I originally wrote this in December, shortly after Refaat Alareer was killed by the IDF, in the spirit of his poem If I must die but didn’t publish it at the time because I thought it didn’t do him justice.
But, now Netanyahu has repeated the line “We are in a battle of civilization against barbarism” in his deranged rant at the US Congress calling for more weapons to “finish the job faster”; so, time to fly the kite.
On the day this was written, Palestinian casualties stood at 18, 412. Today, it is more than twice that. What price “civilisation”?
Barbarism
In the battle of civilisation against barbarism
It is necessary for the civilised
To bomb the schools of the barbarians and kill their children
To bomb the homes of the barbarians and kill their families
To bomb the hospitals of the barbarians and kill their doctors and nurses
To stop the barbarians’ sources of fresh water, so they thirst
To stop the barbarians access to food, so they hunger
To cut off the barbarians’ access to medicines, so they sicken
To kill the barbarians teachers and poets to still their stories
To bulldoze the barbarians olive groves to empty their land
so you can say later that they were never on it
To flood the ground water with salt so nothing can grow
To bomb the barbarians libraries and archives to erase their history
in the futile hope that, this time, “the young will forget”
To drive the barbarians away from shelter
Make them move, again and again
To make sure that they despair
To strip barbarian prisoners to their underclothes and make them kneel in the dust
To kill a hundred or a thousand barbarians for every civilised casualty
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,”President Biden. May 8th
On the face of it, this is a very strange statement. Israeli troops had already entered Rafah two days before Biden said they hadn’t done it yet. But, although this statement was already out of date at the point that Biden made it, on the other hand, it is “clear”, or seems to be from this statement, that “if they go into Rafah” – no caveats about that – the US would cut off “supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, with the cities…”
What happened since is that the Israelis have continued sending troops into and occupying Rafah, while shelling and bombing the parts of it that they do not occupy.
The UN puts the impact of that like this.
Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, particularly in Rafah. Intensified hostilities following the issuance of evacuation orders and the Israeli military operation in Rafah have so far forced the displacement of about one million people, amid a decline in the entry of humanitarian aid. Between the afternoons of 29 and 31 May, according to MoH in Gaza, 113 Palestinians were killed and 637 were injured, including 60 killed and 280 injured in the past 24 hours.
In Rafah, only three field hospitals are still operating, one of them partially. The World Food Programme (WFP) calls for the immediate opening of all access points, emphasizing that its ability to support people in need is deteriorating. Health and environmental risks are on the rise due to fuel shortages, limited access to clean water, sewage overflow, accumulation of solid waste, and infrastructural damage, UNRWA and partners warn.
The US, in response, made a tokenistic gesture of blocking one weapons shipment. This had the same performative media feed quality as their aid air drops and the pier they built to deliver aid that has now began to sink.
The International Court of Justice ruled on May 24th that Israel “must halt” its military offensive “immediately”. That was a week ago. The Israelis have ignored the ruling. They are in breach of international law and therefore, as the saying goes, “the rules based international order”.
The film below of National Security Council spokesman and former Rear Admiral John Kirby, a man who definitely has “something of the night about him”, slipping and sliding under pressure from reporters on this question is a study in squirming self righteous evasiveness that becomes embarassingly revealing.
