‘Chronicle Of A Genocide Foretold’: Evarist Bartolo Delivers Speech At Nuclear And Security Forum In Cairo

At the beginning of the present war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Remember what Amalek has done to you, we have been commanded. And we do remember.” He invoked the Bible: “Now go, attack Amalek, and destroy all that they have, and spare no one; but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Netanyahu calls Gaza ‘Amalek’. The Hebrew Bible describes Amalek as the recurrent enemy nation of the Israelites since at least 3,000 years ago. As the chosen people of God, the Israelites believe that they have the right and duty to exterminate Amalek. As the Amalekites could transform themselves to resemble animals, in order to avoid capture, it was considered necessary to destroy the livestock when destroying Amalek.

There are Talmudic commentators who argue that the calls to spare no Amalekite or “blot out their memory” are metaphorical and do not require the actual killing of Amalekites. Certainly this is not the interpretation favoured by the Israeli leadership and their supporters.

Scholars like Norman Naimark, discussing the ethics of the commandment to exterminate all the Amalekites, including children, and the presumption of collective punishment describe it as genocidal.

Did the Amalekites exist in fact? Archaeological research has found no conclusive proof about them among the nomadic Arabs of the period. Hugo Winckler has concluded that there were no Amalekites and that the Biblical stories concerning them were entirely ahistorical and mythological. Some scholars do not dismiss the possibility of Amalekite communities in the Negev highlands and Tel Masos. They contend that if this is the case, it is likely that the Israeli king Saul’s anti-Amalekite campaigns 3,000 years ago were motivated by a strategic desire to wrest control of copper production at Tel Masos. Copper was valuable to the early Israelites and their theology and ritual.

What is indispensable for Netanyahu, to justify what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians, not only in Gaza, and not only in the last year, but since the birth of the Zionist movement in 1897, if Amelikites did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them in the image of the Palestinians.

Planned Hell

On 9th October 2023 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant justified the planned mass slaughter of Gazans by declaring that “we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”. He also said that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and that he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, as well as presenting the road map of the impending genocide: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”

On 10th October 2023 , the head of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, warned the Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”.

The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari vaunted about the deliberate destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz made it clear that the present war on Gaza had one objective – to empty Gaza of its people either by making them leave Gaza or by killing them all: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

The Israeli government cannot be accused of concealing its genocidal intent from day one of its present war on Gaza.

A Genocide Endorsed

Most of the American and European leaders endorsed what Israel declared openly that it was about to continue doing to the people of Gaza. Some of them, like the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, disingenuously said in October 2023:  that “Israel is a democratic state guided by very humanitarian principles, so we can be certain that the Israeli army will respect the rules that arise from international law in everything it does.”

Western elites have continued to look the other way on Israel’s horrific campaign in Gaza, even as the death and destruction has been visible for months thanks to Arab satellite television channels and social media outlets that Western governments have been unable to control. The US and the UK use their veto in the Security Council to provide diplomatic support to Israel and more tangibly provide the bombs that are killing and destroying the people of Gaza and their land.

Recently, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, denounced German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s defence of Israel’s bombing of Palestinian civilian displacement sites in Gaza, warning of the legal repercussions of supporting a state that commits international crimes. The rapporteur expressed her concern about Germany’s position on Israel and Palestine and its “serious consequences.”

“As a UN Independent Expert, I am deeply concerned by the stance Germany is taking on Israel/Palestine, and its dangerous implications and consequences. Minister Baerbock should be invited to provide the evidence of what she claims, and then explain how “civilian objects losing protected status” justify the massacres Israel is committing in Gaza and elsewhere.”

Historical Context for Supporting Genocide

Israel has been acting with impunity for the last 76 years. International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber who formerly worked for the United Nations describes Israel as holding “the world record for breaching UN resolutions. It has been found responsible for gross and systematic violations of human rights and humanitarian law by successive UN commissions of inquiry and independent special procedures. Worse, it has killed more UN staff than any party in history (and by a wide margin), has detained and tortured UN staff, and has regularly attacked, slandered and obstructed the Organization and its duly-mandated operations.”

Despite all this, the United States considers Israel as a democratic state and morally superior to its neighbours. It invites Israel to participate in its Summits for Democracy as part of its self-righteous crusade to evangelise the rest of the world, casting itself as a choir of democratic angels against the hordes of autocratic devils.

The total support of the West for Israel is better understood within a historical context as it is the result of the confluence of three rivers flowing into one big river of Zionist, European and American exceptionalism.

On May 4, 1493, pope Alexander VI issued the infamous ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, decreeing that “any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be discovered, claimed and exploited by Christian rulers”. This was the time that the Europeans were discovering the so-called New World, or the Americas.

Pope Alexander VI declared that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted, be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous (sic) nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI had been asked to rescind and revoke the colonialist decree to no avail until Pope Francis finally obliged the Vatican do so in March 2023.

