We are now a quarter of the way through 2024, and I feel a deep weariness and melancholy. A despondency of the kind that fills one’s mind with thoughts of flight, a desire to hide, or to disappear for a time.
Of course, there is much to feel weary about. I suspect that many of us, even in 2024, are experiencing a lingering pandemic fatigue. And of course we have our criminally incompetent government, load shedding, Cabinet minister idiocy and an economic meltdown.
But the root of so much of this exhaustion is the horror unfolding in Gaza. And more specifically (for me) is the wanton slaughter of its children.
All genocides begin with vilification. The first step is dehumanisation when the other is described as a “savage race” (as the Germans did with the Herero and Nama people before the Namibian genocide of 1904-1908); as the Hutus did in Rwanda in 1994 by positioning the Tutsis as “dangerous, inferior and as less than human”, and of course the Nazi dehumanisation of Jews to facilitate the Holocaust.
Soon after 7 October 2023, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said “we are fighting against human animals”. Later, Rami Igra, previously the head of division with Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) stated that there “are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza over the age of four, and any child over the age of four deserves to be starved”. In another interview he displayed his genocidal worldview even more openly when he declared that the entire population of Gaza should be considered “combatants”.
I have no hesitation in condemning what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023. Peace activists were slaughtered, children murdered and kidnapped. It was an atrocity.
But what do we make of the orgy of racist bloodlust that has followed, led by the corrupt and murderous Benjamin Netanyahu and his messianic and genocidal cabinet?
Of course, some people have always been dispensable. Slavery and apartheid are but two examples.
The death and destruction have occupied my waking and sleeping hours. At the time of writing, more than 15,000 children have been killed. But even that unfathomable number does not come close to painting the full picture – the bodies that remain in rubble, the children who have suffered catastrophic injury, those whose limbs were amputated without anaesthetic, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of children experiencing chronic and severe trauma.
There are countless stories and narratives that try to paint a picture that moves us beyond the sterility of statistics. Al Jazeera’s “Know Their Names” scrolls the names of the first 10,000 children killed. The list would fill 150 pages.
But for me, the story that I am unable to chase from my mind is that of Hind Rajab. On 29 January 2024, an Israeli army tank killed Rajab’s aunt, uncle and four cousins in the car in which they were travelling. Only Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, survived the initial attack.
Layan called the Palestinian Red Crescent Society for help, and then was heard being shot by machine gun fire, shouting that a tank was right next to the car. Hind continued to plead for help. She was found dead 12 days later, alongside the bodies of her family and two dead paramedics.
We live in a world where misery and destruction have become ambient to the lives of millions.
Hind was traumatised, pleading with the world to help her. And the response of the Israeli forces? Murder the paramedics trying to reach her. She died alone, alongside the bodies of her cousin and family, possibly watching her paramedic rescuers being murdered on their way to help her.
According to the International Court of Justice, what is happening in Gaza today is plausibly genocide. That it is an actual genocide seems increasingly incontrovertible. The latest Israeli strategy of forcibly starving two million entrapped people is itself evidence enough.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War
But for me, beyond this horror lies another concern. I fear that what is happening in Gaza today is also a bloody portent of the future for billions of people. The genocide unfolding in Gaza shows, in technicolour horror, the hypocrisy of the West, shines a withering light on the international rules-based order, but most importantly reminds us (as if this was needed) that the lives of some people are worth considerably less than the lives of others.
Of course, some people have always been dispensable. Slavery and apartheid are but two examples.
But there is a broader and more worrying trend. The art and film of an epoch are often an accurate measure of our moral moment. Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable film, Zone of Interest, is a case in point. The film tracks the idyllic family life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in his family home which shares a wall with the camp.
There are no images of gas chambers or emaciated prisoners in the film. The camp is portrayed mostly via sound and rising smoke. The utter horror has to be intimated. Glazer has written (and Naomi Klein has echoed this) that a key part of what he was trying to do was to show how “genocide [became] ambient to their lives”.
We live in a world where misery and destruction have become ambient to the lives of millions. When the president of the US, Joe Biden, casually licks at a mint ice cream while answering questions about a ceasefire in Gaza, the murder of more than 15,000 children has become ambient.
When the only mention of children in Gaza at an entire Oscar ceremony – Glazer’s – attracts controversy, with vacuous celebrities vying for attention wearing $10,000 dresses, genocide has become ambient.