His line can be summarised as …“the Israelis say that they didn’t do the bombing, it “might have been” a Hamas ammo dump spontanously combusting, and anyway they used their smallest bombs, a teeny, tiny bomb, and if they did it was somewhere else, and an accident, and they are investigating it; so I really can’t comment until their investigation is complete. And of course we will not rush to judgement until they have had time to judge their own actions, and there will be nothing self serving about this because they are a “democracy”. We haven’t been able to verify any of the evidence we have seen. We will ask the Israelis about this and accept what they say. Any critical view about this is conjecture that does not fit the facts, even though I’ve just said that we won’t know what the facts are until the Israelis decide what they are. As far as red lines are concerned, there is no mathematical formula, so, trust me, trying to pin me down on this will be like trying to nail blamange to the wall. A great deal of aid has gone into Gaza but I am not going to specify how much because I know damn well how far short it falls. We have a red line against a major incursion, but no matter how major the incursions have been so far, they won’t be major enough for us to actually do anything; and we are in constant talks with the Israelis so we are on the same page on whatever this is going to be. Trust me. Anyway, all this could be avoided if Hamas came out of their tunnels and lined up with big targets on their heads so the IDF could shoot them without having to, sadly, drop 2,000 lb bombs on thousands of people trying to shelter in tents; because its very worrying that the Israelis are having to send troops back into areas that they had already flattened and thought they had “cleared”; so there needs to be a plan for the day after, though for goodness sake don’t ask me what that might be.”
Watch it for yourself. Its an education.
“You cannot make judgements in the midst of a conflict”John Kirby. Exept that the US judgement to cut funding from UNWRA after Israeli accused 7 UNWRA personel of taking part in Oct 7th was immediate, and in the midst of the conflict, even though the Israelis presented no evidence at the time; and the funding remains suspended even though the Israelis have presented no evidence since. This is complicity in using famine as a weapon.
I can think of many words to describe what the IDF is doing in Gaza. “Moral” would not be one of them.
Perhaps Michael Gove looks at things differently; rather like Frederick Lindeman, Churchill’s right hand man and an advocate of mass area bombing in World War 2, who, when asked for a definition of morality replied: “I define a moral action action as one that brings advantage my friends”.
Only such a skewed perspective could allow him to see systematic algorithms that target air strikes and shelling using a 50:1 ratio of collateral damage (making it ok to kill 50 civilians if a strike manages to kill one fighter), smashed hospitals, schools and water treatment plants, the destruction or damage of over 250,000 homes, the displacement of nearly 2 million people, and the use of famine as a weapon as evidence of a superior morality on the part of the Israeli government.
Perhaps he hasn’t seen the people with white flags being shot in the street, didn’t listen to 6 year old Hind Rajab’s pleading phone call from a car trapped by the IDF, nor hear the IDF bullets that killed her family, nor note the way that the IDF waited for paramedics to get to her before they killed both her and them.
Perhaps he hasn’t seen any of the gloating videos made by IDF soldiers, and some civilians, or the Israeli civilians trying to blockade aid trucks.
Or perhaps he thinks all of this is ok; as his presumption of moral superiority for the IDF is not based on objective criteria, but because they are allied with the UK in the US centred Global North Bloc and therefore “the good guys”; on the side of “democracy” and “human rights” no matter what they actually do.
In a way this is almost Nietzchian. The ubermensch of US allies by definition “beyond good and evil”; and certainly not subject to the International Criminal Court.
Gove’s indignation at the ICC prosector arguing for arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant as well as 3 Hamas leaders, echoes that of Netanhayu himself, who has spluttered his “disgust” that “democratic Israel” (i.e. him) has been put in the dock with what he described as “mass murderers” and threats from the United States to impose sanctions on the ICC.
In the interests of objectivity, it makes sense to look at who has been carrying out murder en masse; and how Hamas matches up to Israel in that respect.
This graph compares the numbers of people killed in Israel on Oct 7th with those killed in Gaza by the IDF since.
If Hamas are mass murderers, what does that make the IDF?
If Hamas leaders are culpable for deaths at their hands, how much more culpable is Netanyahu for the deaths at his?
Nearly 30 times… so far.
This is even higher than the ratio of 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed in the period from 2000 up to Oct 7th 2023, which, once you’re aware of it, goes some way to explaining why it happened.
In quantitative terms, there is indeed, no equivalence. What the IDF have done since Oct 7th, and what they did before Oct 7th, is far, far worse.
And they are doing it in a now futile attempt to reassert by terror and massacre the status quo for a state that occupies and represses another people; against whom it commits continuous and casual violence, systematically discriminates, and has been inexorably dispossessing since 1948.
