Calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is a moral imperative.
“Genocide is the crime of crimes. It is not a political issue. It is a moral issue. Defying genocide and rejecting all complicity with those who commit genocide is a moral imperative. … It is about standing, no matter the cost, with the oppressed … for if justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning. And this is our task, to fight, no matter the cost, for justice. To fight, no matter the cost, for the sacred. To fight, no matter the cost, for life.”
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent
If you don’t feel comfortable calling this an unfolding genocide, then call it what you think is right. Genocidal war crimes or mass killings. But whatever the phrase you use, don’t hide from the fact that Palestinians have been fighting for their right to self-determination, for equality and for justice, for over 75 years. So much has happened that naturally many of us feel we simply don’t know enough about this cause to speak out or take sides.
Indeed, you might have noticed that we used the word ‘cause’ in the sentence above, not ‘conflict’ or ‘war’ – both of which are commonly used in mainstream media. That is because what’s happening in Gaza (and away from the spotlight, in the West Bank) is not a fight between equals. It is the struggle of an oppressed people for freedom, for belonging, for life.
Palestine is a classic case of settler-colonialism dating back to 1882 and the Palestinians have been suffering the terror and the trauma of ethnic cleansing ever since.
There is no parallel in recent history for what Robert Pape, a US military historian at the University of Chicago describes as “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history … it now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
According to the Geneva-based human rights monitor, Euro-Med, in the six months leading up to April 2024, Israel had dropped more than 70,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip. Officials report in public that 37,000 humans – mostly women and children – are dead, and most of Gaza has been incinerated. In reality the numbers of dead are likely to be at least 2-3 times as many. And many more will die from starvation and the destruction of basic sanitation.
Thousands more have been bombed, displaced, and starved in Gaza since Arundathi Roy called on governments to ‘Stop the Slaughter’ in December 2023. Many more are dying in the West Bank, an Occupied Territory that Hamas does not govern. Calling for an end to the bombing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and hundreds of murders of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is an act of compassion and shared humanity.
Roy said it best:
“Please — for the sake of Palestine and Israel, for the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of the hostages being held by Hamas and the Palestinians in Israel’s prisons, for the sake of all of humanity — stop this slaughter.”
That’s all we need to know.