Cassandra Voices

Tag: Genocide

  • Review: Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide

    Gaza’s history since the Nakba of 1948 is punctuated by waves of forced displacement. The enclave has been the epicentre of Palestinian refugees since 1948, having welcomed Palestinians from all over the colonised territories. Since Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023 its entire population of over two million, in a territory of just 151 km2, has been rendered internally displaced persons.

    Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, Edited by Yousef M Aljamal, Norma Hashim, Noor Nabulsi, and Zoe Jannuzi (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a collection of twenty-seven testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza enduring the genocide. An immediate response upon reading through the chapter titles is: to what extent have we become desensitised as spectators or activists? And, moreover, what is the link, or disconnect, between this wider perception of a genocide occurring and a person living through it?

    It begs the question, when reading through the testimonies, after more than two years how much can our mind take before the experiences themselves, narrated by survivors, merely become background noise? With the daily recounting of Israel’s kill toll being reduced to statistical data – a roll call similar to the reporting of Covid cases that gradually desensitised the listener – can our minds link back to the human tragedy?

    Of course we should. For the chapter titles speak of a shattered, mundane reality. Birthdays morph into atrocities. Education is ruptured by bombs. A woman is widowed by targeted assassination. A husband is killed while searching for food. Entire families are wiped out. The details are so mundane, so quotidian, yet genocide is an immense, unforgivable laceration in both its experience and the memory if it. That memory should, and must, extend to the rest of us. Narratives can combat desensitisation, as long as we know what to prioritise.

    In the foreword to the book, Ahmad Alnaouq writes:

    Everyone on Gaza is now a citizen journalist, determined more than ever to confront and challenge the Western media narrative – the demonising and dehumanising of the Palestinians, the lack of agency recognised, and the distortion of truth.

    This collection of testimonies directly challenges the Western hegemonic narrative which, even while reporting the official genocide kill toll, still finds ways of sanitising bloodshed and diminishing the humanity of Palestinian survivors. The kill toll is represented in two ways – as a statistic that either supports sporadic calls for accountability or offered in support of Israel “finishing the job.”

    Yousef Al-Jamal references the Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by Israel in 2023, and for whom storytelling was an integral component of Palestinian history.

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    ‘For centuries,’ AL-Jamal writes, ‘Palestinians have tended the rich oral history of Palestine, preserving cultural heritage, including folktales and stories about the land.’ This collection of narratives from the Gaza genocide is a contribution to Palestine’s oral history, and one that, due to its international dissemination, cannot be destroyed by Israel.

    The personal narratives in this book speak of a disrupted simplicity, but not a disrupted normality. This includes death or killing, displacement, hunger, the tribulations of living and enduring life under a highly militarised genocide. We find the disruption of education and attempts to teach, as well as the full spectrum of forced displacement including of a Nakba survivor, along with attempts to rebuild a semblance of normality even as Israel destroys Gaza’s infrastructure. Even before the genocide, Palestinians in Gaza faced immense hardships and restrictions which were normalised into manageable deprivation, even by international institutions.

    For many Palestinians, as evidenced by several contributors to this anthology, the large scale killing meant that families were welcoming other relatives into their midst. At times it was orphaned children, as was the case with Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa, a mother of four children who began taking care of two children whose parents were killed when Israel bombed an entire residential block. In her description of forced displacement, Abu Ajwa writes, ‘The children witnessed dozens of martyrs’ bodies strewn on the ground. They cried intensely, while blood covered the streets.’

    ‘I hope war ends soon. Eight months of continuous killing exhausts us,’ writes Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, whose son was killed while riding a bike just 800m away from the family home.

    Another recurring horror is Palestinians fleeing to supposedly safe zones, while Israel bombs move in the direction the displaced are heading, leaving not only a trail of displacement but bloodshed. The killing of Palestinian children, as described by the narrators of this genocide, encompass all ages. The visibility of Israel killing children is magnified when the writers note the dead children’s ages. Thus removed from the general term, the children take on meaningful identities; allowing the reader to recognise how Israel has attempted to obliterate Palestinians through its killing of the younger generations. Children killed on their birthday, children killed while sleeping, the tragedy is portrayed through the eyes of the living, bereaved and those unable to process their loss due to a perpetual quest for survival.

