Numbers mean nothing when they correspond to lost human lives. The difference between 10 and 10,000 people being massacred says nothing to the fallen and their relatives.How many people were killed in Gaza? The whole of humanity! How many children were killed in Gaza? All the children of the world!
I am not a Gaza survivor; I am a Gaza victim -- and so are all of you -- because there, humanity was massacred. There, human civilization was undermined. There, Western civilization was forced to deny all its moral and political grounds. In Gaza, it was not only human life that was depreciated. All the attainments of our quest of thousands of years for more civilized and developed societies were wasted in Gaza.
In Gaza Western history was reset.
The 20th century international political paradigm was based on five premises: primacy and guardianship of superpowers; recognition of human rights and international justice as the highest moral values, desirability of regional and global international organizations, a presumptuous veneration of democracy that democratically elected governments behave in moral and reasonable ways and the priority of the negotiated resolution of conflicts.
We were taught that the US was a necessary player in international politics that intervenes in the unacceptable use of violence by state organs. We were taught that Washington was the real peace broker of all possible conflicts and wars. Gaza proved this premise wrong! Americans watched Gazans being slaughtered… They did this during a promising transition from a realpolitik to an ideal-politic understanding of the international politics in Washington.
We were taught, and we were all ready to believe, that the Western emphasis on human rights and international justice would hold for all human beings and not for only Western beings. We believed that Westerners would react to all the human rights breaches from wherever they came and at whomever they were directed. Gaza proved us wrong! Western reaction to the Israeli atrocities never reached a point of active prevention of the use of force against the Gazan civilians.
We were told that in the modern age, countries could live only through becoming members of international organizations such as the United Nations. We saw in the UN the potential to solve the problems of the world, bring peace to the restless regions of the world. Gaza proved us wrong! Neither the UN nor NATO nor other international bodies were able to say “Stop!” to the Israeli tanks and bulldozers.
We were often told that no two democracies in the 20th century ever fought each other. This premise meant that through further democratization we would built a more peaceful society on the world. Gaza proved us wrong! Being democratically elected didn’t help the Hamas government in Gaza, and one of the rare democracies in the region, Israel, denied the axiomatic link between democracy and peacefulness.
As such, we have lost our faith in the negotiated resolution of conflicts. Diplomacy was one such developed art of negotiation with the enemy and adversaries, but it was not even appealed to in Gaza.
The bombs that rained down on the unprotected houses of Gaza can be forgotten and forgiven in time and through efforts of reconciliation, but the bomb that was set at the bases of our human civilization went off, killing our belief in the attainments of history.
That we won’t forget and we won’t forgive…
