Palestinians are being dehumanised to justify occupation and genocide
It has been more than a month since a former president of the United States, Donald Trump, used my identity as an insult in a televised debate. He called his opponent, current US President Joe Biden, a “very bad Palestinian” for his alleged failure to help Israel “finish the job” of killing everyone in Gaza and stealing the land. He received zero pushback. Biden, the person who is directly funding and supplying the weapons for the ongoing genocide of my people, clearly had no issue with our identity being turned into a slur. But the nation’s liberal commentariat, always ready to call out Trump’s racism, did not really care either. There were a few articles on how Trump’s “racist insult” has upset human rights advocates, but in a matter of days if not hours, the incident was completely forgotten.
This came after months of Palestinians in Gaza being indiscriminately bombed, shot at, imprisoned and starved. After the complete decimation of the strip’s hospitals and universities. After the despicable murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab with 355 bullets shot directly at the car she was in.
And since Trump used my identity as a slur on national TV, the killing, maiming and repeated displacement of Palestinians continued, not only in Gaza but all across Palestine. Various investigations concluded that Palestinians being held without charge or legal representation in Israeli prisons and detention camps, like the notorious Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, are being tortured, starved, raped and left to die. The official death toll of this latest round of Israeli slaughter in Gaza has surpassed 40,000 with many more thousands still buried under the rubble. And after all this, the US government approved weapons sales to the genocidal state of Israel totalling $20bn.
A brutal, systematic war is being waged on my people, in open view of the world, to deprive us of our land and our basic right to dignity. And yet, it seems, the global community has became numb to our suffering, our pain and the injustice we have been subjected to for many decades. Especially those in the West appear indifferent to what Israel, with the help of their governments, is doing to us. This is why Israel has been able to continue this genocide with impunity for 10 long months, and this is why no one even flinched when two of the........
© Al Jazeera
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