If you are poor and live in the Global South, please do not harbour any illusions that what is happening to the children of Gaza will not one day happen to you.
How is it that the slaughter of 15,000 children by an occupying force running an open-air prison has not provoked widespread outrage? I fear that the capacity of so many to feel so little for the slaughter of the children of Gaza is a worrying portent.
Currently there are about 200,000 children in the Darién Gap, the jungle region between Colombia and Panama, a region characterised by disease, snakes and gangs of kidnappers.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, US politicians spoke of how Covid was rather useful due to the way in which it “culled people” – the elderly and those with weak immune systems (see Naomi Klein in her recent book Doppleganger).
On the Serbian border earlier this year, migrants were stripped of their clothes in freezing temperatures. Recently, a Republican politician in the US made a joke about dropping migrants out of helicopters into the sea. And as we have seen, the random shooting of migrants at borders has already begun.
This is my plea. If you are poor and live in the Global South, please do not harbour any illusions that what is happening to the children of Gaza will not one day happen to you. You are already partly dispensable.
But as the crises mount and you begin to threaten the moneyed political elites of the Global North, you will rapidly become fully dispensable, perhaps even vermin.
The billionaires are already feeling beleaguered. So, imagine what is going to happen when climate breakdown really wreaks its havoc, and the pampered “mint ice cream” lives of those in the Global North becomes increasingly tenuous?
In her wonderful book, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, the Palestinian author Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian speaks of how “our existence is upsetting them”. This is true for the Palestinians, for the Roma people, for indigenous people, for trafficked children, for modern-day slaves, and it is increasingly becoming true for migrants.
The lives of the poor and marginalised have always “upset” the moneyed and the powerful. Expect, as the sun will rise in the east, that eventually you too will be treated like the children of Palestine. Dispensable. Less than human. Vermin.
You are already (or certainly will become) Palestinian. DM
Become an Insider
Oh dear! Mr Tomlinson did not get the memo: to decry what is happening in Gaza and point an accusatory finger at Israel is to confirm being bought by Iran and sharing common “anti-semitic” cause with Hamas.
And I guess if all you say is true it gives Israel the right to slaughter innocent Palestinians and Europe to condemn Israel only when 7 of their civilians die.
You agree that the lives of Palestinian children is worthless.
Pursue Hamas, pursue Iran at least they have weapons to defend themselves.
Like the author says what we condone today will be the value we give life for billion years to come.
Hopefully you stay in Europe because if you are in Africa you are nothing to the western world.
You are right. The Global South should be worried. Children slaughtered in Sudan, Syria, Yemen to name a few. Babies beheaded in Mozambique by ISIS. Where is the outrage?
In a article headed Sudan,Syria or Mozambique, this one is specifically Gaza.
Its a technique called ‘deflection’ … so that you can avoid dealing with the real issue at hand. Some call it whataboutism ! Magicians are experts at it .
prof mark, you should look at destiny, then you might sleep better
More than 50% of the Jew population camping in the streets of Israel, the Jerusalem post,Haaretz have the pics affirming that what is happening in Gaza is wrong, this was never about hostages.
They ask that if this was about Hamas why are innocent Palestinians and hostages being killed.
You are free to research, prof Mark is on point.
Palestinine civilians are getting killed because Hamas has embedded themselves amounst the civilians.
I understand why you would like to believe that but there is a lack of evidence to support the human shield theory.
Hind Rajab was not a human shield, the attacks of MSF vehicles, WCK convoys and doctors sleeping at their homes were not collateral damage due to human shields. Reports from IDF soldiers, breaking the silence, B’tselem, multiple human rights agencies all point to the use of inappropriate and excessive force. This type of reckless military action and collective punishment is less likely to lead to any type of peace. But given the expansion of illegal settlements in the OPTs, it’s clear that Bibi’s government does not prioritise peace.
There is nothing ‘reckless’ about the IDF actions not just in Gaza, but west bank also. It is consistent with the Israeli regime spokespeople e.g. galant Gallant, who have given them license to behave abominably ! The US expression (that is all it is – quite meaningless!) of ‘concern’, is fig leaf for its real intentions of endorsement. The only difference is the US would like Israel to show some modicum of ‘restraint’ in carrying out of the slaughter, which it no doubt expects ‘others’ to buy into ! I am not even sure that the likes of Gallant et al have had to or apologized for their genocidal remarks/observations ?
