Home » Posts tagged 'Gaza'

Tag Archives: Gaza

Disproportionate slaughter?

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, says “There is nothing more atrocious and preposterous” than the lawsuit filed in the international court of justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocidal actions against Palestinians in the Gaza war.

Israel is a Jewish state. The Nazis committed genocide against the Jews, murdering 6 million of them. That historical tragedy is called the Holocaust – with a capital H.

I say there is nothing more atrocious and preposterous than Israel doing the same to the Palestinians.

Some have said the Israeli response to the Hamas attack is “disproportionate”. That’s not good enough, is it? We’ve all seen what it is: it’s a holocaust. Even if they haven’t reached 6 million.

We should call it by that name. And Israel should be held accountable.

No justice, no peace: but will Netanyahu ever have to answer for his actions?

A warning from Shakespeare’s King Henry V for Netanyahu. Williams, a soldier on the battlefield, is talking about who will be held responsible, on the day of judgment, if the King is leading them to fight an unjust war (although Williams doesn’t realise he’s talking to the king himself):

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection. (William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4:1.)

Netanyahu may not be worried by this ghoulish Christian view of the final judgment. For one thing, he may have a different tradition in mind:

Thus says the Lord of Hosts, “I will punish what Amalek did to Israel in opposing [the Israelites] on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling ox and sheep, camel and ass. (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, 1 Samuel 15:2-3.)

But I somehow doubt he’s thinking of that either. He just wants to kill Palestinians. And there’s nobody to hold him to account for that.

Certainly not the UN.

Telling the truth: the undiplomatic diplomat

Following the horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s collective punishment of innocent civilians in Gaza in response, Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until yesterday, has said four things some of which, up to now, have been almost unmentionable. But, daring to say them,  he is certainly a hero.

He has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. You’re not allowed to even suggest that Israel could ever be guilty of genocide or ethnic cleansing, after the mass slaughter of the Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. But Mokhiber says what is happening in Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide”, and he also accuses the UN of failing to prevent it.

He accuses “the US, the UK and much of Europe” not only of that failure but also of “arming Israel’s assault and providing political and diplomatic cover for it.”

He says:

The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt.

He suggests a solution:

We must support the establishment of a single, democratic secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews … and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land.

These are the things he’s said.

He’s a hero.

Top UN official in New York steps down citing ‘genocide’ of Palestinian civilians: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/un-official-resigns-israel-hamas-war-palestine-new-york?embed=true