21-07-2025
The Orwellian nightmare in Gaza
A string of recent developments forced me to pull out my daughter's copy of 1984 from her bookshelf. I had first read the Bihar-born George Orwell's classic as a teenager some 50 years ago and wanted to revisit some of his prescient vocabulary: Big Brother is Watching; War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Two Minutes Hate; Doublethink; Newspeak; Unperson; Thoughtcrime; Thought Police, and so much more.
The trigger was a statement made by Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz about plans to set up a 'Humanitarian City' on the ruins of the bombed-out town of Rafah, located near the border with Egypt on the southern extremity of the Gaza Strip. Without the slightest tinge of irony, he proposed to 'concentrate' 6,00,000 Palestinians in an area in which access would be strictly controlled, and residents would not be permitted to leave. He also reiterated his ambition to encourage the 'voluntary migration' of Palestinians to other countries. In Orwellian Newspeak, forced expulsion is being called voluntary migration and a planned concentration camp is being described as a humanitarian city. The 'encouragement', of course, comes in the form of mass starvation, destruction of water, electricity supplies and over 90 per cent of all housing units, and the continued targeting of medical infrastructure.
Another classic Newspeak is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), set up and funded by unknown or dubious entities to replace the UNRWA that was established by the UN in 1949 to provide support to Palestinian refugees. But Israel banned the UNRWA, choked essential food and medical supplies, and then responded to the growing global outrage by establishing a sham organisation whose aid-distribution centres have been described as a killing field.
Between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the armed contractors of GHF, some 880 Palestinians have been killed and over 5,000 wounded since the GHF started its operations in late May 2025. Meanwhile, formula milk for babies remains scarce and six children have been killed earlier this week while trying to get drinking water. In a rare admission, the Israeli government attributed this one attack to a 'technical error' in the missile that it fired into the crowd.
Doublethink — that act of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs — comes through the daily assertions of the IDF being 'the most moral army in the world'. Even after they have killed over 58,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, the respected Lancet journal thinks that this figure represents an underestimation of around 41 per cent. CNN and The New York Times have estimated Palestinian fatalities to be significantly higher than the official count. And Israel, 'the only democracy in the Middle East,' not only prohibits international media from entering Gaza, but has killed at least 186 mostly Palestinian journalists, according to the Committee for Protection of Journalists.
And there is the BBC which commissioned and then refused to screen a film titled Gaza: Doctors under Attack because it made a persuasive case that the IDF had deliberately and repeatedly targeted each one of Gaza's 32 hospitals. It also reveals that a completely disproportionate number of doctors and medical personnel have been killed and arrested since October 7, allegedly because the hospitals were built on Hamas tunnels. It was left to Channel 4 to muster the courage to show the horrors of Gaza.
Israel's advanced satellite and drone capabilities make sure that Big Brother is Always Watching. IDF has made extensive use of Lavender, an AI-based system developed with technology from US-based Palantir, to process large amounts of data including geospatial and signal intelligence, human sources and open-source information, to develop a list of some 40,000 suspects. The system produces target recommendations and the IDF's armed drones use face recognition systems to lock on these targets and fire. Gazans are being used as guinea pigs to refine this platform and when civilian casualties occur, who is to blame? The lines between ethics, law and accountability have been virtually erased. No wonder Palantir chairman Peter Thiel was distinctly evasive when these questions were posed to him in an interview, mumbling, 'I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel.'
Meanwhile, legal scholars, foreign policy experts and even a handful of Israeli politicians have now started to ask the forbidden question. Do Israeli actions in Gaza constitute ethnic cleansing, war crimes or even genocide? Read this and form your own view: Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948 says that 'genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting living conditions calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part…'
Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert now acknowledge that the actions of the Benjamin Netanyahu government in Gaza constitute war crime. Leading Jewish historians like Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg and Lee Mordechai have described it as a genocide. A group of 10 Holocaust survivors have issued a signed letter condemning Israeli actions as genocide. The Jewish Voice for Peace issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day to call for an end to 'the Israeli government's genocide against the Palestinian people'. But the students of Harvard and Columbia or the musicians at Glastonbury are not allowed to say this. Criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza is now equated with blood libel if you are a Jew and with antisemitism if you are not. Either way, it attracts the wrath of the ever-vigilant Thought Police.
And what is more Orwellian than the bizarre spectacle of PM Netanyahu — designated as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court — proposing Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize while the US President sanctions senior ICC and UN staff for doing their job. Or, the intellectual gymnastics of the president of the European Commission, tying herself in knots as she tries to balance her angst over Ukraine with her nonchalance on Gaza.
Truly, as Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.'
The writer is a former ambassador to Egypt and UAE
