Paris Demetriades
Back in 2022, when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the “leftist” and anti-Western biases revealed that many supposedly progressive people among us struggled to read the events unfolding around them outside the one-dimensional narratives with which they had been raised. Now, with the indescribable atrocities committed over the past two years by Netanyahu’s schizophrenic government in Gaza, the “right-wing” and Western-worshipping biases prove, sadly, to be far worse.
This is compounded by the fact that, according to every serious international humanitarian organization out there (United Nations, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and a long, extensive list) the scale of the crisis in the Gaza Strip is catastrophic. What is happening in real time before our eyes is so outrageously and unconscionably brutal that it is almost impossible to categorize calmly and rationally what should be addressed first and what should be left aside.
According to, for example, leaked classified documents from the Israeli military, revealed through a joint investigation by The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972, and the Jewish outlet Local Call, five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 8, 2023, are civilians, a slaughter rate rarely seen in conflicts over the past decades. By way of comparison, civilian death percentages were higher in only three cases: the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the 2022 siege of Mariupol, and the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.
The fact that humanity has stooped to counting victims and fatalities with such meticulous precision just to debate whether or not this constitutes genocide is itself indicative of the decadent decay we have fallen into, and, of course, of the remarkably effective propaganda machine of the Israeli government, to put it bluntly.
At some point, a response must also be given to those otherwise seemingly reasonable claims about “selective sensitivity” among those protesting the Palestinian tragedy, claims that arise because civilian deaths in other conflicts, like Sudan, Syria, Congo, etc., are also numerous. Clearly, it would be beneficial for us, as a global community, to care about all wars worldwide, and of course, according to UN declarations, no human life should be considered more valuable than another.
What must also be considered in the case of Israel and Gaza is that we are talking about the so-called sole democracy in the Middle East and the allegedly most humane army in the world. The Israeli government, its devoted supporters argue with shocking ideological rigidity even today, is fighting for self-defense and for the right of Israel to exist as a state. Really, what more must Palestinians endure for it to be clear that this is a case of raw, ruthless ethnic cleansing and erasure, and that arguments of “self-defense” have long been buried under the rubble with thousands of deaths? The deafening silence of Western democracies, including Cyprus and Greece, adds to the urgency of responding more strongly and assertively to the plight of the Palestinian people.
It is far from insignificant that we are speaking about the Jewish people, who experienced the Holocaust less than a hundred years ago and who are now gradually transforming from the greatest victim of the previous century into its greatest perpetrator. The tragic irony of this alone is a major reason why this particular conflict demands our attention, perhaps more than any other.
And one last point, prompted by a recurring discussion in the Greek-speaking sphere: however condemnable, awkward, and absurd the booing of Israeli tourists on a cruise ship in Greece may have been, it is not a pogrom, as, if you can believe it, some have claimed. A pogrom is thousands of civilian murders. There is a world of difference between massacring and impoverishing an entire population and booing a few tourists. Enough already.
