As I write, Greta Thunberg and eleven other pro-Palestine activists intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters are being transported to Israel, where they will be shown videos of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th 2023. What this is intended to achieve is a mystery, but maybe the Israeli authorities think Greta and her fellow peace campaigners will decide that Israel has a right to tear up humanitarian law while it takes its revenge on Gaza, and stop complaining. Events may have moved on by the time you read this, but I don’t think we will have seen the shutting up of Greta Thunberg.
No precise figures are available, but it’s widely accepted that the numbers add up to at least 100 Gazans who have been killed or injured in revenge for each of the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas on that day, and with many bodies still to be recovered, the number of dead, let alone those injured, orphaned or who’ve pulled their dead children from the rubble, could be as high as 80,000. And the death toll is still mounting, with daily bombings adding to the effects of the starvation policy introduced three months ago by Israel.
International law is absolutely clear that no illegal targeting of civilians by one side gives the other side permission to do the same, and yet, more than 600 days into the conflict, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government still thinks it might be able to persuade those captured along with Greta Thunberg that what it is doing is justified. At best, forcing them to watch the horrific videos will simply show them why Israel seems to have lost its reason and reacted with such fury, but they must know that already.
What could be causing this complete failure in Israel to comprehend the hopelessness of its attempts to get the rest of the world onto its side ? Apart from anything else, Greta Thunberg is literally the last person in the world anyone would want to contest occupation of the moral high ground with. I would suggest that blame for that lack or awareness in Netanyahu’s government lies with the leaders of western governments, who have failed both the Palestinians and their own people by allowing Israel to proceed with what is very probably genocide, and what various Israeli government ministers have admitted themselves is ethnic cleansing.
Jo Biden might be forgiven, given his evident mental deterioration, but his successor in the US has continued to supply weapons and verbal support, and our own prime ministers and foreign secretaries since late 2023 still haven’t withdrawn military aid to Israel, and apart from a brief period when David Cameron was foreign secretary (and he was rapidly shut down by Sunak’s Downing Street) have never had the courage to challenge Netanyahu in any meaningful way.
Meanwhile people around the world have demonstrated the absolute abhorrence most of us feel to be watching the suffering in Gaza, and did so again in London last Saturday, right outside Parliament, as they have done every Saturday for the last nineteen months.
Nothing could equal the tragedy in Gaza (and increasingly in parts of the West Bank) but UK governments, first the Conservatives, and now Labour, but the other tragedy is the complete and utter contempt our government shows for the wishes of the British people.
One of the irrelevant claims made by Israel is that they are “the only democracy in the Middle East”, as though that somehow makes what they are doing alright, but on this issue, democracy in the UK is proving irrelevant too. Keir Starmer and David Lammy theoretically hold the reins of power, but MPs refuse to assert their authority and demand that the British government stops merely talking, and starts acting. The case for a total trade embargo, not the piecemeal, bit by bit, sanctions on individuals proposed but not yet implemented by a suddenly animated David Lammy a few weeks ago, could not be stronger.
We can, and should, sympathise with the Israelis, given the position they have got themselves into, much, but not all, of it their own fault, after many years of avoiding dealing with the question of Palestinian sovereignty inside the borders agreed by the UN and the world community, but only by forcing the Israelis to confront the full horror of what they are doing can we bring them to their senses and save the Palestinians. And we need to do it now.
* Andy Daer is a member of the Liberal Democrats in South Gloucestershire.
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5 Comments
Just to note:
The reason for showing Thunberg et al the video was due to clips online of activists disregarding what had happened on October 7th, with some – not all, granted – but some regarding it as a hoax or staged.
What also needs to be shouted from the rooftops is how there is a liberal opposition in Israel to Netanyahu, headed up by opposition parties such as Yesh Atid and the Israeli Labor Party, along with anti-war activists, consisting of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
We must also support the anti-Hamas Gazans, who have bravely spoken up about the mistreatment Hamas have put upon them for daring to question why Hamas stole democracy from Fatah in 2007, and have refused to hold an election since, despite outcry from both Gazans and Fatah.
Both Hamas and Netanyahu are monsters, with one being an anti-democratic terrorist group that holds babies hostage, rapes women, kills gay people and refuses to negotiate with Jews, and the other being the head of an ever-growing unpopular far-right administration, that is set to lose the next election.
Free Palestine from Hamas.
Hold Netanyahu accountable.
Free the hostages.
Allow aid into Palestine.
Support a sustained two-state solution, built upon democracy, now.
Great piece and thanks to Jack Meredith too. Why do you say ‘very probably genocide’ when you links takes us to this statement from Amnesty ‘Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza’? This isn’t a critcism, it’s a question!
@Meg Thomas, thank you for what you’ve said about my article. It’s widely believed that ‘genocide’ is a word which has a very precise legal meaning and which requires the International Court of Justice (the ICJ) to ratify its use. That may be several years in the future, so some of us use the word in its ‘colloquial’ meaning, but I couldn’t do that in my article. Whichever way you look at it, what is happening in Gaza is something the majority of British people find completely unacceptable, and which the British Government ought to be acting to stop. For reasons unfathomable to me, they would rather talk about things like winter fuel payments, and the threat posed by Nigel Farage.
I was in the West Bank in 2019, and I’m glad I’m not there now, having to tell the kind and gentle families I met that we British have serious concerns like those I’ve mentioned, which take precedence over their troubles.
@Jack Meredith, the truth may only rarely be pure or simple, but for many of us the essential underlying fact is that the Palestinians have a right to live in their own land, and the Israelis do not have the right to evict them and steal their country.
As I’m sure you know, after the First World War the British tried to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ in Europe (in other words, antisemitism amongst non-Jews) by donating to European Jews an undefined part of a country we never owned – Mandate Palestine. The British gave up trying to figure out how to achieve that in 1948, packed their bags, and left.
Palestinians have a perfect moral and legal right to resist occupation, but not by the means Hamas used in October 2023, and Hamas have made plenty of other mistakes since. However, the Israeli position is that those mistakes deprive the Palestinians of the right to self-determination in their own country, and that by default it now belongs to Israel. This kind of excuse for annexation is a close cousin of the one Putin uses for his invasion of Ukraine, and is wrong both in law and in the opinion of most ordinary people around the world.
Your assertion that Hamas are “monsters”, and the following examples you give to prove it, some of them probably untrue, but all of them irrelevant to the case for Palestinian statehood, simply support the Israeli narrative, and are extremely unhelpful to those striving for peace and justice.
My alternative, to impose very painful sanctions on Israel, sounds brutal, but I can’t see any other way of getting a message through to those people in Israel who want to exterminate or expel the Palestinians from their own country that what they are doing is still fuelled by the emotions aroused in October 2023, and that by now they ought to be looking rationally at what can be done to allow Israelis to live in peace with their neighbours. That would involve looking themselves in the mirror and questioning whether killing or maiming ten of thousands of people, displacing millions, and bombing their entire country flat makes them the kind of people they want to be.
@Meg you are correct, there is an even better source: David Mercier, the Israeli Government spokesperson, in a recent BBC interview gave his definition of a “genocidal death cult”, it fitted Netanyahu‘s government exactly to the point I was surprised the BBC didn’t put this point to him in the interview.