Image by Onur Burak Akın.

Disfigured by 200,000 tons of American bombs, the mountain of rubble called Gaza represents the open casket of Emmett Till, whose funeral forced the world to behold the ugly, violent truth of America’s failure to protect a people suffering racism, colonial violence, torture, and murder for centuries. The genocide against Palestinians since October 2023, and the refusal of western governments to prosecute the Israeli government for genocide in line with international law and the Geneva Convention, takes us back to the torture, maiming, and murder of a 14-year-old black American teenager named Emmett Till.

On that fatal Mississippi night in 1955, the husband and brother of the white woman, to whom Emmett Till had allegedly said “bye, baby” after buying bubble gum, expressed their God-given, inviolable right of racial supremacy to abduct, torture, and murder him. In complete defiance of the US Constitution’s spirit of “all men are created equal…endowed by God with certain inalienable rights,” and laws criminalizing kidnapping, torture, and murder, the two white men walked free, acquitted by an all-white jury of one of the most grisly and infamous American crimes of racism and genocidal violence toward black people in the 20th century.

That same history of political and judicial tactics the US perfected since Reconstruction after the Civil War, of denying black people equal protection under the law, imposing segregation, and excluding them from rights guaranteed by the US Constitution, reverberates throughout the world in the 21st century.

While Israel with the direct help of western democracies has committed a genocidal war of total annihilation for two years against Palestinians in Gaza, and war crimes across the region, the West has exempted its “staunch ally” from an entire body of international laws in place since WWII, exposing the global racial order in the making for centuries.

In this racially configured society and country, USA, the cradle of plantation slavery, segregation, and white supremacy, two separate set of republics, constitutions, and bodies of law emerged and continue to coexist – an official, sacred one for white Americans and an unofficial one for people of color – that allowed the US to establish a racially configured world order after WWII.

The binary logic of American morality and legal institutions, written and unwritten, have come to light in the colonization and genocide of Palestinians. Arabs and Muslims do not have the same rights as equal human beings to demand freedom, liberation, self-determination, and statehood, as enshrined in numerous UN resolutions, international laws, and the Geneva Convention, which legally authorize Palestinians the right to resist and defend themselves against the occupation of a settler-colonial state called Israel and its western backers. This moral and institutional duality, one reserved for the brown people of the world and another one for those of European descent, has undergirded not only American society, but the world order established by Europeans since the 16th century. The genocide committed against Palestinians for two years under Democratic and Republican presidents exposes the historical roots of the American and international legal order premised on eugenicist beliefs and racial supremacy.

The October 7 Palestinian rebellion emerged from the West’s utter denial of Palestinian legal rights since the Nakba of 1948, when Isreal forcibly removed 700,000 Palestinians from their lands, committing massacres and war crimes, robbing them since of some 80% of historical Palestine. The extermination campaign meted out to the Palestinians after October 7, 2023, has occurred under the watch, funding, and support of the United States of America, its democratically elected leaders, billionaires, Big Tech, the media, and its European allies. Palestinians have faced total annihilation for the simple crime of resisting and challenging their permanent siege, starvation, erasure, and expulsion from land they’ve lived on and domesticated as a people for thousands of years.

The 20-point ceasefire plan for Gaza, aimed at ending the genocide, has handed Israel victory and protection for apartheid, war crimes, and an ongoing genocide, with Palestinians facing destruction of their history, culture, geography, and physical bodies – the cumulative effect of Israel’s inviolable right to exist and “defend itself” at any price. The ceasefire plan completely fails to address the injustices committed against the Palestinians and the region since World War I, as well as the larger Muslim and Arab populations who have lost nearly 5 million people to the murderous American Global War on Terror.

Just as Emmett Till’s open casket led to the Civil Rights Movement, Gaza’s open casket and genocide must sustain a Global Human Rights Movement that ensures international laws against war crimes and genocide extend equally to the protection of every single human on this planet, regardless of geographical location, religion, political affiliation, or skin color. Not doing so will fatally disfigure humanity’s collective conscience.

The post Gaza’s Open Casket appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed