Skyfall Over Rafah

Yesterday (6th of May), the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) ordered that Rafah, part of southern Gaza, was to be evacuated. This, it was believed, came at the head of another push by the IDF to finalize their invasion of the Palestinian “open-air prison”.

For you to understand just how immaculately insane this order is, you need to understand what Rafah is. Rafah is the last, southern, vestige of the Gaza strip not pulverized by the nuclear war machine of Israel, the last strip of land that Israel hasn’t bombed, bulldozed, and executed their way through.

And any observant observer may just realise the profundity of the natural follow-up question to the IDF order:

Evacuate to where?

There is no more Gaza strip after Rafah. There is no where to go. Israel lets no one out. Egypt lets no one in. There is. No where. To go.

Except Muwasi. A little bedouin town along the coast – a strip of land about the size of four square kilometres – that Israel has declared a “safe zone”, that is supposed to house every Palestinian in Rafah (estimated about 1.7 million people) until… further notice.

That’s how today’s column was supposed to go, carrying on to elucidate on Israel’s cruelty and genocidal intent, explaining the insanity of calling 2,4 square meter per Palestinian a “humanitarian refuge”. But then the bombs started dropping in Rafah, tonight, while we were sleeping. On this day, seven months since October 7, Israel made good on its threat to level Rafah, giving the 1.7 million people there naught but a rough 24 hours to relocate.

This campaign is simple to understand if you look at what’s being done. The Gaza strip is being levelled, at an increasing rate. While Israel is bargaining for off-shore oil drilling contracts under the guise of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s populist extremists are battling the clock as internal political resistance against their murderous regime is on the rise, not to mention international grass-root outrage, and they’re trying to finish up their unsustainable military campaign as quickly as possible – not for the sake of Israeli hostages but in accordance to their Hannibal doctrine. This is the ethnic cleansing of a strip of land, pushing civilians into the sea through maniacal cruelty, to take land and make a buck off of fossil fuels.

There’s no justice to this. There’s no proportional response in anything the IDF has done since October 7th, or before for that matter. This is the text-book definition of ethnic cleansing, no different than the orchestrated famines of Soviet Ukraine or Nazi Germany. This is the labour of eradicating a population from plots of land that you want for either greed or religiously delusional entitlement.

And while all this is being done for the sake of glory and national security, I’m left to wonder… Just what atrocities does a nation state have to commit, and how much cruelty does the international community have to turn a blind eye to, until it justifies vengeance?

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/5-2024

Not All Human Rights Abuses Are Equal

In other news, the US impose sanctions on Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa, along with the president’s wife, and a gaggle of other top officials and companies.

The reason stated being to curb Mnangagwa’s looting of state resources, primarily the smuggling of gold and diamonds for personal enrichment:

“We are focusing our sanctions on clear and specific targets: President Mnangagwa’s criminal network of government officials and businesspeople who are most responsible for corruption or human rights abuses against the people of Zimbabwe”, the US Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement to the press.

So once more, the US takes on the role of world police. Though, in the case of Mnangagwa’s Zimbabweian government it might be valid, as shown by independent reports. And let it not be said that the international community should turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, or that if you’re one of the world’s leading economies you shouldn’t wield that position to push back against corruption and atrocities.

The effort pales though, don’t it, in the face of other, current, atrocities being performed by other corrupt, criminal governments, that the US world police is turning a blind eye to. It somehow… takes the zest out of the moral outrage of the dubious leader of the western world. Whataboutism is a dangerous habit, and one blind eye turned does not take away from one well-advised stand, but even so… Even so…

It seems like it is very easy to sanction and oppose such things as corruption and tribalism and ethnic cleansing when it’s perpetuated by neo-colonial African countries, doesn’t it. There’s no end to the high horses available to sit on when adjudicating how some countries should mind their business. But others – oh! others – well they simply seem completely above reproach, there’s no amount of genocide or ethnic cleansing or debauchery that they can commit that would ever make you raise your voice in objection, is there?

It’s the juxtaposition that make the Zimbabwe sanctions taste so bitter to me. No doubt they’re useful and warranted, but at this specific time they only serve to illustrate one very damning point: It’s not the ethnic cleansing that matters. It’s not the corruption that matters. It’s not the criminal government that matters. That’s all just excuses, smoke and mirrors.

/Sebastian Lindberg 5/3-2024