When the tiny lifeless body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish shore 10 years ago, the world stood still. We were horrified.

That image inspired a column I wrote at the time lamenting the Harper government’s refusal to welcome and resettle more Syrian refugees. 

This was a time before genocides were livestreamed, and before desensitized doomscrolling gave way to indifference. This was a time when the sight of a child suffering and dying would actually stir some sense of morality in most of us.

Hind Rajab was only a couple years older than Alan Kurdi when she was murdered by Israel. Her voice could be heard pleading with Palestinian emergency dispatchers to save her, as an Israeli tank approached the vehicle she was trapped in, surrounded by her dead family. Twelve days later, she was found dead.

A forensic investigation found 335 bullets were shot into the small vehicle Hind and her family died in. Two paramedics who tried to save Hind were also found nearby, and also murdered by Israeli soldiers.

None of the Palestinian children who’ve miraculously survived Israel’s tanks, bullets, and carpet-bombings will ever fully recover from these last two years – trauma on this scale is quite literally passed down at the cellular level through intergenerational trauma – but there are still roughly a million lives in the Gaza strip right now that the world could choose to save if it wanted to. 

If nothing is done now to stop the genocide of Palestinians, Israel will most certainly “finish the job.” Worse, they’ll keep going. One day after Qatar was bombed by Israel, the Qatari prime minister concluded that “Netanyahu has no limits.” He was right.

Most of the humanitarian organizations and government agencies who’d normally be counting the dead in Gaza are themselves dead now after being murdered by Israel — otherwise the death toll of 60,000 that’s floated around for months would likely look more like 186,000 according to The Lancet.

More recently, two Australian academic researchers published a long-form investigation suggesting the Palestinian death toll could be closer to 680,000. Six hundred and eighty thousand. And that’s not even counting the hundreds of thousands of displaced, arbitrarily detained, imprisoned, kidnapped, starving, orphaned, and missing.

It is my view that we are long past the point of needing a diplomatic escalation. 

A new coalition must be formed with global allied democratic countries, led by Canada, with the goal of protecting the Palestinian population before it is extinguished completely.

Israel is a rogue apartheid state committing genocide right before our eyes. As long as Donald Trump is in power, the United States cannot be relied on to stop this. But Canada still can. It’s not too late to put ourselves back on the right side of history.

According to the Geneva convention to which Canada is a signatory, we are legally obligated to act. The convention clearly states that “the contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” 

If we ever intended to stand by these laws as a contracting party, then by all objective measures we’ve failed.

But all is not lost. There are many who have not given up on Gaza.

Right now, the Samud Flotilla, 10 vessels shepherding aid and supplies to Gaza, with high profile activists aboard, is making its way through the Mediterranean Sea. They are just days away from reaching the coast. It is believed to be the largest civilian-led convoy of its kind in history.

Greta Thunberg is one of the activists on board. “These kinds of missions should not fall on civilians to prepare. This should be done by governments, in line with international law,” she told UK’s Novara Media.

The International Criminal Court has already issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant in 2024 for both war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC’s prosecutor didn’t mince words when the arrest warrants were issued last year:

“Even war has rules, and yet we’re seeing baby after baby destroyed. People in Gaza who want to have food and water, who want to stop waking up in terror as bombs land and the earth shakes, and no place is safe, it seems, including schools.”

Israel’s murderous impunity has only intensified in the months that have followed these arrest warrants. Louis Theroux recently used the word “sociopathic” to describe the kind of Israeli Zionism Netanyahu supports. 

Netanyahu is really the only face missing from this cartoon featuring famous fascists of our present moment, by Michael de Adder.

Historians tell us that only if we dehumanize a group of people long enough can we ever defy our own humanity to kill them. Only once we lose the empathy that makes us human, ethnic cleansing can be done with a clear conscience, then carry on living above the charred remains of those who’ve been killed. This explains why so many have drawn parallels between Zionism, and the dehumanizing treatment of Palestinians, with Nazism and the dehumanizing treatment of Jews. 

To this end Zionist propaganda has been effective. However there are a growing number of Jews across the diaspora who’ve seen the oppression and subjugation of Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid with their own eyes — whether through birthright trips or through the livestreamed brutality these last two years — who are refusing to stay silent.

“Vast parts of Gaza look like a wasteland now. So many human beings have been killed,” Sarit Michaeli, international director at Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, recently told Guardian journalist Matthew Cassel. “We have failed, as Israelis who are opposed to this, to stop it. Israelis will forever have to reckon with what we have done to Palestinians in Gaza,” Michaeli said. 

In July, B’Tselem released its landmark report “Our Genocide” that determined that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. This followed similar conclusions by other global human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“As an Israeli Jew I belong to the collective that is perpetrating this genocide. I bear responsibility. It’s done in my name, regardless of the claim that some people make. It is done in my name,” Michaeli added.

This was recently echoed in Hollywood by Hacks star Hannah Einbinder who used her platform as an Emmy winner to say “free Palestine” at the microphone. Later, she added that as a Jewish person she felt a responsibility to condemn the genocide and distinguish Judaism from the state of Israel. 

It’s a message that has been silenced for so long, and is now finally being heard in the mainstream.

Two years ago, Palestine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, pleaded with the global community to simply see his people as human beings. To this day I don’t think anyone else has so clearly articulated the agony that has long characterized the Palestinian and broader Arab existence. A plight so unimaginable that not even the sight of an emaciated child, no older than six, found with dozens of bullets in her tiny dead body could move world leaders to do something.

Mehdi Hasan’s recent interview with two United Nations commissioners, who also concluded that Israel is committing genocide, offered a damning indictment of Netanyahu’s government. One commissioner who’d led the UN criminal tribunal for Rwanda compared the genocide in Gaza to the Rwandan genocide. 

The other noted that unlike Rwanda, Palestinians are trapped. Each time they’re ordered to evacuate or relocate, or sent to a new location to collect food or medicine, they’re murdered.

“There is nowhere that the people of Gaza can go to escape this slaughter,” the UN commissioner told Hasan.

Many people and institutions from newsrooms to legislatures who’ve excused, enabled or even funded Israel’s criminal brutality are now slowly starting to change their tune. Strangely though, when asked recently for her reaction to this new UN report, Canada’s foreign affairs minister is still refusing to call this a genocide.

Canada doesn’t have a choice here. We are obliged through treaty and international law to act, and we’re refusing to. 

Canada is known around the world as a defender of democracy and human rights, and we’ve finally taken the important step to recognize a Palestinian state, so why are we still complicit in the Palestinian genocide? Why are we still calling the undemocratic state of Israel an ally? 

If Israel should ever reckon with what it’s done to Palestinians, Canada, again, has a leadership role to play. We should advocate for a Truth and Reconciliation process — the same process that has helped Canadians continue to reckon with the genocidal legacy of what colonial settlers did to the Indigenous peoples of this land.

I was there a decade ago when Murray Sinclair, Marie Wilson, and Wilton Littlechild delivered the TRC’s final report and 94 calls to action. I will never forget the weight of that room; the tears and sage that filled the air.

The Canadian government admitted fault, at the end of a long six-year painful process, acknowledging its genocidal intentions and promised to never let this happen again. 

And yet here we are, on another Orange Shirt Day, watching the settler colonial project unfold again in real time.

As I type this, another Hind was likely murdered. How many more Palestinian children have to die before we keep our promise to the world?