Nothing can justify this massacre of the innocents in Gaza. No politics. No history. No revenge

A long time ago in Bethlehem, so the holy Bible says, Mary’s boy child, Jesus Christ, was born. Glad tidings reached King Herod of Judea that the infant was destined for greatness. Not if I’ve anything to do with it, resolved Herod, and he ordered his army to slaughter every boy aged two and under.

Around Ireland and across the world these December days, schoolchildren are enacting the nativity as the greatest story of human redemption ever told. Many of the performances will skip over St Matthew’s gospel account of the Massacre of the Innocents because it is too bleak to contemplate in this season of good cheer.

For Palestinians, there is no dodging it. They are living the reality in Gaza, and dying from it, while the rest of us are preoccupied with shopping for baubles. At night, we watch the scenes on our televisions. We see toddlers blinded by blood pouring from their heads. Children screaming soundlessly. A boy recounting his friend’s decapitation by an explosion while they were playing on the beach. Parents running for belated help for the lifeless offspring in their arms. The apocalyptic landscape of rubble entombing more than 1,000 missing children.

This is Reubens’ Massacre of the Innocents come to life with all its surging grief and seething mercilessness. No truer word has been uttered since it began with Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel, than those spoken by Tawfik Abu Breika, an elderly man whose home in Khan Younis was demolished by a no-warning air strike on Monday: “The world’s conscience is dead,” he said.

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[ How the loss of entire families is ravaging the social fabric of Gaza ]

According to Hamas authorities, nearly 7,000 children and minors have died in Gaza, which the UN secretary general has styled “a graveyard for children”. Nothing can justify this massacre of the innocents. No politics. No grievance. No strategy. No history. No revenge. Every day that it continues, our collective humanity dies a little bit more. To accept that this massacre is justifiable self-defence by Israel is to abdicate all conscience.

In the initial days after Islamist fighters broke over the border into Israel, killing 1,200 people, abducting 240 others and raping and torturing countless more, and the US and its allies gave Israel the go-ahead to “defend” itself, an American commentator on one of the cable news channels predicted that hell was about to be unleashed on Gaza. He predicted it would continue for some weeks before the US would discern that the public’s tolerance for the violence was waning and would start urging Israel to ease its finger on the trigger. His prognostications had all the professional detachment of an economist forecasting a dip in bond markets or a doctor prescribing strong medicine. What is chilling is that they have proved entirely correct.

For all his bumper-sticker sloganeering about good values, Joe Biden has presided over the terror that is laying waste to Gaza. The US veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire was an act of cold-blooded inhumanity. One wonders how Biden’s scarily self-obsessed rival, Donald Trump, could do any worse were he the one in the Oval Office.

Biden not only gave his blessing to release the deadly genie from the bottle, he actively encouraged it. Now he tentatively suggests that Israel is going too far. How far is too far? Is it one dead child? One hundred? One thousand? Ten thousand?

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been admirably outspoken in criticising Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, but words are proving as ineffective as a plaster on a heart attack. Ireland needs to put pressure on Biden to call a halt to Israel’s campaign. On the threshold of a US presidential election, the incumbent, who enjoys brandishing his Irish roots, might pause for thought were the Taoiseach to suggest that, in all conscience, he could not plan to attend the White House on St Patrick’s Day while children are being slaughtered in Gaza.

[ EU has ‘lost credibility’ due to stance on Gaza, Varadkar says ]

Such a gesture of solidarity with the oppressed is exactly what a genuinely neutral country can do to help restore peace. Instead, the Irish Government is planning to unstitch the UN element of the triple lock at a time when the UN itself is being over-ruled by Washington and Moscow.

The geo-political cynicism in our world was evident at Cop28 when reports emerged that hopes a deal could be struck lay largely with the so-called umbrella countries, primarily the US, UK and other Nato allies. Some are the same countries currently supplying killing machines to war zones that flatten and poison the Earth – the same Earth Cop is attempting to save.

If powerful states won’t think of the children, perhaps they will consider the planet. Amid reports that Israeli Defense Forces have used white phosphorus sourced from the US in its onslaught on Gaza, Biden is trying to persuade Washington’s lawmakers to provide more than $15 billion (€13.6 billion) in additional aid for Israel’s military campaign. White phosphorus burns human flesh right through to the bone. It also kills crops and livestock and resides in fish that swim in contaminated waters.

Wars destroy our cultural heritage too. Musicians and writers have joined Gaza’s list of the dead. Lubna Alian had the talent to, as was her dream, become “one of the world’s top violinists”. The teenager died on November 21st, when her home in Al-Nusairat, an area Israel had declared safe, was bombed. Many Irish artists, including Luka Bloom, Lisa Lambe and Colm Mac Con Iomaire have performed at fundraisers for Gaza’s school of music where Lubna was a student.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers destroyed a school funded by Irish Aid. The West Bank is where Jesus Christ was born, on the spot where the Church of the Nativity stands in Bethlehem’s Manger Square. Signs on the doors state that no guns are allowed inside. It is a Unesco world heritage site because a child who was born there survived a Massacre of the Innocents and, some 2,000 years later, he is still being talked about.

Who knows what extraordinary lives have been lost in the massacre that we are witnessing now.