    Their attempt to persist in living instead of perishing at times makes the writing of these recollections and experiences become slightly devoid of emotion. Emotion almost becomes a luxury when surviving a genocide, but the almost matter-of-fact narratives in this collection make grief all the more important, not only to grasp but experience. Israel has not only wiped entire families out and lacerated others beyond repair, it has also obliterated entire psychological processes that are necessary when experiencing traumatic events. In the midst of a genocide, Palestinians are unable to experience the grieving process.

    Incessant worry about family members displaced in different locations around Gaza is another hardship Palestinians must endure. Without means of communication for the most part, relatives receive no news of each other. ‘Gaza is small, yet we have not seen each other since the war began. We have not reunited. I know nothing of my sons. My life’s dream is to reunite with them in one home before my death,’ Yusra Salem Abu Awad states in her narrative.

    The script flips to a twelve-year-old boy, Youssef Qawash, writing about how he has lost his father and uncle in a bombing and not knowing whether his father’s remains will ever be discovered. ‘My uncles have searched in Deir al-Balah and Maghazi, but no one knows where my father is buried,’ Qawash ponders, noting that his father might still be buried under the rubble of destroyed houses.

    Ireland and Palestine: A Crucial Vote Awaits

    The ramifications of starvation are reflected in Najlaa Al-Kafarna’s story. Her husband was killed while searching for food for the family on the third day of the genocide, which was their second day of forced displacement. Six other relatives were also massacred in their search for food. Her special needs son, Muhammad, is malnourished and lacks medication and physical therapy sessions.

    Throughout most of the narratives in the book, the cry for food recurs. So does the lack of basic necessities, and the wearing of the same clothes through different seasons. We find the rationing of flour, and the shelling of a school while forcibly displaced Palestinians are baking bread. The deprivation is exacerbated by employment being almost non-existent during the genocide. Profound mental health issues as a result of ongoing trauma (Palestinians cannot speak of post-traumatic stress disorder) are also a common experience.

    ‘This war is larger than the 1948 Nakba. I am 91 years old,’ Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif says. Aged fifteen, he experienced the first Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and he notes the differences between the specific targeting of Zionist paramilitaries in 1948, and the widespread destruction of the current genocide in Gaza. One of the few remaining survivors of the Nakba, he narrates his experience of displacement in 1948 and how his family settled in Gaza in the Nuseirat camp. ‘My testament to my children and grandchildren is to never leave Gaza. We cannot leave Gaza, and we cannot migrate again,’ Abu Seif asserts, noting the miscalculation in 1948 of an eventual return and of leaving to save their lives.

    Narrating the Israeli colonial aggressions he has experienced throughout his life, he describes the genocide as ‘a war of extermination and destruction of humans and nature.’ The description is far more tangible than the word genocide will ever be, particularly now that the international community has diluted its meaning to preserve Israel’s impunity. A destruction of humans and nature is something that anyone anywhere in the world can easily envisage. This narrative brings the consequences of destruction, as well as fear, to the reader’s mind.

    The entirety of this anthology also serves to highlight what a vibrant society Palestinians in Gaza had created before the genocide. Education stands out in particular as one of their achievements. Indeed the tenacity to attempt to study and teach throughout the genocide is remarkable. Ambitions are currently stilted, but dreams are still cherished, An awareness of the many hurdles to overcome in order to create a healthy society post-genocide is also to the fore in many narratives in this collection. As the UNSC hands over the rebuilding of Gaza to the U.S. administration, thus prolonging the genocide, these testimonies will stand in opposition to the U.S.-Israeli narrative. More importantly, they are a sliver of testimony from Palestinians that neither the U.S. nor Israel, have the power to annihilate.

    Feature Image: Ahsanul Haque Z

  • War Crimes: Collective Guilt

    As events in Ukraine demonstrate, ineluctably, war diminishes our humanity, possessing men – and mostly men – of a callous disregard for life, and a capacity for often inexplicable cruelty.

