Newsletter comment from 2nd April
On Sunday, White House spokespersons were faithfully repeating Israeli justification for the destruction of Al-Shifa hospital, while admitting that they had no means of verifying it. Eyewitness accounts tell of the IDF carrying out summary executions of civilians, including medical staff.
The killing of the Western aid workers will be explained away as a tragic accident despite the fact that it is in line with the IDF’s deadly attacks on UNRWA’s Palestinian staff and on all other means of distributing aid in Gaza. Israel aim is unambiguous: it is to bomb and starve the population to turn against Hamas. It is not working.
The US cover-up is easily explained. It had just transferred $2.5 billion worth of weapons to Israel. The Washington Post (29th March) reports: “The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter. The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” This comes on top of a $14.5 billion arms transfer earlier in the war and exposes the hypocrisy of the Biden administration’s professed disagreement with Israeli efforts to destroy Gaza. And the UK is continuing to provide weapons despite the Foreign Office’s own lawyers advising that this is almost certain in contravention of international law (see Owen Jones report)
The US and its allies parachuting food aid and building a floating dock on the coast of Gaza to ship pathetically small quantities of aid from Cyprus are utterly unconvincing theatrics aimed at placating a growing worldwide protest movement that demands that the Western powers halt Israel’s genocidal campaign. So far, Israel has killed over 32,000 Palestinians, injured over 75,000 and many more are likely to die from further Israel’s bombardments and its blocking of food and water.
There are signs of nervousness and divisions among the West’s ruling elites. The full blowback from Israel’s war is yet to be seen but outrage on the streets will not stay on the streets. On Sunday, in Turkey’s local elections, the Islamist New Welfare Party gained support at Erdogan’s expense, in part, because of the latter’s passivity in the face of Israel’s war.
Israel is now a pariah state. It is drenched in the blood of Palestinians, and inseparably linked in the eyes of future generations not with the Holocaust, a European crime for which redemption cannot come from a racist state, but with the liberal democracies’ long history of murderous wars against the colonised. The “defence of Western values,” the brand name under which the US-dominated international order is constantly justified, has been irreparably damaged. The millions around the world who chant, “We are all Palestinians,” know that delivering justice for the Palestinians is integral to the struggle for a world free of racism, colonialism and militarism.
