A Hundred Days after Gaza's October 7
Part I: Double Helix over Gaza
by Gwythian Prins • January 24, 2024 at 5:00 am
History has the form of a double helix: history is indeed the DNA of living memory. There is what actually happened and there is what people believe happened. They are not the same but they are inseparable....
Hamas had told Israel that it intended to focus on helping its people in Gaza and that it did not want war. Israel, to show good faith, had even provided work permits for thousands of Palestinians to enter Israel every day for better wages than in Gaza. What Israel did not know was that many of them were spies who would tell Hamas exactly where in the villages to attack.
An elated youth called Mahmoud called home to his father and mother in Gaza using a murdered Israeli woman's phone to boast about how he had just killed ten Jews with his own hands ("oh my son God bless you"... "Mom, your son is a hero"). Part of the recording was played to the judges of the ICJ as part of the State of Israel's must-see rebuttal of South Africa's accusations.
Jeffrey Gettleman, in The New York Times on 28th December, published details of the unimaginable mass depravity committed by Gazan men on Israeli women....
Many of the first responses to these events, as with the Holocaust, were denials that such savageries had ever taken place.
Almost four months to the day, and not in a good way, the world has turned upside down.
In a risibly threadbare case, the victim of a depraved genocidal attack was accused at the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague of committing genocide. Lacking evidence of mens rea (criminal intention) that is prerequisite, or indeed any vestige of substantive evidence, South Africa sought to invert the object and purpose of the Genocide Convention of December 1948, which is specific to the "crime of crimes". The accused is not just any victim, but the Jewish state, whose re-establishment in the May of the same year that the Convention was brought into effect was no coincidence.
