GAZA
Survivors of the Israeli destruction of Gaza are now being starved, and our government still won’t admit that Israel’s tactics are illegal, or use the word genocide. Biden is reportedly ‘growing impatient’ with Netanyahu, but holds back from meaningful action like cancelling financial support or stopping the supply of American weapons. We’re told the UK and US are tougher with Netanyahu behind closed doors, but if so, it’s probably because they anticipate being ignored yet again, and don’t want any witnesses.
However, if western leaders can’t or won’t bring Netanyahu to heel, his government’s increasing hubris may do the job for them. Observers can make up their own minds about who is responsible for the killing of 32,000 people in Gaza by the Israeli army and air force – Hamas, according to Israeli spokesmen – but Israel has gone too far when it asserts that it is trying to “flood Gaza with food” and is being thwarted by inept aid agencies and Hamas gunmen, or bans UNRWA from supplying food, as it has done today. Israel has been using the restriction of water and food going into Gaza since day one, and to pretend other than that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war is to take the watching world for fools.
If the US attempt to build a temporary port was meant to shame the Israelis into allowing food in by land, it hasn’t worked; Netanyahu thrives on showing defiance to the world. However, at some point the Israeli people are going to find there is a limit to the tolerance world leaders are willing to grant them.
Most of us accept that threats by Hamas to repeat October 7 “again and again” awoke visceral fears in Israeli Jews brought up on the story of the Holocaust, and that for many it created genuine, uncontrollable terror. Others saw political advantage in amplifying that fear in order to justify an onslaught designed to further the aim of annexing Palestine, but either way it created the belief in Israel that the normal rules of war no longer applied. Less excusably, that belief has been echoed in both chambers of our own Parliament. In reality, Hamas is not even close to being able to annihilate Israel, even with the help of Hezbollah, a far superior fighting force, and no-one thinks the US would tolerate Israel being “annihilated” by Iran or any of the Arab countries. Nor are there any circumstances in which international humanitarian law doesn’t apply.
In the vacuum left by UK politicians, most of whom are frightened of being called antisemitic and losing votes in the coming general election, people feel free to say on the BBC’s Question Time that “Hamas wants to kill every Jew”. Meanwhile Israeli spokesmen get away with bracketing Hamas with ISIS, useful for those who yearn for a simple, binary world in which the Israelis become the good guys, and the Palestinian struggle to end the oppression by Israel becomes generic Islamic terrorism.
What the Israeli war cabinet refuses to concede is that when wars end and peace is negotiated, things change. We have a classic example in the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA killed Earl Mountbatten, very nearly killed the British Prime Minister, and planted bombs in English pubs designed to kill ordinary civilians, and yet Jerry Adams and Martin McGuiness went on to become politicians, and McGuiness became a peace advocate, working alongside Liberal Democrat Lord Alderdice on conflict resolution in other countries.
The constant description by Israel of its opponents as ‘inhuman’, or as partners of ISIS, has to stop if the next phase is going to be allowed to happen. We have known from the start that Netanyahu had the military capability to ‘win’ the war by inflicting more damage on Gaza than Hamas could on Israel.
What matters now, for the Israeli people as much as for the Palestinians, is that he doesn’t win the peace. If he does, Israelis and Palestinians will rue the day for generations to come.