There are times when the veil of delusion, the web of weasel words that weaves our brains into complacent compliance, tears of its own accord and we can see them for what they are.
When the peaceful encampment at UCLA calling for the University to divest its investments in Israel was attacked overnight by masked far right Israeli supporters spraying mace, throwing fireworks and wielding iron bars, aerial footage showed a large concentration of police vans just a few blocks away. It was apparent from the film that the violence and aggression was coming from the pro Israeli side. Resistance from the occupation came in the form of holding up the barricades that the attackers were trying to tear down. The Police did not intervene. Analogies with the West Bank, where far right settlers attack Palestinian villages while the IDF stands by, and sometimes joined in, were hard to avoid.
The attack failed.
So, the following day, the Police themselves in full riot gear, steamed in to smash the occupation and arrest the students taking part. The state having far greater resources than a bunch of vigilantes. Film of students – who had been protesting peacefully – being brutally dragged off, their wrists fastened behind their backs with plastic ties were all over the news.
The similarity in the style of attack juxtaposed together coming so soon after each other was obvious. You could see it.
But the news framed this violent Police action as an attempt to stop violence on campus. You couldn’t make it up. But, in a way, they did just that. And in so doing they reveal what they are. The longer this goes on, the more the masks will slip.
Personal Note: The demand for disinvestment is a crucial one. When I was a student in the 1970s, our Anti-Apartheid society had a campaign for the University I was at to disinvest from investments in South Africa. As the Secretary of the group I had to take in a petition to the University Bursar and try to negotiate with him. Brushing aside my arguments about the sheer immorality and inhumanity of Apartheid and the University’s complicity in it, he commented “Essentially, you want us to opt out of the capitalist system”, before phoning his PA to ask for roast beef, “left a little pink in the middle”, for lunch. I drew the conclusion that if breaking with Apartheid required breaking with capitalism, thats what we’d have to do.
This cartoon is based on a design by the Atelieres Populaires for workers at the Renault Flins factory, who were occupying their plant as part of the General Strike in May – June 1968 and were coming under attack from the CRS riot police as a result.
A recent article on Labour Hub tries to link the struggle in Gaza and the war in Ukraine as parallel “struggles for self-determination”; not noticing that one struggle (Gaza) is in resistance to the US centred global imperial system, the other (Ukraine) is a struggle to join it as an auxiliary ally.
People in the Palestine Solidarity movement have strongly felt and taken note of the difference in the response from Western governments to these “struggles for self determination”.
The flags of Ukraine and Israel have both been flown on public buildings, head teachers and college principals have been told by the DFE to “stand with Israel”.
Palestinian flags – and Keffiyas – have been denounced as “threatening”, or “symbols of terrorism” or “hate” and children drawing flags on their hands or wearing badges in schools have been referred to Prevent. This has become increasingly shrill as the movement has grown and public sympathy for the Palestinians has grown with it.
Like many similar articles, this one has two glaring pieces of disavowell at the heart of it – a selective approach who who is entitled to self determination and a failure to take account of the very active role of the United States and NATO – and a logic that leads those sections of the labour movement who support their line to end up campaigning for the rearmament and militarisation drive that our ruling class is determined to push, even as our societies crumble for want of invetsment and fail to rise to the challenge of climate bteakdown.
All peoples are entitled to self determination, but some are more entited than others.
If a struggle for “self determination” is based on denying that right to another people, it has no leg to stand on. The Palestinian struggle, including the way it is defined in the revised Hamas Charter (2017) is against Israel as a racist state, not against the Jewish population, in the same way that the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was a struggle against the state, not white people as such.
The dominant, far right, form of Ukrainian nationalism, however, denies the national rights of Russian citizens and heroises historic figures like Stepan Bandera, a recruiting seargent for Nazi concentration camp guards. The US and NATO are quite comfortable with this, but no one on the Left should be.
