[By Alison Pyle]
When the rules are ignored
When legally binding resolutions
Are suddenly ‘non-binding’
Allowing bombs to target homes, tents in hospital grounds
Allowing the raiding of hospitals
Allowing the execution of 13 children
Allowing drones to execute four pedestrians
Allowing 31 children to starve to death
Under the gaze of the world media
Allowing snipers to pick off white-flag waving civilians
And bulldoze their remains into a rubbish heap
Under the gaze of the world
Who would believe in rules-based order?
In the hellscape that is Gaza
Local journalists record their own demise
Mothers watch helplessly as children become skeletons and then are lost
Medical staff battle illness and injury without adequate supplies
Parents sacrifice food to save their children
And the bodies of more children are pulled from the rubble in the darkness of night
Their dreams cut short without reason or logic
In this new reality
There is no moral soapbox to stand on
In the dissolved trust of Western media
The world is now deaf to their hypocrisy
The world has witnessed the naked transparency of genocide in Gaza
This is not a war
There are no two sides
This is a genocide
And the world is watching!
There is no order in such a world
Where might enjoys impunity
Where the naked truth is twisted
Where the evidence is ignored and distorted
Where order is based on weapons
And the innocents are at their mercy
There is no order in the state born of the United Nations but ignores its legitimacy
There is no order where rules are designed
To normalise injustice and ethnic cleansing
There is no rules-based order to defend the human rights of innocents
So, there is no justice, no accountability and certainly, no order.