Why the wall of silence on the Gaza genocide is finally starting to crack
16 May 2025
As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass
death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are
tentatively starting to speak up
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-genocide-wall-silence-finally-starting-crack-why
Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would
take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has
been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.
Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.
The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial
Times, was first to break
ranks last week to
condemn "the West’s shameful silence" in the face of Israel’s
murderous assault on the tiny enclave.
In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the
FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly
"complicit" as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to
genocide, and noted that the goal was to "drive Palestinians from their
land", an allusion to ethnic cleansing.
Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have
been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from
Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.
So parlous is the state of the western reporting, from
a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need
to seize on any small signs of progress.
Next, the Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and his ministers were driven by a "dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding
Jewish settlements there".
At the weekend, the Independent decided the "deafening silence on Gaza" had to
end. It was "time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to
demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the
enclave."
Actually much of the world woke up many, many months
ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering
through the past 19 months of genocide.
Then on Monday - the supposedly liberal Guardian
voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing
"genocide", though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a
question.
It wrote of Israel: "Now it plans a Gaza without
Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies
act to stop the horror, if not now?”
The paper could more properly have asked a different
question: Why have Israel’s western allies – as well as media like the Guardian
and FT – waited 19 months to speak up against the horror?
And, predictably bringing up the rear, was the BBC. On
Wednesday, the BBC’s PM programme chose to give top billing to testimony from Tom Fletcher, the United Nation’s
humanitarian affairs chief, to the Security Council. Presenter Evan Davis said
the BBC had decided to "do something a little unusual".
Unusual indeed. It played Fletcher’s speech in full – all 12 and a half
minutes of it. That included Fletcher's comment: "For those killed and
those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you
act – decisively – to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international
humanitarian law?"
We had gone in less than a week from the word
"genocide" being taboo in relation to Gaza to it becoming almost
mainstream.
Growing cracks
Cracks are evident in the British parliament too. Mark
Pritchard, a Conservative MP and life-long Israel supporter, stood up from the
back benches to admit he had been wrong about Israel, and condemned it
“for what it is doing to the Palestinian people”.
He was one of more than a dozen Tory MPs and peers in
the House of Lords, all formerly staunch defenders of Israel, who urged British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to
immediately recognise a Palestinian state.
Their move followed an open letter published by 36
members of the Board of Deputies, a 300-member body that claims to represent
British Jews, dissenting from its continuing support for the slaughter.
The letter warned: "Israel’s soul is being ripped out."
Pritchard told fellow MPs it was time to "stand
up for humanity, for us being on the right side of history, for having the
moral courage to lead."
Sadly, there is no sign of that yet. Research
published last week, based on Israeli tax authority data, showed Starmer’s
government has been lying even about the highly limited restrictions on arms
sales to Israel it claimed to have imposed last year.
Despite an ostensible ban on shipments of weapons that
could be used in Gaza, Britain has covertly
exported more than
8,500 separate munitions to Israel since the ban.
This week more details emerged. According to figures
published by The National, the current government exported more weapons to Israel in the three months after the ban came into effect than the previous Conservative
government did through the whole of 2020 to 2023.
So shameful is the UK’s support for Israel in the
midst of what the International Court of Justice – the World Court – has
described as a "plausible genocide" that Starmer’s government needs
to pretend it is doing something, even as it actually continues to arm that
genocide.
More than 40 MPs wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy last week
calling for him to respond to allegations that he had misled the public and
parliament. "The public deserves to know the full scale of the UK's
complicity in crimes against humanity," they wrote.
There are growing rumblings elsewhere. This week
France’s President Emmanuel Macron called Israel’s complete blockade on aid into Gaza
"shameful and unacceptable”. He added: "My job is to do everything I
can to make it stop." "Everything" seemed to amount to nothing
more than mooting possible economic sanctions.