In this Labour Hub article, like so many others, the Russian population in Eastern Ukraine is ignored. Its as if they don’t exist, didn’t rebel in 2014 against the overthrow of a government they’d voted for, and weren’t bombed and shelled indiscrimately by the Ukrainian armed forces from then onwards. At most they are posed as “Russian proxies” with “no interests of their own”; just as Ansar Allah in Yemen is belittled as “Iranian proxies”. This writes them out of history just as surely as the Israelis would like to do to the Palestinians, who are still described in some quarters there as “not a people”.
As this statement from No Cold War – The War in Ukraine must end – points out; A 2001 census found that nearly 30% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’. There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.
All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues – which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.
A “self determination” that denies the national rights of a large minority and denies it equality before the law within the area controlled by an ethnically defined state sounds a lot like Israel – a living expression of Marx’s dictum that “a nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free”. Not something any Socialist should be defending.
The limits of geopolitical Flat Earthism
Its important also to grasp the broader geo political context of these wars in a way that makes sense of both of them. This is because articles like this one reflect a widespread view on the left in the Global North that the world is geopolitically flat. That every country is capitalist. That there is no structure to global imperialism.
This is profoundly disorienting and can lead to the same people challenging the dominant narrative coming from our own ruling class on Gaza, while actively repeating it over Ukraine.
This is inherently distorting for any accurate understanding of whats going on; especially if you fall for, or worse, promote the sort of manichean propaganda that the Russians (or Hamas) are all evil, murdering rapists, while butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of the Azov battalion or the IDF.
The bottom line on this is…
Who is threatening whom?
In the case of the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, from 2008 to 2023 there were 319 Israeli deaths and 6,779 Palestinian deaths; thats a ratio of 21 Palestinians to 1 Israeli before Oct 7th and the ensuing IDF offensive.
That looks like this.
With 1,200 Israelis killed on that day and 235 since, and over 29,500 Palestinians killed in the Gaza strip and another 399 in the West Bank thats a ratio of more than 24 to 1.
That looks like this.
The balance of threat and the balance of death in this conflict is obvious and evident; and needs smoke screens of indignation to try to obscure it.
As there are millions of people in this country who feel a connection with the Palestinians, and have sources of information outside the establishment media, it has been impossible to control this narrative, to allow Israel to get on with what its doing with no scrutiny, and this is rebounding on the government and opposition, both now forced to oppose an IDF attack on Rafah and in some disarray. As there is no such community here with any links in the Donbass, even the existence of Russian speakers in eastern Ukriane is barely known about, let alone understood, and the narrative has been much more tightly controlled.
And, as the war in Ukraine is now being visibly lost by NATO, we are back to the sort of over heated rhetoric that was common two years ago – that NATO is an essentially defensive alliance needed to stop the Russians steamrollering over Europe.
This argument is politically absurd. Taking control of a continent would require a political project that could hold the allegiance of enough of the people who live there for it to be viable. It is not simply a technical military exercise. Russia does not have such a project. It has the military capacity and the political pull to absorb Russian speaking parts of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, and thats it. Even taking over the Western parts of Ukraine has been described as like “swallowing a porcupine”; let alone anywhere else.
Even if it could be reduced to the level of technical military capacity, the threat is actually in the opposite direction.
This uses NATOs own figures for its spending. Monthly Review has assessed that US spending is actually about double the amount claimed.
That imbalance looks like the graph above and shows the absurdity of NATOs claim to be both defensive and worried about the potential of being attacked by a power with less than a tenth of its strength. The Russians however, clearly have every reason to be worried about what NATO wants all that expenditure for; especially as it conducts annual “war games” in Eastern Europe practicing for a war with them.
It was fear of that threat, and the failure of NATO to even negotiate about it, which led to the current phase of the war in Ukraine.
Two phases of the wars for the New American Century.
The global context for this is that, for the first time since 1871, we are living in a world in which the United States is no longer the largest economy. China already is in Purchase Power Parity terms; and at current growth rates is likely to overhaul the US in Current Exchange Rate terms before 2030.
