Once again, the New York Times sells Israel’s genocide in Gaza as law enforcement

This is another masterclass from the New York Times in how to sell genocide as law enforcement.

According to today’s headline, “new Israeli rules” mean “suspensions” of aid groups from Gaza – that is, the forced expulsion of 37 humanitarian organisations from Palestinian territory illegally occupied by Israel.

These aid groups organise most of the field hospitals currently operating in Gaza and set up after Israel destroyed the enclave’s proper hospitals. The groups also run emergency shelters, water and sanitation services, and treatment centres for children with acute malnutrition.

Israel’s “registration rules” are a death sentence for a homeless, destitute Palestinian population left vulnerable to starvation, floods, winter cold and disease by Israel’s two-year destruction of their homeland.

Who is to blame? Apparently groups like Doctors Without Borders, Medical Aid for Palestinians and CARE. Why? Because they are “resisting” Israel’s “rules” to “provide detailed information” on their staff in Gaza – information Israel has used time and again to kill those aid workers.

As Doctors Without Borders point out, “we support one in five hospital beds and one in three births” in Gaza. Israel, it added, was “cutting off life-saving medical assistance for hundreds of thousands of people”.

Another organisation affected by the new “rules”, the Norwegian Refugee Council, noted that Israel had killed hundreds of aid workers in the past two years. “For us, it is a safety concern for our staff. And acknowledging who they are – it puts them at risk.”

The New York Times wants you to forget who is the criminal here.

It is Israel that’s illegally occupying Gaza and other Palestinian territories – and has been for decades.

It is Israel that has bombed Gaza into the Stone Age.

It is Israel that has ethnically cleansed Gaza’s people from their lands, driving them into ever smaller concentration camps on those ruins, surrounded by Israel’s “yellow line”.

It is Israel that has starved the people of Gaza for months on end by blocking all aid.

It is Israel that’s killed at least 600 aid workers, 1,700 medical staff and 250 journalists in Gaza over the past two years.

It is Israel that has eradicated all Gaza’s hospitals and health care facilities, leaving its maimed and starved population vulnerable to infection and disease.

And it is Israel now expelling aid organisations vital to keep this homeless, bombed, maimed, starved, orphaned, traumatised population alive.

Criminals don’t get to set the “rules” – because the rules they set will, by definition, serve their criminal agenda.

Israel has not hidden that agenda. It wants to eradicate Gaza and its population. It has destroyed the people of Gaza’s homes and the infrastructure they need to survive – from hospitals and schools to sanitation services. It has blocked aid and food, and is now driving out the emergency aid organisations that served as a sticking plaster to keep this population just barely alive.

Israel’s goal is to make life so desperate, so impossible, that the rest of the world will consent to the expulsion of the Palestinian people from Gaza on “humanitarian” grounds.

The New York Times, like the rest of the media, are using language to persuade you that none of this is happening.

Before, the crimes were justified as a “war” – one to eradicate Hamas.

Now, during a supposed “ceasefire” in which Israel keeps killing Palestinians, the crimes are justified as a new, different way of ordering affairs in Gaza, again supposedly needed to root out Hamas. The aid organisations are apparently the ones causing difficulties by “resisting”, by flouting the “rules”.

This is the language of genocide laundering, of genocide denial. It has a long and ugly history.

The Nazis and their media termed the rounding up of Jewish populations from the ghettoes they had been forced into as “evacuations”. Those sent to death camps were “resettled”. And the gas chambers were where “detainees” received “special treatment”.

This terminology of good administration – of rules, of order, of suspensions, of resettlement – is needed to numb us to the barbarous reality of the horrors unfolding minute by minute in Gaza. To echo this anaesthetising language, as the New York Times does time and again, is more than just a crime against journalism. It is a crime against our common humanity.

Without the assistance of media like the New York Times, the genocide would have been simply impossible.