Still, the rhetorical shift was striking. Italy’s
prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, similarly denounced the blockade, calling it
"unjustifiable". She added: "I have always recalled the urgency of
finding a way to end the hostilities and respect international law and
international humanitarian law."
"International law”? Where has that been for the
past 19 months?
There was a similar change of priorities across
the Atlantic. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen, for example, recently dared to call Israel’s actions in Gaza "ethnic
cleansing".
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a bellwether of the Beltway
consensus, gave Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, an unusually
tough grilling. Amanpour all but accused her of lying about Israel starving children.
Meanwhile, Josep Borrell, the recently departed head
of European Union foreign policy, broke another taboo last week by directly
accusing Israel of preparing a genocide in Gaza.
"Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so
clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide,"
he said, adding: "We’re facing the largest ethnic
cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War."
Borrell, of course, has no influence over EU policy at
this point.
A death camp
This is all painfully slow progress, but it does
suggest that a tipping point may be near.
If so, there are several reasons. One - the most
evident in the mix - is US President Donald Trump.
It was easier for the Guardian, the FT and old-school
Tory MPs to watch the extermination of Gaza’s Palestinians in silence when it
was kindly Uncle Joe Biden and the US military industrial complex behind
it.
Unlike his predecessor, Trump too often forgets the
bit where he is supposed to put a gloss on Israeli crimes, or distance the US
from them, even as Washington ships the weapons to carry out those
crimes.
But also, there are plenty of indications that Trump -
with his constant craving to be seen as the top dog – is increasingly annoyed at being publicly outfoxed by Netanyahu.
This week, as Trump headed to the Middle East, his
administration secured the release of Israeli soldier Edan Alexander,
the last living US citizen in captivity in Gaza, by bypassing Israel and
negotiating directly with Hamas.
In his comments on the release, Trump insisted it was time to "put an end to this very brutal
war"– a remark he had very obviously not coordinated with Netanyahu.
Notably, Israel is not on Trump’s Middle East
schedule.
Right now seems a relatively safe moment to adopt a
more critical stance towards Israel, as presumably the FT and Guardian
appreciate.
Then there is the fact that Israel’s genocide is
reaching its endpoint. No food, water or medicines have entered Gaza for more
than two months. Everyone is malnourished. It is unclear, given Israel’s
destruction of Gaza’s health system, how many have already died from
hunger.
But the pictures of skin-and-bones children emerging
from Gaza are uncomfortably reminiscent of 80-year-old images of skeletal Jewish children
imprisoned in Nazi camps.
It is a reminder that Gaza - strictly blockaded by
Israel for 16 years before Hamas’ 7 October 2023 breakout - has been
transformed over the past 19 months from a concentration camp into a death
camp.
Parts of the media and political class know mass death
in Gaza cannot be obscured for much longer, not even after Israel has barred
foreign journalists from the enclave and murdered most of the Palestinian
journalists trying to record the genocide.
Cynical political and media actors are trying to get
in their excuses before it is too late to show remorse.
The 'Gaza war' myth
And finally there is the fact that Israel has declared its readiness to take hands-on responsibility
for the extermination in Gaza by, in its words, "capturing" the tiny
territory.
The long-anticipated "day after" looks like
it is about to arrive.
For 20 years, Israel and western capitals have
conspired in the lie that Gaza’s occupation ended in 2005, when Israel’s then
prime minister, Ariel Sharon, pulled out a few thousand Jewish settlers and
withdrew Israeli soldiers to a highly fortified perimeter encaging the enclave.
In a ruling last year, the World Court gave this claim short shrift, emphasising that Gaza,
as well as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, had
never stopped being under Israeli occupation, and that the occupation must end
immediately.
The truth is that, even before the 2023 Hamas attacks,
Israel had been besieging Gaza by land, sea and air for many, many years.
Nothing – people or trade – went in or out without the Israeli military’s
say-so.