The author condemns what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023 without explicitly naming Hamas as the perpetrator. Shouldn’t Israeli victims and their relatives inevitably come to the conclusion “that” for him when he continues his statements “the lives of some people are worth considerably less than the lives of others”? If he appealed equally to supporters of Hamas and Israel to do everything in their power to achieve a timely hostage deal and ceasefire, he would have credibly demonstrated that his empathy for the Palestinian victims is not propaganda hypocrisy.
I assume you also mean the thousands of ‘hostages’ in Israeli jails since ’67 ? What about the ongoing ‘land grabs’ by Zionists since then ?
A deal is a deal. What matters is that both sides are seriously prepared to stop killing. How many prisoners on the Israeli side are exchanged for the hostages from Oct. 7 is negotiable, but what the opponents call them is completely irrelevant.
Well written article, thank you Mr Tomlinson. Hopefully it opens the eyes of the many who remain “blind” to reality.
I endorse your comment. Mr. Tomlinsons’s article echoes the agony in my heart and soul at the suffering of fellow human beings – we are one human race – why do some people not see that?
The ‘blindness’ Enver refers to is a self induced state … facilitated and amplified by the US and its allies’ many decades of pro-Zionist propaganda via mainstream media sources. That it is finally now unravelling at last .. is cause for some optimism. Certainly it seems the ‘youth’ in many of the ‘western’ regimes are waking up to the calculated disinformation, seem to be one indicator of this.
And if we’d had no Pax Americana post WWII…….. rather Russia, Hitler, Hamas, Chairman Mao, Mugabe, the fat boy in Nort Korea running the world? Where do you think you’d be? Grow up, the US is imperfect but infinitely better than what we could have – and may still yet – get?
I cannot but agree with professor Tomlinson on many points, but feel uncomfortable about the one-sided condemnation of the west’s hypocrisy. It appears to me that we as humans are inclined to see things primarily from our own background and perspective, as is so clearly the case in South Africa too. Yes, we westerns must beat our breasts and say mea culpa and, dare we say, so must people from other backgrounds and cultures in order for us all to be able to become one human family of brothers and sisters. Listening to one another is only just a start.
Genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Hamas has genocidal intent – they say they want to destroy Israel and the Jews. Israel says what it is doing is not genocide but what it thinks is necessary to get its hostages back. Israel says it does does not want to destroy Palestine and its people – (hence not genocide) and it says to do this Hamas must be destroyed. Who is Hamas? – half of Palestine – so is this not genocide by Israel?). Who is right? So the balance lies against whoever started the latest issue – before rather doing ‘jaw, jaw before war , war’ (W S Churchill.)
You mean the deliberate ignoring of the ’67 UN resolution and continued ‘land grabs’ by Israel since then (even in the midst of the current war!) … with full complicity and support of the US and its allies ? It is like the ‘western’ monopoly on what is/constitutes ‘terrorism’ … with the latest addition of ‘self hating Jews’ to our lexicon .
Thank you Mark for posting with such clarity ,’feelings’ I share !
A really sound and eliminating article for those open to its purpose and value. How sad that some responding here are clearly devoid of an ethos of basic humanity. More whataboutery defenses being postured… Talk of deflecting, then deliberately ignoring many a UN resolution on the illegal occupation for more than seventy years. Then, when the (imperialist) US is your measurement, it’s a bar set very low. Let’s wait till it’s our / your children… As the Palestinian children are, to many of us!
All I can say as an ethnically (as defined by the most conservative among us) but non-practicing Jew and has lost many relatives of previous generations to the Nazi Holocaust, the dehumanizing of any people is the first step toward unimaginable horror against our fellow human beings
“I have no hesitation in condemning what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023. Peace activists were slaughtered, children murdered and kidnapped. It was an atrocity./But what do we make of the orgy of racist bloodlust that has followed, led by the corrupt and murderous Benjamin Netanyahu and his messianic and genocidal cabinet?”
One really has to read this from a Prof at Stellenbosch to understand how little basic factual accuracy or integrity and historical reality counts in the mind of a brainwashed activist. For the DM to publish such egregiously stupid, ignorant and hateful commentary as something to be taken seriously is to poison all the rest of its output. To think that this man is responsible for the education of young people at a respectable University is horrifying but I am partly consoled by the hope that the filter of history will consign his views to where they belong. Otherwise his prediction may well come true.
Well said