Dehumanisation of the Colonised

The Papal Bull of 1493 has provided the spiritual, political and legal justification for colonisation and the seizure of land not inhabited by Christians in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. It fuelled white supremacy and gave European settlers the sense that they were instruments of divine design and possessed cultural superiority over the rest of the world.

It created the ideology that supported the dehumanisation of those living in the newly discovered lands and made acceptable the dispossession, murder and forced assimilation of the indigenous people.

In the ‘Political uses of the past: the recent Mediterranean experience’ (2002) Jacques Revel and Giovanni Levi write: “ …almost every nation in southeastern Europe is represented in its self-perception and national myth as the bulwark of a particular universal system of values (Christianity. Islam. and so on).”

Around 500 years ago the ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’ ran from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. It was a Papal label given to those countries as frontiers of Catholic Europe defending it mostly from the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Christian Orthodoxy.

This Antemurale myth insists on the countries’ inclusion into some larger cultural entity which is allegedly superior to other groups which do not belong to it. This mindset facilitates the propensity of the people of Southern European countries to join entities like the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a continuation of their mission of belonging to the West against the East and South.

Superiority and Dominance

The United States is driven by a belief in its exceptionalism considering itself to hold values and distinctive qualities in its political and economic system that make it unique in the world. In the last 60 years a new secular religion has been born in the United States where neoconservatism and neo-liberalism have merged in their belief that the US is better than other countries and has a superior culture and has a worldwide mission to spread capitalism and liberal democracy.

It is interesting to note that Mormons believe that America is the “promised land” that was settled by Lehi and his fellow Israelites. The influential Christian Zionists in the United States not only believe that Israel has a God-given right to the land of Israel but also put the Israel state on a pedestal and support it in all that it does. But it is the Israel lobby in the United States that ensures that the American political and security establishment not only shapes US domestic and foreign policy in the interests of Israel but also works constantly, in John Mearsheimer’s words to guarantee “that the United States and Israel are joined at the hip”. This explains why pro-Palestinian academics and students in the US have been treated so harshly when protesting against the genocide in Gaza.

In her article ‘Needing an Enemy: On the Manichean Mindset of the North Atlantic’s Foreign Policy Establishment’ (9 September 2020), Dr. Arta Moeini, Research Director of American Institute for Peace & Diplomacy writes how: “The dualistic paradigm of the international system during the U.S.-Soviet rivalry bred an entire generation to see the world through a black-and-white binary.”

The Other as a Demonised Enemy

She writes that “the North Atlantic elites continue to seek adversaries to demonize and “monsters to destroy”, not only in order to justify their moral universalism and presumed ideological superiority”, but also because of the “endless stream of funding from the defence industry, neoliberal and neoconservative foundations, as well as the … bipartisanship” of the Democrats and the Republicans “around preserving the status quo”.

She says that the West has replaced the Soviet Union with Russia and China (and I would add countries like Iran and all others not resigned to the destiny that the West condemns them to) as the enemy in today’s holy war between good and evil … “suggesting that the North Atlantic bloc holds a certain monopoly on all that is good and true.”

American economist Michael Hudson who worked in 1974 with Uzi Arad (former head of Mossad and present advisor to Netanyahu) says: “Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was all pioneered in Vietnam. We had a chance to [get to] know each other very much (referring to Uzi Arad). And I could see that the intention from the very beginning was to get rid of the Palestinians and indeed to use Israel as the basis for U.S. control of Near Eastern oil. … what they wanted was the oil reserves in the Middle East. And again and again, I heard the phrase, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier in Israel’.”

Kill the Palestinians

“So, what you’re seeing today isn’t simply the work of one man, of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the work of the team that President Biden has put together. It’s the team of Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor Blinken, and the whole deep state, the whole neocon group behind them, Victoria Nuland, and everyone. They’re all self-proclaimed Zionists. And they’ve gone over this plan for essentially America’s domination of the Near East for decade after decade…So I think I want to make it clear that this is not simply an Israeli war against Hamas. It’s an American-backed Israeli war. Each of them have their own objectives. Israel’s objective is to have a land without non-Jewish population. And America’s aim is to have Israel acting as the local coordinator.”

Hudson says that the playbook Israel is following today in Gaza was developed 50 years ago by the United States for Vietnam: “The aim all along has been to kill the Palestinians. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimizes the domestic casualties…. So, the genocide that you’re seeing today is an explicit policy, and that was a policy of the forefathers, the founders of Israel. The idea of a land without people was a land without Arabs in it, the land without non-Jewish people.”

Apart from getting rid of the Palestinians and expanding into Gaza, new opportunities are being created to develop luxury beach properties and to exploit the deposits of natural gas in the sea off Gaza.

