After 365 days, the genocide hasn’t changed, but Gaza has transformed the world

Alameen Templeton
The battered Gaza enclave has changed the entire world as 365 days of unrepentant savagery have swamped social media screens while Israel with the United States have murdered 41 870 people before our horrified eyes.
It has changed the world forever.
We have watched impotently as Israel has prosecuted its genocide and its chief enabler in Washington has enforced the widening obscenity while steadfastly and deliberately dismantling America’s global reputation as a protector of human rights.
And Gaza will continue changing the world, because the attacks on Gaza are attacks on the whole world’s citizenry as the Zionists led by its chief enforcers, US president Joe Biden and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, try impose their “new normal” on international law.
We cannot forget
The grisly trail of blood writhing in its wake is smudged with the scarlet blush of America’s “red lines”. And Israel would like us to somehow forget the blood, like it and Washington forgot the red lines as soon as they were drawn in Gaza’s exhausted soil before they moved on to the next massacre.
But we cannot forget, even as Gaza hovers on the fringe of retreating into “old normal” as the Lebanon border opens into a new front of the genocide and threatens to spawn a regional tragedy.
South Africa is due in the next few days to present an updated memorium on the progress since its last approach to the International Court of Justice. It’s likely to make depressing reading, for Israel has continued its starvation blockade and its merciless transformation of Gaza into a desolate wasteland of bombed out buildings as it has waged a direct war on its civilian population, deliberately targeting hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel, aid convoys, schools, refugee camps and women and children in battered tent towns on windswept sand dunes.
The sacrifice of others
Remember when we, the rest of the world, still thought we could appeal to US sensibilities, when we thought we could still save Gaza’s hospital infrastructure? When we were horrified at the Israeli attack on Al-Ahly Hospital? Remember how we pored over the evidence and held our breaths as Biden flew in? Do you remember how he mumbled in turncoat feebleness that “the other side did it”?
Along with billions of other people on this planet, we no longer hope like that anymore.
Over 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2,3million people are displaced and starving, facing the daily threat of war famine, artificially induced and deliberately enforced with the United States watching protectively on Israel’s shoulder.
And Netanyahu insists even now the war must go on, it must widen, it must encompass the whole world because that’s the only way he can stay out of jail. And he has to try and rewrite humanitarian international law if he is to succeed.
It’s an impossible task, but he’s giving it his best shot.
ICC fiddling while Gaza burns
No sacrifice is too large, as long as it’s the rest of the world making it.
It’s been four months now and the International Criminal Court has yet to approve its chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant.
In contrast, the ICC took just nine days to issue arrest warrants on 9 March 2022 against Russian generals leading the Russian invasion of Ukraine which started on 24 February 2022. Arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, followed eight days later on March 17.
Just nine days after the start of a war that has seen only 10% of civilian casualty rates compared to Gaza, Khan received approval to prosecute arrest warrants against senior Russian military officials General-Lieutenant Gergei Kobylash and Admiral Viktor Sokolov.
The ICC approved the warrants on reasonable grounds of suspecting them of the war crimes, of directing attacks at civilian objects, and of causing excessive incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects.
Yet, the genocide in Gaza has been far more extensively documented via social media and massive public protests that have swamped into irrelevance protests over Ukraine. The podium at the UN General Assembly has quivered beneath the pounding of fists as speaker after speaker, specialist after specialist, president after prime minister, has demanded impotently that the US and Israel stop the bloodshed, to stop the war crimes, to stop directing attacks at civilian objects, and to stop causing excessive, incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects.
But the ICC has remained silent on Karim’s request for arrest warrants against Israel’s biggest thugs, and they remain free to strut the world’s stage.
It deserves a mention that Khan, probably in a desire to blunt inevitable Israeli accusations of “bias”, issued three arrest warrants for Hamas leaders, but Tel Aviv has already liquidated two of them in the intervening four, empty months. Yahya Sinwar remains the lone suspect still on Khan’s wanted list; Ismail Haniyeh and Muhammad Deif no longer need concern themselves with drawing up defence statements.
Trampled into the ground
The US, Israel and their other Zionist allies are making a mockery of all humanitarian law, of that enshrined in international conventions and even on their own statute books.
America’s famous “Leahy Laws” that are supposed to outlaw the sale of US arms to conflicts or countries that target and murder civilians have been trampled into the ground. Similar UK laws have been derided, deliberately ignored and evidence demanding their enforcement has been consciously covered up.
Russia and China are hovering on Arabia’s sidelines, probably more concerned with dislodging the US as Arabia’s effective power broker than saving human lives, but they can sniff the opportunity on the wind.
They can sense Washington’s influence is on the wane and they’re eager to pick up the slack.
Russia has shown its willingness to spring to Syria’s defence as the widening war in Lebanon spills over borders. It has also been also a long-time, battleground ally of Teheran in combating “American jihadis”, like ISIS, in Syria.
Allies adrift in the Persian Gulf
China has warned that stability in Arabia is hanging by a thread. It has pressed ahead with its line throughout the Gaza genocide, insisting it must be solved through multilateralism, posing itself as a responsible power on the world stage as it widens its influence through the expanding membership of BRICS and underlines the chaotic consequences of US unilateralism.
America’s erstwhile Gulf allies, so comfortably ensconced in the “normalization” boat before October 7 last year, have lost patience with Israel and no longer have confidence in NATO “mutual defence agreements” to guarantee their security in the volatile region.
Israel has made it clear it has no interest in securing or allowing the emergence of a Palestinian state, which is the basic condition that Gulf nations insist on for normalization to proceed. Few cool heads in Arabia believe the Israelis are interested in anything other than the complete and final ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Palestine.
It is clear to most observers that the Americans’ narrative on Arabia has lost the plot and all sense of direction. It is no longer capable of congealing the region’s national interests into a hegemonic centre capable of keeping its “allies” stuck on what is now a shrinking island of shared, corporeal interests.
Hegemonic blowback
Israel’s threats last week after the Iranian missile shower to target Iran’s oil infrastructure, underlined by US confirmation they were discussing the issue with Tel Aviv, has awakened the Arabian hegemonic concern to the danger Israel’s military adventurism and America’s ineffectual leadership pose to their oil wealth
It has driven them into the arms of Teheran. They have committed themselves to “neutrality” in the conflict and have stated bluntly they will not allow their airspace to be used to defend Israel or to attack Iran.
They appreciate the old wartime axion “battlefield tactics beat war room strategy every time”. They know Biden is too weak to remove Netanyahu’s hand from the Arabian tiller. They appreciate American “policies” like negotiating 21-day ceasefires, or normalization deals five years down the line, mean nothing when they’re trying to forge a business environment that will last for centuries.
America’s hegemonic centre has disintegrated beneath Netanyahu’s clutch on the steering wheel of day-to-day activity. America can promise; Netanyahu can do.
And, as long as Washington allows Netanyahu to do as he likes, he keeps control of the direction Arabia and the rest of the world is headed in – to war and more war.
That is not the narrative the Gulf nations signed up to. America is still “speaking the same speak”, but Israel is walking a different walk and its on a trail the Arabs have no interest in following.