The president of the United States threatened this week to commit genocide against Iran. As Israel engages in continued bombing in Lebanon, killing more than 200 people in a single day, that fact must never be scrubbed away, not least because there is no guarantee the threat will not be revived. But as we descend towards the abyss, we need to understand where our fall began.
“A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Donald Trump wrote on Tuesday. Just over a year ago, he announced: “A civilisation has been wiped out in Gaza.” The connection is not hard to trace. Trump knew Gaza had been razed by Israel, insisting it was “not a place for people to be living”. When he joined forces with the perpetrator of that genocide in an illegal war on Iran, the apocalyptic rubble of Gaza became a template.
For two and a half years, western politicians and media outlets normalised Israel’s wholesale shredding of international law. Opponents of the genocide in Gaza warned this would unleash a boundless violence. They were right.
The US-Israeli war on Iran began with the mass killing of 175 people, most of them schoolgirls, in the city of Minab. When it happened, there were hardly any outraged front pages, nor nearly enough strong denunciations of the US from western leaders. But what did we expect? The west had already normalised the killing of more than 20,000 Palestinian children. Many were incinerated in their beds; others deliberately shot in the head, chest and genitals, according to western doctors who served in Gaza. Now 763 Iranian schools are reportedly damaged or destroyed – but did the west not facilitate the same fate for almost every single school in Gaza?
According to the Iranian Red Crescent, 316 medical centres have also been severely damaged or destroyed, but did the west not normalise the Israeli attack on every hospital in Gaza and the killing of at least 1,722 health workers?