How Bad is it really in Gaza?

Here's what one expert says

In my last post, I found a video that I was afraid would be deleted. I felt that its contents were too important to lose, so I transcribed much of it.

A commenter said that she found the information so valuable that she thought I should post it separately.

I thought about it, and I agree with her.

We need to understand the extent of what’s going on in Gaza, and what our governments and tax dollars here in the west are supporting.

Ousman Noor, who is the interviewer, is a human rights lawyer. In this video, he is interviewing Dr. Maung Zarni, who is a Burmese genocide scholar.

Here again is the video, my transcription notes, and some of my commentary from that post:

The term ‘genocide’ is no longer abstract when we see it in gruesome detail on our social media feeds every day, and when we hear the heart wrenching voices of Palestinians.

This is revealing so much to all of us, and I hope we’re able to digest and process what we’re learning, and are able to move towards a better world together.

Here’s a video of Ousman Noor’s interview with Burmese genocide scholar, Dr. Maung Zarni, who outlines the extent of the ugliness of Israel’s actions actions in Palestine. I looked them both up and followed Ousman Noor on X. I wanted to follow Dr. Maung Zarni as well, but his account, unsurprisingly, has been removed from X.

Dr. Zarni’s words bear repeating, and I don’t know how long this video will remain on X, so I’m going to quote much of what he says in it:

Israel is the most vicious kind of settler colonialism. Everything that is wrong with the human civilization Israel has mastered and institutionalized. I’ve never seen a situation where genocidal paradigm or policies and practices are so creatively pursued … a vast ecosystem of genocidal methodology.

You have the complete impunity of settlers — basically land thieves — sponsored by the State of Israel as a matter of policy protected by what Netanyahu calls the most moral army, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). This ecosystem of genocidal practices, which includes systems of apartheid, colonial occupation, racist supremacist institutions and judicial system, genocidal racist ideology that permeates across different sectors of Israeli society.

So this is a complete genocide that is even beyond what Nazi Germany had embodied. Extreme sadism and torture methods — that’s straight from Inquisition — with a single purpose of destroying a nation or a population under occupation by an occupier.

The checkpoints are set up to make life unpredictable. Sniper towers, like you are being watched 24/7 from all angles. An 810 km. long wall established to create this vast prison camp.

Before October 27th, 2023, there was racial underfeeding of populations, Israeli households can use about 400 litres of water a day, and Palestinians can use 40 litres per day. This is a permanently established system of deliberately under supplying life’s essentials to the Palestinian population.

There has been deliberate genocidal slaughter in a very short time plus diseases that put Palestinian lives at extreme danger, preventable diseases.

Destruction of health system - that is a classic genocidal extermination in Gaza. Apartheid, crimes against humanity, war crimes, settler colonialism, erasure of memory as part of a total whole with the singular purpose to turn this slogan ‘land without people’ turning into a self fulfilling prophecy.

Using this ecosystem of various genocidal methods — different sub populations of the Palestinians are subject to different types of repression.

Now Israeli settlers are all armed. They’re using the settlers as the spearhead of Israeli violence outside of Gaza. Inside of Gaza the spearhead of violence is the IDF with American weapons, with American and European Union money.

This is the most comprehensive and complete genocide. It’s not just single acts. Different policies and practices of Israel interconnected with the singular purpose of taking the land without people. It has everything. All the historical crimes in settler colonial genocides in North America, Latin America, Australia and Africa. Everything is there.

Israel is the embodiment of all elements of crimes, with the exception of slave trade and slavery, that we have witnessed Christian Europe commit over the last 500 years against people of colour around the world.

Israel is the worst form of genocidal regime. That’s why Noam Chomsky, who lived in Israel in the 1950s, said that Israel is the most vicious type of settler colonialism. Everything that is wrong with the human civilization has been mastered and institutionalized.

In the West Bank, which is under the Palestinian Authority (PA) which are, at best, completely impotent to protect the Palestinian population there. At worst PA is working as a local controller of Palestinian people — their own people — for Israel.

It’s a Nazi Germany type situation. Because people, the western media, politicians and Israeli people are all blaming Netanyahu. But Netanyahu is riding the beast of a thoroughly Zionized society. The way Israelis talked about Palestinians: they’re miserable, they’re in deep poverty, they’re not the problem. It’s their leaders. That’s the standard Israeli narrative. They don’t talk about the 810km. wall that has massively impoverished and dispossessed, the settlements, the displacement, the use of terror.

Israelis feel that they are moral. One woman said Netanyahu has broken the moral code because he didn’t rescue the hostages. We don’t leave our people in distress, or in need or at risk alone. Their sense of moral obligation does not extend to any Palestinian that they have terrorized for the last 75 years, from whom they have taken land and whose villages they have destroyed. The last count of villages destroyed in Nakba is 609. And 11 Palestinian cities were depopulated. This is classic Hitlerite depopulation.

The policies of the Israeli authorities is to make Jerusalem a majority Jewish enclave excluding and erasing multi faith, multi ethnic, multi racial inter civilizational tradition. They want to make it almost exclusively Zionist.

We cannot conflate Zionism with Judaism. There are so many Jewish people who feel extremely offended by the fact that Israel is committing this or set up this ecosystem of genocidal methods in their name.

Land without people when they knew that 95% of the population there were Arab, Palestinians of different religions, even including the Jewish population there.

I think what we are seeing is Israel’s pursuit of its singular overarching project of taking the land without the people. I’ve never seen this level of terrorist and sadistic violence. Israel is systemically and systematically cheating the international law.

First and foremost, Palestinians want to stop the genocidal onslaught in Gaza. It’s gone on for 11 months. And that’s the most immediate because everyone’s affected. Even if they are 100 or 200 km. from Gaza they are still affected by what they witness as their fellow Palestinian are essentially being exterminated by airstrikes and diseases and all.

Secondly they want Israel to comply with the International Court of Justice Advisory Ruling, not just once, twice that the occupation is totally against international law. Israel needs to remove all the settlements. Israel needs to take its 750,000 or close to 800,000 land thieves euphemistically described as “settlers” from Palestinian land.

Palestinians are not talking about one Palestine. But I don’t see with the level of dehumanization, with the level of hatred and disgust and low opinion that the Israeli public hold of their cohabitants, the Palestinians, I don’t see reconciliation in a single state. It has to be two states. They want the end to occupation, they want to dismantle the wall, they want to dismantle the system of checkpoints, they don’t want to be under Israeli occupation. That’s been ongoing for 57 years, since 1967.

What do Palestinians want? Immediate ceasefire in Gaza, end to occupation, and withdrawal of nearly one million land thieves, off their soil. Simple.

It’s worth the twenty minute watch. If terms like ‘colonialism’ and ‘occupation’ seem abstract, they won’t after watching this video.

The terrifying thing is that western governments are funding and arming Israel as it commits these unimaginable atrocities. This with our tax dollars, and the expectation that citizens of the western world will find this acceptable; that the alternative to supporting this barbarism is being accused of anti-semitism.

We can’t afford to be fooled, or to be silent in the face of this.

I hope you find this information, as distressing as it is, helpful to your understanding of what Israel is doing in Gaza, and that our governments are supporting.