To achieve this, Hudson says Israel has been killing journalists to stop them from reporting the war, bombing hospitals and health personnel so that the wounded have no one and nowhere to be taken care of – “… you bomb the greenhouses, you bomb the trees, you sink the fishing boats that have supplied food to the population. And then you aim at fighting the United Nations relief people.”

Ground Zero in Gaza

Last July, ‘The Lancet’, one of the world’s leading medical journals in a scientific report called “Counting the dead in Gaza” showed that the Gaza death toll could be 186,000. That was four months ago. The report said that the number killed is around 8% of Gaza’s population and is still a “conservative estimate.”

On 30^th September 2024 Oxfam issued a report concluding that more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year for a similar period than in any other conflict over the past 20 years. It also showed that up to 23 September 2024, Israeli explosive weapons hit on average homes every four hours, tents and temporary shelters every 17 hours, schools and hospitals every four days and aid distribution points and warehouses every 15 days.

Oxfam says that over 25,000 children have been traumatised deeply either by losing one or both parents and thousands of others are left “grappling with anxiety and severe physical injuries, with many having lost limbs.”

A joint World Bank, UN Report assessing damage to Gaza’s infrastructure between October 2023 and end of January 2024 finds that every sector of the economy has been affected: housing, water, health and education facilities, commercial and industrial buildings. Tens of millions of tons of debris and rubble have been left following the bombing. This will take years to remove before recovery and reconstruction can begin.

Destroying the Environment

In a similar report about the environmental impact of the war, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) found that most of Gaza’s environmental management has been reversed through the destruction of water desalination and wastewater treatment facilities, solar power infrastructure and investments in the Wadi Gaza Coastal wetland.

An estimated 39 million tonnes of debris have been generated by the conflict posing risks to human health and the environment, from dust and contamination with unexploded ordnance, asbestos, industrial and medical waste, and other hazardous substances. Human remains buried beneath the debris must be dealt with sensitively and appropriately.

The water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are almost entirely defunct. Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants have shut down, with sewage contaminating beaches, coastal waters, soil, and freshwater with a host of pathogens, nutrients, microplastics, and hazardous chemicals. This poses immediate and long-term threats to the health of Gazans, marine life, and arable lands.

The solid waste management system is severely damaged. Five out of six solid waste management facilities in Gaza are damaged. By November 2023, 1,200 tonnes of rubbish were accumulating daily around camps and shelters. A shortage of cooking gas has forced families to burn wood, plastic and waste instead, endangering women and children in particular. This, coupled with fires and burning fuels, is likely to have sharply lowered Gaza’s air quality.

Even Strawberries and Olives are Considered Enemies

Munitions containing heavy metals and explosive chemicals have been deployed in Gaza’s densely populated areas, contaminating soil and water sources, and posing a risk to human health which will persist long after the cessation of hostilities. Unexploded ordnance poses especially serious risks to children.

Destruction of solar panels is expected to leak lead and other heavy metals, causing a new kind of risk to Gaza’s soil and water.

The UNEP report also concludes that the Hamas’ tunnel system and Israel’s efforts to destroy will cause long term risks to human health from groundwater contamination and to buildings constructed on potentially unstable land surfaces.

All this shows that the environment is not just collateral damage but a planned target of the Israeli army.

Samar Safiya, a Gazan environmental activist says: “In the place of orchards, sandy beaches, and strawberry fields that were once the pride of Gazans, the coastal territory is now a dystopian landscape of military bases, craters, and ruins. In northern Gaza, two-thirds of the land was agricultural – now there’s nothing left. More than 80,000 tonnes of Israeli bombs have spared neither fields, olive trees nor lemon trees. This environmental destruction accompanies the massacres and genocide,”

Towards a Global Gaza?

The war on Gaza has not only destroyed millions of lives and Gaza’s environment, but is also demolishing the rule of international law and the basis for founding the United Nations in 1945.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador says: “Western countries have been planning this genocide for months, if not years, and this coordinated line that Israel is not breaching international humanitarian law – when it plainly is, and when the latest ICJ ruling was unanimous – 15 to nil ordering a complete ceasefire – just responded to with the Ali Shifa Massacre and with yet more and more bombings. And it’s not just that this is destroying the fabric of international law. It’s making a mockery of the Security Council. It’s making a mockery of the International Court of Justice, for the whole fabric of post-1946 international law.”

To a large extent, what is happening in Gaza is symptomatic and a microcosm of what is happening in the world at large, where the old unipolar world dominated by the United States is refusing to die, and where the new multipolar world creating alternative institutions to those dominated by the US is struggling to be born. If this painful and turbulent transition is not managed within a framework of basic coexistence and the enemies confronting each other continue to go up the escalation ladder, the whole world will end up like Gaza, through nuclear annihilation.

Will we manage to step back from the abyss like we did 62 years ago in the Cuban missile crisis?