By
Tisaranee Gunasekara
“The question’s what happened to Israeli people. How they allowed themselves to be so debased. How they become so inured to pain and suffering. How they have become oblivious to their own horrific past. And these images which remind you of their own horrific past… for Israeli people to let this happen in this name is despicable… The shame of this for Israel, the shame… What are we living in?”
Bob Geldof (Interview with Irish national news – 24.7.2005)
On 15 July 2025, a group of Jewish Israeli teens gathered in Tel Aviv to burn their draft papers. Israel has a conscript army and every Israeli Jewish citizen over 18 years has to undergo fixed-term military service and remain as reservists until the age of 40. The teens burning their draft papers face imprisonment, but for them the alternative is infinitely worse. As one of them said, “There is a genocide. You don’t enlist into an army that is committing genocide” (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9zzbb_Ac-W8).
The war in which these teens are refusing to participate is killing an average of 28 Palestinian children a day (including babies and infants), according to UNICEF. It has also birthed a new acronym: WCSF – Wounded Child; no Surviving Family.
10-year-old Amir was one of the (on-average) 28 children killed on 28 May 2025. He was seeking food from an aid station run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy organisation entrusted by the US and Israel to deliver uncooked food (but no water) to starving Palestinians in Israeli-blockaded Gaza. Amir belongs in another UN statistic – the almost 1000 Palestinians killed in the vicinity of the GHF sites while seeking food aid. As Bob Geldof told the Sky News, “They are dangling food in front of starving, panicked, exhausted mothers and while they arrive for this tiny amount of foods, this pantomime outfit the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Humanitarian Front I would call it, then they are shot…”
Amir’s death in this real life Hunger Game came to light thanks to an unlikely whistle-blower. Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar is a US army retiree, a Special Forces veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year, he was hired by a military contractor to provide security for GHF’s aid distributing sites in Gaza. Mr. Aguilar was at Site Number 2 when Amir came seeking food. “He seems about 6 or 7… He doesn’t have a bag. He’s got some rice, some small items that he picked off the ground… He walked up to us and he just extended his hand…You see, the contractor standing next to me, and he (Amir) kissed his hand and then he kissed my hand. And then I knelt by him, put my hand on his shoulder, to comfort him… And he set down the items that he had and he placed his hands on my face, and his hands were very frail. His fingernails were dry and cracked…his skin tight and dehydrated… He then kissed me and he said Thank you in English and stepped back… He joined the rest of the group that was leaving. At that point the contractors began the inherited practice of pushing the civilians off the site with tear gas and pepper spray and stun grenades” (https://www.msnbc.com/the-weekend-primetime/watch/whistleblower-10-year-old-palestinian-boy-gunned-down-after-receiving-food-aid-244262469741).
The IDF had a position nearby. They shot at the panicked civilians fleeing the aid site. Little Amir was among the dead. His family is yet to find his body.
Mr Aguilar has been vilified and his family threatened for bearing witness to Amir’s death and other atrocities perpetrated by the GHF and the IDF. Hounding those willing to bear witness to genocide is as much of a habit with the IDF today as it was with Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Like Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, camera operators Ibrahem Zahir and Mohammed Noufel, and freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khalidi killed in “a targeted strike on a tent used by the media near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza city,” according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). “Israel is murdering the messengers,” the CPJ regional director stated, (https://cpj.org/2025/08/israel-kills-al-jazeera-journalists-in-targeted-gaza-city-airstrike/).
Most Jewish Israelis are not opposed to the Gaza genocide. Ellian Misrai was amongst them. An IDF reservist, he served 187 days in Gaza since October 7. He operated a D9 bulldozer and used to post Tick Tock videos of Palestinian homes being flattened. Yet, when he was called to serve again, he killed himself rather than return to Gaza. As Tuly Flint, a mental health official once deployed with an IDF unit, explained, “When your government and your commanders are saying things that are not true, you start thinking are they lying to me as well?… People talk about torching houses, people talk about a deadline, real not metaphorical, a deadline if they (Palestinians) cross they will be killed no matter they are children, women…” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0NSbIw-eBk). Even the wiliest lie can work only so far.
Hasbara as History
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is currently holding an exhibition on Tatreez, the centuries old tradition of Palestinian embroidery. Titled Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine, it displays dresses Palestinian women from all walks of life sewed for themselves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dresses, made of locally woven indigo-died linen and embellished with gold threads, mirror work, Syrian silks, and English cotton, bear witness to a historical truth buried under the weight of Israel’s Founding Lie – that Palestinians either didn’t exist or they were so poor and underdeveloped they were nearly subhuman.
Hasbara, a Hebrew word meaning explain, was introduced into the Israeli lexicon by Nahum Sokolow, a Zionist leader, as a clean alternative to the word propaganda. “He explained it as a communication strategy that ‘seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified’…aimed at obtaining and maintaining international support for Israeli policy” (The Jerusalem Post – 19.1.2024).
In Israel, official history is mostly Hasbara, starting with the myth of Israelis ‘making the desert bloom’. In truth, the desert (Palestine had both fertile and arid land) was blooming by the time the Jewish migration (First Aliyah) began in 1882.
Between 1830 and 1873, the Ottoman Empire launched Tanzimat, a reform movement to modernise its moribund economy and society. Tanzimat was a particular success in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. According to historian Alexander Schölch, “Palestine experienced a remarkable economic upswing in the two and a half decades following the Crimean War.
Apart from the building industry, the production of soap, and the manufacture of devotional articles, however, it was the agricultural sector which increased its output on a significant scale. It had already been stimulated by the pull of external markets before the Crimean War, but after 1850’s it became more and more export oriented” (Palestine in Transformation: 1856-1883 Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development).
