by Andrea Zhok
It is difficult to find the right words to continue talking, after nearly a year of massacres, about what is happening in occupied Palestine. Not a day goes by without the IDF or groups of settlers killing innocent Palestinians.
Those who get their information from reliable sources, and not from the selective omissions of official news outlets, know that the bombing of refugee camps, snipers targeting children, the killing of the (few) journalists present, the armed blockades preventing UN aid, machine-gun fire on ambulances, the arrest, arbitrary detention, and torture of mere suspects are everyday occurrences.
All of this takes place in a setting where the buildings still standing are in the minority, and where death from starvation or lack of medical care is common.
Psychologically, every human being has a limited amount of emotional resources: it is impossible to remain in a state of constant disgust and outrage, even if those feelings are the only appropriate response. At some point, a kind of emotional numbness sets in—a deep fatigue. The human species is designed to follow emotions with decisions and actions. If no decisions or actions are taken, the emotion begins to wither, even if its cause remains very much alive.
It is on this psychological mechanism that all the well-dressed butchers of history have relied: a brutal murder arouses outrage, but if systematic, daily killings become a bureaucratic routine, they eventually turn into mere statistics. The slaughter of Palestinians is a balance sheet where the only calculation is how much is spent on bombs and how much comes in from American financiers—the rest is routine, programmed slaughter.
The other day, Jewish director Sarah Friedland, while accepting an award at the Venice Biennale, spoke a few important words:
“I accept this award on the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in the 76th year of occupation. It is our responsibility as filmmakers to use the institutional platforms where we work to address Israel’s impunity on the global stage.”
These words are crucial because they serve as a reminder not to let the legitimate disgust for Israel’s actions slide into generic antisemitism. There are Jews who are fully aware of the indefensibility of Israel’s actions. And this point, of course, works both ways: Israel must stop deceiving the world with its tiresome victim narrative, where every critic is labeled an antisemite.
These words are also significant for their careful simplicity: 76 years of armed, illegitimate OCCUPATION + 336 days of GENOCIDE (the indiscriminate killing of members of an ethnic group with the aim of eliminating them from a territory) + IMPUNITY on the global stage. Naturally, I am certain that the usual social media linguist will jump in here to explain—citing an elastic interpretation of international law—that yes, but no, “genocide” is an inappropriate term, it depends, we’ll see, the sources, international consensus…
But enough.
If you want to quibble over semantics to distract yourselves from the elephant in the room, that’s your problem. And the elephant is that we are witnessing something that makes historical precedents like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising pale in comparison (there, 13,000 were killed for resisting the occupiers; here, we are already at three times that number).
The only hypocritical reason for Israel’s impunity, the sole reason why Israel is not immediately held accountable, is that whoever governs in the U.S. ensures and will continue to ensure unlimited protection to its outpost in the Middle East—Israel.
The only reason why the daily slaughter of innocents continues, unscrupulously, in complete disregard for every earthly and divine law, for every moral norm and every international right, is that this “rogue state” is shielded by the neighborhood bully.
And now, European commissioners, American senators, presidents, and prime ministers of various stripes, please continue to explain to us how much you care about “human rights,” how indomitable your sense of justice is. We are waiting, trustingly.
