No hindrance placed in their way

Victory is near. So at least must the West Bank Israeli-Jewish settlers’ assess as they consume by fire, bullet and bulldozer Palestinian land, livelihoods – and lives. No hindrance placed in their way.

Struggling for food in Gaza

In Gaza, too, the death knell sounds as Israel busies itself with the dirty – but it must be done! – business of conducting a genocide against an already weak and stricken civilian population. Israel will show no mercy here. Mercy, a word absent from Israel’s lexicon.

The mission of the messianic Jews, supported by a wider constituency of racist-infused Zionists, nears, if not its immediate and final conclusion – the removal of Palestinians, by death or displacement from the land of Palestine - then at least a temporary way station wherein it can re-gather its strength, preparatory to its next genocidal onslaught. Sixty-thousand reservists are being called up, preparation for an attack on Gaza City.

Something in the order of a million exhausted, malnourished, maimed, traumatised people, weary beyond what that designation– weary – is capable of conveying, variously accept, or seek to avoid, their fate.

We will watch the displacement and genocide on our screens. Hear of it via the radio waves. Paralysed by anger and grief, recognising our ultimate impotence. The means we deployed to halt and turn back Israel’s genocidal project, have not prevailed.

Willed impotence

But our politicians, their impotence in the face of the evil being perpetrated before their eyes, is of a different order: it is a willed impotence. A conscious turning away from deploying effective agency, a refusal to use the instruments available to them to, at the very least, impose costs upon Israel that have some bite. 

The UK is not short of potential pressure points, especially if amplified by similar action across Europe. A Europe our PM claims to want to get closer to, but, seemingly, not in terms of meaningful action against Israel.

Measures against Israel, that are within the power of the UK to implement include, but are not limited to:

• Cutting all military ties with Israel. That UK planes are supporting Israel’s genocide in various ways should be a source of profound shame

• All Israeli ministers and public figures who have supported the genocide should be barred, not just token extreme-right ministers. 

• Support the ICJ and ICC cases against Israel and its officials, for illegal occupation, genocide and war crimes

• Immediately disqualify Elbit Systems from a £2 billion bid for a contract for training British soldiers - see recent article in Middle East Eye 

• Require all pro-Israeli lobby groups to declare their funders – not the case at present

• Lobby for the expulsion of Israel from the UN

• Impose a trade ban with Israel – exports and imports

• Grant no immunity to Israelis from arrest and prosecution for war crimes where there are powers to underpin such proceedings.

• Designate Israel a national security threat. at least as the same level of Russia and Iran, in view of its meddling in British politics and political parties.

  
  

Form over substance

In place of substantive action, we must instead witness the verbal gyrations of our Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, as he mouths what amount to empty slogans – a flagrant breach of international law - in response to the Netanyahu government approving a vast new settlement scheme in the West Bank. This will cut the West Bank in half, severing Palestinians ability to come together – the necessary prelude to organising, concerted political action.

Atop this cracked edifice of perfidy, stands the President of the United Sates, Donald Trump. He alone has the power to force halt to Israel’s exterminatory progress but does not trouble himself on that account.

His motives? No doubt contradictory, evanescent.  Difficult to discern an underpinning rationale beyond that of his preening, narcissistic self-regard.

We can look forward to watching him receive the Nobel Peace Prize in due course.

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Note: this article was first published on Bernard Spiegal's blog: https://bernardspiegal.com/