The onus for stopping a genocide is on the party committing the genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to end it by meeting certain conditions. This should not even need to be said.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
It’s actually never legitimate to withhold aid from starving civilians. It was never legitimate at any time.
That’s one of the annoying things about having to discuss Israel’s ridiculous claim that Hamas is hoarding hostage corpses in order to achieve some kind of goal, and therefore justifies reducing aid into Gaza as punishment: the conversation skates right over the fact that it has never been legitimate for Israel to withhold humanitarian aid into Gaza. Debating whether Israel is right or wrong to withhold aid under these specific circumstances tacitly assumes that it could ever be right to withhold aid under any circumstances.
Listening to Israel’s justifications for why it needs to inflict monstrous abuses upon the Palestinians has the effect of assuming that there are circumstances under which those monstrous abuses could be acceptable. And there just aren’t.
It has never been legitimate to intentionally deprive civilians of humanitarian aid that they need to survive. You have to give them aid.
It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants because you decided they crossed some sort of line into a forbidden zone. It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants at all.
It has never been legitimate to commit genocide. Israel just needs to stop the genocide.
The onus for stopping a genocide is on the party committing the genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to end it by meeting certain conditions. This should not even need to be said.
It’s so obnoxious how everyone’s getting sucked into these debates about whether or not Israel might need to resume the genocide because Hamas refused to disarm or they didn’t get their hostage corpses back or this or that ceasefire demand wasn’t met or blah blah whatever. Israel has never needed to commit genocide. It needs to stop committing genocide.
The world shouldn’t be bending over backwards to ensure that the state which is committing genocide is happy with the terms by which the genocide is ended. The world should be aggressively punishing the state that is committing genocide until it stops. That would be true peace. What we are seeing now is just a bad joke.
And of course this true peace is not emerging because the powerful western states who’ve been backing the genocide this whole time are perfectly fine with it. Their weapons industries get to profit from the genocide. Their empire managers get to enjoy the domination of a critical geostrategic region. They sleep like babies at night, because they do not view the victims of the genocide as human beings.
So we find ourselves doing this ridiculous dance where we go “Okay well maybe the genocide could stop if the victims of the genocide agree to terms X, Y and Z and don’t make too much of a fuss about being killed in smaller numbers every day.”
This is madness. It’s the craziest thing you could possibly imagine. We live in a dystopian madhouse.
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