The Gaza genocide: Watching Atrocities and Doing Nothing
By Jeremy Salt
‘Too little too late’ is true but ‘never too late’ is also true. Governments and individual politicians still have time to show some spine by standing up to Israel.
“If this new attitude taken by western leaders is designed to fend off a reckoning, then it’s too little, too late.” So wrote Nesrine Malik in the Guardian recently, speaking of the announcement by the UK, France, and Canada that they were suspending trade talks with Israel and warning of “concrete action” unless aid was allowed into Gaza.
Separately, the UK announced sanctions against West Bank settlers – three individuals, two “illegal settler outposts” and two organizations “supporting violence against the Palestinians.”
As no one needs reminding, all settlements and ‘outposts’ in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law. Violence is hardly confined to two organizations, and only the Israeli regime draws a distinction between settlements and “illegal settler outposts. ”
This is a public relations smokescreen because the outposts are the stalking horses of government policy. The settlers in them are the pioneers carrying forward the process of absorbing all of Palestine. In virtually all cases, the ‘illegal’ outposts are eventually given the status of a ‘legal’ settlement. Step by step, this is how settlement has proceeded since 1967.
As for sanctioning three individuals, more than half a million settlers are living illegally on the West Bank. All should be subject to sanctions. More importantly, sweeping sanctions should be applied to the Israeli government.
It is the source of every crime committed on the West Bank. It allows the soldiers and settlers to bully, intimidate, and kill Palestinians. It allows them to burn Palestinian crops. It calls “settler outposts” illegal and then allows more of them to be constructed, 61 in 2024 compared to 32 in 2023.
Its goal is the ethnical cleansing of Palestinians, from Gaza, the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and pre-1967 Israel, if that point can finally be reached. It is playing a very sly, duplicitous, and brutal game.
It has just authorized the stampeding through East Jerusalem on ‘national flag’ day of thousands of inflamed sociopaths chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ and bullying all Palestinians in their way before massing in the Haram al Sharif. Their dancing and yelling in the Haram every year is basically a tribal war dance before the battle.
Nesrine Malik writes of “too little too late,” but it has been too late for more than a century now. ‘Too late’ has proceeded from stage to stage. ‘Too late’ to stop the beginning of the Nakba and ‘too late’ to stop all the heinous crimes committed since then. All the same, ‘too late’ is an excuse because the collective ‘west’ has always had the power to intervene and stop what was going on.
‘Western’ governments have not consistently ‘failed’ to use this power but have refused to use it, for reasons that have always been clear. Zionism was planted in Palestine with specific purposes in mind. It was the centrepiece of a choreographed reordering of the entire region, beginning with a change of name from the ‘near’ east to the ‘middle’ east, a phrase launched into the strategic mainstream by the American naval geographer Alfred Thayer Mahan, if in fact he did not coin it.
Oil had been discovered in 1908, and for many other reasons, the Middle East was too important to be allowed to go its own way. Controlling it consisted of breaking it up, creating new states, installing puppet kings, seeding it with military bases, and planting a Zionist colony in the middle. The US took over from the UK as the dominant power in the 1960s, but the collective interest was always ‘western.’
Israel, the outgrowth of ‘western’ strategic interests, never wanted to be part of the Middle East on terms acceptable to anyone in the region but corrupt, unrepresentative ‘governments.’ It was a hated outsider, and hated more because it never wanted or tried to fit in, only to impose its terms on everyone else, with the full support of its ‘western’ sponsors.
If they never punished it even for the worst of its crimes, that was because Israel gave the ‘west’ the division and regional instability it could exploit to its own advantage for generation after generation. It has taken the monstrosity of Gaza for this to finally rebound on the ‘west,’ in the so far small ways we are seeing now.
It has never been ‘too late’ to stop the crimes being committed by Israel. If they were not stopped, it was because these crimes furthered ‘western’ interests. This synchronized approach was disrupted in 1956 when Eisenhower forced the UK, France, and Israel to end their attack on Egypt, after learning that they had hidden their intentions from him.
The apparently righteous nature of his intervention has to be set against what also angered him, which was that the attack on Egypt disrupted his own plan to overthrow the Syrian government at the same time. Failure through the exposure of the plot by the redoubtable head of Syrian intelligence, Abd al Hamid al Sarraj, would have rubbed salt into the wound of British (in particular) betrayal.
This falling-out was the exception, and agreement within the ‘western’ collective was the norm when it came to Israel. Glee resonated across the Atlantic after the destruction of the Egyptian army in 1967. The upstart Nasser had been taught a lesson, and the lie of a ‘preemptive attack’ was immediately accepted as justification.
As for the Palestinians, whose land is now wholly occupied, nothing was done to give effect to UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, affirming the right of all Palestinians to return to their homes. Nothing was done after 1967 either, even though a further 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled from the West Bank.
If there was no attempt to enforce Resolution 194 from the time it was passed and on all the occasions it was reaffirmed, it was because Israel’s western sponsors knew what they were never going to admit, that a Jewish state could not come into existence without the expulsion of the Palestinian people.
