Is the tide turning
on Israel?
Western leaders seem finally to be waking up
to the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has
unleashed upon Gaza
Derek Sayer / February 21, 2024 / 8 min read
MIDDLE EASTWAR ZONESHUMAN RIGHTS
Damage in Gaza caused by Israeli airstrikes, October 2023. Photo courtesy Islamic
Relief Canada.
After four months of war, some Western leaders seem finally to be waking up to
the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has unleashed upon Gaza, in which our
governments and civil societies—our corporations, our news organizations, our
social media, our educational and cultural institutions—are unarguably complicit.
The West has supplied the bombs, tanks, drones, and Hellfire missiles with which
the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has killed at least 28,473 Palestinians, injured
another 68,146, displaced 90 percent of the population, and rendered much of the
Gaza Strip uninhabitable. Over 12,300 of the dead are children or young teenagers.
These are the known casualties, as of February 13; thousands more people are
missing, presumed buried under the rubble. According to Israel’s social security
agency Bituah Leumi, by comparison, Hamas’s October 7 attack killed “695 Israeli
civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners,
giving a total of 1,139 deaths”—not 1,400, as was stated as recently as February
15 by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—an unknown but likely
substantial number of whom died from IDF friendly fire.
Comparisons may be odious, but I am not the only one making them. Benjamin
Netanyahu, Joe Biden, and other defenders of Israel’s actions in Gaza have
constantly reiterated that October 7 was “the deadliest day for Jews since the
Holocaust,” coopting the memory of the most horrific crime of the twentieth
century to justify what threatens to be the worst genocide so far of the twenty-
first.
But however horrific Hamas’s crimes were on October 7, they are dwarfed by
Israel’s retribution, which matches them in its callous brutality but is infinitely
greater in its scale. It seems the IDF has taken Netanyahu’s injunction to
“remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible” literally: “Now go,
attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare
them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels
and donkeys,” says the relevant passage from the first book of Samuel.
For every Israeli killed on October 7, the IDF have now killed 27 Gazans. For every
Israeli civilian killed on October 7, the IDF have now killed 40 Gazans. For every
Israeli child killed on October 7, the IDF has now killed 342 Gazan children.
You might have seen one of them, 12-year-old Sidra Hassouna, hanging dead from
a wall in Gaza, ribbons of flesh all that was left of her legs after Israel struck Rafah
in a “complex overnight operation” to free two hostages, while a worldwide
audience of 123.7 million people were glued to the 2024 US Super Bowl, making
it “the highest number of people watching the same broadcast in the history of
television.”
Western representatives at the UN have repeatedly prevented the Security
Council from ordering a ceasefire that might have halted this carnage. Western
media have boosted the Israeli narrative through brazenly one-sided reporting
(e.g. at CBC, BBC, CNN), while our universities, museums, film studios, art
galleries, professional associations, and a host of private employers have
compliantly suppressed all pro-Palestinian speech on grounds of “antisemitism.”
The ICJ ruling that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is committing genocide in
Gaza vindicated Israel’s critics, but has so far done little to alter the situation on
the ground. Canada’s evasive response, in which Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie
Joly reiterated Israel’s “right to defend itself” in the face of “Hamas’s brutal attacks
of October 7,” was typical of official Western reaction. Immediately after the court
delivered its verdict, the US, UK, Canada, and 13 other “Western democracies”
diverted attention from the ruling by suspending funding to UNRWA, the principal
relief agency in Gaza upon which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives
depend, on the basis of Israel’s unevidenced allegation that a dozen UNRWA staff
(out of 13,000) had participated in Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Such is the power of the spectre of October 7, which up till now has been a black
hole into which everything—reason, morality, proportionality, context, or any
other perspectives on the conflict—get sucked and disappear.
Palestinians inspect the ruins of Aklouk Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in
Gaza City on October 8, 2023. Photo courtesy the Palestinian News & Information
Agency-WAFA/Wikimedia Commons.
Is the tide turning?
When the Spanish and Belgian prime ministers denounced “innocent killings of
civilians” back in November, Netanyahu rebuked them because they “did not place
total responsibility on Hamas for the crimes against humanity it perpetrated:
massacring Israeli citizens and using Palestinians as human shields.” As Israel
seems poised for a final solution (“absolute victory”) by assaulting Rafah, where
an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians the IDF has driven from their homes are
holed up in conditions of unimaginable squalor, famine, and disease, that
argument seems finally to be losing its stranglehold over rational or moral debate.
Maintaining that “The expanded Israeli military operation in the Rafah area poses
a grave and imminent threat that the international community must urgently
confront,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro
Sánchez wrote Ursula van der Leyden on February 13 demanding that “the
European Commission urgently review whether Israel is complying with its
obligations to respect human rights in Gaza.” Along with Belgium, Luxembourg,
Norway, and Portugal, Ireland and Spain have been among a handful of European
countries who have refused to join the boycott of UNRWA and publicly criticized
Israel for its military response to October 7.
