Genocide Is Not a Metaphor: Reflections on Gaza and the Denial of the Crime of Genocide
摘要
The Zionist entity responded to Hamas’s act of resistance on October 7 2023 by launching a mass bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave followed by a ground offensive, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties, flattening most of the Gaza Strip and leaving 80% of the population homeless. The assault was termed genocide by genocide scholars, international agencies including the UN, Palestinians, and their supporters, a term fiercely denied by Zionists and their supporters across the political divide. The Gaza genocide continues the ongoing Zionist resolve to eliminate the Palestinian natives and is in line with the racialisation and dehumanisation of the Palestinians by the Zionist entity that constructs European Jews as a race superior to the alleged inferiority of Palestinians as well as non-European Jews. A month into the Zionist genocidal attack on Gaza, junior minister Amichai Eliahu called to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, later withdrawing and saying it was “metaphorical.” But as the world has been witnessing horrible images of death and destruction, and as Gazans struggle to stay alive amidst bombs, starvation and disease, and huge shortages of food, water, electricity, hospital care and basic necessities, and as Zionist commentators call for “flattening Gaza” and annihilating all Gazans, genocide is not a metaphor, genocide is a reality. Centring race as an analytic principle, this chapter surveys the Gaza geocide debate, including the debate regarding the accusations levelled against Hamas of mass rapes of Israeli women. The chapter argues that there will be no way back from the deep divide between supporters and deniers of the Zionist assault on Gaza as genocidal.