing the American Independence Declaration, which contained no mention of territorial limits, Israel’s founding Prime Minister Ben Gurion said, “We are not obliged to state the limits of our state.”

Eretz Israel, or Greater Israel, is Zionism’s ultimate goal, with one end of its border being the Nile in Egypt and the other the Euphrates in Iraq. The Gaza operation is part of this effort to realise the Zionist dream of Eretz Israel. It involves pushing the Palestinians in the West Bank into Jordan and those in the Gaza Strip into Egypt.
It is hard to believe that the October 7 Hamas attack took Israel by surprise, given Israel’s high-tech monitoring and ultra-sophisticated spy network inside Gaza. Like 9/11, October 7 was not due to an intelligence failure. It is intentional neglect aimed at rolling out the next phase of the Eretz Israel plan.
The choice before the Gaza Palestinians is either expulsion or extermination.