The “unipolar moment” and “end of history” is long gone. This analysis of the structure of global imperialism by the Tricontinental Institute goes into this in immense detail and is essential reading. Its core point is that the US has integrated the Global North into a subordinate imperial economic bloc and set of military alliances, but its decline is leading to increasing challenges from a far more diverse set of regimes in the Global South, with China as the core; and China’s highly succesful Socialist economic model at the heart of it. Those who disagree with this definition of China nevertheless have to acknowledge its success, and perhaps concede that that’s how the Chinese themselves define their society. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
In its resistance to its slipping domination, the USA threatens the end of humanity because, with its primacy in capital formation, production and trade gone, financial control and technological lead slipping, the US is trying to push the challenges it faces increasingly onto the military field; which it still believes that it can dominate. That is what makes our current decade the most dangerous in the whole of human history.
The first stage of the wars for the New American Century, the War on Terror after 9/11 2001, was directed at weak powers that the US could overwhelm, killing 4.5 million people according to Browns University, but nevertheless ending in defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; and chaos in Libya. This was when they thought they could incorporate China into their world order.
The second phase, now they know that they can’t, threatens to be worse, and could kill all of us, with a nuclear first strike an active part of US war planning.
This is where the tension in the world is coming from. This is who is driving it.
There is an argument within the US ruling class between those who think that it has to take Russia on first before it can get on to the confrontation it wants with China – the position of the Biden administration and more traditional Republicans – and those, like Trump, who think they might be able to get Russia onside against China. Putin’s response of ridiculing questions on these lines from Tucker Carlson in his recent interview, shows that this is wishful thinking on Trump’s part.
The second phase
The US and its allies have now crossed the security red lines of a nuclear armed power (Russia) in Ukraine, and have fuelled the attempted genocide in Gaza; because they have to be seen to be able to impose their will.
The US has repeatedly vetoed ceasefire motions for Gaza in the UN Security Council.
Russia and China have voted for a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the world majority, in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
In General Assembly votes, Ukraine has been among the tiny minority who have voted with the US against a ceasefire.
Israel and Ukraine are both using weapons supplied by the US. Neither could pursue their war without them.
The US signed up to provide $38 billion in military aid to Israel between 2016 and 2026, and additional aid has gone in since October 7th.
It has gave Ukraine £113 billion between 2022 and September 2023, with more on the way.
The US is intervening in and arming both in its own interests. The Israelis are already an established US attack dog and the Ukrainian regime aspires to be; and has been playing that role since 2014.
A “Big Israel”in Eastern Europe
The forces the US is supporting – or using – in each war are the same sort of ethno nationalists with far right backing.
Netanyahu has Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalal Smotrich. Zelensky has the Right Sector and the Azov battalion.
Just to dispell any doubt, speaking in April 2022, President Zelensky was very clear that he wanted Ukraine to be “a big Israel” in Eastern Europe. A country where there were “soldiers in cinemas and supermarkets” and “people with weapons”, not a “liberal European” state at all.
This vision was eagerly and approvingly embraced by US commentators (its possible that they wrote it) because being like Israel is being a military frontier state for the US.
Israel has been the lynch pin of US domination of the Middle East. President Zelensky has volunteered his country to do the same in Eastern Europe.
The Left in NATO countries, marinading as we are in the ideological stomach juices of the belly of the beast, should never forget who our ruling class is.
NATO and other direct US allies – the world’s wealthiest countries – account for 75% of global military spending, are the core of global imperialism, organised as a coordinated bloc, with the US dominating its subordinate rivals.
Russia is not part of this bloc. It is a target for it.
Not recognising that NATO expansion in Eastern Europe has predatory intent takes self delusion a little far. See the map displayed by Kyrillo Budanov, Head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence for the partition of Russia that this aims at if you have any doubts.
