The mass starvation and daily massacre of Palestinians in Gaza are setting the moral tone for the rest of the world. Governments which make only grudging, punch-pulling efforts to stop the butchery are complicit in a war crime of the century.
The sadistic cruelty and acts of evil perpetrated daily in Gaza are watched by millions of people around the world, in a way that was not true of the worst atrocities in past ages. In Israel and, to a lesser degree, in the US, pictures of the savagery may be hidden from the public, but they are viewed with horror by the rest of the world.
“These are pictures reminiscent of concentration camp survivors, pictures from the Holocaust,” writes Gideon Levy in the Israeli daily Haaretz. “The skeletons of babies and infants, living and dead, whose bones stick out through wasted fat tissue or muscles that have withered, their eyes and mouths opened wide, their expressions dead.”
Previous generations had the excuse that they did not know what was happening during the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-16 and of six million Jews 30 years later. Today we do know about the relentless deaths in appalling detail, making it all the more shocking that Western leaders have openly or covertly backed the Israeli campaign.
Unsurprisingly, President Donald Trump has given full support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his political doppelganger. More hypocritical are European leaders like Sir Keir Starmer, who finger-wags at Israel but treats protesters as terrorists.
Among those recently arrested are retired headmaster Jon Farley in Leeds, his offence being to carry a placard, drawn from an illustration in Private Eye, contrasting the banning of Palestine Action for spraying paint on military aircraft with UK government tolerance for Israeli forces “shooting Palestinians queuing for food”.
Yet the moral crisis posed by Gaza goes deeper than Starmer’s predictable lack of fixed principle and moral courage. “Governments do as much harm as they can and as much good as they must,” runs a cynical old journalistic saying. But the word “must” is important here, and public anger over Gaza has yet to over-boil to the point where Western governments feel that, in their own interests, they must genuinely put real pressure on the US and Israel to force a ceasefire.
As Greta Thunberg, the climate campaigner, asks: “If watching children being systematically starved, over two million people being systematically starved by Israel, is not enough to motivate you to get off the couch, then what is it going to take?”
Once again there is talk of a ceasefire but this has so far invariably turned out to be a smokescreen. A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the new text for a ceasefire agreement proposed by Hamas was something Israel could work with.
But Israel’s Channel 12 says a rapid deal was not within reach, with gaps remaining between the two sides, including over where the Israeli military should withdraw to during any truce. A Palestinian official said that the latest Hamas position was “flexible, positive and took into consideration the growing suffering in Gaza and the need to stop the starvation”.
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How has Netanyahu and his ethno-nationalist government, the most far right in Israel’s history, got away with the systematic destruction of Gaza and its people? Their most effective propaganda weapon has been to claim that anybody criticising Israel for its actions in Gaza is an antisemite. This demonstrably false argument has helped silence politicians and pundits throughout the West, though in most cases there was not much to silence.
This self-serving self-censorship remains strong in the UK, but is visibly breaking down in the US, especially within the Jewish community itself. Ezra Klein in the New York Times writes: “The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews. Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. And there will, someday soon, be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism.”
It was Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor which highlighted the disintegration of this consensus. He declared that, if elected mayor, Netanyahu would face arrest on war crimes charges if he set foot in New York City.
Klein emphasises the deep rift that has opened between different generations: “Many older Jews I know are shocked and scared by Mamdani’s victory. Israel, to them, is the world’s only reliable refuge for the Jewish people. They see opposition to Israel as a cloak for antisemitism.”
But he says the younger generation feels differently: “Many younger Jews I know voted for Mamdani. They are not afraid of him. What they fear is a future in which Israel is an apartheid state ruling over ruins in Gaza and Bantustans in the West Bank. They fear what that means for anti-Jewish violence all over the world. They fear what that will do – what it has already done – to the meaning of Jewishness. Their commitment to the basic ideals of liberalism is stronger than their commitment to what Israel has become.”
The moral, cultural and political earthquake in Gaza will inevitably send out even more destructive tremors. Netanyahu’s three trips to see Trump in Washington since the latter took office have produced no ceasefire and have been followed by an escalation in violence. “Voluntary transfer” of Palestinians from Gaza is increasingly likely – though there is nothing voluntary about the exodus of de-housed people fleeing starvation and death.
The Israeli Defence Ministry has set up a directorate to encourage emigration. The West Bank has already witnessed the biggest displacement of Palestinians since 1967.
Gaza may be destroyed, but the destruction is not going to end there.
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