More recent converts to the chorus of belated concern include the EU’s top
diplomat Josep Borrell, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, French Foreign
Minister Stéphane Séjourné, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock,
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Mélanie Joly, who is rapidly
developing into Canada’s very own Susan Collins. These all speak for states who
have up till now backed “Operation Swords of Iron,” as Israel’s Gaza offensive is
officially codenamed, to the hilt.
On February 14, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Canadian Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau, and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon went
further, issuing a joint statement calling for a ceasefire. As the Times of
Israel noted, the statement “did not mention removing the terror group [Hamas]
from power, as a trilateral statement in December had, but rather focused on
civilians in Rafah.”
Though the leaders reiterated that they “unequivocally condemn Hamas for its
terror attacks on Israel on October 7” and demanded that “Hamas must lay down
its arms and release all hostages immediately,” the statement’s main focus was no
longer on Hamas but Israel. The settler colony troika adopted a markedly different
tone toward the ICJ’s measures than Mélanie Joly’s earlier statement of January
26:
There is growing international consensus. Israel must listen to its friends and
it must listen to the international community. The protection of civilians is
paramount and a requirement under international humanitarian law.
Palestinian civilians cannot be made to pay the price of defeating Hamas.
An immediate humanitarian ceasefire is urgently needed. Hostages must be
released. The need for humanitarian assistance in Gaza has never been
greater. Rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian relief must be provided to
civilians. The International Court of Justice has been clear: Israel must ensure
the delivery of basic services and essential humanitarian assistance and must
protect civilians. The Court’s decisions on provisional measures are binding.
Perhaps more significantly—time alone will tell—a visibly exasperated Joe Biden,
whose public backing for Israel has up till now been (in his own words)
“unwavering,” told White House Reporters on February 8: “I’m of the view, as you
know, that the conduct of the [Israeli] response in the Gaza Strip has been over the
top.” The White House meantime leaked that in private, Joe calls “that guy”
Netanyahu an “asshole.”
Speaking in Tel Aviv a day earlier, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
had warned: “the daily toll that [Israel’s] military operations continue to take on
innocent civilians remains too high …”
Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way on October 7. The hostages
have been dehumanized every day since. But that cannot be a license to
dehumanize others. The overwhelming majority of people in Gaza had nothing
to do with the attacks of October 7, and the families in Gaza whose survival
depends on deliveries of aid from Israel are just like our families. They’re
mothers and fathers, sons and daughters—want to earn a decent living, send
their kids to school, have a normal life. That’s who they are; that’s what they
want. And we cannot, we must not lose sight of that. We cannot, we must not
lose sight of our common humanity.
An Israeli artillery unit in action near the Gaza Strip. Photo courtesy IDF
Spokesperson’s Unit/Wikimedia Commons.
Colonialist legacies
It’s nice to see Western politicians admit that Palestinians are people rather than
(as Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called them) “human animals.” It would
be nicer still if the words were matched by deeds—the suspension of arms
shipments to Israel, the immediate restoration of UNRWA funding, and Western
support for a binding UN Security Council resolution on a ceasefire and
implementation of resolution 242 (1967) mandating Israel’s withdrawal to its
1967 borders would be a start. Despite Biden’s and Blinken’s words, the US used
its veto to block a Security Council ceasefire resolution for a third time on February
20.
But one has to ask: what took you all so long? Where have you been these last four
months (these 57 years of illegal Israeli occupation)? Whether or not the ICJ in the
end classifies them as genocidal, what has blinded you to the palpable war crimes
playing out live from Gaza on our screens in real time, that have horrified the rest
of the world and brought hundreds of thousands of protestors out on Western
streets week after week, only to be maligned by you as antisemites?
These questions might especially be asked of otherwise (relatively) progressive
Western politicians, who are on the center-left of their countries’ political
spectrum yet have stood foursquare behind the most right-wing government in
Israel’s history while it methodically obliterated Gaza and canceled its people: Joe
Biden and other Democrat leaders (Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer)
in the US, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in the UK, Justin Trudeau in Canada.
Could an embarrassing part of the answer be that “the West,” or what is more
accurately conceived as the Global North, is made up largely of imperialist states
that not so long ago possessed colonies spread across the Global South, and their
former settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and above all the United
States)? That Israelis are in some obscure way felt to be, in a phrase once beloved
of British supporters of Ian Smith’s rogue UDI regime in what was then Rhodesia,
“our kith and kin,” in a way that Palestinians (Arabs, Muslims) are not? Why else
would we be prepared to believe the most ludicrous of Israeli atrocity
stories while for so long ignoring the mountain of evidence of war crimes
committed against Palestinians now and previously by the IDF?
We need seriously to consider the disturbing proposition that it is not
contemporary economic interests or geopolitical alliances, nor even the
undoubted power of pro-Zionist lobby groups like the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPIC) or Canada’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA),
that are the decisive factors in Western support for Israel, but the deeper, affectual
bonds of a shared legacy of colonialism. That what most closely and insidiously
binds the West to Israel, at the end of the day, is a deeply embedded culture of
white supremacy in which “the natives” are indeed regarded (in Benjamin
Netanyahu’s words) as children of darkness, capable of any vileness, while we are
the progressive children of light, pure as the driven snow.
