Suzanne Harrington: 'We are all witnesses to genocide in Gaza — it's livestreaming in our pockets'

An Israeli screenwriter, an individual called Gil Kopatz, likened sending food to starving Gazans as “feeding sharks”. Picture: AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana

What’s the difference between Slobodan Milosevic, the Butcher of the Balkans, and Benjamin Netanyahu? So far, only a body count, although Netanyahu is fast catching up.

Look, I don’t want to be writing this, and you probably don’t want to be reading it. Didn’t we think we’d left genocide behind in the last century? Evolved a bit? Can’t we just focus on the Eurovision instead of Gaza? Welcome to the prevailing mood in the UK.

All last week here, there were commemorations of the 80th anniversary of 1945, celebrating the bravery of now-ancient service people, and the liberation of the death camps. The commemorations dominated the radio news every hour. Poppies and fly-overs and pomp, the prevailing message ‘never again.’ 

Never again? It was Slobodan Milosevic who popularised the term ethnic cleansing as a nicer way of saying genocide – there’s something almost reassuring about it, implying a bit of a spring zhuzh, of getting into the grimy corners and making a place clean and shiny again. Getting rid of an infestation.

An Israeli screenwriter, an individual called Gil Kopatz, likened sending food to starving Gazans as “feeding sharks”, adding that what the state of Israel is doing “is not genocide, it’s pesticide, and it’s essential to do it”. Meanwhile, images of children being deliberately starved to death are popping up on our feeds. We see footage of a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza – basic food - being bombed by drones. 

Images of children being deliberately starved to death are popping up on our feeds. Picture: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images

In the UK, the media spin has moved from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth into actual Lewis Carroll territory: ‘Palestinians Are Facing Starvation’ as though the unfortunate victims of a natural disaster. They’ve had 100,000 tons of bombs dropped on them – five times the power of what annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago. 

The UK media persists in calling this a ‘war’, as though civilians starving amid the rubble of their former homes are equal to the IDF war machine. Never again?

With this genocide, unlike the one 80 years ago, we cannot pretend we don’t know about it. It is livestreaming in our pockets. The UK is arming Israel, while barely pretending to condemn it, amid an omerta of deafening silence and sickening media spin. 

Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister – the one who called Simon Harris anti-Semitic “based on the delegitimisation and dehumanisation of Israel” – had a ‘private’ visit to London last month where he ‘privately’ met the UK foreign secretary. What did they ‘privately’ talk about? 20,000 murdered children?

We are all witnesses. We are all seeing this happening in real time. The feeling of helplessness is overwhelming — seeing it in full colour and being unable to do anything. Starving people crying out with empty food pots, small children running behind water trucks, all those white-wrapped bodies. Never again?

Yes, we can do tiny things — go on marches, donate to emergency funds for Palestine, wear a keffiyeh, share Michael Rosen’s poem Don’t Mention The Children. At least in Ireland, our government and media are not gaslighting us, unlike in the UK, whose leaders would like us to sit down and shut up, to watch the Eurovision and forget about Palestine. To think of Palestinians as not quite human. 

Here we are, bang in the middle of never again.