THE joint statement from human rights officials at the United Nations on the dire situation in Gaza may well form part of the epitaph of international human rights.
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the UN Relief and Works Agency, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organisation and the International Organisation for Migration issued an incredibly rare joint-statement highlighting this catastrophic moment in a desperate attempt to shift the unmoved nations of earth to belatedly protect the lives of children and civilians.
While the world is consumed with the emerging trade wars and stock market responses, this statement appears to have flown into the ether of disregard, along with all of the other warnings to history’s conscience.
The statement has many details of gross violations which tell us exactly what we know – that Israel and United States policy is to annihilate the population of Gaza and convert it into a genocidal recreational park for the depraved.
Telling us that “over 1,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured in just the first week after the breakdown of the ceasefire, the highest one-week death toll among children in Gaza in the past year” should have stopped all of the clocks of all governments and demanded answers. Journalists standing in front of Benjamin Netanyahu allowed him to smile and gloat and chuckle instead of excoriating him for this one line alone.
Think about how the world stands still after school shootings in the United States. How policies and practices are examined and torn about across the globe for those American children. And think how we scroll past the images of dismembered Palestinian babies, and have normalised the surviving children without arms, legs, and organs. Journalists in the White House acted like they were hearing something new when Trump said he was taking an empty and destroyed Gaza for real estate development. The same journalists that live in neighbourhoods where shares in Palestinian land have been sold every Friday and Saturday at Israeli fun days. Not one of the corps had the courage to ask if Palestinian children’s bones are proper foundations for these condominiums of hate.
When something is so outrageous it cannot be fully ignored each singular atrocity is treated like it is in isolation. The treatment of Israel murdering of clearly identified Palestinian medics and the attempts at cover ups were treated by Irish and British media as though it were new, as though it were an event out of character. The journalists who were in receipt of the evidence provided by the murdered medic from his grave did not prevent the perpetuation of cover up with spewed out sentences saying Israel had made a “Mistake” in their narrative of impunity. It is deliberate cowardice and collaboration.
Netanyahu’s country visits this week highlighted the 21st Century’s axis of evil from Jerusalem to Budapest to Washington. The cries of Palestinian children, school teachers, journalists and doctors as they die mean nothing to them, or those who attend with press passes in rooms with them. The warnings of the international human rights community are disregarded and silenced.
And thus our new world order is formed. An order where suffering, injury and murder is policy. And attention is diverted to the colours of arrows on stock markets.
