On February 3, 2015 ISIS released a chilling video of a Jordanian fighter pilot, Lt. Moaz Youssef al-Kasasbeh, being burnt alive in a cage. The world reeled from the shock. On the one year anniversary of the murder, the Washington Post ran an article with the headline “A year ago ISIS burned a Jordanian Pilot to death. His family is still anguished.” The Jordanian King and his government swore that it would give ‘an earth-shaking response’ to the murder while former US President Barack Obama said that the video was one more indication of the “viciousness and barbarity of this organisation [ISIS]”. He continued and added that “whatever ideology they’re operating off of, it’s bankrupt.” Former British Prime Minister David Cameron called the murder ‘sickening’ and said it would ‘strengthen our resolve’ to defeat ISIS.
On October 14, 2024, Israel bombed Al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza. Patients in tents outside the hospital were hooked up to IV drips. They were burnt to a cinder. One particular video has emerged of a person being burnt alive while trying to raise their hand as if to call for help. It transpires that the victim’s name was Shaban Ahmad al-Dulu, a student of software engineering. The Washington Post ran an article with the following headline “Israeli strike at Gaza’s Al-Aqsa hospital burns tents, killing at least 4.” The sub-heading began with reiterating Israel’s usual claims that they were hitting a Hamas command and control centre while also observing that the tents were full of people who had been displaced.
Following the strike, Matt Miller, a White House spokesperson, was asked by a journalist about the strike on Ahmad and whether Israel would be held accountable? Miller’s predictable reply was to restate, as he and other spokespersons have done for decades, that ‘Israel operates in an incredibly difficult environment’ and then added that the journalist left out the fact that Hamas bears a burden for hiding behind civilians. He then said Israel should try and ‘minimise’ civilian casualties while Hamas should stop ‘hiding behind human shields.’ The absurdity of using this excuse to continue targeting Palestinian, and now Lebanese, Syrian and Yemeni civilians, can be gauged by drawing the conclusion that Israel is using its citizens as human shields because the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv is in a civilian area. The fact remains that there seems to be no effort to recognise the pernicious and vicious ideology that the Israeli government is relying upon that enables this kind of brutal terror.
These two videos and their reception encapsulate the egregious imbalance with which Israeli actions are being presented to and viewed by the world. While ISIS had put the pilot in a small cage, Israel had placed 2.2 million people in the Gaza strip, a thin strip of land with an area of 365 sq. kms and a population density of 500 people/100 sq. metres. Additionally it controlled land, sea and air access to this open air prison and over the past year has displaced Palestinians internally within this small area many more times, while claiming that they were only targeting Hamas. Shaban al-Dulu said that he and his family were displaced five times. Over the past year we have witnessed the first live-streamed genocide in the world’s history. In real time, people can access fearless reporting by both journalists and civilians in Gaza on Instagram and other social media.
In the past, some images that have documented the sheer horror of war are seared into our minds. Nick Ut’s photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing her village in Vietnam after it was napalmed by the US air force became a ‘decisive moment,’ to use Henri Cartier-Bresson’s phrase, that captured the terror of war.
For the past year, there have been dozens and dozens of such ‘decisive moments,’ including the murder of five-year-old Hind Rajab as she screamed for help while surrounded by the bodies of her family members that had been killed by Israeli soldiers. Unfortunately, these moments have been justified by a single refrain from many Israeli politicians, as well as by civilians, who claim that there are no innocent Palestinians. Former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yousef, called Arabs ‘snakes’ and claimed that God himself was sorry that he created these sons of Ishmael [Arabs]. During the 2014 invasion of Gaza, Israeli MP Ayelet Shaked, while also referring to Palestinians as snakes, demanded the killing of women and children and the destruction of homes. Israel’s current defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has called Palestinians human animals while the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich bemoaned the fact that the world wouldn’t allow 2 million people in Gaza to be starved, even though it is moral. Of course it is another matter that this is precisely what has been happening in Gaza and the world is largely unmoved. National security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who had once threatened that he could kill Yitzak Rabin and is perhaps Israel’s most dangerous politician, without whose support the Israeli government would fall, has repeatedly called for the mass deportation of Palestinians.
