Gaza: If we don’t protest – blood is on our hands too

Surely the UK complicity in the slaughter in Gaza is something that no ethical Briton should tolerate?

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We all know that money and realpolitik drive UK foreign policy.

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We all know that the Foreign Office ensures that our relations with other nations are never polluted by anything but the purest and most pragmatic self interest.

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But there are limits? Yes?

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We allow the U.S. to secretly use our airspace and landing strips for rendition torture flights. This is not a limit – we tolerate this.

The waging of an illegal and aggressive war in Iraq was not a limit either. The UK went to war, abandoning all legal, moral and ethical obligations in order to keep the U.S. happy.

It seems that our political establishment is incapable of any stance that might have at its core a basic standard of human decency and ethical behaviour – they are however quick to point the finger at others.

Philip Hammond our Defence Secretary was (rightfully) quick to make the link between the supply of arms and the people who use them. He admonished Russia for its supply of weapons to the separatist movement in the Ukraine – weapons that brought down the MH17 passenger jet with the loss of 298 lives – this is what he had to say:

 “They have been supplying them, they have been supporting them . . . They cannot deny their responsibility for the acts that these people are carrying out.”

Quite right. Mr Hammond makes a perfectly valid moral argument – but his lack of integrity is breath taking..

Then there can be no possible excuse for supplying arms to Israel as they continue a forty year illegal occupation and now commit war crimes against unarmed civilians and children. The United Nations is to set up a war crimes tribunal to investigate the actions of the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) – only one nation opposed its formation – the U.S.

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Thus far 789 people have been killed in Gaza including 189 children. Is this a limit, are the deaths of 189 CHILDREN enough to inject a little ethical backbone into the actions of this nation? It would seem not.

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While no-one at Sodium Haze condones the actions of Hamas in firing rockets indiscriminately at Israel – one cannot ignore the huge imbalances of power and loss at work in Gaza – this is not a war, its a slaughter.  Philip Hammond with break-taking duplicity refuses to declare the Israeli attacks disproportionate.

Its not hard to see why Mr Hammond loses his moral compass so quickly. With £50 million of export licences granted to UK weapons manufacturers supplying  Israel over the last five years and British and Israeli arms manufacturers sharing defence contracts worth billions of pounds – money and realpolitik have won the day.  

While innocents suffer and die, we have only the rhetoric of expediency from politicians aided by sickening bias from large sections of the media. The BBC shamefully talks in soft euphemisms about how the IDF is to ‘investigate the circumstances’ of how they came to drop bombs on schools and hospitals as if that sanitises state sponsored terrorism .

So its up to us. If those 189 innocent murdered children are our limit then we cannot stand idly by while our elected representatives and officials fudge our complicity in those deaths. The UK supplies the arms, the UK supports the U.S. as they refuse to confront Israel, the UK takes Israeli arms and money, the UK supports Israel – a rogue state now if ever there was one.

This is why I will be joining demonstrations in London tomorrow to protest the massacre in Gaza. To do any less lowers me to the level of our immoral political establishment.

I urge anyone reading this to protest tomorrow and to support all subsequent demonstrations.

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The only way the lives of innocents in Gaza will be saved is if the force of domestic protest around the world is more powerful than the vested interests of the arms industry and the expediency gained by supporting U.S. foreign policy.  

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What will you do?

What is your limit?

When the dust finally settles in Gaza, how many more innocents will lie dead – and will you feel that you did all you could?

Please share this call to protest as widely as possible.

John Lynch

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