Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write:

We have been watching the suffering on our phones and screens for almost two years. Now famine is here. Far from the horror, it seems obscene and unbearably self-indulgent to say that Gaza is upsetting. But certainly, many of the rich and powerful of this world seem to want us to feel that way. And perhaps the for them the real point of our distress is to make us feel helpless and fearful.

For many Israelis the point of this vast theatre of cruelty is the extermination, genocide, torture and breaking of the Palestinians. But for the powerful of the world, what matters most is the example and the creation of a new normal. They are showing all the rest of us what can be done to those of us who, even by our very presence, resist. And they think that in future they will have need of this example.

None of the cruelty is new. But easy availability of the images on our phones is new. And the direction global politics is taking is also new.

We are writing this in Massachusetts, sitting at a window looking out over a river in the dawn, safe and warm, two miles from the town of Mashpee. In 1665 the white English settlers of Massachusetts, the pilgrim fathers, went to war with the native people, the Wampanoag. They destroyed every Wampanoag community but the two bands who had converted to Christianity. Mashpee was one of those two communities, and the natives here survive, and are now proud and organized.

There is an account of the burning of a native fortress where people of the Narragansett tribe had offered refuge to fleeing Wampanoag. The white settlers set fire to the wooden fortifications and killed the people one by one as they ran from the flames. The settlers who survived remembered how they had to pray together at the top of their voices to drown out the screams of the burning natives.

Cruelty, conquest, racist wars and genocide are not new. These are old stories. We know people are saying Gaza is not a war, it’s just a one-sided massacre. But many colonial wars have been mostly one-sided massacres.

Children also died in the Nazi holocaust. Children died when the US Air Force created the firestorm over Tokyo and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But the photos and videos we see on our phones are new.

Phones are everywhere now. In Afghanistan they say that the 5G coverage is so good that every shepherd in the mountains has a phone. Of course, they are exaggerating a bit, and many people in many countries try hard not to look at the horrors happening in real time. But in another sense, the whole world is watching Gaza now.

And one thing people in Gaza have been saying over and over is that the people of the world have deserted them.

TWO: WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?

This is not Netanyahu’s war. It is a war consented to and prosecuted by the majority of Israelis. But the Israeli state could not have continued this war for more than two weeks without the financial and military support of the Americans. This is Joe Biden’s war far more than it is Netanyahu’s.

And it’s not just Biden’s war. It’s also of course Trump’s war. And Europe’s war. And it is the war of the regimes in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. Any two of these states acting together could have stopped the killing with the power of oil or the power of great crowds marching to the border. And they have not.

China too could have stopped this war if they had rallied the world, and they did not. Perhaps that’s because they have their own hundreds of thousands of Muslim prisoners. But more likely it’s because they are playing a long game for global power and control of resources, and because they fear their own people.

Israel has launched terror against the Palestinians many times before. Always the Americans called them off, looking over their shoulder at what was called “the Arab street.” Not this time.

The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the European Union and the ruling families in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates did not launch this war. Nor did Russia or China. But as it has unfolded, they have seen what it did, and they liked it.

They don’t necessarily like the cruelty. And probably they did not plan for us to see those images. They would have preferred the mainstream control of the media of previous wars and massacres which censored the images of mutilated children, and of the killing, the dying and the grief.

But once we saw those images, powerful people had a choice. And they decided to enable the genocide.  

We cannot know why, but we can make a pretty good guess. We think the thing they like is the helplessness and the fear that we, ordinary, common working class people, feel. And they have begun to teach us that they can do anything, and we can do nothing to stop them. They are creating a new normal.

WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS?

Why do the rich and powerful and the politicians in so many countries need this new normal?

Again, we cannot know for certain, but we have some suggestions that make sense to us.

The silence of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other regimes in the Middle East is striking. The largest revolt against police states, inequality and neoliberalism in the world this century was the Arab Spring in 2011-2013. Those memories are everywhere, and the Arab and other regimes in the Middle East still fear their people.

In North America and Europe a different, but related, dynamic is at play. Since the financial crisis of 2008, ordinary working class people have become more and more furious about the ways neoliberalism and inequality have affected their lives. Increasingly the centre cannot hold.

In this economic situation, the parties of the centre, like the Democrats in America and Labour in Britain, cannot help the common people to cope, or make the lives ordinary people better, without raising taxes on the rich. And that they are deeply opposed to doing. And if they cannot take care of us, they need to be able to justify the cruelty they will need to frighten us.

