So the unimpeded bloodbath continues apace. According to latest reports from several news agencies, more than 700 Gazan civilians were killed on Tuesday, October 24, most of them women and children.

Some 5500 Gazan women are due to deliver their babies this month. Most are delivering on the streets as many hospitals are dysfunctional and most are hopelessly overcrowded. The siege imposed by Israel is denying water, food, medicine and fuel to the inhabitants of Gaza.

Depriving a whole population of what is essential to survive is a crime against humanitay and demanding they evacuate their land constitutes ethnic cleansing – a war crime under provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over Palestinian territory.

In the eyes of the Israeli state, Palestinians are unforgivably guilty of wanting to take back land, home and hearth stolen from them. Now, the Israeli prime minister heading an extreme right-wing government that includes fascists and religious zealots, minces no words: he seeks the eradication of Hamas which he characteriaes as a purely terrorist organization. But who is Hamas? Clearly, Israel  does not plan on eradicating only militants and activists. No less an authority than the president of Israel had said there are no innocent people in Gaza and the bombing we are seeing is proof that this belief is a cornerstone of Israeli military strategy.

Aided by the “international community” and other friendly states who also regard Hamas as nothing other than a terrorist organization, Gazans have been told in no uncertain terms that they must leave the land so the Israeli war machine can go ahead and eliminate Hamas forever.

The only problem is that Gaza is perhaps the world’s most densely populated strip of land, with all exits controlled by the Israelis – de jure or de facto,

The Rafah crossing into Egypt is of course manned by Egypt, which questions with reason why the “international community” should expect Egypt to take in so many refugees when they themselves fight off little dribs and drabs of migrants and refugees from their borders, indifferent to the hundreds who end up drowning in the seas.

Besides, once taken in, who is to say that Israel will ever let them back in again.

To this day, they have not let in the hundreds of thousands who were ejected from Palestine after the 1948 usurpation – the Nakba – with the active connivance of the “international community.”

As to terrorism, the “international community” should remember that the first “terrorists” of modern history in West Asia were the Zionist Irgun gang who blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, killing 91 people.

That “act of insane terrorism” (to use the words of Clement Atlee, British prime minister at the time) was preceded by several other acts of terrorism. The last chief of the Irgun gang was none other than Menachem Begin, later to become Israeli prime minister. You see, the ugly truth about terrorism is that terrorists who succeed in their projects can become prime ministers. Those who fail remain terrorists.

Had the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu, Prabhakaran, actively empathised with by many in India , succeeded in obtaining a “Tamil Elam” he too, like Begin, could have become a prime minister, notwithstanding all the terrorist doings of the LTTE, including the assassination of the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

And had Lenin or Castro, even Mandela, not succeeded, they would have remained reviled terrorists, no?

Just as a Bhagat Singh, a Chandrashekhar Azad and an Udham Singh would have if the British empire had not been defeated by India’s anti-colonial struggle.

But of course, those that support the Zionist warmongers find it convenient to date Palestinian history from October 7, 2023, just as many in India nowadays count Indian independence from 2014. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” UN secretary general Antonio Gutteres told the Security Council on October 24. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

Meanwhile, the civilians in Gaza who wish to live in what has been called the world’s biggest open-air prison have no safe place to be.

As to the two-state solution envisaged in the Balfour declaration of 1917 which divided Palestine, and jointly reiterated in the Oslo accord, Jewish settlers are seeing to it in the Occupied West Bank that this will never come to pass with daily acts of violence including murder, vandalism and arson.

No nation state in modern history has defied as many resolutions of the Security Council as has Israel.

So much for the ‘rules-based international order’ the “international community” loves to talk about.

The only guilty party remain the Palestinians for their temerity and gumption to seek to reverse their dispossession.

Not the Ukrainians, for whom the “international community” has spared no money or materiel in their war to take back the eastern Donesk regions from occupation by the Russian Federation.

If the history of the “international community” has taught us anything, it is this: sauce for the goose is never, or not necessarily, sauce for the gander.

Sensible people accept what fate is delivered to them by God’s chosen ones.

And yet, there exist thousands of non-Zionist Jews not just among the “international community” but within Israel herself who have made bold to step out to denounce what they have called “Israeli apartheid.”

These include Holocaust survivors as well .

In a demonstration in New York City’s Times Square, the Jewish Voice for Peace Organisation came out to say “not in our name,” and, marching to the house of the Senate Majority leader, Chuck Schumer, demanded an immediate ceasefire.

No better proof that Zionism as a political philosophy does not represent all Jewish people, just as Hamas does not represent all Palestinians.

Tailpiece

However despicable the assault of October 7 by Hamas on Israel, and however despicable the vengeance exacted by the Zionist war-machine on innocent Gazans, we need to remember the crude fact that both the extreme right-wingers in the current Israeli government and the Hamas were elected to their controlling positions by the Israeli and Palestinian voters respectively.

Such are the conundrums democracy can yield in circumstances of existential catastrophe.