Plus ça change – to Gaza and back

JVL Introduction

Henry Siegman opens his essay with these words:

“Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.”

They could almost have been written yesterday.

Yet the article was written over seventeen years ago, since when the tissue of Israeli lies which enveloped us then had become more stifling than ever.

What’s happening today is in both legal and moral everyday parlance a genocide.

Israel is a country born out of a genocide of the Jews. How dare you accuse the descendants of those who suffered so traumatically of inflicting a genocide on another people. It’s antisemitic, it’s a blood libel…

But it is true.

Over seventy-two thousand killed in Gaza – a grotesque underestimate, we all know, but that’s the “official” figure. Over a thousand in the West Bank in the last year or so as pogroms become commonplace and the army not only protects the extremist settlers but actively joins in. The intention to harm and destroy is openly expressed.

Only, we are told, don’t call it a genocide. That would put an obligation of Western politicians to intervene to stop it or to be complicit themselves.

Guess what: it is a genocide and they are complicit.

H/t MN

This article was originally published by London Review of Books, Vol. 31 No. 2 on Thu 29 Jan 2009. Read the original here.