As the FT reported yesterday:
Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel planned to take over all of Gaza as the country escalated its offensive in the war-torn enclave, pounding the strip with air strikes and issuing an evacuation order for one of its largest cities.
The FT added:
The expanded military operations came as Israel began re-allowing limited quantities of aid into Gaza, which the Israeli premier said was necessary to maintain international legitimacy.
He acknowledged for the first time that Gazans were on the brink of starvation.
In his defence, it is reported he said:
“We're quickly getting close to the red line [of starvation], to a situation where we can lose control and then everything crumbles,” said Netanyahu on Monday, adding that international pressure — including from the US — had forced the country to ease its blockade.
I think that should be taken as a plea of guilty to war crime charges. He has clearly always known precisely what he has been doing when using starvation of a civilian population as a weapon of war.
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And in the background, the corruption case against netanyahu continues – & has been going on for quite some time.
Thus the events of Oct 2023 can be seen as allowing the genocidist to stay in power and delay/deflect the court case at a cost of 40,000? murdered people. The resonable response from the EU would be to cut off all diplomatic, commercial & transport links permanently. Restoration only when Israel treats non-jews in a civilised fashion. Anything less than this means the EU is complicit in genocide. As for the UK, Starmer and his clique are guilty of abetting genocide, ditto anybody voting for them.
Of course, the EU will, as per, do very little.
I completely agree.
It needs the kind of action that brings home to the Israeli public (and their supporters elsewhere), that their behaviour is utterly unacceptable. To put it very politely. As you suggest, cutting off commercial, diplomatic and transport links would that kind of action. Especially targeting anyone linked to the IDF and the Israeli state.
There is a telling description of how the IDF has now gone completely rogue in this recent podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/today-in-focus/id1440133626?i=1000709079856
If it is right to impose sanctions on Russia – and it is – then similar sanctions on Israel are easily justified.
Starmer knows the power of the Israeli misinformation apparatus all too well. He helped turn it on Corbyn is my bet. The weaponisation of anti-semitism. He’s terrified of getting on the wrong side of it, as are the BBC and most media outlets. How many trolls does our host have to block when it comes to discussions of Gaza? It’s up there with daring to express an opinion on immigration, another topic on which I often see comments from people who are likely not regular readers of this blog. There is a dedicated and committed misinformation network out there trying to steer the conversation, attacking any dissent they find. This, and the fact that the British public has been taught to hate Muslims for the past 20 years, doesn’t help the Palestinian cause. Public outcry isn’t big enough yet for our government and media to dare speak against Israel. Although given the number and size of demonstrations I have seen, I wonder how big support has to become before action is taken.
I’ve grown up and got old looking at Africans starving because of war and famine and that is bad and shameful enough.
But to see darker skinned Caucasian type human beings looking like white European Caucasian human beings from Nazi concentration camps – skeletal, malnourished, hollow eyed – is just a bit too much and a new low.
Words fail really…………
Death is everywhere at the moment I tell you. He’s having a ball.
You cannot expunge a people from their lands without consequences, whether you say God wills it or not.
Guilty as charged M’Lord I’d say.
At long last Carney, Macron and Starmer have stood up and spoken out, threatening to take action. They must insist Palestine is recognised and its security guaranteed by the UN. The Arab League in 2001 proposed recognition of Isreal in its 1967 borders and withdrawal of settlers. Since then the number of settlers has drastically increased. A solution will not be easy.
But if the aim is to reduce ‘terrorist’ activity, then the world must remove the incentive to do so as we found in South Africa and Northern Island. (In my view Israel is acting as a terrorist state ).
Much depends if the US backs up the new state. This is a war Trump COULD scale down if he wanted.
Israel is a case study in how to incubate ‘terrorism’. Where a powerful state, usually with a majority, uses that power to oppress and discriminate an ‘other’, usually a minority. Whether it’s Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka – or Israel – some form of violent resistance results as the ‘other’ has little alternative. No doubt the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto would have been described as terrorists when they fought back against the Nazis. As was famously, Nelson Mandela. (Matt Carr on substack is good on conflict and terrorism)
Palestinians have endured nearly 80 years of violent oppression with little if any hope of freedom. Their land and dwellings trashed or stolen, freely killed by Israelis, or imprisoned without charge. It is easy, and right, to condemn what Hamas did on October 7th. However Israel’s response is wholly unjustified and reflects the deeply engrained and violent racism of Israeli society. The UK has seen its share of deaths at the hands of terrorists of one creed or another. It was not seen as an excuse to justify the carpet bombing and invasion of Derry or Dublin.
