COMMENT BY GREG RAY
Suddenly something changed.
The first big sign came when the conservative English media outlet, the Financial Times, published an editorial under the heading: “The West’s Shameful Silence on Gaza”. And just like that, it was suddenly acceptable to criticise Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign of territorial expansion in occupied Palestine.
Up until then it seemed that Western governments and media outlets were determined to follow Israel’s rogue extremist government to the mouth of Hell and beyond. Speaking out against the genocide was frowned on to the extent that doing so could cost jobs, artistic grants, academic status or even freedom. It still can and it still does, to be honest, and probably will for some time while the cowardly universities, politicians and corporations who kowtowed to the pro-genocide lobby from the outset struggle to recalibrate their positions without a humiliating loss of face. If, indeed, they ever do.
But the climate has unmistakeably changed and it seems like a change that – irrespective of all the pressure from below – has been condoned from above.
Now my Facebook feed is full of anti-genocide items that would previously have been algorithmically suppressed. Permission to look at the truth and call it what it is has apparently now been granted to the denizens of the mainstream.
But the mystery to me is why, and by whom? And what will be the result?
Barrel-shoot in Gaza
I struggle to believe that any of the faceless creatures who pull the strings in leading the West have found a conscience. That hasn’t happened in any previous unjustified war, invasion or genocide committed by a member or client of the dominant global empire of money, so I doubt the heart-searing horrors of Israel’s barrel-shoot in Gaza would have touched whatever those monsters have in lieu of souls.
Some writers have speculated that the motivation for the change may be due to the extreme difficulty of trying to hold the narrative line. It’s impossible to pretend that Israel is “defending itself” now that Gaza is a death-pit of maimed children starving in piles of smoking rubble. But sticking to bullshit narratives is standard fare for the Western establishment, so perhaps that’s not it.
I wonder if the problem the West has suddenly identified with Israel is that it has analysed the strategic consequences of letting the rogue state follow through with its master plan to eliminate or exile every Palestinian. Perhaps the West has realised that letting Israel push the broken survivors of the massacre into Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere will guarantee massive blow-back against Western interests in the not-too distant future. Perhaps it can see – as I saw months ago – that Israel’s actions amount to an existential threat to its own future security and is hoping, belatedly, to wind the campaign of extermination back a few notches.
Or perhaps – and this may be most likely – the West merely wants to Israel to slow the genocide down: revert to the old Israeli policy of drip-feeding food and supplies to Gaza in order to make the spectacle of starvation less confronting for “sensitive” witnesses in the West and in surrounding Middle Eastern countries. This would align with what some Israeli politicians have stated publicly: that a number of US politicians have told them they can complete the ethnic cleansing campaign but they need to do it in a way that avoids having Western audiences see images of starved Palestinian children.
I don’t know the answer.
I am glad that large portions of the West appear to have become willing to tolerate criticism of Israel’s actions and that the ludicrous but determined attempts to criminalise such criticism as “anti-semitic” are clearly beginning to fail. But it should also be obvious that these small concessions to humanity and decency are really very pathetic tokens. While the weapons keep flowing from the corporate war profiteers in the West and while the extent of political protest is no more than mild censure then these governments remain as complicit in the ongoing genocide as they have been from the very outset.
The issue that appears to have caused the West to falter in its previous wholehearted, if thinly veiled, participation in Israel’s latest Nakba, is the calculated and deliberate starvation of the Gazans. And yet this is not a new part of Israeli strategy. From the very start Israel has meticulously targeted civilian infrastructure while simultaneously choking off supplies of food, water, medicines and electricity. This has never been surreptitious. It has always been open and declared. And all the West has done is wring its collective hands in public while privately shipping more bombs, missiles and aircraft parts to Israel to facilitate the continuing destruction.
Remember the Kosovars?
Of course the United States is the chief sponsor of the massacre. It could stop the killing in an instant if it dared to halt the flow of weapons and money. Clearly, in the USA’s calculus of cost and benefit, the genocide is “worth it”. How different in the 1990s when Serbia was accused of slaughtering Muslim Kosovars. Here in the Hunter Valley of NSW, Australia, hundreds of these victims were temporarily housed until it was considered safe for them to return to their homes. Who is offering sanctuary to the dying Palestinians? Serbia, of course, was a Russian satellite and hence fair game for the US/NATO. Israel, on the other hand, is the West’s vital forward outpost in the Middle East, home of the oil resources that have dictated the course of world affairs since they were first discovered and exploited.
Let’s not forget that former president Joe Biden – who declared himself a Zionist – said that if Israel did not exist then the US would have to invent it. (Incidentally this calls into doubt the contention that to criticize Zionists is necessarily antisemitic. There are huge numbers of “Christian Zionists” in the USA, many of whom base their support for Israel on their belief that the return of their messiah depends on a massive war in the Middle East in which they expect Israel to be a necessary participant.)
The US and Israel are joined at the hip. Indeed, the current slide into autocracy being seen in both countries is a remarkable parallel. Both are led by atrocious individuals, intent on personal gain, willing to trash whatever vestiges of democracy that stand in their way in order to strengthen their grip on power. Both are backed by deluded confederacies of dangerous extremists who will cheerfully see democracy die if it furthers the ends of their own vindictive moralities and their ill-concealed greed. That Trump and Netanyahu dislike each other is neither here nor there. Trump’s current transactions with other rich Middle Eastern states which, like his negotiations with Iran, are bypassing Israel entirely, are naturally hugely upsetting to Netanyahu who is declaring that he won’t be bound by any US-Iran peace plan but reserves the right to attack Iran unilaterally.
Netanyahu is, indeed, a loose cannon. He, at the bidding of the other extremists who keep him in power and thus safely away from the corruption probes that threatened him before the war conveniently began, has overstepped the bounds of normalised, “tolerable” Israeli atrociousness to its occupied subjects. There is a Western “deep state”. It has no national borders and its master is money. My guess is that this deep state of transnational money and power may have decided that Netanyahu’s time was almost up. He had become an arrogant liability. The problem with that is, of course, that Netanyahu will not go quietly and the extremists who hold him in power can see that their dream of totally destroying the idea of Palestine, along with the actual Palestinians, is within their grasp. More than that, a recent survey – reported in Haaretz – found that 82% of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the other occupied territories. The indoctrination of the population is so complete, thanks to generations of exploited fear and hate, that while most Israelis condemn Netanyahu they nevertheless appear to approve of his actions.
“Worth it”
The West could stop the killing. It could have stopped it long ago. It chooses instead to actively support the atrocity. This should be no surprise given the West’s own bloody record of killing in the name of geo-strategic advantage. Remember when former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Allbright was asked about the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Western-imposed sanctions following the 1991 Gulf War? The price, she said, was “worth it”.
Clearly, the collective brains trusts of the West decided that the destruction and depopulation of Israel-occupied Palestine would be “worth it”. I have a feeling that some among them may now be reassessing that view. I also have a feeling that it may be too late and that their estimate of costs and benefits to their own sorry immoral selves will prove to have been a severe miscalculation.
