On 8th December 2023 there was a motion before the UN Security Council calling on the Israelis and Palestinians for a ceasefire. The majority of the member states, in line with the clear expression of world opinion in the thousands of demonstrations world-wide, were in favour of the motion. But as is habitual for the USA, which opposes anything critical of Israel, it used its veto to scupper the motion. The UK, being a supine apologist for Israel and puppet of the USA, abstained. So the slaughter continues and the USA and UK continue shipping armaments to Israel and the armaments manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic are relishing the profits they are making from this worsening blood-bath and genocide.
And what had His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to say? Sod all of any value.
Labour continued its pusillanimous line, that a ceasefire would favour Hamas. In other words, Israel must be allowed to continue its genocidal war on the Palestinians.
Yet again, the Security Council, which, under the UN Charter, has responsibility for promoting world peace and security, paralysed by the USA and UK, has totally abdicated its responsibilities and lets the killing continue.
On 12th December there was a successful ceasefire call before the UN General Assembly, passed by 153 votes in favour, to 10 against, with 23 abstentions. Israel and the USA were, of course, among the 10 against. The UK abstained. The resolution will have no effect on Israel and its backers. As the slaughter rolls on, the death toll is now 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers as against 18,400 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children.
The BBC has been roundly criticised, even by its own journalists, for its reporting of the current Israel/Palestine conflict, for failing to give the historical background, which goes back at least as far as 1948.
Contrary to the impression created by much of the media, the atrocities of 7th October did not come out of nowhere.
The pent-up pain and degredation inflicted by Israel on the people of Gaza, built up over decades, resulted in hundreds of semi-literate, poverty-stricken young men venting their anger on the targets nearest to hand, including scores of Israeli women.
Israel’s retaliation has been swift and overwhelming. The plea has been that Israel surely has the right to defend itself. Israel’s military has gone well beyond defence, engaging in the collective punishment of the two million inhabitants of Gaza, the world’s biggest open-air prison. This shocking cruelty is nothing new.
Every bomb dropped on Gaza increases the hatred. Every bomb results in more support for Hamas. On 13th December, a poll showed 42% of Gazans supporting Hamas, up from 38 % three months before.
Despite the carnage that has been unleashed, 57% of people in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the 6th/7th October attack.
Will the USA never learn?
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Despite the relentless terror-bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s, the defeated US army still had to run away from Vietnam. The US was similarly disgraced in Afghanistan. Now a tiny nation with no standing army is defying the US proxy, Israel.
Noam Chomsky, the United States leading public intellectual, on the re-opening of Israeli attacks on Gaza, following the recent short ceasefire, pointed out that Israel has resumed the assault on Gaza by air, land and sea, while the Palestinians have no navy, no tanks, no heavy artillery and no air defence. “It is not war”, he said, “ It is murder.”
Egregious cruelty is being meted out on Gaza and the rest of the world stands by.
In his criticism of Israel, Chomsky speaks for a large proportion of the American Jewish community.
At one time, Israel commanded the undiluted sympathy and support of the American liberal left. Not any more. Patience eventually wears thin.
Netanyahu fell in with Trump, causing many American Democratic Party voters to lose sympathy for Israel. It is now the far right evangelicals, all racist Trump supporters, who subscribe to biblical legend in condoning everything that Israel does.
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In its supreme arrogance, Israel refuses to consider a ceasefire until it has captured or killed at least the leadership of Hamas. This is no more than a spurious cover story. Israel’s true intention is to pursue the Zionist cause by driving out or killing every Arab Palestinian, so that colonising settlements can take over the vacated land.
In its supreme arrogance, Israel is intent on continuing the war on Gaza, by bombardment and a starvation siege, until the last Palestinian has fled or is dead.
In Gaza the killing is led by the Israeli military, the euphemistically named Israeli Defence force (IDF). In Jerusalem and the West Bank of the River Jordan the ethnic cleansing is shared between the IDF and the heavily armed vicious settler gangs, who, like the Italian Mafia, enjoy the protection and connivance of corrupt officialdom.
Israel, which was born out of the Holocaust, is now itself committing genocide, not by taking vengeance against the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but against the indigenous population of Palestine, so that Jewish people can clear and settle the entire territory. This is Zionism red in tooth and claw. Criticising Zionism will earn you the label anti-Semite. This is the big lie that Margaret Hodge (Labour MP) used to scandalise the name of Jeremy Corbyn, losing Labour the 2019 General election and the same lie has resulted in hundreds of members being expelled from the Labour Party, accused of anti-semitism, including someone as unimportant as me. My actual sin was being a self-professed Corbynista and damning Margaret Hodge as a liar.
A repercussion of ethnic cleansing in Israel/Palestine has been political cleansing in the Labour Party, Keir Starmer’s right wing officials forcing out Left activists and abandoning progressive policies, so that the Labour Party is now hardly distinguishable from the Tories.
Since the 1939-45 Holocaust, the period since the 2nd World War has been characterised by endless regional wars and smaller-scale genocides or ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, central Africa, and former Yugoslavia, Sri lanka and elsewhere.
Why has the Holocaust not sensitised all Jews to the injustice of racial discrimination in its various forms no matter where it is found?
An equally valid question is: Why has knowledge of the Holocaust not sensitised all of us to the evil of racial discrimination no matter where it is found?
But I repeat my question. Why have the centuries of Jewish suffering and persecution failed to instil in Jews a deep humanism and intolerance of racial discrimination and injustice?
Have we the right to expect a people who, over the ages, have been subjected to racial slurs, degredation, dispossession, expulsions, ghettoization, pogroms and genocide, nevertheless to be the conscience of the world?
Clearly not. But it is surprising, perhaps disappointing that, for example, in South Africa, which has a large Jewish population, the attitude of the Jewish community during the decades of apartheid was largely passivity.
Under the Nazis, Jews were made the Blacks of Europe. The Israeli government’s Jewish State Law makes the Palestinians effectively the Blacks under the apartheid regime of their own country. Many Jewish Israelis perceive this to be the case, but still the majority consistently vote extremist governments into power.
I have no right to expect Jews to be consistent in their social and political beliefs, when others find it entirely comfortable to be capricious and inconsistent.
For example, western liberals who condemned South African apartheid and American racism, have no difficulty in endorsing the racism of Zionism as manifested against the Palestinians.
Theodor Hertzl was an Austro-Hungarian Jew, considered the father of modern Zionism. In the latter part of the 19th century he promoted Jewish settlement of Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire.
He must have been aware that Palestine was already inhabited by over half a million mostly Arab people, many of them nomadic. He proposed that this mass of poor natives should be expropriated. This was to be done, he wrote in his diary, by “spiriting” the penniless population across the border to employment in neighbouring countries, while denying them any employment in “our own country”, to wit, the biblically Promised Land. Hertzl predicted that the small number of native
landowners could be had for a price. And so it proved.
This brand of criminality was not invented by Hertzl. At that time, similar colonialism was flourishing all over Africa, Asia and North and South America, often not as circumspectly as the Zionists.
In the rest of the world, colonial expansion has largely abated. By continuing blatant colonialism, Israel has made itself a pariah state, except in the eyes of its imperialist paymaster, the USA.
It looks as if the rest of the world will continue to stand, hand-wringing, while Israel steals the whole of Palestine.
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