A charity kitchen at a camp for displaced people in Gaza City, May 21, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi/Getty Images.
By Tarik Cyril Amar – Jul. 15, 2025
The Gaza genocide is special. And not in one but two regards.
As has often been observed, this is the first genocide in history that is, in essence, livestreamed. No genocide before has been committed under the eyes of the world like this one. And second, the Gaza genocide is undermining and, in effect, devastating whole moral and legal orders—or at least longstanding claims to them—in an equally unprecedented way.
These two peculiarities are related: The only way the world as a whole could have tolerated the Gaza genocide for almost three years now is by stubbornly disregarding fundamental norms, both written and unwritten. For instance, almost no state—with the exception of Yemen (under de facto control of the Ansar Allah movement or Houthis)—has even tried to comply with its binding and clear obligations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, namely to “prevent and punish” the crime of genocide. No one with the power—alone or with others—to do so, not in the Middle East, not beyond it, has come to save the Palestinian victims of the Gaza genocide in the only manner that would work: By stopping their “Israeli” murderers by massive force.
Yet the small but still disproportionately influential part of the world that calls itself the West has gone beyond merely failing to act. That’s because, whether the West is a civilization once shaped by Christianity or not, for a long time now, its true inner core has been hypocrisy. And during the Gaza Genocide, the West’s compulsive need to rationalize even its most vicious actions into acts of virtue covered by “values,” has led to a new peak of absolute moral and intellectual perversion: Precisely because the West has not only abandoned the Palestinian victims but is actively co-perpetrating this genocide together with “Israel,” its elites—in politics, culture, the media, the police, and judiciary—have made a sustained, obstinate effort to radically alter our sense of right and wrong, from specific legal norms down to our intuitive and widely shared understanding of limits never to be crossed.
Waging, for example, a so-called “war” by killing or injuring—often maiming for life—over 50,000 children (as of May 2025)? A “war” in which we receive one reliable testimony after another that many of these children are targeted deliberately, including by drone operators and snipers? A ‘war’ in which starvation, medical deprivation, and the promotion of epidemics have all been deployed equally deliberately? In the West, we are told to call this “self-defense.”
Indeed, we are asked—with great insistence, to say the least—to believe that this form of mass-murderous, infanticiding “self-defense” is something to be proud of, even vicariously: The mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, for instance—notorious for his suppression of any signs of resistance to “Israeli” genocide—has just declared that city hall will keep flying the “Israeli” flag.
In the same depraved spirit, the establishments of the West hand out punishment—from vicious police beatings to crippling lawfare to international sanctions—not to the perpetrators and accomplices of the Gaza genocide, in “Israel” and elsewhere, but to those who resist it in solidarity with its Palestinian victims. Protesters, journalists worth their salt, and even a UN special rapporteur are treated like criminals, even terrorists for actually standing up against the crime of genocide, as – just yesterday, it seems—we were all officially supposed to do. But “never again” has been turned into “definitely again, and as long as the murderers want, since they are ‘Israelis’ and our friends.”
It is in this context of a reversal of morality, law, and meaning so complete the overused term “Orwellian” for once really applies that we can understand what is now happening to the concept of “humanitarian” action.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s back-to-basics definition, a humanitarian is a “person who works to make other people’s lives better,” for instance, by trying to end world hunger. Since modern humanitarianism already has a history of two centuries, historians, such as Michael Barnett in his ‘Empire of Humanity’, have delivered more complex accounts. Critics have long denounced humanitarianism’s limits and even flaws. For French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, it is what’s left when a more optimistic humanism decays: a sort of bleak emergency response, a sign that the world has gotten worse, again.
In particular, during the post-Cold War decades of American hubris—misnamed the “unipolar moment”—humanitarianism often allied with Western imperialism. In the war of aggression against Iraq that started in 2003, for instance, humanitarian organizations became servants to the aggressors, invaders, and occupiers.
Yet, whatever view of humanitarianism you may endorse, there are things the concept can only accommodate for the completely deranged and limitlessly evil, such as massacring starving civilians and concentration camps. And yet, in Gaza, both have been labeled humanitarian. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a shady US-“Israeli” concoction, has promoted a scheme in which pittances of food are effectively used as bait for lethal traps: Palestinians deliberately blockaded by “Israel” have been lured to four kill zones masquerading as aid distribution points.
