I Went to Gaza. What I Saw Was a Holocaust

 

Unutterable destruction.

by susan abulhawa

18 October 2024

Editor’s note: This article was commissioned by the Guardian US as part of its Rise against fascism series, which was published in September. It was spiked by editor-in-chief Katherine Viner following a disagreement about the author’s use of the term “holocaust” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza – the Guardian suggested she amend it to “genocide” and she refused. The context of the incident is documented in this report.

Novara Media has decided to publish the piece in full, including the term “holocaust”, following consultation with several scholars of genocide and Jewish history.

The author spells her name in lower case.

Content note: This piece contains explicit references to torture and sexual assault.

United Nations Resolution 3379 defined Zionism as “a form of racism” because at its core it is a supremacist ideology that seeks to privilege Jews at the expense, even detriment and demise, of non-Jews (the resolution passed in 1975 and was revoked in 1991 following pressure from Israel and the United States). Regardless of how one defines Zionism, it manifests, among other myriad ways, in the subjugation or displacement of indigenous Palestinians.

For the past 12 months, Israel has been implementing a long-held colonial fantasy of not only “finishing the job,” but doing so with a gleeful sadism that echos the social media posts of Tzipi Navon, Sara Netanyahu’s close advisor and office manager, who called for residents from Gaza who participated in the [7 October] massacre to be tortured live on broadcast television: “First removing the nails from the hands and feet … cut off [their] genitals and let [them] see [their testicles] fried in canola oil and [force them] to eat them … Keep the tongue to the end, so that it pleases us with its screams, the ears so that [they] can hear [their] own screams and the eyes so that [they] can see us smile.”

Polling data from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies suggests that a majority of Jewish Israelis do not think that soldiers accused of torturing Palestinians should face criminal charges.

In a rare moment of candour, the New York Times reported UN findings of systematic torture, including sexual torture. According to the UN’s report, Israeli soldiers have allegedly kept Palestinian captives in severely overcrowded prison cells, subjected them to sleep deprivation and forced nudity, threatened them with gang-rape, and penetrated or electrocuted male and female prisoners’ genitals and anuses with electrified batons and other objects. Released Palestinian hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza have reported being mauled and sexually assaulted by trained dogs. A lawyer who has been granted rare access to a Palestinian captive inside an Israeli detention centre reported the activation of a fire extinguisher inside the body of a 27-year-old man through a hose inserted into his rectum.

Many of those who were kidnapped, including prominent surgeons such as Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, director of the orthopaedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, may have died after torture. Some emerged from Israeli gulags with such trauma that they have reportedly suffered memory loss; some were unable to speak; all of them broken by unspeakable torment in Israeli captivity. And they were the lucky ones who got out.

Dr Mark Perlmutter, an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon from North Carolina who volunteered as an emergency doctor in Gaza, has said that of “all the disasters I’ve seen … 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza … almost exclusively children. I’ve never seen that before. I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I’ve never seen more shredded children in just my first week.” He said children are “definitively” being shot by snipers.

The raw footage and sounds of carnage are undeniable – whole families buried alive en masse in the rubble of their homes, over and over; torn bodies; shredded bodies; broken bodies; burnt bodies; dismembered bodies everywhere; blood and gore in the town squares and roads; unreachable bodies rotting in the streets, picked apart by starving stray dogs, themselves burned and broken; wanton destruction of everything in the entirety of the Gaza strip.

Still, what I witnessed on the ground, even for a small period in just a small area of Gaza, is infinitely worse than the worst video broadcast to the world. The enormity of harm beggars belief. We don’t yet have a language for it. As I watched exhausted families flee from place to place, hungry, thirsty, dirty, and bewildered, I kept thinking about the words of the Israeli general Rafael Eitan, who promised in 1983 that after the land was settled: “All the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” The state of Palestinians in Gaza is Israel’s vision manifest.

The near-total degradation of an entire high-functioning society in months is impossible to comprehend. The lack of adequate sustenance and sanitation, coupled with unceasing terror, the spread of disease (from hepatitis and polio to mysterious and painful pediatric skin pustules), testing of new weaponry, and an AI-guided death industry has made Gaza the most macabre experiment of empire.
I conducted a brief study to estimate the true death toll in Gaza because I knew the capacity to keep count had been decimated. My study, published by Electronic Intifada, found the true death toll to be between 190,000 and 500,000. It includes martyrs from direct fire, as well as those with chronic illnesses who died from lack of access to medications; the dead or dying from starvation and dehydration; those missing; and those dead from the spread of rampant communicable diseases borne of Israel’s destruction of sanitation and water treatment facilities.

As is frequently the case when Palestinians speak, my article was met with scepticism and dismissal. But 10 days after its publication, The Lancet, a venerated peer-reviewed medical journal, published a “conservative” number of “up to 186,000 or even more deaths” killed, corroborating the lower end of my estimated range, which I believe is still a gross underestimation.

Israel has dropped the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs in explosive ordnance on an area that’s less than half the size of Hiroshima. The statistics alone are unfathomable. But what’s more terrifying is the pleasure that Israelis – across nearly all sectors of their society – seem to take from witnessing the unimaginable misery, pain, and terror of Palestinians. Their soldiers set their acts of cruelty to music and post them on TikTok. Families across Israel dress up in blackface to mock Palestinians mourning their dead and bloody children. People across Israeli society call for greater violence, even a nuclear strike to wipe out all Palestinians in Gaza.

Ram Cohen, a Tel Aviv school principal who has spoken up about the Israeli culture towards Palestinians, describes it as such: “Arabs are inferior to us. That’s why we kick Palestinians and slap them. That’s why we shoot them. They’re nothing.” In July, many Israelis and some of their own lawmakers rose up in unison to demand the right to rip open the bodies of Palestinians through gang rape in their gulags at the Sde Teiman torture facility.

Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and it is doing it in full view of a seemingly indifferent world.

Gaza has rightly been described as “a graveyard for children,” but Gaza will also be the graveyard of western hegemony, along with the slogans and institutions that sustain it – from the myth of so-called “international law” to the Olympic committee that allowed members of a genocidal military and apartheid state to compete, while tolerating France’s ban on barrier-breaking Muslim women in hijab from participating.

susan abulhawa is a Palestinian author and human and animal rights activist living in Pennsylvania.

https://novaramedia.com/2024/10/18/i-went-to-gaza-what-i-saw-was-a-holocaust/