Accountability for the Gaza genocide? Deny at your peril

As news of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire broke, the voice of the Al Jazeera Arabic anchor in Doha cracked with emotion. Who could blame him? For the past two years, he and his team have been covering an unfolding genocide in real time, including the repeated targeting and killing of Al Jazeera colleagues in Gaza.

One can only imagine how Gazans feel today. Whatever it is, I don’t expect the word to exist in any dictionary.

With that said, one does not need to be a Gazan to experience trepidation toward the ceasefire. Indeed, there is a strong basis for us not to trust any deal.

This is not the first ceasefire declaration of the past two years. Everyone knows Israel can go back to its video game killing spree with a push of a few buttons.

History also teaches us that the devil lies in the details of such agreements, especially in contexts of deep asymmetry, where the deal unfolds in stages, the guarantors are unreliable, and the totality of the deal is unknown, negotiated behind closed doors, with few details released, preventing us from a fair, holistic assessment.

The world has also just witnessed an appalling slaughter broadcast live on social media for two years. “Never again”, happened again, and world powers stood by and watched.

The international rules-based system and liberal political establishments, time and again, showed shocking duplicity, paralysis, and cowardice. The genocide was committed against a largely unarmed civilian population of refugees who have been living in UN-administered camps for more than 70 years.

This community has legitimate claims to lost private property in current-day Israel. They have lived under occupation for 58 years and been under a brutal siege for 19 years. Despite this reality, their concerns and rights have repeatedly been ignored.

Israel’s genocide specifically targeted this vulnerable population. It starved them; dropped the equivalent of five nuclear bombs on them; shamelessly and repeatedly committed war crimes against them, filming them, and putting them on Instagram.

It openly declared — and still declares — its intention to commit ethnic cleansing against them. This wasn’t just Netanyahu and his ‘right-wing coalition government’. It was the Israeli opposition who participated and justified the slaughter as well. The overwhelming majority of Israeli society also supported the genocide, with more than 80 percent of Israeli Jews supporting the ethnic cleansing of Gazans.

European and ‘Western’ democracies provided diplomatic, political, military, and economic backing through government channels and private corporations. This included direct material support in terms of financing and arms, as well as forms of digital facilitation, intelligence sharing and political and discursive support from state and private corporations, media, political parties, and even civil society.

This was an international genocide as much as it was an Israeli one. Seen in this light, the ceasefire gives us pause to shift from speaking of ‘stopping the genocide’, to speaking of the forces that enacted, enabled and perpetuated it.

It is a moment that indicts the entire Israeli state system, from its 'Jewish democratic state' character, to its colonial practices of occupation, apartheid and displacement of Palestinians past and present. These were the ideological and political drivers of the genocide.

It is a moment that indicts key political and economic figures and networks across Western society, as well as the great majority of the Israeli political and military classes.

The world cannot go back to normal after the crimes committed by these figures and networks were exposed with such clarity. Many of these characters even financially profited from their crimes, effectively using the genocide as an advertisement space.

Genocide is amongst the highest political and legal crimes known to man. Its perpetrators must be pursued and brought to justice while the systems that tolerate and sustain them must be dismembered.

This was not a ‘war’ or a ‘conflict’. It was a genocide that academics, human rights organisations and the UN have all reached analytical consensus around.

Israel attempted to use its genocide to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza. They came close to doing so — and still may attempt to do so — but were prevented by the Gazans themselves. It was the people of Gaza who stood up and said “no!”

Their herculean steadfastness and resistance are the real forces that stopped this plan by refusing to comply, despite a relentless aerial bombardment and terror campaign. They even defended territory and continually attempted to organise local needs.

The international solidarity movement also played an important role, taking to the streets and challenging the latent, lazy and anti-intellectual justifications that so frequently give Zionism, Israel and its practices a free pass.

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No less than 67,000 persons were slaughtered in Gaza to assert their determination to remain in their homeland and to pursue their long-ignored rights, though figures are estimated to be multiple times more.

We owe it to these sacrifices to pursue every last criminal that participated in these crimes. The stakes are too high not to.

The precedents unleashed by the Gaza genocide are a prelude to a horrific future if left unaccounted for. Israel has brought back to fashion some of the worst crimes of human history while giving them new technologies of destructive efficiency, combined with new means of governmental surveillance and control. These tools, technologies and trends will distort democratic systems, encourage authoritarianism, eliminate social gains (by redirecting funds from health and education to militarism), hollow out civil liberties, and destroy the planet.

This is how the Gaza genocide is organically linked to global and local struggles to prevent a brutal dystopian future. That is why this ceasefire is not an opportunity to wait and watch what happens, but a moment to redouble efforts to mobilise for accountability.

Israel is not about to transform into a human rights-respecting state any time soon. You don’t need to have a PhD to know that Israel will attempt to use the ceasefire to attempt to achieve the ends of the genocide, ethnic cleansing, by creating one thousand excuses to prevent reconstruction, if we even get that far.

By ensuring the Gaza Strip indefinitely remains a toxic rubble dump, Israel will keep hope alive that it can encourage Gazan outmigration. It may again see the need to resort to military means as well.

This is a key moment when the direction forward will be determined. Now is the time to build a people’s campaign that can enforce accountability by identifying, exposing, isolating and bringing to account the killers and their abetters in our midst, and to dismember the political and economic networks that made the genocide possible.

This includes holding to account the active agents of genocide, as well as the passive cowardly apparatchiks who white-washed, gas-lighted, or effectively acted like there was "nothing to see here" or said "it’s not our job."

History will remember who did what, when and where. But before these matters even get to the history books, it is our obligation to write history through our actions, like Gazans did with their steadfastness.

To not pursue every last genocidal criminal will be to open the gates of tolerance toward the systematic destruction of peoples and places deemed ‘problematic’ and ‘obstacles’ to fantasy-driven regimes and narcissistic leaders — this in a context of rising neofascism, populism and growing inter-imperial rivalry. It is a recipe for globalising the Gaza genocide, in a context where there is no shortage of charlatan politicians, no shortage of sinking ship economies, and seas of widespread discontent.

Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American academic and author of “Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory.” He has worked in various capacities across the OPT as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher, including in Gaza for several UN bodies since 1997, and was most recently the Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant's Jerusalem Branch - the Kenyon Institute. He also writes for the Palestinian policy network Al Shabaka.

Follow him on X: @thaddad

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.