The following is part one of a talk given by the author to a meeting of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) on April 24 in Philadelphia. (Trigger warning due to graphic descriptions of rape and torture.)
The truth is that I struggle these days to find the right words. I think everyone does. I recently posted a letter from my friend, the writer, Samah Sabawi, who couldn’t find the words to explain what she felt after losing dozens of family members and then seeing the rest of their ancient Gaza family, totally severed from their land and homes: “How small and inadequate language becomes when you have fallen outside the boundaries of vocabulary. We are in the post era of adequate. We are in post language, post diplomacy, post erasure, post dispossession, post ethnic cleansing, post rules-based order, post truth in reporting, post pretending, post everything.”
We also do not have language to adequately capture the depths of Israeli terrorism. Extermination, holocaust, depravity — none of the words we know are big enough to convey what an aberration of life this monstrous entity truly is. For the past 18 months, they’ve been implementing a long-held colonial fantasy of not only “finishing the job,” but doing [it] with a gleeful sadism that echoes the public post of Tzipi Navon, Sara Netanyahu’s close adviser and office manager, who wrote that it was not enough to flatten Gaza. She went on to detail methods of torture, first with pork fat and humiliation:
One by one. First removing the fingernails from the hands and feet, then removing pieces of flesh from different areas of the body, slowly, slowly and carefully not to cause death, [but] make them suffer and suffer for a long time. After stripping the scum from their skin, then cut off genitals and let him see how his testicles are fried in canola oil and force him to eat them, and this is how they slowly and patiently spread it to parts (we have a lot of time), keep the tongue to the end of the torture session so that it pleases us with its screams, the ears so that they can hear their own screams and the eyes so that they can see us smile.
While these words may sound like the ramblings of a deranged individual, the evidence indicates her sentiments are in fact widespread, entrenched attitudes throughout the Israeli military, and indeed Israeli society.
Kidnappings and extreme torture
In a rare moment of candor, buried in a New York Times article, were accounts of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian hostages with hot metal rods and electrified sticks. The sexual torture of kidnapped Palestinians included being raped by dogs trained to rape; of inserting a fire extinguisher hose in the rectum of a Palestinian young man, then releasing the chemical contents of the extinguisher into his body.
Footage of the gang rape of a Palestinian cancer patient at Sde Teiman torture center was leaked to the public after the young man was sent to a civilian hospital, ostensibly to retrieve the cell phone they had shoved inside him to call the number for a laugh. The hospital noted ruptured bowels, ruptured lungs, broken ribs and a torn rectum with cuts and bruises all over his body. Public outcry ensued, not in protest, [but] to ensure the rapists would not be punished. Then the world got to watch Israeli politicians and pundits extol their right to rape Palestinians.
Many of those who were kidnapped, including prominent surgeons, such as Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, director of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa hospital, were tortured and raped to death, according to Doctors without Borders. Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh is still being tortured in their custody after they kidnapped him from Kamal Adwan Hospital. Those who made it out of Israeli prisons emerged with such trauma that they had lost all memory and could not recognize their own children and family members. Some emerged unable to speak. All of them returned utterly broken, their mutilated, burned bodies testifying to the unspeakable.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, along with multiple international doctors, have testified that children are definitely intentionally targeted, with a shocking number of them coming to hospitals with sniper bullets to the head. The raw footage and sounds of unimaginable carnage are undeniable — whole families burned alive or buried alive en masse in the rubble of their homes; torn bodies; shredded bodies; broken bodies; burnt bodies; dismembered bodies everywhere; blood and gore in the town squares and roads; unreachable bodies rotting in the streets, picked apart by starving stray dogs; wanton destruction of everything in the entirety of the Gaza strip.
Still, what I witnessed on the ground, even for a small period and even in just a small area of Gaza, is infinitely worse than the worst video broadcast to the world. The enormity of harm beggars belief.
What is happening in Gaza is the most macabre experiment of empire, wherein the entire world watches day in and day out the industrialized murder and denigration of an entire society. What is unfolding in Gaza in real time is a break in humanity, from which there can be no return if we continue to watch idly. The late prophet poet June Jordan warned us over thirty years ago that, “Palestine is the moral litmus test for humanity.”
