Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Drop Site News reports that more than 80 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza since what we’re calling a “ceasefire” went into effect on the 19th of January. The majority have been in Rafah, a now completely destroyed city which the Biden administration had previously said was off limits for a major Israeli offensive.
More than 80. Imagine if 80 Israelis had been killed by Hamas during that time instead. Hell, imagine if 80 Israelis were killed in addition to the more than 80 Palestinians who’ve been killed by Israel. Does anyone believe anything resembling a “ceasefire” would continue to hold had that been the case?
Of course not. Palestinian lives are viewed as expendable, while Israelis are viewed as human beings. Killing a few Palestinians here and there is viewed by Israel as morally equivalent to swatting a few flies who are creating a nuisance.
As an example of the kind of behavior I’m talking about, on Monday Israeli forces killed a five year-old girl in an airstrike on an animal-drawn cart near the Nuseirat refugee camp, apparently for no other reason than because the cart was traveling on a road that had not been “authorized for passage”.
Those are the IDF’s own words, not mine. That’s their own public justification for bombing a cart pulled by a donkey with a small child on it.
“In central Gaza, an [Israeli military] aircraft fired to distance several suspicious vehicles that were moving northward in an area that is not authorized for passage according to the agreement,” the Israeli military said.
The IDF claims that it used strikes from military aircraft to “distance” vehicles it considered “suspicious” because they were not traveling the right direction on the right road. They’ll use airstrikes as a means of communication, the way normal countries use road signs. They’ll say, “We don’t like the way those Arabs are moving so let’s just send them a little message. There. Boom. Now your kid’s dead. Guess you’ll stop traveling the wrong way on that road now.”
In all the dozens of incidents in which Israeli forces have been firing upon Palestinians in Gaza, they have reliably justified their actions as defensive responses to a perceived “threat”. But we can see from the example above how shaky those claims of being under threat actually are.
We also see it illustrated in the way IDF troops on Tuesday “accidentally” killed an Israeli military contractor who happened to look a lot like an unarmed Palestinian civilian. If you read the Haaretz report on the incident you’ll be told that the man “was unarmed and dressed in civilian clothing, making it unclear why he was shot,” but it is not at all unclear why he was shot. The photo the outlet provides makes it clear that the contractor was darker-skinned and did not look like an Israeli of European ancestry, so when he showed up without a weapon or a uniform, the Israeli troops assumed he was a Palestinian civilian and killed him.
Obviously an Israeli military contractor would not have been behaving in a menacing way toward Israeli soldiers. His only mistake was failing to adequately communicate to them that he was Israeli, and therefore worthy of being treated like a human being. Because he didn’t, he was exterminated like the vermin the Israeli troops saw him as in that moment.
Palestinians are so pervasively dehumanized in Israeli society that Israelis tend to think nothing of killing them, which is why the Gaza holocaust has been allowed to happen. Palestinians are also dehumanized in western society, which is why we also allowed it to happen. Despite all the west’s purported values of equality and human rights for all, it’s an easily observable fact that, under the imperial status quo, some human lives are more equal than others.
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