Gaza: hypocritically “heartbroken” politicians have nothing to offer
JVL Introduction
Nesrine Malik’s latest opinion piece in the Guardian highlights the knots that supposedly liberal politicians are tying themselves into. Calling for international law to be respected, for aid to get in and yet standing by Israel knowing that it is breaking International Law, is currently being investigated for genocide.
Malik points out that the implications for politics are wider even than the horrors we are witnessing. “Gaza has become the expression of a legitimacy crisis for an Anglo-American political class who preside over already fragile systems that deliver less and less to their populations, and whose main offering is that the alternative is worse. Things may look stable, but underneath lurk managed discontents about costs of living, diminished social mobility and the ravages wreaked by rightwing governments to which centrists provide no real answer.”
LL
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Mon 12 Feb 2024. Read the original here.
Israel’s assault on Gaza is exposing the holes in everything liberal politicians claim to believe
Starmer and Biden see themselves as custodians of stability. But their support for this bloody conflict shows nothing but weakness
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There was a comment on one of the TV political shows that the “hoi poloi”
members of the political parties are ahead of their masters in respect of what is going on in Gaza. How could anyone not be moved to tears after watching scenes as reported from that place?
Much has put me in mind of “Bleak House” by Dickens and “Jo” one of its characters. Jo is homeless, starved, uneducated and an orphan who is harassed and forced to keep moving about by the use (mainly) of the Victorian “vagrancy laws”. He eventually (Chapter 37) and near death reaches a place where he is looked after by kind people.
Unfortunately for the population of Gaza (and the West Bank) they do NOT reach such a place ! However if you don’t mind I will quote the last
of Chapter 37 (using “Project Gutenberg eBook of Bleak House”) with Jo, now near to death the first to speak.
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“I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.”
“Jo, can you say what I say?”
“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.”
“Our Father.”
“Our Father! Yes, that’s wery good, sir.”
“Which art in heaven.”
“Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”
“It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!”
“Hallowed be—thy—”
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
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Many faceted crises usually require us to dump everything we were used to and SUDDENLY create a new framework to live by and act on. It’s as if a treasured 30 year old marriage had died, leaving all parties to work out what this meant for personal relationships, self-esteem, memories, finance, the future….
Naturally the Bidens, Sunaks and Starmers cling to the dead relics of their Middle East policies and networks of relationships. Honestly confronting the horrors and costs of their policy mistakes might be even worse for them than it is for us.
I think the best we can hope for from the current lot is that they START the process of change and don’t resist legal decisions from the ICJ and ICC. Their successors may do better.
Members of the Israeli Defence Force must have been carefully taught not to see Palestinians as people – they will however either have to suppress their human feelings or one day wake up to the horror they have been involved in and the sorrow they have caused. For Jewish Israelis who are in denial about their apartheid regime, treating themselves as the white south africans during apartheid and the palestinians as black, they will come to realise there is no right to defence themselves in this way that their leaders have chose, that is wiping out people because they are palestinian – surely genocide. We need to support people in both communities who want to work together for peace not to choose sides while more people die.
I first visited my Palestinian Christian friends who lived in Israel in 1975.
He was an Anglican vicar in an Arab town. I was taken all around the country , Jerusalem, Acre, Hebron , the Lebanese border, etc. The different rules that applied to Arab residents was painfully obvious, and affected their lives and that of visitors to Arab areas, from abroad.
From security at London Airport before being allowed on the plane, to the same coming back. Our luggage piece by piece was examined in public, we were bodily searched. The last time I visited , the airport security was of course electronic .The travel around the country was much more difficult , the separation wall of course, the constant police checks etc. If anyone had thought Israel was a democracy, they would have been proved wrong very easily. It’s proving itself an apartheid state constantly now. I am ashamed of the UK , it’s started this in early 20th century, and is continuing it’s I’ll thought out solution.
Right wing Labour candidates like Azhar Ali and Graham Jones are being sent out to reassure Party members that they don’t support what is happening in Gaza and end up getting themselves suspended by Starmer’s apparatchiks for daring to criticise Israel. The madness of being in violation of the rules if you dare to criticize another country – which is engaged in genocide – is at the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy.
As an aside, Labour Party member Ed Balls has been on national television defending Graham Jones – does this mean that Comrade Ed will be suspended? Party members on the Left get suspended for standing next to someone at a demonstration.
I believe these contradictory behaviours on the part of Biden, Starmer, and many others arises from two intersecting and paralysing forms of guilt and fear. The first is apparently unresolvable personal feelings of guilt about the Nazi holocaust. The second is worse — fear of being labelled antisemitic publicly by anyone at all, and being punished for it by losing one’s job or honorary position, or one’s university place, or one’s membership of and/or even local candidacy in standing for the Labour Party, and (not reported but very nasty, very racist and very hidden) even being investigated and harassed by the police for months on end in spite of them not being able to find anything to charge the person with. The latter is based on the perhaps little known fact (I only found this out a few days ago) that Hamas has been a proscribed terrorist organisation in UK law for many years and any expression of support for them (even if it is completely against terrorism) can be interpreted by the police if they wish to use it as very seriously breaking the law, threatening deportation.
Nesrine Malik makes some good points in her article.
For decades, the effective position of our so-called centrist political leaders on Israel has been one of unqualified support. There has been no effective action taken against Israel to stop its flouting of international laws and UN resolutions. This position has largely been supported by the corporate mainstream media, including, unfortunately, the Guardian – not many calls for sanctions and withdrawing military, financial and political support that I can remember, and often framing the situation as a conflict between two equal belligerents, rather than between an oppressor and the oppressed.
With the ICJ, nearly unanimously, finding that there is a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and with the horrors of what is happening daily hard to conceal from the public, certain politicians are finding it harder to hide their moral bankruptcy and rank hypocrisy as they pretend to support a rules based international order whilst ignoring those very rules when it suits them – as is in plain sight when it comes to Israel today.
More and more people are getting sick of the contortions these political leaders go through to try and justify the unjustifiable and want action to stop the slaughter and provide a just solution for the Palestinian people.
Israel is ignoring the provisional measures imposed on it by the ICJ, with the support and connivance of major ‘Western’ political leaders and the corporate mainstream media. It is a rogue apartheid state that should be isolated and sanctioned until it stops it genocidal actions and agrees to the implementation of a just and viable solution that enables there to be peace and equal rights for all. Those leaders that continue to support and give political cover to this rogue state should be viewed as accomplices to the on-going genocide and should face the legal and electoral consequences of their actions!…
[cut to our limit of 300 words – admin]
The recent re-emergence of the “Kahanists” is an example of how
right wing the Israel Government have become .. where members of the current Coalition are trying to sanitise his reputation.
Meir Kahane was a US born Israeli who managed to get himself elected to
the Israeli Parliament but where other members were disgusted by his racism regarding Arabs. So much so that the Knesset cleared when he
made his hate imbued speeches. He formed his own political party which was eventually declared “terrorist” in Israel.
[An internet search of “Kahane” will reveal the full story.]