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Each twist of the news from Gaza illuminates more grotesque moral bankruptcy, the West’s complicity in the live streamed genocide of the Palestinian people has defrocked the world’s self proclaimed moral policemen forever.
Israel stands accused of genocide and the West stands alongside them, for they have offered military, political and media support for Israel’s brutal and murderous campaign at every turn.
With South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) looming , a rattled David Cameron suddenly remembered that Israel (as an occupying power) has had Gaza surrounded for 17 years, and was thus legally bound to provide basic services.
This tiny admission (extracted from Cameron under intense questioning) reverses Keir Starmer’s infamous assertion that Israel ‘had the right’ to cut off food, fuel and medical supplies from Gaza – an odd stance for a human rights lawyer, but Starmer is primarily a flunky, beholden to all the projects and shibboleths of western imperialism.
This evening the U.N. security council passed a resolution to protect Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. Israel’s sailors already have the U.S Navy, British threats and a ‘coalition of the willing’ to protect them.
By contrast the U.N. security council has failed to pass a single resolution to end the mass slaughter of defenceless Palestinian women and children in Gaza – the UK forming a lonely coalition of the unwilling alongside Israel and the USA – the grisly triumvirate of ethnic cleansing.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Six weeks ago, the UK co-submitted accusations to the ICJ. Myanmar was charged with committing genocide against the Rohingya, by inflicting “a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes, and the induction of essential medical services below minimum requirement” – a fraction of what Israel is doing in Gaza right now. The UK understands what genocide is, it just doesn’t care when Israel is doing it.
The UK wants to prevent others caring about Israel’s genocide too, rushing through anti-BDS legislation to ban public bodies (including elected councils) from boycotting, disinvesting or sanctioning any nation – unless the UK government agrees with it. In the U.S. any professed solidarity with Palestine can cost you your job, student bodies are banned from campuses and the Israeli lobby uses every media platform to bully and smear all critics of Israel.
It will be hard to hoist the battle banners of ‘defending democracy’ after this, indeed the UK Home Office wants to force pro-Palestinian protesters to pay for the massive and wilfully intimidatory police presence at their marches – thus making protest the sole preserve of the rich.
Everyone knows that charging Israel with genocide is an open and shut case as the evidence is overwhelming, the only question is whether the USA and Israel can nobble the judges at the ICJ to delay or skew the verdict.
If the West succeeds in blocking all censure of Israel at the ICJ then humanitarian law is lost. If the corrupt political and media class of the West can criminalise and sideline all protest against Israel then democracy is finished.
One is reminded of humanity’s last hope, the Ironclad Thunderchild tilting towards the martian fighting machines in War Of the Worlds. Will South Africa’s courageous stance be swatted aside as easily as the martians destroyed the Thunderchild or will this legal case mark a turning point in this war of the worlds?
Will the ICJ finally prove to Israel that the world does have rules, that truth transcends geopolitical gambits and that those who commit fascist atrocities in Gaza will be held to account? Or will it uphold Israel’s view that it can do as it pleases, that truth is defined only by the powerful and that consequences are just for little people who don’t have mighty armies and powerful partners in crime.
The world holds its breath.
Go Thunderchild go…
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