Israeli Jews and their supporters elsewhere will have to live with the shame and guilt of what they have done, even if they are a long way from recognising that. Another generation of Palestinians have learned to hate. And anti-semitism has been boosted when it becomes unjustifiably linked to wholly justified criticism of apartheid, war crimes and genocide.
The issue for me is not so much Netanyahu’s guilt (when has that ever been in doubt?), but our own complicity.
Time after time, Israel’s military and political leaders announce their intention of committing war crimes, of committing genocide, using unambiguous language. I can read about it in the Israeli press (but not the UK press), it is a matter of public record.
Then they DO what they said they would do, and their atrocities are verified by international and Israel-based agencies, and livestreamed to the world by their victims.
But my government, my PM, my foreign secretary, my Attorney General, somehow cannot bring themselves to say it – the word genocide, or the charge of war crimes.
It’s not that they don’t understand the concept, it’s not that they are shy of accusing others of war crimes (as long as they hail from Russia or Iran), but for reasons of utter political corruption and deep moral decay, they obey a self-made rule that Israel must NEVER, no matter what she does, EVER be accused of any breach of international law. They then compound their crime of complicity, by actively suppressing, here in UK, free speech and the right of peaceful protest, to silence their own citizens, students, academics and journalists with spurious charges of antisemitism or supporting terrorism.
They can get away with this because over 420 “Labour” MPs, on a guaranteed >£90k/pa till 2029, plus generous expenses, plus a big payout if they lose their seat in 2029, choose actively to support the government’s complicity, and themselves become morally and legally corrupted by their own complicity.
Their parliamentary salaries and privileges are being enjoyed as innocent civilians are being murdered, starved, and punished by their occupiers. Their silence and for hundreds of them, their membership of Labour Friends of Israel, cements their complicity as do the donations they accept from Israel’s many well known lobbyists.
Palestinians have been refugees and occupied peoples for almost a century, under Israeli rule. The Holy Land, that convenient corridor between Africa and Mesopotamia, has seen many imperial armies come and go over the millenia, including our own Mandate rule.
But now something new is happening, something Jewish people are horribly familiar with, and which no Israeli should want to be associated with.
Palestinians are being exterminated, expelled, wiped from the land, bombed out, sniped out, starved out, and Israel’s leaders, aided and abetted by the West, are doing what they always intended to do, have long promised to do, claiming sovereignty “from the river to the sea” (as claimed in the Likud charter) for their dream of a mono-ethnic state.
And still, we remain silent. Embarrassed rather than outraged, inconvenienced rather than repulsed, protesting quietly in private, rather than openly, publicly condemning in the international court, or censuring in the United Nations, uttering the forbidden words of genocide and war crimes, rolling out the sanctions that we so proudly impose on Russia or Iran, but refuse to countenance for our war-crimes ally, Israel.
Any MP with a conscience would call this out for what it is. Genocide.
History will not be kind to those who remain silent.
The EU and Starmer are still wittering on about the two-state solution. Even they must understand that that has been dead and buried for decades due to illegal Israeli settlements expansion and ethnic cleansing. They are simply hand wringing. Either continue to let Israel expand and expel with impunity, or rein in the Zionist monster and return the area to a secular state with equal rights and opportunities for all.
It is now an excuse now.
“and return the area to a secular state with equal rights and opportunities for all” Very very difficult.
Israeli jews are terrified of becoming a minority. Indeed, not being in a minority was the rationale for the nakba.
Thus there is total resistance by Israeli jews to a single state (Israel, West bank and Gaza).
While I agree with JohnA and his hand wringing comment, does anyone think that this genocide, while obviously quite deliberate, is not only being facilitated by powerful forces, but was planned as an outcome to the situation in Gaza that these people desire? I say this because, as has been pointed out, words are meaningless unless action is taken to stop this mass murder continuing, and frankly I don’t see any sign of that happening, so most nations, by their inaction, are complicit in what appears to be their aim, the eradication of the Palestinians form their homeland.
I said, back in October 2023, that I thought Hamas’ plan was to so antagonise the Israelis that their response would be appalling and this would lead to the loss of the support of their allies in Europe and the US. The resulting slaughter would have been irrelevant to Hamas, if Israel lost Western, and particularly US, support.
In saying that I never expected the European and US governments to accept Israel’s appalling response as they have done.
https://dearscotland.substack.com/p/the-wests-immorality-is-dooming-it
Israel has embarked upon its final solution, Operation Gideon’s Chariots, to murder, starve and drive the remaining Palestinians from Gaza.
The book of Judges tells the story of Gideon, who led a band of 300 Jews against the much larger army of their oppressors, the Midianites, and defeated them with divine intervention.