    As such, the invasion of one state by another without a casus belli – as we have witnessed in Russia’s essentially unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and also with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and other incursions since – has long been considered an injustice: any aggressor thus bears a level of responsibility for what follows.

    This does not, however, absolve an injured party from guilt for mistreatment, or worse, of prisoners of war, or other breaches of the Geneva Convention; notoriously described as ‘quaint’ by George W. Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with apparently horrifying consequences.

    Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.

    A Single Murder

    In peacetime the violent ending of a single life is newsworthy, but during a military conflict the deaths of thousands are often defined as mere casualties, calculated to diminish one side or another’s capacity to wage war. A cold-blooded logic often underpins such strategic analysis.

    ‘What was a single murder’ Stefan Zweig asked of World War I, ‘within the cosmic, thousand-fold guilt, the most terrible mass destructive and mass annihilation known in history?’

    Beyond the mindless trench warfare of World War I, the twentieth century also produced the exquisite evils of World War II, when the carnage reached the civilian sphere as never before; the leading industrial nations harnessing advanced technologies to produce Concentration Camps, Gulags, carpet bombing, and of course – supposedly bringing wars between Great Powers to an end – the atomic bomb.

    In that war’s wake there emerged a new understanding of international law, previously dominated by an insistence that this should only apply between states, as opposed to allowing individual rights to be enforced against officials of an offending state in a foreign jurisdiction.

    This traditional understanding was emphasised by a British official during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I: ‘The new League of Nations must not protect minorities in all countries,’ he complained, or it would have ‘the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from the more serious problems such as the Irish.’

    According to Phillipe Sands: ‘Britain objected to any depletion of sovereignty – the right to treat others as it wished – or international oversight. It took the position even if the price was more injustice and oppression.’ [i]

    But the depravities of World War II changed the global mood, even if Hermann Goering could persuasively assert that ‘the victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’ Indeed, there is a reasonable argument that Russian, American and British officials should also have been in the dock to account for what occurred in Katyn, Hiroshima, Bengal and elsewhere.

    Nonetheless, the universal ambit of human rights was one of the great advances of the post-Second World War period, culminating in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In theory at least, it was no longer permissible for states to act with impunity even within their borders, as the Rule of Law gained universal jurisdiction, at least where atrocities were concerned.

    Looting of an Armenian village by the Kurds, 1898 or 1899.

    Genocide v. Crimes Against Humanity

    Thus, charges of Crimes Against Humanity and, arguably more problematically, Genocide, were laid against leading Nazi at the Nuremberg trials.

    Coincidentally, the two Polish-Jewish jurists Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht responsible for developing these novel concepts both studied in the University of Lwów, a Polish city between the Wars, before being annexed by the USSR at the end of World War II. Today Lviv, as it is now called, is the main city of Western Ukraine.

    Amidst accusations of war crimes, including that of Genocide, being levelled against Russia, it is worth considering important distinctions between Crimes against Humanity and Genocide.

    The author of the former concept, Hersch Lauterpacht argued that ‘The well-being of an individual is the ultimate object of international law.’ In contrast, in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Rafael Raphael Lemkin adopted an approach which aimed to protect groups, for which he invented the new crime of ‘Genocide.’

    In response, Lauterpacht worried that the protection of groups would undermine the protection of individuals. He challenged the ‘omnipotence of the state,’ suggesting atrocities against individuals should be referred to as Crimes Against Humanity, whereby no longer would officials from any state be free to treat their people with impunity.

    Lemkin also wrote of the misdemeanours of the ‘Germans’ rather than the Nazis, arguing that the ‘German people’ had ‘accepted freely’ what was planned, participating voluntarily, and profited from their implementation. This was similar to the War Guilt Clause contained in the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which was deeply resented by Germans.

    Genocide concerned acts ‘directed against individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups.’ For Lemkin Germany’s terrible acts reflected a militarism born of the innate viciousness of the German racial character. He selectively included a quotation from Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt who noted that one of Germany’s mistakes in 1918 was to ‘spare the civil life of the enemy countries’[ii] and that one third of the population should have been killed by organised under-feeding, but not all Germans shared this mentality.

