The disgraced world and its insatiability for human tragedies

The fragmentation of history and continuous international complicity remain Israel’s greatest assets. As the Israeli Defence Forces continue to spread ruthless, manipulative propaganda about Hamas utilizing civilians and premises as human shields and weapons storage facilities, the world is updated on reality with more horrific images of dismembered bodies awaiting collection from beneath the rubble.

Israel’s repetitive targeting and bombing of UNRWA schools in Gaza, already crowded beyond capacity due to forced displacement and the ban on returning to already bombed areas, has generated a belated outrage. This is focused explicitly upon the immediate horrors as they unravel and spread through social media. On Wednesday, Israel fired five shells upon the school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing 15 civilians and wounding more than 100. According to statements published on the UNRWA website, Israel was warned 17 times that the premises housed forcibly-displaced Palestinians.

Besides their macabre elimination, Palestinian victims also suffer the ultimate, additional indignity of the UN assuming sole responsibility for a eulogy in the name of the international community. The imperialist organisation that endorsed the settler-colonial state and upholds Israel’s right to massacre the indigenous population in the name of “self-defence” is now expecting the world to acquiesce with its transient statement serving as a façade to endorse further Zionist atrocities.

The UN’s vocabulary has remained repetitive; tediously so. This has diminished the organisation’s capability of articulating horrors beyond conventional expectations. Of course, the strategy includes the additional benefit of deeming Israel’s murderous rampage to be “outrageous and unjustifiable”; it is insignificant rhetoric that fails to impart even a basic introduction to the intensity of the reality of the colonial violence supported by the world’s imperialists.

UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krähenbühl expressed the ultimate endorsement of alienation in his statement regarding the massacres perpetrated in UNRWA facilities. “Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to us all, a source of universal shame,” he insisted. “Today the world stands disgraced.”

By now, the world ought to be flagellating itself with unprecedented remorse. Standing “disgraced” is little more than an impression of embarrassment divested of responsibility. The overnight sensationalist quote, however, reflects world alienation. In order to generate a semblance of sympathy, the world requires instant unfolding human tragedies to manifest themselves constantly.

Within this degeneration, another overnight sensation has been that of UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness in tears while attempting to articulate the magnitude of the Israeli massacres of Palestinians for the benefit of the “disgraced world”. Without questioning what seems to be an unpretentious surge of emotion, creating icons out of temporary visual and verbal displays detracts from the primary accountability which is disregarded intentionally. I refer to international complicity in recognising the settler-colonial state and subsequent endorsement of Israel’s colonial violence.

The UN’s direct collaboration with Israel is reflected in affiliated agencies such as UNRWA, whose function is dependent upon voluntary donations from imperialist powers and, of course, the historical reality of the state’s maleficent existence and its insistence upon a combination of extermination and displacement for the indigenous Palestinian population. Perhaps the greatest dissonance in Gunness’s video clip is the juxtaposition of genuine anguish and the UN flag in the background. As an emblem of international collaboration in Israel’s impunity and, in turn, the UN’s deceitful existence, the flag and the values it claims to stand for have been compromised.