Substituting Palestinians for Israelites and Israel for Midian in the Bible passage, is a description of what’s been happening to the Palestinians not for 7, but for 77 years. Instead of Gideon’s chariots, you have ZOF tanks and 2,000 pound bombs, courtesy of the US, the UK and the EU.
It’s not the first time Israel has invoked a Biblical story to legitimise a mass slaughter of Palestinians. In 1948, the ZOF precursor, the Jewish Haganah, called their offensive to forcibly displace the Palestinians from the Beit Shean area “Operation Gideon.” The Zionist entity is using the name again to do the same thing, but this time in an even more horrific manner.
Israel Knesset member Moshe Saada said, “I want to starve Gazans completely.”
An image from Haaretz of a row of eclairs oozing cream, their surface glazed with coloured icing saying, “Let the IDF mow them down”, speaks to the rot in Israel.
And yet the US and Europe are silent.
Have you heard a peep from either Keir Starmer or David Lammy?
Since 1945, the West has lorded its vaunted ‘moral values’ over the world, while at the same time invading, bombing, sanctioning, subjugating and destroying weaker nations. Is it any wonder the global majority, witnessing the holocaust in Gaza, is turning away from the West’s depravity and hypocrisy?
The Western world ‘order’ is consuming itself. It no longer retains any vestiges of morality, if it ever possessed any. It doesn’t deserve to survive.
Let’s hope that whatever replaces it will value security, sovereignty, national culture and autonomy, and above all, human life.
Thank you, Richard.
This morning, former PM and diplomat and possible 2027 (Gaullist) presidential candidate, Dominique de Villepin, told French tv news that all of the Israeli government should be at the ICC, not just Netanyahu and a couple more.
He was right to do so.
Edward Said characterised the Oslo Accords and Clinton’s performance on the White House lawn as a surrender by Arafat – ‘we will accept anything so long as you recognise us’.
He said the ‘two state solution’ was bound to fail – as it was premised on Israel retaining the power – and solidified the ‘Oriental’ perspective.
Said characterised Orientalism as ‘the exaggeration of difference, Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the “Oriental world”.
Its underlying perspective was irreconcilable differences between the west and Orientals – which would make any prospect of a secular state with equal rights for all citizens utterly impossible.
Apologies for posting – yet again.
Franz Fanon: subjugation is as mentally damaging for the subjugator as the subjugated.
Louis Theroux’s recent documentary shows Jewish Israeli society (the non jewish bit keeps its head well down – understandably) that is highly damaged, if not demented due to 70-odd years of subjugating non-jewish citizens and neighbours. Thus bearing out Fanon’s point.
This begs the question – post Netanyaho – what to do? Two state solution? nope. One state? The truth & reconciliation committee will need to be composed of super humans.
Israelis need to round up Netanyahu, Smotrich and any of the other racist violent members of the Israeli Knesset and deposit them at the court in the Hague. Will they do it? Who knows. The latest encouraging but feeble protests from western countries are a start to legitimizing the thousands of students, professors, activists, “ordinary people” who have spoken up against this occupation and war and have been silenced, deported, fired from their jobs, accused of anti-Semitism while the supposed grown ups in the room have done nothing about the daily horrors caused by modern weaponry allied with racism and hatred on babies and children… on unarmed civilians legitimately allowed to resist occupation and violence. Hundreds of thousands of people protested at The Hague last week and outside the Eurovision song contest where of course Israel was allowed to take part while Russia was not as well as around the world on May 15th commemorating Nakba day. Now lets hope our laggard western leaders actually carry out their threats to bring this genocide to an end, its no more than they are required to do anyway as signatories to the Rome statute as well as other international laws. The settlements in the West Bank should be no insoluble barrier to instituting a tw state solution; in 1948 Palestinians were ejected from their homes, their houses and land, often their banks accounts were closed down, there was no compensation.. now its time for the reverse to happen. Kick the settlements out, return the land to Palestinians with reparations for all the destruction caused by Israel. Its the only just solution.
It is now obvious many of our government ministers know they are in hgrave danger of being arraigned before the courts charged with the worst possible crimes. These crimes have been and still are being committed in plain view. Defence will be difficult ,if not impossible. As far as I am aware the real instigators of these unbelievable acts have not been threatened with facing justice . I refer of course to the USA. The are powerful but they are not the world. The leaders from the President down are blatantly untouchable. That has to change. America is now hated globally. Britain’s reputation is irreparable. I am ashamed of what is being done in my name. Young people must be afraid of what is to come. I am an old man and have little time left. I feel lucky. The younger members of my family could be facing the curse of Fascism. Its’ on the horizon.