Shortly after the invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, as a retaliation for the Hamas attacks on October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the destruction of the Amalekites in order to justify the wholesale dehumanisation and destruction of all Palestinians, their homes and their belongings. In the old testament, God commands the Prophet Samuel to tell King Saul to “now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and not spare them; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” This is precisely and literally what has happened over the last year in Gaza. Nothing and no one has been spared. Netanyahu had said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” In placing members of the Israeli military in a long line of ‘Jewish heroes’ going back thousands of years, what is very clear is that the Israeli government is driven by a messianic and apocalyptic vision of its future.
In recent days, the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon, not to mention Syria and Yemen, has brought back to the fore Zionist dreams of Eretz Israel or Greater Israel. In a recent interview Smotrich has said, invoking God’s promise of the Holy Land to His chosen people, that the border of this Jewish State will extend all the way to Damascus not to mention Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It is worth remembering that the other person who invoked the dreams of an expanding state a decade ago was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed leader of ISIS who was later killed. In 2014 he ascended the pulpit of the Grand al-Nuri mosque in Mosul and declared himself leader of a new Caliphate. For a period ISIS instilled terror, ruthlessly killing men, women and children and destroying towns. They even tried to erase the borders of Iraq and Syria that were created by the secretive Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 between Britain and France which established their mutual spheres of influence.
Much like Gallant, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and Netanyahu, al-Baghdadi also justified terror by arguing that Muslims “have no choice.” In 2018 he released an audio recording, with allusions to the Quran and ahadith or the Prophet’s sayings, arguing that if “you [Muslims] want to live in dignity, then you return to your religion and fighting your enemy.” Much like many European and non-Arab Muslims who flocked to this fantasy caliphate with dreams of living in an Islamic state, many young Israelis who are also dual nationals in Europe and America, have also been fighting in the Israeli armed forces, committing war crimes and yet not being the subject of criminal investigations in France, Italy, the Netherlands, England, America and other countries.
Thomas Portes, a member of the French National Assembly, posted a letter on twitter in which he asked for an investigation into the potential war crimes committed by 4185 French citizens fighting in Gaza. However, his intervention is the exception rather than the norm and volunteers to the IDF’s international volunteer programme called mahal face little to no opprobrium from their governments. Meanwhile the citizenship of some of those who went to the Caliphate, like UK national Shamima Begum, has been revoked. What explains these double standards apart from the obvious explanations of endemic and persisting racism?
The fundamental problem is that the US and much of Western Europe fail to acknowledge that Israel is being governed by militant ethno-religious chauvinists. In fact they see Israel as an extension of the West and therefore incapable of committing the heinous crimes that Muslims and Arabs are deemed to be capable of. Notably, the Spanish and the French have called for arms embargoes and ceasefires though their criticism is limited to recent events and do not question their ideological basis. With the rise of the far right in various Western countries, it is increasingly clear that Israel is ‘the West’ unveiled. The guilt of the Holocaust allows a past genocide to be used as justification for a current genocide. Indeed European fantasies about its own colonial pasts live on through Israel’s actions. Perhaps this is the only reason that Obama could call ISIS’ ideology bankrupt in 2015, while most American and European leaders are unwilling to use the same words for Israel’s government despite both behaving in similarly brutal ways.
In 1992, Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz expressed his worry about certain circles in Israel who justify incarcerating and holding Arabs in concentration camps. He used the term ‘Judeo-Nazi’ for the Israeli State. One of his co-panellists, Tommy Lapid, talking head and father of acting Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid, was provoked by the comparison with Nazi Germany and retorted “and do these Israelis burn Arabs?” Leibowitz repeated that the concentration camps exist while Lapid repeatedly asked about whether Arabs were being burnt. Finally, in a fit of exasperation, Leibowitz retorted saying ‘that is your prophecy’ while pointing to Lapid. With the horrific murder of Shaban Ahmad al-Dulu and countless others, that prophecy has now been fulfilled.
It remains to be seen whether the image of him being burnt alive will be that ‘decisive moment,’ like Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s photograph, that will expose the indiscriminate and brutal attacks by Israel for what they are: state sponsored terrorism. Following the news of Al-Aqsa hospital, President Biden’s administration has given Israel 30 days to ‘improve’ the humanitarian situation in the absence of which Israel will face an arms embargo. A mere improvement is not going to remedy the situation – a similar letter was sent in April – but at least it might just allow the Palestinians to breathe.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad is head of the department of political science at Ashoka University. The views expressed are personal.
