In times of war and genocide, post-truth is imposed. Politicians, governments and mass media make it their main weapon. But the independent media goes against the tide, shows the facts and questions them. In this Special Edition on Palestine, The Prisma publishes the work of a number of independent media, mostly members of the Independent Media Association (IMA) who have covered the issue. We must not stop talking about Palestine.
Mónica del Pilar Uribe Marín / The Prisma
It is Sunday, past midday. Israeli occupation forces have just shelled homes in the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Some 40 people have been killed and more than 84 people have disappeared or been injured. All innocent people.
The news horrifies me, but it does not surprise me. A year and almost three months have passed in which death, pain and barbarism have been televised and turned into numbers that grow daily. From 7 October until today, the day I write this chronicle, Israel’s attack on Palestine has left 45,259 dead and 107,627 wounded.
According to the UN, in October 2024 there were 1.9 million displaced people in Gaza, out of a population of 2.2 million people. The first mass displacement (over one million), occurred in northern Gaza on 13 October when the Israeli army told them they had 24 hours to leave.
From then on ultimatums and evacuations have been repeated, displacing 85% of the population.
It has been a chaotic displacement because, as Human Rights Watch explains, “Israel put in place an evacuation system that gave instructions which were unclear, inaccurate, and contradictory, making it extremely difficult for civilians to know where or when to move. Others contained missing or contradictory information about where to go, when, and which destinations were safe, and were corrected only hours later, if at all.”
This forced displacement brings with it the suffering of a nation that they want to erase, make invisible and astigmatism.
There are hundreds of thousands of orphaned children, adults, the elderly and minors who have had limbs, mutilated and traumatized, hundreds of thousands of people who have disappeared under the ruins, hundreds of thousands of ill people who have nowhere to return to because their homes, hospitals, schools and many other buildings have been destroyed. They are survivors, but they have lost everything. They are ill, they lack water, clothes, food, medicine, education, work, joy. They have no homes. They have no hope, no future.
In the places they have been forced to migrate to, they hear or know of permanent bombings, screams and fear. Being able to sleep, laugh and eat is not on their agenda. Added to this are family members or friends who have been detained without charge or trial in Israeli prisons, where they are subjected to torture and the uncertainty of not knowing if they will regain their freedom.
This destroyed and grey Palestine is the product of a genocide that many do not want to call by its name or do not admit is happening. Others don’t care or think it is just an inevitable.
Somehow many consider this to be the price to pay for the abominable events of 7 October 2023 in southern Israel, when Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups murdered 1,200 people and abducted 250 others, all innocents. Certainly crimes against humanity that “are horrific and completely unjustifiable”, as Amnesty International described them. “A year on around 100 hostages remain held in Gaza. While some are confirmed dead, those still alive are at risk of death, torture and other abuse.”
There is also an unconscious and instinctive solidarity for anything that happens to Jews, because of the horror they had to live through during the Holocaust and the years of persecution, suffering, uprooting and discrimination they experienced. It is therefore almost impossible not to be on their side. But while the events of 7 October deserve to be repudiated by all, what happened to the Palestinian people should also be condemned, not only because those thousands killed and millions displaced are not the perpetrators of the murder and kidnapping in southern Israel, but also because this genocide is a clear strategy of ethnic cleansing and the disappearance of a nation in order to take over a territory that the Israeli state has long wanted in its domain.
Of course, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has argued that they are acting in self-defence and has therefore denied that his government is committing genocide. But the figures, the facts, say otherwise. That is why on 21 November the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant and a Hamas military commander for alleged war crimes.
Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024”.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International published on 5 December the report “You feel like you are subhuman: Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza” , which concludes that Israel’s war on Gaza “meets the legal threshold for genocide”, as the Israeli Israeli military “has committed at least three of the five acts banned by the 1948 Genocide Convention, including indiscriminate killings of civilians, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and “deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction”. As for the United Nations (UN), it is under constant attack from Netanyahu because it represents international law. In April this year the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for a suspension of arms shipments to Israel.
The body made it clear that Israel has committed violations of international humanitarian and human rights law and that the Israeli army has allegedly committed “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. Like these bodies, hundreds of organisations from all over the world and several countries have made it clear that what is happening in Palestine is genocide.
In any democracy, in a civilised world, this would mean that Netanyahu would stop the genocide and stand trial. But this is not the case. Faced with the arrest warrant, he responded: “Israel rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions leveled against it by ICC”, and said Israel would not “give in to pressure” in defence of its citizens.
And in response to the Amnesty report, the Israeli government called it “entirely false” and said it is legally targeting Hamas and other militants among Gaza’s civilian population – and not deliberately targeting the Palestinian people. This argument is implausible to Amnesty.
And as for the United Nations, the Israeli government declared Secretary-General António Guterres ‘persona non grata’, banned him from entering the country and called him an “anti-Israeli secretary-general who supports terrorists”. Netanyahu feels at ease because he has the backing of a major bloc of Western states, including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Australia, among others. He also has a powerful military and, best of all, most of the mainstream media on his side.
Media that we consider respectable are those that allow him to perpetuate the genocide. Those are the media that report in such a way that they call this genocide a ‘war between Israel and Palestine’, something impossible because Palestine does not even have an army and Netanyahu’s fight is supposedly against Hamas. A media that manipulates information, stigmatises and distorts even historical facts and conceals the permanent tragedy of the Palestinian people.
These media are busy not only hiding the truth, but also lying and defending the indefensible. They serve a system and powers, whether through censorship, self-censorship or economic and political interests. They serve governments that see innocents murdered on a daily basis.
This is where the independent media, as well as social media, have played a fundamental role in ensuring that the genocide in Palestine is not turned into a superficial and isolated episode. In their philosophy and structure, many of them have reached out to the different aspects of the information on the attack on Palestine. In the UK, for example, they have devoted lengthy writings and broadcasts to what is happening, creating a need for public opinion to be informed with the truth. This has been done, for example, by several publications of the Independent Media Association (IMA) whose work is dedicated to the memory and the present of the Palestinian people. December is certainly not the best month for a Special Edition on Palestine, because nobody wants to know about this reality during time of ‘joy and peace’.
But we cannot stop talking about Palestine. Its inhabitants do not have a December, they do not have a day of peace or joy. Death hovers over their every waking hour.
(Translated by Rene Phelvin – Email: renephelvin@gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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