The failure of diplomacy and the resultant human toll.
After nearly half a year, the relentless bombing in Gaza continues. Israel maintains its story of wanting to bring Israelis held in Gaza to Israel while refusing any deal that would lead to this so long as it requires a permanent ceasefire. Israel’s refusal to accept Hamas’ ceasefire offers evidence of the fact that it does not really care about the lives of its people. Instead Israel sees these people as collateral damage to continue bombing the civilian population of Gaza. If the settler-colony of Israel actually did care about its people’s lives, it would have made an offer on Oct. 8, 2023.
Dissenters would say that Hamas broke the ceasefire and that Israel should ensure they will not do it again to protect future Israelis. This excuse places the lives of Israelis, the occupiers of Palestine, over the lives of Gazans, the indigenous people, by insinuating that it is right for Israel to murder thousands of civilians, target journalists, continuously violate numerous international laws, along with other heinous acts, because Israelis might die in the future. Israel is perpetrating active genocide. It is something the International Court of Justice has called “genocidal acts.” Yet, this statement argues that it is okay that Palestinians are being murdered currently because Israelis could die later. It places possibility over actuality and, therefore, Israeli lives over Palestinian lives. Furthermore, contrary to the media’s reporting and the stories of Israel and its accomplices, Hamas did not break the ceasefire — Israel did. A ceasefire agreement is an accord between both parties to stop aggression, meaning there should not be any, but primarily civilian, deaths or injuries. However, before Hamas’ counterattack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel constantly attacked Palestine, killing hundreds of Palestinians and injuring thousands more. Every time Israel fired a rocket into Gaza or a soldier shot a Palestinian, every time Israeli soldiers beat a Palestinian or raided a refugee camp, Israel broke the ceasefire. Only if Israel abides by the ceasefire agreement will bloody violence stop.
However, even if the physical violence stops, peace would not exist because Israel is an apartheid ethnostate founded on stolen land through settler-colonialism. Israel has separate laws for Jews and Palestinians, even preventing Palestinians from using the same roads as Jews. In certain places, Palestinians must live below Jews. In Gaza, even before Oct. 7, Israel enacted a strict blockade over Gaza, despite claiming it pulled out of the occupied territory in 2005. It neglects its duties as the occupier by denying Gazans enough to live without fearing death from starvation, dehydration, medical issues and more. One of many examples is the fact that 97% of the water in Gaza before Oct. 7 was declared unfit for human consumption, yet Israel did not provide a solution, which it is required to do as the occupier. Israel instead aggravated the problem by taking rainfall in Gaza and funneling it into Israel. A situation such as this is not peaceful even if there is no mass violence because the circumstances Israel has forced Palestinians in are unjust, to say the least. Saying it is peaceful is nothing short of a lie and an excuse for Israel to continue its illegal occupation of Palestine and its people. It is a path to the racist rhetoric of ‘See? Palestinians just want violence’ used whenever Palestinians fight the environment of degradation and dehumanization created and propelled by the West and its media.
The idea of Palestinians being inherently violent coupled with the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself, even by murdering over 30,000 people with 10,000 more presumed dead under the rubble, allows Israel to look like the hero when it offers a six-week pause on genocide, or as Kamala Harris called it, a ceasefire. After the end of the proposed six-week period, Israel would be free to bomb Gaza again until every Gazan is dead or displaced. If the fact that the massacre of Gaza is ongoing after nearly half a year has shown us anything, it is that the US will do nothing to stop it and will instead choose to abet this genocide.
The only form of relief the US has provided is a measly 74,000 meals, which is only enough to feed 3.4% of the population — that has been without food or water for nearly half a year — once. This is nowhere near enough. Most of us would feel starved if we were restricted to one meal a day. For Palestinians, it is one meal after months of starving or, at most, eating rotten scraps and animal food. This is especially true for those in North Gaza who have not received any food assistance since January because of Israel. And even then, what the US provided is not a proper meal. Videos from Gazans show the airdropped food to be expired army food. Furthermore, this aid came days after the Flour Massacre in which Israel purposefully shot and murdered over 100 Gazans and injured hundreds more on Al-Rashid Street, the site of airdropped flour, who were attempting to get something to eat after months of near famine. Israel knew Gazans would be concentrated in one place and would have difficulty fleeing and chose to open fire on this starved civilian population. It would make sense that Palestinians would be wary after Israel has decided to target them when they receive the little aid they do. This wariness was warranted as five Palestinians were murdered in the US airdrop due to parachute malfunctions.
Although this airdrop may make it seem like Biden has had a change of heart when it comes to Palestine, the fact that the US is still supplying weapons to Israel during this genocide is enough to disprove this. At most, the Biden administration is putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. If the administration really cared about Palestinians, they would force Israel to open Gaza’s borders. They would stop making it easy for Israel to commit genocide. They would have called for a ceasefire months ago. Furthermore, the announcement of this airdropped food came only a couple of days after the Michigan primary, in which more than 13% of the population voted uncommitted due to Biden’s policy on Gaza and has become prominent with Representative Rashida Tlaib’s advocacy. For instance, in Minnesota a staggering nearly 20% voted uncommitted for the same reason. The same day, Super Tuesday, Biden dropped the second wave of food. This, in addition to the fact that airdrops are impractical, according to numerous aid organizations such as the United Nations’ World Food Program MENA, which tweeted, “[r]oad routes are the only way to bring in the large quantities of food desperately needed to avert #famine,” leads to the conclusion that Biden is only trying to clean up his image. He is trying to fool those against the Palestinian genocide by making it seem like he is trying to do everything he can when this is not the case. He is the president of the United States. He can easily stop Israel’s actions with a phone call like Ronald Regan did in August of 1982, which led to the cessation of Israeli hostilities in Lebanon only twenty minutes later, or as Biden did in May 2021.
In a circumstance such as this, in which people are undergoing mass murder and displacement with their healthcare system collapsing as people flood any semblance of a hospital with severe gruesome injuries, all people should be drawing attention to Gaza. Neutrality is not an excuse to remain silent. This goes for institutions as well, including The University of Tulsa, which has refused to publish any statement acknowledging the situation in Gaza, thus failing its Arab and Muslim population and making us feel unsafe regardless of its claims.
The administration’s reason for doing so is that speaking on such a sensitive topic goes against the university’s principles. However, on Feb. 28, 2022, CGE published a statement on Ukraine and even provided links to help only six days after Russia began its invasion. Their statement can be found here: https://utulsa.edu/news/statement-on-the-situation-in-ukraine/. Clearly, TU has no issue breaking its silence on sensitive issues. So, I have to wonder why TU refuses to even acknowledge the circumstances in Gaza. I am curious to know what differentiates Ukraine from Gaza to such a degree that after 20 weeks of genocide, the university has not found it imperative to publish a statement even though it did less than a week after Russia invaded Ukraine.
In any case, as the situation in Gaza worsens with it being on the verge of famine, and its infrastructure, from healthcare to economic, decimated with no end to this genocide in sight, my principles tell me to continue talking about Palestine and I urge others to do the same.