The Rhetorical Tricks for Normalizing Genocide

( Middle East Monitor ) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that, “From now on, negotiations will be conducted under fire.” His words were total nonsense, of course, because the previous negotiations for the ceasefire agreement were definitely conducted under fire. Netanyahu’s statement condemns to oblivion the previous long months of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, as if the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure before our eyes never really happened.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz also got in on the act, and issued his own threats against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. His rhetoric is an example of how Israel considers all Palestinians to be terrorists in its fake “security and self-defence” narrative, not just the legitimate resistance movement.

“Take the US president’s advice,” Katz declared pompously. “Return the hostages and remove Hamas, and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to.” Palestinian civilians are not responsible for either the hostages or Hamas and undoubtedly won’t be happy with his call for “voluntary” ethnic cleansing, for that’s what it was. The minister ignores the fact that colonisers and their allies have no right to impose any such conditions on the colonised and occupied people. In case Katz forgot, Israel’s settler-colonialism and its military occupation are illegal under international law and so are all actions carried out in their name.

Failure to heed Israel’s demands, he added, would be met with “absolute destruction”. This is yet another open statement of Israel’s genocidal intent. I hope that the International Court of Justice has taken note of this.

International rhetoric has fared no better, and while words alone will not be enough to stop the genocide, Western leaders are always swift to take cues from Israeli statements. Speaking as if the genocide in Gaza was not a genocide and just in its initial stages, Western leaders availed themselves of the usual clichés about hostilities, the “conflict” and “concern”. As if Palestinians haven’t been massacred, displaced, buried under rubble and burnt alive already. As if the events leading to, during and since the 1948 Nakba never happened.

While attention is focused on Gaza again, diplomacy is being utilised to avoid antagonising Netanyahu, even as the Israeli prime minister announced “the possibility that a larger front could open up” in the occupied West Bank. Not a single Palestinian, it seems, is safe from Israel’s genocide.

Will world leaders confront Netanyahu about his inaccurate statements and misrepresentation of the genocide timeline, which are also part of the genocidal strategy? There is no obligation to act dumb under international law.

An ongoing genocide carries tremendous culpability with it. World leaders have the power to make Israel’s colonial enterprise collapse, yet they have instead chosen to allow Israel to collapse Gaza, literally, and probably the West Bank too. Hypocritically, world leaders have approved a plan to rebuild Gaza, even though Netanyahu has never given any indication of at least having an intention to stop the genocide at some stage. Is the international community furthering its manipulation of humanitarian concern by making rebuilding a permanent part of its narrative, like it did with the two-state compromise? Both are enabling the international community’s shocking dereliction of its legal duty to stop an ongoing genocide.

According to Netanyahu, resuming the genocide was a last resort response to Hamas not freeing the remaining hostages. Let us just focus on the rhetoric about this “last resort” for a moment. Given that Israel violated the ceasefire agreement over many weeks by killing Palestinians and blocking all humanitarian aid, this week’s deadly air strikes are not a “resumption” of its genocide, but simply and sickeningly more of the same. We must ask, therefore, if genocide — once regarded as the ultimate crime in international law — is now normalised and acceptable if all else fails. Well, is it?

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