Climate Breakdown helps drive US brinkmanship
The accelerating breakdown of the climactic conditions for human civilisation adds urgency to the increasing US brinkmanship that we have seen in Ukraine and Gaza. To try to survive it with the current imbalance of global wealth and power intact requires catastrophic defeats to be imposed on the Global South, and any power not included in the US dominant bloc; in short order.
This can’t be kicked down the road anymore; hence the emergence of apocalyptic maniacs as mainstream political options for the ruling class – from Trump to Bolsonaro to Millais – and the increasingly unhinged quality of mainstream political debate.
Into the vortex of barbarism
We are spiralling into a vortex of barbarism in which light minded fools like Grant Shapps can float the possibility of nuclear war with “Russia, China, Iran, North Korea” and argue that we should arm even more to prepare for it; and this is repeated in a blase way by media talking heads as though this wasn’t suicidal insanity. A mainstream consensus urging us on to Armageddon stretches from the military itself – with former Generals calling for the UK to be put on “a war footing” and floating the idea of conscription – to Boris Johnson arguing in the Dail Mail that a Trump Presidency might be “just what the world needs” because of his “willingness to use force and sheer unpredictability” – to Timothy Garton Ash, arguing in the Guardian that Trump’s America First volatility gives Europe the opportunity to become a more serious military imperialism in its own right – to the Labour front bench, with Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules mysteriously not applying to the large increases in military spending pencilled in by the Tories (in a country which already has one of the highest military spending burdens in the world).
Supporters of Ukraine Solidarity Campaign like Paul Mason are following the logic of their support for NATOs war aims by arguing, in his case, that the investment needed to combat climate change cannot be afforded because “the cost of borrowing has increased”, but at the same time saying that the UK should follow the US and EU in using debt to finance arms spending. Suicidal logic.
The whole labour movement should be pushing in the opposite direction.
On Friday the International Court of Justice threw out Israel’s objection to proceeding with South Africa’s case that it is committing genocide in Gaza, on the grounds that it is plausible that it is, gave it specific instructions on what it had to do, and ordered it to report back to the court by February 26th on what it has done to comply.
Simply put, it has to cease attacking civilians and allow in aid. There was a brief moment of hope that this might provide some pressure towards a change of course. But, hope, above all else, must be crushed.
Over the weekend there was no let up in the Israeli assault. This is from the latest UN daily report:
“Intense Israeli bombardment from air, land, and sea continued across much of the Gaza Strip on 27 and 28 January, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction.”
Between the afternoonsof 26 and 28 January, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza, 339 Palestinians were reportedly killed (165 people on 28 January, 174 people on 27 January), and 600 Palestinians were injured (290 on 28 January and 310 on 27 January).
Incoming truckloads of aid, averaging 156 a day in the preceding week, are now being held up at Kerem Shalom by Israeli demonstrators.
On Saturday Israel’s leaders responded to the ICJ ruling by demanding that countries cease to fund UNWRA – the backbone of what aid structure there is in Gaza – on the grounds of “allegations” that 12 of its employess “participated” in some undefined way in the attacks on Oct 7th. These allegations have not been published. UNWRA has sacked the named individuals while an investigation takes place.
The UN Reports that UNRWA is the main humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over two million people now dependent on its services and some 3,000 out of its 13,000 staff in Gaza continuing to report to work, despite the ongoing hostilities.
So, far from seeking to comply with the Court, and recognise what a deep hole they are digging themselves into with their armoured bulldozers, Israeli leaders have sought to bluster, calling the South African case “outrageous”, carried on as though no ruling had been issued, and to hit back by undermining what limited aid has been getting in.
This is in a situation in which the UN reports that
2.2 million people are at imminent risk of famine.
378,000 of these are at “catastrophic” level (extreme lack of food, starvation, exhaustion of coping capacities)
939,000 are at emergency level.
The ICJ will take a long time to come up with a definitive judgement. Without a ceasefire, the scale of this famine could well have made the case de facto for them by the time they decide de jure.
The response of “the West” has been instructive. A rush further down the rabbit hole towards confrontation with the rest of the world.
