By Lasantha Pethiyagoda –

Prof (Emeritus) Lasantha Pethiyagoda

A tentative ceasefire is now declared, between Resistance forces in Gaza and the Occupying Israeli government. On 7th October 2023, after periodic aerial bombing of refugee villages every so often by the Israelis over several decades, Gazans decided to counterattack on a large scale and killed around a thousand armed combatants and some civilians after breaching the apartheid wall that laid siege to the strip that was in every sense a concentration camp.

What followed was easily the most horrendous reprisal and barbaric settler colonial genocide in modern history. Western-led international judicial institutions, previously used to deliberating on African, Asian or “lesser” countries’ atrocities between tribes or warring factions, reluctantly acknowledged that genocide was plausible. Various spurious deadlines were given for Israel to comply, similar to decades of UN Security Council or General Assembly resolutions that Israel and its main ally the United States had never heeded.

Possibly around two or three hundred thousand Palestinians were killed by unprecedented aerial bombardment, starvation, deliberate denial of basic medicines and disease from lack of sanitation, polluted water and exposure to extreme weather that were foisted on the population.

With mainstream media fully co-operating, Israel consistently lied about their objectives while ugly realities were often hidden or denied. Denial is the final fortress of those who commit genocide and other mass crimes.

Following Western colonizers of North America, Australia and other “white outposts”, Israeli perpetrators hid the truth to avoid accountability and protect the political and economic advantages they sought to gain by mass killings and theft of the victims’ land and property, and to cement the new reality by manufacturing a wholly untrue alternative history.

The objectives of ethnically cleansing the areas around present day Israel, including Palestinians in the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria and erasing their very existence from history books have established that such denial not only irreversibly damages the victim populations and their destroyed communities, it promises a future based on lies, sowing the seeds of future conflict, more sustained repression and much higher scales of suffering for the oppressed.

A concerted attempt is made to deny the holocaust in Gaza. The methods include sanctioning the international criminal court and its prosecutors, muzzling dissenter voices, killing local journalists and banning foreign reporters which helps to deny or minimize the scale and severity of the genocide. It is established that denial is an integral part of genocide and includes the secret planning of genocide, propaganda while the genocide is going on, and obliteration of evidence of mass graves and continuous massacres. The above are some of the most certain indications of more to come.

Thanks to social media and various pressure groups and resistance movements, former apartheid states and humanitarian groups, a ceasefire has been enabled. This will help both parties to the conflict to re-organize their strategies. The ulterior objective, in full accord with much of the Israeli public, has been the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people. This required the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, blatant deception and a plethora of lies reduced the stark inhumanity and barbarism that led to the struggle for independence from an occupation that defies logical comprehension.

The western media and historians except for a small, marginalized minority will not record the history of this holocaust in an accurate manner. There is a distinction between respectable academic historians and illegitimate historical negationists and revisionists, hand in glove with genocide deniers. The latter will use all powerful state apparatus to use the despicable techniques which are employed in the writing of such histories.

These influential and well-paid historical revisionists and negationists will rewrite history in order to support the settler colonial agenda which their ancestors engaged in, after invading the lands of North America and Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The intentions are usually political or ideological, religious and commercial. So, by using falsification and rhetorical fallacies like the 9-11 pretexts, or others coined from time to time in order to obtain their desired results they create narratives that seem just or understandable to the largely ignorant publics of their constituencies.

Self defence has been convincingly used in the earlier stages of the genocide. Many citizens outside of the region had very little historical knowledge of the Palestinian issue and the perpetrators took full advantage of it, often saying that precision strikes, surgical targeting of fighters and sparing of civilian life were being followed.

However, in reality they used extremely disproportionate force to attempt to subjugate the people who were simply defending their homeland against a barbaric invader. All attacks were indiscriminate and often involved deliberate targeting of large population centres with 2000 pound bombs that wreak havoc for kilometres around them.

It is very important that the international community, led by the powers of the Global South ensure that Israel is punished for its unprecedented barbarity during the last fifteen months and also ensure that full independence for the Palestinians is established, with full diplomatic and military ties with its allies, and equipped with defence capabilities including a strong air force and naval presence, open borders for free interaction with neighbouring countries, and self-reliance for producing its food, access to water and electricity etc.

The ethno-supremacist nature of Israel must be broken, where they will live like everybody else, without being an overlord of its neighbours.