Israeli officials instituted a secret policy of putting the population there
on a strict "diet" – a war crime then as now – one that ensured most
of Gaza’s young became progressively more malnourished.
Drones whined constantly overhead, as they do now,
watching the population from the skies 24 hours a day and occasionally raining
down death. Fishermen were shot and their boats sunk for trying to fish their
own waters. Farmers’ crops were destroyed by herbicides sprayed from Israeli planes.
And when the mood took it, Israel sent in fighter jets
to bomb the enclave or sent soldiers in on military operations, killing hundreds of civilians at a time.
When Palestinians in Gaza went out week after week
to stage protests close to the perimeter fence of their
concentration camp, Israeli snipers shot them, killing some 200 and crippling many thousands
more.
Yet, despite all this, Israel and western capitals
insisted on the story that Hamas "ruled" Gaza, and that it alone was
responsible for what went on there.
That fiction was very important to the western powers.
It allowed Israel to evade accountability for the crimes against humanity
committed in Gaza over the past two decades – and it allowed the West to avoid
complicity charges for arming the criminals.
Instead, the political and media class perpetuated the myth that Israel was engaged in a
"conflict" with Hamas – as well as intermittent "wars" in
Gaza – even as Israel’s own military termed its operations to destroy whole
neighbourhoods and kill their residents “mowing the lawn”.
Israel, of course, viewed Gaza as its lawn to mow. And
that is precisely because it never stopped occupying the enclave.
Even today western media outlets collude in the fiction that Gaza is free from Israeli
occupation by casting the slaughter there - and the starvation of the
population - as a “war”.
Loss of cover story
But the "day after" - signalled by Israel’s
promised "capture" and "reoccupation" of Gaza - brings a
conundrum for Israel and its western sponsors.
Till now Israel’s every atrocity has been justified by
Hamas’ violent breakout on 7 October 2023.
Israel and its supporters have insisted that Hamas
must return the Israelis it took captive before there can be some undefined
"peace". At the same time, Israel has also maintained that Gaza must
be destroyed at all costs to root out Hamas and eliminate it.
These two goals never looked consistent – not least
because the more Palestinian civilians Israel killed “rooting out” Hamas, the
more young men Hamas recruited seeking vengeance.
The constant stream of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli
leaders made clear that they believed there were no civilians in Gaza - no
"uninvolved" - and that the enclave should be levelled and the
population treated like “human animals”, punished with “no food, water or
fuel”.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reiterated that approach last week, vowing that “Gaza will
be entirely destroyed” and that its people would be ethnically cleansed – or,
as he put it, forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”.
Israeli officials have echoed him, threatening to “flatten” Gaza if the hostages are
not released this week. But in truth, the captives held by Hamas are just a
convenient pretext.
Smotrich was more honest in observing that the
hostages’ release was “not the most important thing”. His view is apparently
shared by the Israeli military, which has reportedly put that aim last in a
list of six “war” objectives.
More important to the military are "operational
control” of
Gaza, “demilitarization of the territory” and “concentration and movement of
the population”.
With Israel about to be indisputably, visibly in
direct charge of Gaza again – with the cover stories stripped away of a “war”,
of the need to eliminate of Hamas, of civilian casualties as “collateral
damage” – Israel’s responsibility for the genocide will be incontestable too,
as will the West’s active collusion.
That was why more than 250 former
officials with
Mossad, Israel’s spy agency – including three of its former heads – signed a
letter this week decrying Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in early March and
its return to “war”.
The letter called Israel’s official objectives
“unattainable”.
Similarly, the Israeli media reports large numbers of Israel’s military reservists
are no longer showing up when called for a return to duty in Gaza.
Ethnic cleansing
Israel’s western patrons must now grapple with
Israel’s “plan” for the ruined territory. Its outline has been coming more
sharply into focus in recent days.
In January Israel formally outlawed the United Nations refugee agency Unrwa that
feeds and cares for the large proportion of the Palestinian population driven
off their historic lands by Israel in earlier phases of its decades-long
colonisation of historic Palestine.
