Commentary
The incomprehensible toll in Gaza and Netanyahu’s impunity
Poland, with a political decision void of any legitimacy, in open violation of the Rome Statute (to which it is a party), has announced that it will grant special protection to the wanted Netanyahu.
On January 1, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released a report saying that Gaza's population has shrunk by 6 percent. 160,000 people are missing from the (official) roll call. More than 100,000 have fled to Egypt, and they are the “lucky” ones: they either had enough money to pay the Hala Agency traffickers, $5,000 each, or were in such poor condition that they got the green light for treatment abroad.
Another 45,000 have been killed. An unknown number have vanished under the rubble: for months now, the official number has been stuck at 10,000, with search and identification work made almost impossible by the collapse of civil defense. Those who have died from lack of treatment, starvation or hypothermia are not included in this total. On Friday, the scientific journal The Lancet revised the tally, estimating that 70,000 people have died as a direct result of Israeli strikes. There is ongoing debate about this number, with other estimates varying by as much as 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 dead.
No one is even discussing in terms of tens or hundreds. The horrifying unit of measurement goes from thousands to tens of thousands, such numbers that one almost loses the sense of their reality. And with that (absurdly) they also lose visibility.
Then there are the injured, estimated at 110,000. Twenty-five percent have suffered permanent damage, amputations, disability. This is a heavy debt weighing on Gaza's future, a society that is no longer able to picture the future, let alone the present: a shrinking land, devastated and polluted, with nonexistent infrastructure and basic civilian services – health, education – completely destroyed. This is what we’re talking about when we talk about genocide: a calculated operation aimed at depriving them of the present and the future, the uninhabitability of space and time, today and tomorrow.
In order to punish and, most importantly, to put an end to these acts, which were committed voluntarily, in November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Two months have passed, and their impunity – which seemed to have crumbled at The Hague – has now risen from its ashes, like a wall raised up in the symbolic birthplace of contemporary international law.
Poland, with a political decision void of any legitimacy, in open violation of the Rome Statute (to which it is a party), has announced that it will grant special protection to the wanted Netanyahu if he decides to attend the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
That place, more than any other, symbolizes the abyss into which humanity sank and from which it has re-emerged, building on the ruins of the absolute dehumanization of human beings a shared value system and a collective memory. In this very place – as one of the best-known Holocaust scholars, Moshe Zuckermann, wrote in il manifesto on Wednesday – a “horrendous betrayal” is being consummated. A betrayal perpetrated, Zuckermann writes, not only by Prime Minister Netanyahu but by the symbiosis between the barbarity of those under his command (the soldiers) and the icy indifference of Israeli society.
They are not alone in that: the betrayal weighs heavy on the countries that claim the name of liberal democracies, which needed only 80 years to violate a shared process of rebirth and recognition of the equal dignity of every human being.
While that equal dignity was never there in practice, and the inequalities that erect barriers between people in every country in the world are deep-rooted, the protection awarded to the criminal Netanyahu is a powerful symbol: it legitimizes the supremacy of some countries (with the privilege to use violence against those considered subordinate) and the right of the strongest as the ultimate authority in international relations.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/lo-scudo-a-netanyahu-e-il-tradimento-di-80-anni-di-diritto on 2025-01-11