According to Gershon Shafir, an Israeli American professor of Sociology, Palestine began to export agricultural produce, from wheat to oranges, to Europe in the late 19th Century and remained a wheat exporting country until 1923. This agricultural boom was caused not by Palestinian Jews but by Arab Palestinians using a mix of traditional practices and modern inventions (Land, labour and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict, 1882-1914).
The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side in the First World War. Post-war, Palestine fell under British occupation. British administrators, true to their wont, carried out detailed surveys of Palestine for this period. According to A Survey of Palestine, even in 1946, the Fellaheen (Arab-Palestinian peasants) produced over 90% of grains, olives, melons, and tobacco and over 75% of grapes and vegetables even in 1946. The Fellaheen, who farmed both arable and non-arable land, were also responsible for over 78% of the agricultural output. This would change only with the Nakba of 1948, and the formation of the state of Israel.
Hasbara explains away the Nakba by claiming that Palestinians were not driven off their land but left voluntarily, in obedience to calls by their leaders and Arab armies. The truth, again, is far otherwise. The Israeli army and Jewish terrorist gangs drove Palestinians out of their homes and villages, forcing 750,000 men, women, and children into makeshift refugee camps.
In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Israeli historian Benny Morris quotes a note made during a briefing by an Israeli military leader about an operation by the Seventh Brigade in the Palestinian village of Safsaf in Upper Galilee. “Safsaf 52 men tied with a rope, dropped into a pit and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. 3 cases of rape. Caught and released. A girl of 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed. Rings of knives.”
The US and European governments were aware of this ethnic cleansing. The response of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva help explain why Israel was allowed to get away with such atrocities. “We don’t want to blame the Jews, three years after the Holocaust, of mass murder, expulsion, rape, and poisoning.” The only exception was the incident of water poisoning by Israeli troops in the Palestinian city of Acer’s water – as part of a biological warfare operation cynically titled Cast they bread.
The Red Cross reported to the United Nations and furore ensued because the victims of this war crime included British doctors working in the Acer hospital. Israel apologised. Gaza’s water too was poisoned, yet no outcry, no apology happened. Its victims were all ‘natives.’
From that genesis to the genocide of today needed no epistemological break; a mere descent from barbarity to greater barbarity sufficed.
The way things are
In a West Bank village, a Palestinian boy is out walking with his beloved dog. He is stopped by Israeli soldiers. The dog barks. A soldier shoots and kills the dog.
That boy was Marwan Barghouti, the radical-moderate Palestinian leader The Economist in a 2024 profile called Palestinian Mandela. According to Mr. Barghouti’s son Arab, who heard the story from his paternal grandmother, 12-year-old Marwan stayed near his dog’s grave for days, mourning his companion. From such acts of casual cruelty to a well-formalised system of Apartheid, this was the life Palestinians endure in Israel and in Occupied Territories since 1948.
Contrary to Israel’s Hasbara, the victims of this system are not just Muslim Palestinians but all Palestinians. For instance, there are over 50,000 Palestinian Christians in the West Bank alone. Most are prevented from visiting the Holy Land by Israel’s proto-Apartheid laws. Easter is one of the few chances these Christians have of seeing and praying at their holy places. Yet to make that simple pilgrimage, they have to obtain permission from Israeli authorities, even though their ancestors lived in these lands for over two millennia.
Mother Agapia Stephanopoulus is a nun belonging to the Christian Orthodox Church. An American by birth, she has lived in the Holy Land for decades, running a school. “I think we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that this is a battle between Muslim and Jew,” she said while being interviewed on the Tucker Carlson show. “The problem with Israel-Palestine, it’s not Moslem vs Jew, it’s Occupation” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y79CfG2R_3g&t=3763s).
Gaza’s direct death toll is now over 61,700. Every day, Palestinians, including children, die of starvation. According to Pulitzer-winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, Israel’s genocide has wiped out entire Palestinian bloodlines, just as Hitler’s genocide wiped out entire Jewish bloodlines. No surprise, since such total extermination is the very purpose of a genocide.
Mr. Abu Toha, who managed to escape Gaza with his wife and children, spends part of his time creating family trees of decimated Palestinian bloodlines. “I sometimes ask myself what if Anne Frank was writing these diaries every day, she was sending these diaries to be published in the New York Times, Washington Post, to be read on Fox News and CNN and she had a chance to do an interview with you while she was hiding with her family…” He said while being interviewed by American TV host Jon Stewart. “Just imagine Elie Wiesel was writing about how he was standing in line for the Nazis to pick him and his father from the lines to go to the gas chambers…”
Jon Stewart said, “And no one did anything? And no one did anything.”
Countries and leaders aren’t doing much, but people across the world continue to protest. From the lone female Israeli medical student who, at her graduation, displayed on stage the anti-genocide t-shirt she wore under the graduation cloak to Australians of Sydney who held a mammoth march against Gaza genocide, men and women of conscience are standing up against the crime of the century – often at considerable personal cost. Nor are their protests in vain. In the newest win for the people-driven anti-Israeli BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) Norway’s $2trillion worth Wealth Fund has decided to terminate all contracts with asset managers handling its Israeli investments.
The Dissident communities of Jewish Israelis are few in number, yet their courage, commitment, and persistence amidst unavailing darkness constitute a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. As one of the Jewish Israeli teens burning his draft papers in Tel Aviv said, “The Jewish state that is representing me is trying to exterminate people of Gaza. We are not going to be silent. Never Again is now Never Again for everyone.” All of us can do something. None of us should remain silent and inactive. Even if images of starving babies and murdered children do not torment our conscience, a sense of enlightened self-interest should nudge us into action. If Israel gets away with this genocide, that fact will convey a sense of impunity to powerful nations, placing smaller, weaker countries, countries without super-power patrons in danger.
Not a good world to live in.
Courtesy:The Island