So genocide goes hand in hand, step by step, with a new cruelty towards the weak and needy in many countries. In Britain, where we have lived for many years, the new Labour government first moved to cut a winter fuel allowance that helped the elderly stay warm. Then they denied child benefits for the third or subsequent child in any family and cut the foreign aid budget by half. After that they changed the law to deport desperate asylum seekers who arrive across the English Channel in small boats, and introduced another law to cut benefits for millions of disabled people.

In the United States the Trump government has so far cut many government services, shut down US AID and cut most foreign aid, passed a Big Bill to throw millions of hungry people off the free food program and millions of poor people off the medical aid program, and sent tens of thousands of men in black masks to round up immigrants off the streets.

CLIMATE CHANGE?

There is another reason for the rich and powerful everywhere to seek to create a new normal. This is that they have clearly decided not to stop climate change. All around us the powerful are repeating that “we” will have “to adapt”, and we will have to “learn to live with climate change”.

On some level, all of us know that will mean some combination of droughts, floods, famines, refugees, uprisings, wars and murderous racism. In these times to come, the rich and powerful everywhere will need to act with quite new levels of cruelty to preserve themselves and their power.

And not just in times to come. Let’s look at what is happening to Afghan refugees.

The genocide in Gaza has particularly encouraged deportations of refugees in many other parts of the world – in England and the US, but also between states in Africa and Asia.

Palestinians, after all, are the most famous group of refugees in the world. The killing in Gaza is also rehabilitating racist murder, for genocide is by definition racist killing.

So, for example, one of the consequences of the war in Gaza is the planned forced deportation of millions of Afghan refugees from Iran and Pakistan. Each country has already deported at least 800,000. These are people who arrived as legal refugees. But many of them have had their papers cancelled in the last year by the host states and then been forced to move.  

These are poor people. The rich can bribe the police. In both Iran and Pakistan, Afghans have long been the lowest people on the ethnic hierarchy. And in both countries, they have long been treated with racist contempt.

In Iran, the government arrested and interrogated hundreds of poor Afghans once the Israeli bombing began, saying that Afghans were spies aiding the Israelis. The regime had no evidence for that, and no reason for saying it, except to create helpless scapegoats for their own mortifying weakness in the face of the Israeli onslaught.

In the twelve days after the Israeli bombing ended, 300,000 people were forcible deported at one border crossing between Iran and Afghanistan. That’s an average of 25,000 people a day passing through the ramshackle customs buildings in the midst of an arid wasteland at Islam Qala.

In all, 800,000 people have already been deported from Iran, and at least as many from Pakistan. The best estimates at the moment are that a total of between six and eight million Afghan men, women and children will be deported or forced to flee.

That is six to eight million people forced back into Afghanistan, an already desperately poor country of forty million people. God knows how they will live. Between 2021 and 2024 there was a climate change induced drought in Afghanistan, and the UN had to feed twenty million people each winter.

When there is another long climate drought – and there will be one – will all those people be fed?

The world is largely silent about what is being done to Afghanistan, because thirty years of American propaganda has persuaded many to think of Afghans as less than human. But the more recent silence also has much to do with the new normal created by Gaza.

History has shifted. We now live in a world where racist murder, persecution of refugees and massacres are perhaps not more accepted, but certainly more normal than they were two years ago.

As we move into economic storms, and into the horrors of climate change, governments will do what they could not have done before, will push the boundaries of cruelty further, and will deport millions upon millions of climate refugees.

This change is about genocide and refugees, but it is also about killing the idea of sharing in every form.

So let us stop, pause and take stock.

FIVE: DO NOT GIVE UP YOUR RAGE

We remember when we first saw the picture of the premature babies in Gaza spread out on a blanket after the electricity failed in the hospital and the incubators shut down. We remember the first time we saw a father holding his child with part of the head shot away, the girl running through the fire, the endless streams of men carrying their children to hospital and the women wailing over the dead. You remember those images too.

The danger is that our rage and horror at those images can turn into fear and helplessness and shame. The danger is that we accept the new normal because the regimes persuade us that nothing can be done.

So do not feel ashamed and belittled by your distress at what you see on the phone. Each of us and all of us must now hang onto our rage, our grief and our decency. As the horror grows, we need to stand up for the Palestinians, for ourselves and for a decent future on this planet.

Related Posts

Nancy Lindisfarne, Conversations about Gaza on the Bus

Jonathan Neale, Climate Despatch from Afghanistan

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation