The slaughter of innocent women and children in Gaza continues unabated by an Israeli government that rightly, can now be called despotic and their actions genocidal, a term I use with regret. The Jewish people should know better, as victims of the most brutal crimes against humanity. I plead, yet I am appalled that the Israeli electorate who have without a doubt seen the killings and destruction perpetrated by IDF in their name, have not said enough is enough. It is now clear, that a large part of the Israeli people has put into suspended animation any sense of humanity or empathy for innocent victims of this new Guernica and this new Warsaw Ghetto.
Over the past weeks, the Gazan tragedy has moved from the front pages because of Biden’s age, Trump’s ear and elections in Europe and the UK.
In April 1937, the Luftwaffe bombed the small town of Guernica in the Basque region, at the behest of the fascist Franco. This was a practice run for what became known as Blitzkrieg. James Corum states that a prevalent view about the Luftwaffe and its Blitzkrieg operations was that it had a doctrine of terror bombing in which civilians were deliberately targeted to break the will or aid the collapse of an enemy. Destroying a block of apartments or a school full of civilians who have been directed there as a” safe place/humanitarian zone,” well if this does not have the whiff of Blitzkrieg, what would you call it? The IDF, calls what are clearly war crimes, targeted killings. The IDF justification goes something like this, “the IDF regret the collateral damage, (a euphemism for the murder of dozens of innocent civilians) though we “may” have eliminated a couple of Hamas commanders. The ICJ has condemned many Israeli actions as war crimes. In Guernica, 1600 civilians were killed, in the new Guernica that is Gaza, 15,000 children and well over 10,000 women have been killed. As this tragedy continues the world stands by and watches, and at best does not care or by its inaction, complicit at worst.
In 1940 the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto to confine Jews before being transported to Treblinka. In the Ghetto, Jews were starved of food to keep them compliant, getting only 200 calories per day. In Gaza, the UN and other aid agencies estimate that 500,000 children are on the verge of starvation as a direct consequence of Israeli actions. Oxfam and the EU foreign policy chief have come out and said that the Israeli government is using starvation as a weapon of war against civilians. This takes the form of stopping UN aid convoys crossing into Gaza, killing aid workers, turning aid shipments away and Israeli forces attacking aid convoys. Pleading by the international community to let food aid enter Gaza is falling on deaf ears of Netanyahu and an Israeli cabinet that is devoid of any humanity. The word Gaza will now enter the lexicon of words that sit beside words like Srebrenica, ethnic cleansing, pogrom, democide, Guernica, and the Warsaw Ghetto which all exemplify man’s inhumanity to man.
Suneil Sharma
23rd July 2024
The Gob 
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