The war in Gaza started on October 7, 2023. Seven months ago. It has moved, just like the wars in Yemen, Ukraine and even Sudan, to the side of lasting wars, which are now part of the ordinary news landscape. Deaths, bombs… we no longer pay too much attention to details. However, as the occupation of campuses in Canada and the United States has clearly shown in recent weeks, Gaza is one of those wars where public opinion counts. It is all that can tip the scales today, in the face of immense geopolitical and economic challenges.
Public opinion is a watchman and must remain attentive, even when we are tempted to look away, when Goliath crushes David. At the risk of being on the wrong side of history.
The story I am telling you is not and does not imply a call to anti-Semitism nor a trivialization of the Holocaust, its scars, its unforgivable gravity. Nor is it a denial of the seriousness of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, or an admission that violence can be a just response. On the contrary.
But it’s not a pretty story. I will not talk here about the figures which are everywhere: the counts of dead, wounded and buried bodies which pile up day by day in Gaza. They convey, it seems to me, the horror and the suffering. Here’s what’s happening in Gaza right now.
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Gaza is a territory surrounded by fences and walls built by Israel between 2002 and 2021. On October 9, 2023, following Hamas attacks in Israel, it ordered a total blockade on the Gaza Strip. Nothing and no one has entered or left since then, no fuel, no electricity, no water, no essential goods. The only remaining entry and exit point is to the south, at Rafah, on the border with Egypt; it is the only place where Israel allows the entry of humanitarian assistance (we are talking about medical supplies, food for the civilian population and humanitarian personnel), in dribs and drabs. On March 28, 2024, the International Court of Justice admitted that famine and starvation were spreading in Gaza and ordered urgent action by Israel. No result.
Since the start of the war, Israel has razed the towns of this Palestinian territory. Attacks have been carried out directly or indiscriminately against schools, hospitals, apartments, homes, universities, mosques and even civilians. More than 60% of civilian installations have been destroyed. Even the United States has denounced (not without continuing to finance and arm Israel) the indiscriminate bombings and the insufficiency of humanitarian assistance permitted by Israel.
For several months, more than half of the 2.1 million Palestinians surviving in the Gaza Strip had crowded into Rafah, a town wedged between the closed border with Egypt and the rest of Gaza, razed. In short, it is the equivalent of the population of the city of Montreal arriving, empty-handed, injured, hungry and traumatized, in Gatineau in a context where the grocery stores are already empty, the houses filled with extended family who are It’s crowded and the hospitals are half-functional. A city bombarded, continually, without respite, but the only one where the army had not yet entered. The humanitarian assistance that reached it was largely insufficient.
It was an unbearable, inhumane situation. In overcrowded Rafah, but also in all the other towns of the Gaza Strip, largely destroyed and where humanitarian assistance was even more difficult to reach, given its insufficiency and the absence of other access to the territory and safe corridors to transport it.
Israel announced several weeks ago its intention to enter Rafah with its troops to “complete the eradication of Hamas”. The international community, including the West, had told Israel that this was a red line that should not be crossed. There was no chance that the entry of Israeli troops into Rafah would not have tragic, catastrophic consequences, I can’t find a word strong enough. Yet here we are.
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What is happening this week in the Gaza Strip, even if it is buried in the now usual landscape of this war, is really not trivial. Last week, Hamas accepted the ceasefire proposal proposed by Egypt and Qatar. Not Israel. The same day, Israeli armed forces instead entered the town of Rafah. They immediately blocked the only entry and exit point from the Gaza Strip for humanitarian assistance. A huge population movement, which however represents only a fraction of the people who had taken refuge in Rafah for months, then set in motion to flee it. Even though there is literally nowhere to go.
Gaza polarizes. “It’s delicate”, “it’s complex”, we don’t dare. But today we must have the courage. This is not about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine and sticking to our respective positions. Those who are currently surviving in Gaza, and those who have also died, are people, human beings.
We decided, as humanity, notably through international law, that such massacres were not permitted, that starvation as a weapon of war was unacceptable, that the destruction of everything and everyone was not a legal means. to wage war, that no one, not even a sovereign state, could empty and raze a territory. We bit our fingers over the colonial massacres, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda. We stood up to denounce torture at Guantánamo and war crimes in Syria and Ukraine.
What is happening in Gaza, and the way it has been happening for months, is not acceptable. Notwithstanding Hamas, notwithstanding the attacks of October 7: because that is not how we achieve justice or peace. Even wars have rules, even states must respect them, and humans remain humans, whose life and dignity must be protected. Let’s stand up, let’s raise our humanity to affirm it together, beyond political divisions. Let us be the vigilantes that we must be, let us have the courage today to look at Gaza, its children, its women and its men, and to affirm loudly that this is not the turn we want to give to the situation. ‘history.