    Collective Guilt

    The difficulty, therefore, with the crime of Genocide is that in purporting to protect one national, ethnic or religious group it often implicates another via its ruling authority; this may perpetuate racial stereotypes, such as innate viciousness, and contains a potential for indiscriminate reprisals, or even further wars.

    Under the original conception of the crime of Genocide, any Russian, even an expatriate opposed to Putin, might be held responsible for the conduct of the Russian army in Ukraine. This idea of collective guilt – a species of Original Sin attached to a national or racial group – generally based on supposedly timeless national characteristics, could also permit crippling sanctions and even bombing campaigns impacting on civilian life.

    Punishing an entire nation for the conduct of its government – even if that government is democratically elected – is therefore unjust, not least as it tends to bolster the authority of belligerent elements within a state – who may point to the aggressor posture of the opponent – diminishing the likelihood of lasting peace.

    Far less problematic is the idea of Crimes Against Humanity, which simply asserts a universal jurisdiction for atrocities committed by the officials of any state, including ‘legally’ against their own people.

    But charging Russian officials with Crimes Against Humanity might lead us to consider whether the leaders of other nations, including the US – which along with Russia (and Ukraine) is not a party to the International Criminal Court – should be similarly indicted.

    Drone Strikes

    Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the US has been waging warfare through extra-judicial assassination operations: drone strikes, aimed at suspected ‘terrorists’ living in some of the world’s most deprived and defenceless countries. As of 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that there have been at least 13,072 confirmed drone strikes on Afghanistan alone since 2015.

    These remote attacks represent a new phase in the cruelty of warfare, as the leading Superpower maintains a social distance from each hit. The consequences, or ‘collateral damage’ is rarely investigated by a mainstream media that now howls in anger at Russia’s excesses.

    As LSE’s Maarya Raabani puts it: ‘Buoyed by mainstream media, an alarming preponderance of metaphors and passive-voice reporting have denied any chance to hold drone atrocity perpetrators to account.’

    Moreover, ‘Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,’ said Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. ‘These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the U.S. government that owes the public an accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.’

    In July 2021, U.S. President Biden announced the adoption of an ‘over the horizon’ counterterrorism strategy. According to the Brookings Institution:

    The new plan would rely on armed unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones — to respond to terrorism threats around the globe without deploying American boots on the ground. But although the strategy was designed to overhaul policies that had kept the United States embroiled in conflict for 20 years, it failed to address the unintended consequences of counterterrorism strikes, namely civilian casualties. On August 29, 2021, with most U.S. soldiers withdrawn from Afghanistan and regional bases shuttered, this challenge became clear. The U.S. military conducted a strike that killed 10 civilians, including women and children, rather than the intended target.

    TAS13: GENOA, JULY 22. Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and US President George Bus.

    In striking unison, mainstream media in the West has reacted to the invasion of Ukraine with outrage, and conveyed statements of the President of Ukraine with uncritical approval. Russia certainly deserves opprobrium for his war of aggression against Ukraine – and its officials may be responsible for war crimes – but the failure to interrogate the actions of the US and its allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia over many years makes the self-righteousness ring hollow.

    Russia is operating in a context established by the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that destabilised the Middle East causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Putin exploited the anarchy in the international system with his invasion of Georgia in 2008, having divined that the rules of the game had changed. There is a continuum between Russia’s attacks against Georgia, the Donbass and Crimea campaign in 2014, and this latest invasion of Ukraine.

    Once Western leaders and their allies are also held accountable for their actions we may move to an environment where the Rule of Law attains a universal character; then the invasion by one state of another without a legitimate casus belli may become unthinkable.

    Unlike during the period of the USSR, Russia exerts little ‘soft’ power. Putin’s propaganda relies on the hypocrisy of the West, especially the US which continues to baulk at becoming a party to the International Criminal Court and allies with rogue actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Confronting Russia should also involve Western governments pursuing morally consistent foreign policies.

    [i] Phillipe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, (Knopf, New York, 2016) p.72

    [ii] Ibid pp.82-184