Gaza Conflict: History Will Judge Those Who Looked The Other Way
Image: AFP
Reneva Fourie
Since 7 October 2023, Gaza has become an open-air graveyard. The staggering figures are echoes of tragedy etched into history. Israel has killed at least 61,430 Palestinians, wounded 153,213, and arbitrarily detained 30,000. Among the deceased are 242 journalists who have been deliberately targeted for revealing the truth, seven of whom were murdered this week. This is not war; it is genocide.
The Palestinian struggle mirrors South Africa's fight against apartheid. Just as the apartheid regime branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist, Israel smears Palestinians and those who defend them as Hamas sympathisers or antisemites. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies parrots this propaganda, shamefully weaponising Jewish pain to shield a genocidal regime from accountability.
The powerful and resourced continue defending a regime that operates with the same impunity as Nazi Germany and the same colonial sadism as apartheid South Africa. When Western powers sanctioned Russia overnight for its invasion of Ukraine, they exposed their hypocrisy. Israel's crimes – indiscriminate bombing, forced starvation, targeted executions of medics and reporters – are far worse, yet they face no accountability.
Israel's military juggernaut, fuelled by United States and European weapons, has turned Gaza into a wasteland of mass graves and starving children. Over the past twenty-two months, the US has dispatched a minimum of 800 transport planes and 140 ships to deliver more than 90,000 tonnes of armaments and military equipment to Israel. The Trump administration approved nearly USD12 billion in major foreign military sales within the first two months of taking office this year.
Germany supplies 30 per cent of Israel's arms. The United Kingdom provides surveillance flights, training, and arms. Coal from South African companies keeps flowing to Israel despite the ICJ genocide case. Qatar, home to Al Jazeera, whose journalists Israel has murdered, gifts Trump a luxury jet, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates welcome him lavishly while Palestinians dig their children out of rubble. The wealthy are brazenly profiting from Palestinian blood despite their effective complicity in war crimes.
What is unfolding is not a tragedy of nature nor an unfortunate by-product of conflict. It is the deliberate dismantling of a people's existence, sustained and accelerated by the wealth, weaponry, and political cover of the world's most powerful nations. The notion that this is a symmetrical war between two sides is a fiction kept alive by media narratives designed to dull outrage and shift blame. The imbalance of power is absolute. One side possesses the most advanced military technology and enjoys unconditional political backing; the other is a captive population, penned into a strip of land without an army, navy, or air force.
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The argument of self-defence collapses under the weight of the evidence. Starvation is not self-defence. The bombing of hospitals and schools is not self-defence. The targeting of journalists, medics, and aid workers is not self-defence. The indiscriminate shelling of refugee camps is not self-defence. It is the language of annihilation dressed in the rhetoric of security. This is the blueprint of settler-colonial violence: dispossess, dehumanise, destroy.
Imagine being a 15-year-old in Gaza, watching your siblings dismembered by drones, your school reduced to dust, your parents executed while pleading for food. Or a mother cradling your malnourished baby as Israel blocks aid trucks, deliberately enforcing starvation. This is Israel's final solution for Palestine: erase them, silence them, break them.
Western and allied powers might shackle the United Nations, but the history of such regimes shows that they are not invincible. The West initially tried to appease Hitler before finally realising how evil he was, and eighty years ago, Nazism was crushed. The West initially backed apartheid, and thirty-five years ago, it was on the edge of defeat. Every oppressive order eventually meets its reckoning.
The people of Palestine are not waiting for saviours; they are resisting in the most extraordinary conditions imaginable. Gaza's women and youth refuse to be broken. Like our youth of the 70s and 80s rose against apartheid, Palestinian teenagers document their annihilation on social media, and women find means to sustain life. Doctors continue to perform surgeries by the light of mobile phones. Their resistance is not terrorism; it is the most profound act of courage in our time. But resistance without global solidarity is condemned to isolation. Israel's regime of terror will fall, but only if we fight with an urgency that appreciates that Gaza has no tomorrow.
The machinery of destruction is sustained by money, resources, and political cover, all of which can be disrupted by organised public will. Boycotts can erode economic stability. Divestment can sap the financial underpinnings of the occupation. Sanctions can strip away the veneer of legitimacy. The choice is stark and immediate: act or become an entry in the ledger of complicity.
The moral clarity of this moment should be as unmistakable as it was in the fight against apartheid in South Africa or the resistance to fascism. No amount of propaganda can conceal the reality that unfolds daily in Gaza's streets and hospitals. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel's actions are plausibly genocidal. History will judge those who looked the other way.
To stand with Gaza is not an act of charity but of justice. It is to affirm the principle that no people should be condemned to live and die under siege, that no child should grow up with drones as their lullaby, and that no journalist should pay with their life for telling the truth. The fate of Gaza will not be decided solely by those who drop the bombs or those who endure them, but by the millions who choose whether to look away or to rise.
History has shown that the arc of justice does not bend on its own. It is pulled, often against fierce resistance, by those who refuse to accept that brutality and impunity are the natural order of things. The window to act is not endless, and each day of hesitation costs lives.
* Dr Reneva Fourie is a policy analyst specialising in governance, development, and security.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.
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