What Comes After 2024’s
Cruelty, Suffering, and Mayhem?
Helena Cobban / Just World Educational

(December 28, 2024) — The above image is a still from a short video widely circulated on and since Christmas Day, that shows medics and staff members from North Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital being forcibly evacuated from their place of work.

I hesitated to show it here since part of the intent of filming these clips (done presumably by someone seated/standing atop the gun-turret shown in the foreground) was almost certainly to increase the humiliation of the partially undressed men forced to walk this gauntlet in winter’s bitter cold… But I judged it an important document, not least because of the two massive tanks visible close behind them and the scale of the urban destruction all around…

 

Hospitals, as you presumably know, are afforded special protections in times of conflict under the Geneva Conventions and all other instruments of international humanitarian law. The entire modern, Western-origined body of “laws of war” and the Red Cross movement that grew around them were birthed after Swiss citizen Henri Dunant saw the misery of wounded people (including fighters) during the 1859 Battle of Solferino, in Northern Italy.

But during 2024, Israel and its close collaborator, the Biden administration here in Washington DC, punched ever more forcefully and more destructively through all the norms and structures that have constituted the “rules-based international order” since 1945.

Today, that order lies in shards, in the ruined cities of Gaza, on the marble floors of the U.N. Security Council, and far, far further afield…

Eyes on Gaza
UN-OCHA issued its latest broad update on the situation in Gaza on December 24 (PDF here). Its details were, as always, extremely disturbing. From December 1 to 22, the daily average of truckloads of goods that the Israeli military allowed into Gaza was 83 — far short of the “350” that Biden’s officials loudly demanded the Israelis let in, back in October.

Given the onset of serious winter weather in Gaza, the details this report gives about shelter are crucial: 1.875 million people in Gaza — that is, more than half of the Strip’s remaining population– are described as “in need of emergency shelter and essential household items.” (Click on the image here to see all these details bigger.)

No surprise, then, that infants in Gaza are now described as dying from the extreme cold. This report said that on December 25 — December 25! — the fourth in a series of infants was reported dead from the cold just in the southern city of Khan Younis. (Conditions in Northern Gaza are routinely described as much more harsh. But reporting from there is very sparse — especially given Israel’s deliberate targeting of well-marked “Press” personnel and their vehicles.)

US/Western Dimensions
Those of us who’re citizens of the United States and its close, “Western” allies need to understand both the degree of complicity of our governments in Israel’s cruel and completely illegal actions– and the ever-rising costs that our leaders’ active military and political support for Israel are imposing on the wellbeing of our own communities.

During the first year of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, taxpayers in the United States contributed a quite unprecedented $17.9 billion-worth of arms to Israel’s military. They (we) have also given similar or slightly larger amounts of weapons to Ukraine, despite the fact that the conflict there is now increasingly understood to be unwinnable and therefore headed for a negotiated ceasefire.

Meantime, the Washington Post reported today that homelessness here in the United States has reached an unprecedented high of more than 771,400 people unhoused across the country. 

One cruelly common sight, as I walk around this imperial capital here in Washington DC, is to see the tents of unhoused neighbors clustered right across the street from a State Department that seems to care just as little about these people’s right to housing as they do about that of Gaza’s Palestinians…

Corporate Media Reports on Israel’s Actions in Gaza

This week, both the Washington. Post and the New York Times have carried lengthy, generally well-documented reports on different aspects of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. The Washington Post report dug in depth into what the Israelis have been doing in Northern Gaza, and especially top completely depopulate and destroy the whole of the (formerly heavily populated) Jabaliya refugee camp. It is headed by a shocking video — posted publicly by an Israeli MK — of the controlled demolition of an entire set of multi-storey buildings in Jabaliya. It also contains harrowing accounts by several of those forced to leave the area at gunpoint…

For its part, on December 27, the print version of the NYT carried a fairly deeply researched article that covered three entire pages in the paper’s interior as well as a sizeable, well-placed lead-in on the front page: It had the significant headline “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians.” Some of the key conclusions reached by this investigation were:

• On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.
• The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets…
• The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error…

I noted that the online version of this story, as linked to above, actually did not include (or even contain links to) one of the most features of the print version, which was an infographic running across the bottom of pages 7-9 that helpfully summarized some of the report’s key findings.

But during one of the family gatherings I was blessed to have in the recent holiday days, someone asked, “But does it actually make much difference if the WaPo and the NYT carry reports like these?”

A good question. I thought for a moment, and said I thought probably not. After all, this same kind of information about Israel’s wilful violations of international humanitarian law (and US complicity therein) has been widely available in the US corporate media for more than a year now– and even more widely available in other forms of Western media, especially social media… But it has never caused the pillars of the US government (either in Biden’s administration or in Congress) to waver from their continuing, “ironclad” support for Israel.

So for the short and medium terms, I am deeply pessimistic. Key to note at this point, too: The impunity with which Israel has devastated Gaza for the past 14 months has led its leaders to conclude they could launch equivalent forms of ultra-violent havoc against the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and most recently also Yemen…

But I continue to hope for– and also to work for– a situation in which the Global Majority of the world’s peoples and governments and that clear majority of American people that actually refuses to endorse Israel’s genocidal aims in Gaza or elsewhere can work effectively together to rein in the ever more gruesome cruelty and scofflawry that Washington and Israel have together been engaged in, in West Asia.

On this latter note, I’ve been interested to see the short reflection that my much-valued JWE board colleague Richard Falk published on December 25. It had the title: “2025: Amid the Darkness, Glimmers of Light.”

I think Richard is probably a little less pessimistic than I am. His conclusion was:

At the same time, global society is experiencing a surge of multilateral initiatives. Strengthening the impulse to create autonomous multipolar networks of the sort modeled by the BRICS, and especially to mount challenges to dollarization of trade and finance…

Above all, 2025 will witness growing tensions between the unified governance of global security by continued US hegemony and a resurgent challenge mounted by the Global South in the ongoing Legitimacy War with the West. 

A week ago, I published an essay on Globalities.org in which outlined my concern that the connivance of Russia in the recent overthrow of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Asad indicated that there’s a deep new fissure in the alliance of forces that previously (a) were united in opposing the US-Israeli assault on the liberation/resistance forces of West Asia and (b) were preparing– through the strengthening of BRICS and other mechanisms– to build a worldwide force capable of confronting US hegemonism in world affairs.

One of the thousands of children surviving the horror of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

A Child’s Wish for Christmas…

In the latest episode of Just World Ed’s Palcast podcast, host Dr. Yousef Aljamal, co-host, Tony Groves, and I were honored to have as our guest 8-year-old Banias Ayesh from Gaza. This poignant episode, recorded on December 24, delved into Banias’s experiences of displacement, her dreams for the future, and her hopes for an end to the war. Joining Banias towards the end of the conversation was her mother, Maram, who shed light on the challenges of parenting and journalism in a war-torn region. The episode is now available for streaming on Apple and Spotify.

Banias spoke candidly about her life before the conflict, attending Rosary Sisters School in Gaza City, and her love for subjects like English, science, and music. She talked about her current living situation in Al-Zawayda, where she lives in a house that is not her own, following the destruction of her family’s home.

Despite these hardships, her resilience and optimism shone through as she shared her dreams of rebuilding Gaza, one day visiting New York, and enjoying simple joys like watching her favorite Christmas movie, “Home Alone.”

She sent a powerful message to children in America, urging them to understand the hardships of life in Gaza and the importance of peace and the basic necessities of life.

Truly, this episode was one of the most meaningful I’ve ever been privileged to take part in. Check it out, and be sure to tell your friends about it…