Ibada — naming the genocide in Gaza - World - Al-Ahram Weekly

Al-Ahram Weekly

a day ago

If the Holocaust was an instance of genocide against Europe's Jews, let us give Israel's slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza the name of Ibada.
Eight decades after the US dropped the first nuclear bomb on Japan, killing some 140,000 people, the past retains its resonance across the world to remind people of past atrocities.
Last week, Japan marked the anniversary of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, which the Americans claimed were meant to bring World War II in the Far East to an end.
The two atomic bombs probably transported humanity from one geopolitical era to another, but they also demonstrated the savagery of modern warfare, where the quantity of violence and death dealt out shows that more civilians can be killed than combatants.
Humanity, however, never heeded that terrible lesson, and today the Palestinian people have to face a modern-day aggressor state that seeks to justify their subjection and glorify its occupation of their territories.
The brutal ongoing war in Gaza, the starvation of its people, and the total destruction of the Strip when put within a broader historical framework amount to a calculated case of genocide shaped by a settler-colonial logic of elimination.
Many instances of genocide happened elsewhere over the course of the last century, though the reference can only be used as a historical guide and not as a way of setting out a 'hierarchy of suffering' of the victims.
The East African country of Rwanda suffered one of the most abominable events of the late 20th century, when over 100 days in 1994 members of the majority Hutu population slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, mostly from the minority Tutsi group.
The list of genocides witnessed in the last century also includes events in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia, Darfur in Sudan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Burma, where millions of people perished in massacres largely because of one group's intentions to destroy others.
The most famous instance of genocide, however, remains the systematic, state-sponsored murder of the European Jews and other ethnic groups by Nazi Germany during World War II.
This was initially called the 'Holocaust,' but later it gained additional prominence through a discourse vehemently promoted by Israel and its supporters to specifically mean the Jewish genocide and to ignore the massacres of others.
The paradox in Gaza today is not that such massive catastrophes are still possible in the contemporary world, but that the persecuted have today become the persecutor, inflicting upon the Palestinians a similar tragic cycle of violence and atrocities suffered by the European Jews under the Nazis.
Israel has been committing genocidal massacres against the Palestinians in Gaza, starving them to death and preparing plans for their ethnic cleansing and relocation.
In piecing together what has occurred in Gaza over the last 22 months, there appears to be a resemblance to what happened in Nazi concentration camps and Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe during World War II.
Under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as any of 'five acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.'
Many of the founding fathers of this document, like the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who coined the term 'genocide,' emphasised the intent or effect of the crime and underplayed the numbers massacred.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has yet to issue a final ruling on the government of South Africa's appeal regarding claims that Israel has violated the convention.
In an initial ruling, the ICJ held that the Palestinians were recognised to have a right to protection from genocide. It ruled that the claim of genocide in Gaza was 'plausible' and acknowledged 'the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.'
The court ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of acts of genocide, to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and to allow basic humanitarian services, aid, and supplies into Gaza.
It also ruled that Israel should allow unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza and take measures to stop and prevent starvation in the Strip and the forcible transfer or deportation of all or parts of its population.
Furthermore, it said that Israel should respect the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions in and the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks and immediately stop the extensive destruction of property and infrastructure in the Strip.
The UN Special Committee set up to investigate Israeli practices said in a report in November 2024 that Israel's war on Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on the Palestinians.
Evidence gathered by humanitarian organisations and the media also abounds to the effect that since the war on Gaza started Israel has deliberately imposed conditions to bring about the Palestinians' physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.
Indeed, as much as the Holocaust was deliberate, organised, and state-sponsored by the Nazis and their collaborators, the Gaza genocide also seems to be systematic, institutionalised, and broadly supported by the Israeli public.
Since 7 October 2023, Israeli officials and politicians have engaged in rhetoric suggestive of genocidal intent in Gaza, providing hardliners and extremists with psychological and ideological weapons to massacre the Palestinians.
