By José Ernesto Nováez Guerrero on June 4, 2024
photo: Bill Hackwell
The numbers alone are shocking. As of January 2024, the latest data available from the media consulted, “Israel” had dropped over 65,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of about five times the destructive power of the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It is more than likely that from January to the present that number has at least doubled.
It has been made public that most of the targets for these bombings were defined using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called “Lavender”. This tool rapidly processes massive amounts of information to generate thousands of potential targets to attack. Primarily alleged Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants, including not only high-ranking members, but also anyone with links to these organizations.
Used since the beginning of the Israeli operation, the IA has defined more than 37,000 suspected militants and their homes, including of course their families as possible targets. According to statements by Israeli military officials to +972 Magazine, the officers in charge of the system normally endorse the targets it defines without devoting too much attention to it, despite the fact that the AI has an error coefficient, according to them, of 10 percent, although it can be much more. This system is complemented by another AI called “The Gospel,” which is designed to identify buildings and structures that can be or are used by the enemy.
Once this impersonal killing mechanism has defined a target, the Israel Defense Forces attack the targets with what are known as “dumb bombs.” These are explosive devices with high destructive power, but lacking precision guided systems. This measure is determined on the one hand by savings, the “dumb bombs” are cheaper, but also demonstrates another aspect of the Israeli occupier’s war against the Palestinians: it acts with total disregard for life. So much so that the Israeli military considers between 10 and 15 people the number of acceptable collateral casualties to annihilate a single Hamas fighter.
It is no coincidence then that the current death toll exceeds 36,000, with a high number of women and children, more than 70,000 wounded and almost two million displaced. Nor is it by chance the degree of destruction of infrastructure and the killing of health personnel, UN, NGOs and anyone who gets in the way of their bombs. What “Israel” is doing in Gaza is unparalleled. For a frame of reference, the second bloodiest “Israel” offensive against the enclave was in 2014, lasted 50 days and left 2, 251 fatalities among the Palestinian population.
A report presented by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics at the Commemoration of the 76th anniversary of the Nakba complements this picture of horror. Currently, more than 89,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the enclave. More than 70 percent of the housing destroyed. About 90 percent of the children, women and pregnant women in the enclave face critical food insecurity.
This is a full-fledged genocide, planned and executed by a modern state, using modern weapons and software to persecute, displace and destroy an entire ethnic group. The genocidal will of Zionism has one of its most macabre and recent expressions in the burning of the refugee camp on the outskirts of Rafah, where dozens of people were burned alive.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was key to the radicalization of a generation in the struggle against imperialism and colonialism. Television played a key role. Correspondents and media transmitted very graphically the horrors committed by the U.S. army against the local population. The anti-war movement in the United States connected with other internal struggles, such as those of racial and sexual minorities, giving rise to a powerful countercultural movement and confrontation with the system.
Imperialism learned its lesson and during the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the U.S. commander in charge of the invading troops prevented any journalist from accompanying them to do what they do best. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the mechanism was perfected: only obedient journalists, inserted within the cartelized media, whose story they could control so that it would fit the imperial narrative, were allowed to accompany the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fear of the role that the media can play when they are brave, honest and do not conform to the narrative of power helps to understand even today why “Israel” has murdered so many journalists and persecuted media outlets like Al Mayadeen, which show the truth that state propaganda and Western mainstream media seek to hide or falsify.
47 million have viewed “All Eyes on Rafah” on various platforms.
However, what is not seen on the screens of the mainstream media is seen on the social networks. Against the interest of the big corporations that own these networks, the truth of what is happening in Gaza has spread like wildfire around the world. No matter how many accounts Meta blocks, it could not stop more than 31 million Instagram users alone from sharing the “All eyes on Rafah” poster, in reference to the Israeli advance on the city, the only one left standing in the enclave.
The brutality and impunity of Zionism have been graphically exposed in the bodies of mutilated children, in those dying of starvation, in the daily despair of millions of Palestinians. It has led to the emergence of a militant consciousness in diverse social groups on all continents. Workers march in the streets of Barcelona or Madrid or London, students of the prestigious American Ivy League universities, the future elites of the system, risk their freedom and their careers to protest in defense of Palestine. Students in Panama expel the Israeli ambassador from their university. Anonymous hands set fire to the Zionist embassy in Mexico. Gaza has taught them, as Gramsci said, that to live is to take sides, Zionism has taught them what to fight against.
It is important, in this struggle, to understand that to embrace the Palestinian cause without fervently embracing anti-colonialism (of which the Palestinian struggle is an important moment, but not the only one) and anti-imperialism (for “Israel” is a tool of imperialism and its interests) is to take the cause to the dead end of an empty moralism. It is not only the right thing to defend the Palestinian cause, but through this struggle we open the door to fight for a new world order, for a world and a system of international organizations that do not stand idly by in the face of genocide and where monstrous entities like “Israel” are definitively condemned to the dustbin of history.
José Ernesto Nováez Guerrero is a Cuban writer and journalist. Member of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS). Coordinator of the Cuban chapter of the Network in Defense of Humanity.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English