Details and death toll of genocide
In June of 2024, I conducted a brief study to estimate the true death toll in Gaza, because the [Gaza] Health Ministry’s numbers remained stagnant despite daily slaughter that we can all see. Their capacity to keep count of bodies had been decimated — bombing of hospitals, destruction of servers, killing of administrators and hospital staff and destruction of communication, as well as the inability of the population to reach hospitals, severely curtailed the ability to log patient data.
My study, published in Electronic Intifada on 27 June 2024, found the true death toll as a range of 193,248 – 514,464. These numbers included martyrs from direct fire, as well as those with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, cardiovascular, renal, vascular and pulmonary disease who died from lack of access to medications due to Israel’s siege. It also included those who were dead or dying from starvation and dehydration, those who were known to be missing and those dead from the spread of communicable diseases, such as dysentery, due to Israel’s destruction of sanitation and water treatment facilities.
As is frequently the case when Palestinians speak, my article was met with skepticism and dismissal. But 10 days after its publication, The Lancet, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, published their own estimate which corroborated the lower end of my estimated range. They gave a “conservative” number of “at least” 186,000 killed. I believe even that is a gross underestimation, even back then, almost a year ago.
Israel has dropped the equivalent of seven nuclear bombs on Gaza, which is less than 40% of the land size of Hiroshima.
When Trump unveiled his vision for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, he remarked that they’d only have to move 1.5 million Palestinians. One can assume this number comes from intelligence we’re not privy to, which begs the question of what happened to the remaining 800,000 people who lived in Gaza prior to October 7. They most surely did not leave the Strip.
The numbers alone are impossible to comprehend, and one’s soul collapses when you try to imagine the universe of life, loves, joys and ambitions behind each of those lives.
But what is yet truly incomprehensible, and terrifying, is the pleasure that Israelis — across nearly all sectors of their society — seem to take from witnessing the shocking cruelty of their soldiers and the misery, pain and terror of Palestinians. Their soldiers post videos of themselves blowing up schools, torching homes and food storage facilities, firing indiscriminately at occupied buildings and ransacking meager supplies left in Gaza.
They set Palestinian pain to music and post on TikTok. Families across Israel dress up in the equivalent of “Black face” to mock Palestinians mourning their dead and bloody children. Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of so-called ordinary Israelis post horrific injuries, beheaded bodies of children and piles of Palestinian bodies with pride and glee. And people across Israeli society call for greater violence, even a nuclear hit to wipe out all Palestinians in Gaza.
The holocaust of our time
Ram Cohen, a Tel-Aviv school principal, spoke in an interview about Israeli cultural attitudes towards Palestinians when raising children. He said: “Arabs are inferior to us. That’s why we kick Palestinians and slap them. We train dogs so they will bite them strongly and tightly. That’s why we shoot them. They’re nothing.”
Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and they are doing it in full view of a seemingly indifferent world. But how did we get here?
It most certainly did not happen overnight. Nazis didn’t build all the concentration camps in one go. First they built one and waited. Then another. And when the population passed the test of obedience and acquiescence, they built another 100 altogether.
Israel’s genocidal campaign in what little remains of Palestine is the culmination of decades of pushing the limits of our silence. It follows capitalist colonial ambitions that have been grooming us all and incrementally pushing the boundaries of our acquiescence since traditional European colonial powers were forced to retreat from their colonies in the Global South and since the United States was unceremoniously ousted from Vietnam by lightly armed guerilla forces.
Despite the romantic narrative surrounding the establishment of Israel — complete with a divine mandate, an aura of a happy ending to Europe’s genocide of their own Jewish citizenry — the reality is that Israel was created as a Western colonial outpost in a resource-rich region. It was Europe’s last hurrah as a colonial powerhouse, which the U.S. adopted in earnest, particularly in the wake of the 1967 war.
It is no wonder that the West collectively is willing to sacrifice not only international law, but also their own constitutions and laws, in service of this genocidal Jewish supremacist project.
But the greatest impediment to empire is, and historically has always been, the conscience and consent of the masses.
After decades of imperial wars, environmental destruction, the gutting of public services and public institutions and the fleecing of workers, empire is at last having to contend with mass discontent on this occasion of genocide. Not only here at home, but abroad, because the empire is actually naked now. The world can see the sham of international law, the sham of free speech, the sham of academic freedom, the sham of democracy. Gaza has laid it all bare.