As I write, it’s exactly four months since October 7, 2023, when Hamas breached the border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and, with others following, Islamic Jihad or simply enraged civilians, embarked upon what was undoubtedly a killing spree. Yet in its aftermath, it is not too farfetched to assert that we in the watching world have been witnessing a catastrophe beyond any previous imagining. I wouldn’t be the first to declare that Israel’s brutally disproportionate response to the attack and the taking of hostages constitutes, for Gaza’s civilian population, a twenty-first century holocaust.

It’s a safe bet as well that Israel’s enablers – the governments of Britain, Australia, Canada, and Germany, say – might never have predicted that in a matter of months the Middle East’s ‘only democracy’, that plucky, super-savvy high-tech state whose ‘right to defend itself’ was unquestioned, could devastate an occupied population of 2.2 million, flattening 70 percent of their built environment and basic infrastructure, displacing over a million of them while killing nearly 31,000.

Yet telling as they are, the mounting statistics of children killed, mutilated, orphaned and starved, homes and hospitals bombed can be numbing. By now, Israel’s rote recitations that........

© Pearls and Irritations