Gaza is packed with such refugees – the outcome of
Israel’s biggest ethnic cleansing programme in 1948, at its creation as a
“Jewish state”.
Removing Unrwa had been a long-held ambition, a move
by Israel designed to help rid it of the yoke of aid agencies that have been
caring for Palestinians – and thereby helping them to resist Israel’s efforts
at ethnic cleansing – as well as monitoring Israel’s adherence, or rather lack
of it, to international law.
For the ethnic cleansing and genocide programmes in
Gaza to be completed, Israel has needed to produce an alternative system to
Unrwa’s.
Last week, it approved a scheme in which it intends to use private
contractors, not the UN, to deliver small quantities of food and water to
Palestinians. Israel will allow in 60 trucks a day - barely a tenth of the
absolute minimum required, according to the UN.
There are several catches. To stand any hope of
qualifying for this very limited aid, Palestinians will need to collect it from
military distribution points located in a small area at the southern tip of the
Gaza strip.
In other words, some two million Palestinians will
have to crowd into a location that has no chance of accommodating them all, and
even then will have only a tenth of the aid they need.
They will have to relocate too without any guarantee
from Israel that it won’t continue bombing the “humanitarian zones” they have
been herded into.
These military distribution zones just so happen to be
right next to Gaza’s sole, short border with Egypt - exactly where Israel has
been seeking to drive the Palestinians over the past 19 months in the hope
of forcing Egypt to open the border so the people of Gaza
can be ethnically cleansed into Sinai.
Under Israel’s scheme, Palestinians will be screened
in these military hubs using biometric data before they stand any hope of
receiving minimum calorie-controlled handouts of food.
Once inside the hubs, they can be arrested and shipped
off to one of Israel’s torture camps.
Just last week Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published testimony from an Israeli soldier turned
whistleblower - confirming accounts from doctors and other guards - that
torture and abuse are rife against Palestinians, including civilians, at Sde
Teiman, the most notorious of the camps.
War on aid
Last Friday, shortly after Israel announced its "aid" plan, it fired a missile
into an Unrwa centre in Jabaliya camp, destroying its food distribution centre
and warehouse.
Then on Saturday, Israel bombed tents used for preparing food in Khan Younis and Gaza
City. It has been targeting charity kitchens and bakeries to close them down,
in an echo of its campaign of destruction against Gaza’s hospitals and health
system.
In recent days, a third of UN-supported community kitchens – the
population’s last life line – have closed because their stores of food are
depleted, as is their access to fuel.
According to the UN agency OCHA, that number is rising "by the day", leading to
"widespread" hunger.
The UN reported this week that nearly half a million people in
Gaza – a fifth of the population – faced "catastrophic hunger".
Predictably, Israel and its ghoulish apologists are
making light of this sea of immense suffering. Jonathan Turner, chief executive
of UK Lawyers for Israel, argued that critics were unfairly condemning Israel for
starving Gaza’s population, and ignoring the health benefits of reducing
“obesity” among Palestinians.
In a joint statement last week, 15 UN agencies and
more than 200 charities and humanitarian groups denounced Israel’s “aid” plan. The UN children’s fund
Unicef warned that Israel was forcing Palestinians to choose between
“displacement and death”.
But worse, Israel is setting up its stall once again
to turn reality on its head.
Those Palestinians who refuse to cooperate with its
“aid” plan will be blamed for their own starvation. And international agencies
who refuse to go along with Israeli criminality will be smeared both as
“antisemitic” and as responsible for the mounting toll of starvation on Gaza’s
population.
There is a way to stop these crimes degenerating
further. But it will require western politicians and journalists to find far
more courage than they have dared muster so far. It will need more than
rhetorical flourishes. It will need more than public handwringing.
Are they capable of more? Don’t
hold your breath.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario