The real barbarians of Gaza

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The real barbarians of Gaza

One human killing another is barbaric. But isn’t it even more barbaric for somebody to rain bombs from the comfort of their air-conditioned rooms, killing tens or hundreds in one go?





The carnage in Gaza continues. Thousands of people have been killed, including children. There’ll be many more deaths, along with almost total destruction of homes and public infrastructure, to come.

And the world just watches it happen, comforting itself through many excuses – that Hamas started it, Israel has to defend itself, civilians are being used as human shields, people were given prior warning to evacuate their houses etc.

How much of that is true? With so much conflicting (and fake) news, who do we trust? The credibility of the western media was an early casualty. Should we trust them? Their credibility may have gone for good.

Another casualty is the sane and moral middle ground, from where one can view things dispassionately and understand the mix of politics and religions and history in this sorry little corner of the world. That’s just as likely gone for good too.

The reality is Palestine has always been an unloved orphan kicked around by everybody in the region.

Shiite Iran and much of the Sunni Arabs, despite being co-religionists – supposedly – probably hate each other more than they hate Israel. Many are still resentful about having to deal with the Palestinian problem foisted onto them by others.

Now Palestine is being kicked around by the biggest bully there – Israel, aided and abetted by the USA. Hamas, for its part, certainly had its own calculations for what they did, while Israel, stung with the unpleasant surprise of October 7th, needs to spill as much blood as possible for the benefit of their domestic and sympathetic international audience.

It’s not for nothing that so many civilians, including children, were killed. The need to “send a message” and raze Gaza to the ground, then to occupy and eventually annex it, is a barely hidden agenda.

Israel is creating an environment in the annexed territories that will push the Palestinians out, preferably into any of the surrounding Arab countries. This could be seen through the escalating violence and killing by Israeli settlers and military in the West Bank even before October 7.

The Israelis are driving the entire population of Gaza south, to create pressure on Egypt to open up its lone border gate, while keeping their own six border gates closed.

Flushing out the people of Gaza will allow the land to eventually become part of Israel, which presumably had calculated the cost of losing a couple of thousands of its people as being worth the price of permanently being rid of the Gaza problem.

Once the Palestinians are forced out, they’d never be allowed back – something that has been Israeli practice since 1948. They’ll be replaced by Jews from Europe or Africa or North America, while wandering around lost, as part of the Palestinian Diaspora – an irony that I’m sure is not lost on many people.

Another casualty that’ll have massive global impact for decades to come is the credibility of the west. An increasing number of people see the West as being even more hypocritical than anybody else, given how often it betrays its own much-touted principles.

One argument used by the West is the question “what to do with something as barbaric as Hamas?”

The word barbaric is a convenient term to throw at people you don’t like. One person’s barbarian is often another person’s hero, and the West’s own definition of what’s barbaric doesn’t convince as many people as it used to do.

One human killing another human is certainly barbaric. But isn’t it even more barbaric for somebody to rain bombs from the comfort of their air-conditioned rooms or turrets or cockpits, killing tens or hundreds in one go? Wouldn’t the person who unleashes what I call Weapons of Large Destruction be the real barbarian?

It seems to be that it’s barbaric when it is gory, but not when it is sterile and septic and you don’t have actual blood on your hands. It also seems like the more people you kill, the less barbaric you are. Perhaps Stalin was right – a single death is a tragedy, whilst a million is just a statistic.

Another argument goes, “Look at all the rapes and kidnapping – if civilians die in our response, that’s too bad”. But hey, how does the much-vaunted western system of justice deal with a serial killer who killed and raped scores of women in such a “barbaric” way in your own country? Does the system sanction that all the friends and relatives of the criminal also be raped and killed in return?

But that’s exactly the justification used in Gaza to kill tens of thousands of Gazans, including children who could never have been guilty – perhaps an example of another western concept called collective punishment?

While we’re at it, let’s look at another vaunted western principle, the so-called proportionate response. It seems this is all good unless the victims are some people you’ve deemed as less than humans. Then, proportionate response be damned.

And let’s also look at a few other western concepts such as genocide and ethnic cleansing – clearly these concepts and principles are disposable when it comes to people not like them.

At home, many Malaysian Muslims have a knee jerk reaction against anything Jewish, something fed into them by religious leaders happy to find a convenient scapegoat. For them, there’s no distinction between Judaism, Jews, Zionism and Israel, they’re all one and the same.

But another thing that this conflict shows up is there’s a lot of Islamophobia right here in Malaysia too. It’s not out in the open, as that would be foolish and dangerous to do so in an Islamic country. But you do see it in the vacuous statements saying “I pray for peace” or “every side is guilty”.

It’s almost as if calling for peace or being even-handed absolves you from having to take sides. That may have passed in the early days when the killings could have been just another series of tit-for-tats so common in that region – but is it still OK now when it’s clearly becoming genocide?

You also see it in silent reposting and the “likes” given to clearly Islamophobic, and even racist, social media content. I can easily call out overt Islamophobia, and antisemitism too; anything that condemns a whole group of people is just plain wrong – but it’s more difficult to call out when it’s disguised.

Killing happens all the time, often in some far hidden corners of the world, or through some sterile, computer-game-like videos seen from drones that don’t actually show the blood of scores or hundreds or even thousands dying.

But if the current scale, scope and ruthlessness of killing civilians, happening in real time in front of your very eyes, hasn’t horrified and shaken you to your very core, then you may not even have a core any more.

Welcome to our own world of genocide, ethnic cleansing, collective and disproportionate punishment all rolled into one, happening in real time on your favourite screen.