The older belief expressed by Churchill and others, that a Jewish state would come into existence naturally through demographic change, as zionist settlers were poured into mandatory Palestine, had not worked. After three decades since the Balfour declaration, the settlers still constituted only a third of the population. Violence was clearly the only way ahead, and Israel’s backers showed by their refusal to give any support to Resolution 194 that they accepted it.
The resolution was passed only three days after the General Assembly had passed the Genocide Convention (Resolution 260 iii). The contrast between the ideals of the UN and their corruption after only three days could not be sharper. By refusing to stop Israel in accordance with both resolutions, the western collective was guilty of complicity in genocide even as the convention was being passed.
The ’west’ has never been without the tools to stop Israel. It has a full toolbox. Suspension of diplomatic and trade relations, suspension of military and economic aid and suspension of UN membership. If it has not picked up one of them in the past 77 years, it is because domestically and in foreign policy, a strong Israel suits its interests.
France, Canada and the UK have just been shamed into “condemning” Israel’s expansion of the ‘war on Gaza.’ The “concrete action” so far remains no concrete or action. The UK
has “suspended” trade talks with Israel as if this was some minor tiff and not slaughter and destruction on a scale not seen since World War II, and in many respects surpassing the horrors of that war. Is “suspending” trade talks really supposed to be a punishment for genocide?
While it is certainly “too little” as Nesrine Malik remarks, it is never “too late.” These governments could stop the genocide today or tomorrow if they had the courage: the courage to suspend diplomatic relations with Israel and suspend arms shipments and economic aid; the courage to face down the threats of Israel’s lobbyists; and – for the rest of the ‘western’ collective – the courage to take a principled stand against the US if it refuses to back away from its open-ended support of this genocidal state.
The horrors of Gaza blur the clear vision of the dangers to the collective ‘west’ itself. Only now do the politicians seem to be waking up to them. Israel is an anchor dragging not just the ‘west’ down but ‘western civilization’ with it. It is the dead albatross the ‘west’ has tied around its own neck. It cannot yet see the damage it is doing to itself by supporting Israel, apparently to the inevitably bitter end, and thus more blatantly than ever destroying the principles it is supposed to live by.
Of course, as it must be said, it never upheld these principles ahead of its own interests. It was only moral when it suited it. ‘Western civilization’ always had its dark, brutal and bloody side. Beethoven and Schopenhauer in Europe, invasion and mass murder in Latin America, Africa, the ‘far’ east and the ‘middle’ east. In Gaza we are now witnessing the final collapse of this deceitful façade.
After 19 months, the same, if not worse, atrocities are still being committed. Now there is the pandemonium caused by the blackmailing Israeli-US ‘aid’ program in southern Gaza when thousands of starving people overran the aid post. Employees and guards ran away, and Israeli soldiers shot into the crowd. Several people were reportedly killed, and nearly 50 were wounded. A video film of what was inside the aid boxes showed soft drinks and biscuits, as if this were a high school picnic.
Yet Netanyahu has still not had enough. Here is how he addressed a yeshiva (religious school) on ‘Jerusalem Day’ or ‘flag day’ when thousands of sociopaths were licensed by the government to run wild in the city:
“This is a war of good against evil. It is being fought against human animals, against monsters who attacked us with horrifying cruelty twenty months ago. And we will defeat them! We will wipe them out! They will not remain!” In time, they would all be walking up to the Temple with him, he assured his listeners.
His partner in genocide, Smotrich, has spoken of “the blessed opportunity to wipe out the seed of Amalek, a process which is intensifying. We still have a long way to go in this matter,” a sinister statement if ever there was one. There is nothing blessed about genocide, and nothing but damnation for the genocidalists.
As these two criminals and their equally criminal cabinet colleagues are not going to stop their genocide, they will have to be stopped – if they are to be stopped, rather than being allowed to complete this crime of crimes. This is the choice ahead of ‘western’ politicians now evasively playing with words.
A passer-by will rush onto the road to rescue an injured dog or cat. These are acts of ordinary human compassion. No one is likely to stand by in the street while a child is beaten. One child being murdered in public without anyone intervening would cause unstoppable outrage. “How is this even possible?” people would ask. “Why didn’t someone do something? Why did they just stand there doing nothing?”
Yes, why didn’t someone do something to save not one but the thousands of children killed or maimed in Gaza? Why did they stand there doing nothing? What was going on in their minds and hearts that they just let it happen?
Don’t the murdered and maimed children of Gaza at least deserve the same compassion shown to a wounded dog or cat? Would anyone with a mite of compassion allow a dog or cat to be starved before their eyes? So how can they watch Palestinian children being starved without coming to their rescue?
Don’t the politicians see their own children in the eyes of these dead and wounded children? Are the depraved humans committing these atrocities in Gaza infecting everyone else with their own depravity?
‘Too little too late’ is true but ‘never too late’ is also true. Governments and individual politicians still have time to show some spine by standing up to Israel. If not, their names will be tied to the Gaza genocide forever. By no means can we be confident that they will make the right choice.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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