At the onset of the conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked violent verses from the Jewish scriptures used by the far right to justify the killing of the Palestinians. The verses call for the Israelites to completely eliminate their enemies, with one text reading 'blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.'
Sharon Halevi, wife of former Israeli chief of staff Herzi Halevi, revealed in a podcast on 7 August that her husband had told her when leaving home that 'Gaza will be destroyed' after kissing a mezuzah, a small parchment scroll inscribed with verses from the Torah placed in a decorative case and affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes.
One of the most obvious examples of the complicity of Israeli state institutions in the crime of genocide in Gaza is the Israeli Supreme Court's ruling to deny a request to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, which is itself part of the perpetration of genocide against its people.
Apart from the state institutions and practices that are hostile to the Palestinians by nature, the complicity of Israeli citizens in the genocide is widespread, not only by denying the Palestinians human rights but also by being an essential link in the occupation enterprise.
In a poll conducted by the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute issued at the end of July, the vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 per cent – said they are 'not so troubled' or 'not troubled at all' by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Like the German Nazis, the Israelis are not acting alone. Countries that send weapons to Israel and have been reluctant to raise their voices against the atrocities against the Palestinians are strategically implicated in Israel's actions despite the world's leading human rights groups agreeing that what is going on Gaza is indeed genocide.
Then there is the Western media's complicity in the mass slaughter in Gaza and its whitewashing of Israel's intentional destruction of the Palestinian people and their historic homeland.
As mass atrocities in Gaza unfold, with Israeli plans to take over large chunks of the Strip paving the way for a wider occupation and an unstoppable genocide, the world should not remain a mere bystander while the Palestinians suffer a new Holocaust.
While the Israelis believe that they can crush the Palestinians militarily, they also know deep in their hearts that they cannot achieve victory and that the Palestinians' determination to build a future on their land is solid and their consciousness remains intact.
With Gaza apparently in ruins and its population starving, the Israelis are losing the battle for world public opinion, and their political discourse, symbols, and slogans drawn from Jewish religious narratives and myths are clearly being undermined.
The Palestinians are gaining support and sympathy around the world, and their fight for justice appears to be assuming the character of a struggle for freedom and resistance.
Given the gravity of the current situation in Palestine and Israel's insistence on its hegemonic discourse, it is time to take the Palestinian narrative more seriously and to apply proper moral standards.
Engaging with the Palestinian narrative means taking their perspective on the way they describe their experience seriously by construing it on its terms rather than as an object of Western and Israeli discourse.
It is time to consider using the Arabic term Ibada to emphasise the nature of the genocide in Gaza, given that the perpetrators and their supporters insist on propagating their own version of history.
The word is derived from the Arabic root bada, which means completely vanished, eliminated, annihilated, or exterminated. It carries a similar idea to that conveyed by the English expression genocide but with a Palestinian identity.
The coinage has a precedent in Arabic, especially in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that can serve as an example representing the Palestinians' struggle for their homeland.
Immediately after 1948, the Arabs started using the phrase Nakba to refer to the Palestinians' losing their country to the Jews and the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of their homes and villages.
The coinage is attributed to Syrian scholar Constantine Zurayk, who used it in his famous book Maana al-Nakba, or 'The Meaning of the Catastrophe,' which was published after the Arabs' defeat in the 1948 War.
The Arabic word Intifada, which translates to 'uprising,' also came into use following the widespread protests, acts of civil disobedience, riots and rock-throwing carried out by Palestinians in Israeli-Occupied Palestine.
The Intifada was largely coined in Middle East newsrooms to describe periods of intense Palestinian protests against Israel during the First Uprising from 1987 to 1990 and the Second Uprising in June 2025.
Today, we frequently hear the chant 'globalise the Intifada' in anti-Israel demonstrations around the world, tying the world's quest for liberation and justice to that of the Palestinians.
The use of the word Ibada for the current Israeli genocide against the Palestinians could become iconic at a time when global progress on human rights seems to be faltering, as seen in the failure to stop the savagery in Gaza.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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