Faced with “plausible” accusations of genocide from the ICJ – the World Court on these questions – they issued diplomatic versions of Itamar Ben Gvir’s dismissive tweet “The Hague schmague. The UK with characteristic patronising condecension snarked that the South African case was “not helpful”. Its “plausibility” in the eyes of the court was not acknowledged. Instead we had the worn out mantra that Israel is “entitled to defend itself”; while the Palestinians, presumably, must suffer what they must with no right to resist. The same mind set that led the Observer to write that Israeli violnece is “understandable” while Palestinian violence “defies comprehension” (Editorial Oct 15th).
Faced with unpublished allegations of a tiny number of UNWRA employees being involved in Oct 7th, the US and nine of its core subordinates have leapt to broadcast Israel’s case from their bully pulpits and to cut UNWRA’s funds.
The ICJ ordered Israel “to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”. UNWRA is the body that organises that. In striking at UNWRA, Israel is signalling that, in doing the exact opposite of what it has been ordered to do, far from respecting international law, it is doubling down on defying it.
This was an opportunity for “the West” to de escalate, if that were their intention. Perfect legal cover. In backing Israel up, and actively imposing its own collective punishment on the people of Gaza, “the West” is tearing off its moral mask.
So, even after the ICJ ruling, the UK and US continue to supply Israel with weapons and argue that the condition for a viable ceasefire is for Israel to have achieved its military objectives before one happens. Given the way that Israel is doing that, that makes them overtly complicit in the ongoing slaughter.
They are, perhaps, hoping that by doubling down they can make what the ICJ says to Israel in a month’s time irrelevant, drowned in a brute display of unaccountable force.
This is what the West’s “rules based international order” looks like with the pretences stripped away. Not naked in the conference chamber, or courtroom, but strutting across the world with their big swinging dicks horribly on display.
Even if we avoid the wider war that is now looming, and which this stance has made more likely, this will neither be forgotten nor forgiven. Now we see you.
Both have argued this week that a ceasefire is not a route to a durable peace because Israel’s declared war aim of eliminating Hamas will not be achieved; therefore further October 7th attacks could take place.
The core moral flaw in this argument is that there is an October 7th attack on Gaza every four days. Another way of looking at it is that the price for stopping a further October 7th is twenty of them inflicted on the Palestinians so far, and an incalculable number of them henceforth.
The only logic of this is that Palestinian lives are worth less than a twentieth of Israeli lives.
There’s a word for that.
Doing the Maths
Total Israeli casualties on Oct 7th: 1,200
Total Palestinian casulaties in Gaza so far: 23,000. This is an underestimate, as it does not include any of the people buried under the rubble and not yet accounted for. Attempts by Israeli spokepeople to cast doubt on this figure by quibbling that this estimate is made by Hamas ignores the fact that previous Hamas estimate of casualties caused by IDF attacks on Gaza have been found to be accurate, that these figures are used as a working assumption by the UN. In any case, they present no figures of their own, other than the absurd claim that just about every male Palestinian they have killed is a “Hamas terrorist”. This follows the sort of practice carried out by some NATO units in Afghanistan, which counted all Afghan males killed as “Taliban”.
While claiming no entitlement to have letters published, I think its indicative of the ideological limits of the challenges The Observer is prepared to publish that neither of these, or anything like it, made it into print.The only response they put in to the Karen Pollock article, which was a way to package Suella Braverman’s accusation that demonstrations calling for a ceasefire are actually “hate marches” in a way that might be acceptable for readers who think of themselves as liberals, was a letter that followed her framing of the conflict as religious intolerance, nothing to do with occupation and oppression (and was pessimistic that anything could be done about it).Narrowing the range of challenge, and excluding challenge to ideological frameworks, is a sign of waning political self confidence. As the old order fades, it has no option but to shut people up.
Eyeless in Gaza
Karen Pollock uses some odd constructions in her article (Anti Semitism and Holocaust denial are rife, just look at Stephen Fry’s Twitter Feed Observer 24/12/23) stepping across the thin ice of distortion on the snow shoes of euphemism.