Over the past one and a half months, “Israeli” forces and Western mercenaries have killed at least 789 victims—and injured thousands—at or near these satanic traps. Obviously, killing the unarmed on such a scale is not collateral damage but deliberate. By now, the murderous intent behind the scheme has been confirmed by various sources, including “Israeli.” No wonder that 170 real humanitarian and human rights group have signed a protest against this fake relief and genuine mass murder scheme.
And then there is the concentration camp plan: “Israeli” leaders have already driven the surviving inhabitants of Gaza—one of the most densely settled places on Earth even before the genocide—into an area comprising only 20% of Gaza’s devastated surface.
Yet that is not evil enough for them: On the way to what seems to be their idea of a final solution of the Gaza question, they have now pitched a new plan to their US allies, namely, to herd the survivors into an even smaller area. This de facto concentration camp they advertise as a ‘humanitarian city’. From there, Palestinians would have only two ways out: By death or by leaving Gaza. “Israeli” Defense Minister Israel Katz wants to sell us this as ‘voluntary’. It is an irony of history that “Israeli” genociders now compete not only with the crimes of the Nazis but also with the Germans’ horrendous abuse of language.
The location of this deadly ethnic-cleansing transit station? The ruins of Rafah. You may remember Rafah, once a bustling city in southern Gaza, as the place “Israel'”s Western allies pretended to try to protect, sort of, for a while. Those warnings were worth nothing, of course. Rafah was flattened, and now the area is earmarked for the concentration camp to end it all.
The scheme is so outrageous—but then, that is “Israel'”s ordinary modus operandi—that even its critics can hardly keep up with just how depraved it is. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA—the effective aid distribution organization that “Israel” has shut down in pursuit of its starvation strategy, killing almost 400 of its local staff—has posted on X that the ‘humanitarian city’ would amount to a second Nakba and “create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians.”
The Nakba was the Zionist ethnic cleansing, interspersed with massacres, of around 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. But Lazzarini is wrong if he believes that the first Nakba ever ended: For the Palestinian victims of “Israeli” violence, it only initiated an ongoing process of theft, apartheid, and often murder. A process that has now culminated in genocide, as multiple international experts acknowledge, including the eminent Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. This is not a second Nakba, but the “Israeli” attempt to complete the first one.
Lazzarini’s comment that the humanitarian city plan would create concentration camps on the border with Egypt is, of course, also true as far as it goes. Yet all of Gaza has long been what (even by 2003) the “Israeli” sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called “the world’s largest concentration camp ever.” The point is not to be pedantic. What Lazzerini’s protest—welcome as it is—still misses is that what “Israel” is now doing to the Palestinians is creating a fresh hell within a much older one.
But not “Israel” alone. The West is, as always, deeply involved. Let’s set aside that the interwar Zionists learned about how to use concentration camps against Palestinians from the British Mandate authorities, as with other methods of vicious suppression, too. Now as well, various Western figures and agencies have become involved in the “Israeli” schemes of resettlement that drive the humanitarian city plan. Tony Blair’s foundation—really a commercial consulting and influence-peddling company systematically working for the dark side wherever it pays well—and the prestigious and powerful Boston Consulting Group have both been caught contributing to “Israeli” ethnic cleansing planning. And behind that stands the declared will of no one less than Donald Trump, the president of the US, who has long been explicit that he would like to see Gaza rebuilt as a vast, glitzy Trumpistan and without Palestinians.
From the beginning of the Gaza genocide, it has been both a brutal crime and a constant attempt to redefine what is right and what is wrong so that this crime would appear necessary, justifiable, and even as a legitimate opportunity to profit. And the West’s elites—with far too few exceptions—have joined “Israel” in this absolute perversion of fundamental ethics and reason no less than in the mass murdering. If both “Israel” and the West are not stopped at long last, they will use the Gaza genocide to change much of the world into a hellscape where everything we have learned to despise about the Nazis will become the new normal.
(RT)
