by Jerusalem Post Staff
Thieren said he was shocked that the roles of perpetrator and victim were assigned from the outset of the war.
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Just two months after October 7, international organizations were already discussing how to apply the term “famine” to the situation in Gaza.
This was revealed by World Health Organization representative to Israel, Dr. Michel Thieren, on the Mosaïque podcast last week.
The podcast was created by Akadem and the French Institute of Israel, and former journalist Antoine Mercier hosted the episode.
Thieren attended a multilateral governance meeting about Gaza in Geneva in December 2023. During the meeting, Thieren said organizations discussed how important it would be to scientifically demonstrate the occurrence of a famine in Gaza, and how to use the term for communication and political pressure on Israel. According to him, this was explicitly discussed at the highest levels in these meetings.
“At the very end of the meeting – I won’t say exactly where, and it wasn’t necessarily at the WHO, rest assured – there was a gathering of experts who asked the question quite forcefully. I was there, and I was absolutely stunned. What they were saying, essentially, was that one should try to find a term that could be used to exert pressure. So yes, I was very shocked by that.”
“So when these people were saying it would be necessary to demonstrate famine, the guilt had already been assigned [to Israel]. When we talk about genocide, the WHO never went there, others did – but very early, these people pronounced these two terms [genocide and famine], they were thrown out right from the start. So the crimes were already predetermined, and then the organizations tried to demonstrate them. And for me, that is not normal at all.”
Regardless of whether or not the word famine was accurate, Thieren said it was amplified “in the abyssal void of social media, and the harm was done.”
While Thieren himself didn’t comment on whether a genocide had occurred in Gaza – “the reports will come, we’ll judge then" – he did note with suspicion the length and detail of reports discussing Israel’s alleged genocide.
“There aren’t 72 pages of justification," he said.
“You know, in medicine, when we learn the treatment of a disease, if the treatment is described in 10 pages, it means there is no treatment. A treatment is three lines: you take this, it works, and it kills the disease. So the bigger the reports, the more suspicious they are.”
In the case of Rwanda, where the genocide was “self-evident,” Thieren said he read a report from an independent commission that was 24 pages long, with one paragraph on the justification of the genocide.
Narrative around Israel's actions 'biased'
The issue with the narrative around Israel and Israel’s actions is “not only that it’s biased, but that there is often a kind of enjoyment,” he said. “There’s a kind of... we describe, we announce, we tell the story of this war with a certain pleasure.“And that’s where, for me, all these accounts – wherever they come from – are tinged with antisemitism.”
Thieren was in Europe on the morning of October 7, 2023, but took one of the first planes to Israel when he learned of what happened. Soon after, he went to see the kibbutzim.
“For the third time in my life, I saw what a land of massacre looks like.”
The other two times were in Srebrenica in 1995, and Kigali [in Rwanda] in 1994, he said.
“I could describe to you what a land of massacre is, but it’s that kind of landscape – very silent, echoing, muffled – as I say, frozen in a sort of Pompeii of murder. I’ve always felt that a land of massacre is not a land of war. I was in Syria: you see lands of war there. It’s not the same thing. A land of massacre is a land of massacre.
“And what I saw at Be’eri and at Nova was a land of massacre – unmistakably.”
He then went to visit the morgues at Shura military base near Ramle, where the dead from the kibbutzim had been gathered and autopsied. He asked to see the bodies: “It’s because, in the same way that a land of massacre must be seen, must be listened to, must be felt. I needed to go inside, to be close to the death of Kfar Aza and Be’eri, which I had seen just a few hours earlier.
“There’s this desire to say ‘yes, but there’s context.’ No, there is no context [to October 7]. There is no possible context for Hamas’s murder. It is absolutely impossible.”
Jerusalem Post Staff
Source: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-871851
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