Conceding that you “can“ be “appalled by the scenes we are witnessing in Gaza and critical of the choices made by the Israeli government and not be an antisemite” is just as well. If you read the daily UN updates there is such utter horror there, expressed in the most dispassionate prose, that it becomes numbing to read it. That’s why a majority of people in this country want a ceasefire, almost every country in the world has voted for one at the UN, and why there have been such huge demonstrations, here and everywhere else.
Implying that is driven by “hatred” rooted in “antisemitism”, not by the reality of a genocide unfolding in front of our eyes, inverts reality; and would even if there weren’t such large and vibrant Jewish contingents and speakers on all of the marches.
Her use of the word “scenes”, for the utter carnage we are all seeing, possibly indicates a shying away in her own mind from the consequences of seeing it for what it is, as the logic of racism leads to genocide, and no people are immune from following it.
In that spirit, I hope that the Holocaust Education Trust would agree that Israeli politicians have learned the wrong lessons from the Holocaust when they
build their state on racially discriminatory laws,
say “the Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there—death”,
or back settlers who terrorise villagers in the West Bank and chant “Death to Arabs” and “May your villages burn”?
This one was written in the middle of October and calls out the fundamental imbalance in their editorial response to October 7th. The figure quoted in this letter understates the asymmetry in casualties since 2000, which is almost 7 Palestinians for every Israeli killed.And this has got far worse since then, with the casualty rate since October 7th being “at least” (in the UN’s words) 18 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.
In the last decade the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been five Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, just on that level and leaving aside everything else, it is therefore strange that your editorial finds calls for violence from Israel “understandable”, while considering that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”.
Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.
Outside Parliament calling for a ceasefire. November 14 2023
Nearly three weeks ago you said that you were opposed to a ceasefire in Gaza because it would “freeze the conflict” at that point, leaving Hamas’s military infrastructure intact. That was on October 31st. At that point deaths in Gaza were just under 9,000 according to the UN. Because of the collapse of services and communications in the hospitals in Gaza no totals have been reported in the ten days since Nov 7th, by which time it had reached 11,078. It could now be approaching 20,000, as the Palestinian Red Crescent has reported that it is now no longer able even to pull people out from the rubble of their bombed out homes when they call for help. If you think these extra deaths are a necessary price to make people in Israel safer, why do they matter less?
Given that most of the people killed have been civilians not fighters, how many civilians, how many more children do you think will have to die before the IDF thinks it has, in Ron DeSantis’s phrase, “finished the job”?
If you don’t agree with the comment of Republican member of the Florida State Legislature Michelle Saltzman, who, when asked how many people in Gaza have to die for Israel’s security, replied “all of them” how many do you think should?
Do you disagree with the families of the hostages held by Hamas that the IDFs current military campaign will put the lives of their loved ones at risk ?
You often say that Israel has the right to defend itself, but do you also accept that, under Additional Article 1 of the Geneva Convention, an occupied people like the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, including by force of arms?
As your argument is that no country could accept the scale of attack on Oct 7th this year without retaliation, and that the 1400 deaths suffered that day justifies whatever measures are necessary to remove the military threat posed by Hamas; do you think that the Palestinians have the right to retaliate for the Israeli invasions of Gaza in 2008, that killed 1400, or that of 2014, that killed 2100 and keep retaliating until the threat to their lives represented by the IDF is removed?
If not, why not?
Do you recognise that since 2000, eight Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli life lost, and the figures for children are thirty seven Palestinian children killed for every Israeli child?
If you do, what explains your stance that retaliatory attacks from Hamas are terrorism, while retaliatory attacks from the IDF are justified?
Given that you so firmly believe that the UK cannot take an independent line from its closest allies, now that EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, is arguing that “there is no military solution”, will you embrace this recognition; or are you waiting for Washington to say the same thing before you can feel safe to do so?
Urban ramblings 