An historical evaluation and contextualization of the present Israeli assault on Gaza and that of the previous three ones since 2006 expose clearly the Israeli genocidal policy there. An incremental policy of massive killing that is less a product of a callous intention as it is the inevitable outcome of Israel’s overall strategy towards Palestine in general and the areas it occupied in 1967, in particular.
The 1998 Rome Statute, the International Criminal Court’s founding charter, states that one of the critical ICC’s tasks is that “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished.” However, under pressure from the US and the European Community, the ICC has avoided opening an investigation into alleged war crimes in Gaza. By doing so, the ICC is not living up to its mandate.
While the staggering scale and wickedness of Israel’s violence is treated with effective impunity – ‘it’s a sovereign state, after all’ – spineless editors and stenographer ‘journalists’ are still paying lip-service over ‘Israel’s security’, while agonising over whether ‘we’ should even be speaking with, or recognising, Hamas.
Such is the reality of Israeli terrorism, Western subterfuge, and the media’s sacrificing of truth over what’s repeatedly deemed the ‘darker Hamas threat’. Predictably, almost none of this is up for serious discussion at the Guardian or BBC.
As the bombing continues I expect we’ll hear more reasons why the Palestinians are to blame for being bombed. An Israeli minister will say “These people in Gaza are always complaining that they live in a densely populated area, so we’re trying to help them out by reducing the population as much as we can to give them more space. But they’re STILL not happy. Some people are never satisfied.”
The blood of the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed by the so-called Israel Defence Forces since the beginning of the siege of Gaza, stains the hands of each and every politician who has done nothing to censure Israel for this cruel and illegal act of virtual imprisonment, or who has taken any kind of bribe to bolster his or her election-campaign coffers, in return for turning their backs on the quite obvious fact that Apartheid Israel has never had any intention other than to genocide the Palestinian people.
The US has ‘condemned’ Israel’s bombing of the UN school. Predictably, their short, strangled words have been matched by precisely no political action against Israel. No emergency gathering of international allies to organise sanctions. No freezing of assets. No arms embargo.
Just imagine the response had this and other such massacres been carried out by Iran or Syria.
Chaos reigns and spreads as enraged leaders in the US, Europe and their clients and allies pursue genocidal wars.
Mercenary wars in Syria; Israel’s terror bombing on Gaza; proxy wars in the Ukraine, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia.
Tens of millions of refugees flee scenes of total destruction. Nothing is sacred. There are no sanctuaries. Homes, schools, hospitals and entire families are targeted for destruction.
“The indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the targeting of objectives providing no effective military advantage, and the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian houses have been persistent features of Israel’s long-standing policy of punishing the entire population of the Gaza Strip, which, for over seven years, has been virtually imprisoned by Israeli imposed closure.”
“If we are to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed,” says Pilger at the start of the film, “What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have risen up against Israel’s huge military regime, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But, for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison.
Let’s be clear: the only people putting the Palestinians in danger are the Israelis. The only people killing innocent people are the Israelis. Hamas may not be the party that the chattering classes of the West would want to govern them, but they are democratically elected and they have as much right as Israel, Britain, France and America to fight against an oppressor that quite literally wants to ‘wipe them off the map.’
In his video piece, Snow speaks of a necessary ‘preparedness to listen, and watch and read’.
But surely journalists like Snow must also have a duty to read and watch and listen to what’s long been recorded about the true reasons for the murder of Gaza.
And if he did, it wouldn’t, with dutiful moral heart, take much additional effort to amplify the truth that America is not an ‘honest broker’. It is financing and backing Israel to the hilt. Therefore, it’s the problem.
These are desperately bad times. The government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives. An atmosphere of hysteria is being deliberately provoked in Israel, and whole communities are being subject to collective punishment, a war crime. People are dying, and for what? To prevent a unity government of Fatah and Hamas?
