The Blood of Gaza Is on the West’s Hands as Much as Israel’s
Jonathan Cook | The truth is that this moment of catastrophe could never have been reached without western powers indulging, subsidising and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinian people, decade after decade. The bloodiest hand in the current slaughter of Palestinians and Israelis belongs, not to Hamas or the Netanyahu government, but to the West.
● Yes, Palestinian fighters carried out a brutal attack at the weekend on Israeli settlements on the edge of the Gaza Strip. But this attack did not emerge from nowhere, or without warning. It was not “unprovoked”, as Israel would like us to believe. In fact, western capitals know exactly how much the Palestinians of Gaza have been provoked, because those same governments have been complicit for decades in supporting Israel as it has ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their homeland and imprisoned the remnants of the population in ghettoes inside historic Palestine.
● For the the past 16 years, western backing for Israel has not wavered, even as Israel has turned the coastal enclave of Gaza from the world’s largest open-air prison into a gruesome torture chamber, where Palestinians are experimented on. Their food and power have been rationed, essentials of life denied to them, their access to drinkable water slowly removed, and their hospitals prevented from receiving medical supplies and equipment. The problem is not ignorance. Western governments have been informed in real-time of the crimes Israel is committing: in confidential cables from their own embassy officials, and in endless reports from human rights groups documenting Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians. And yet Western politicians have time and again done nothing to intervene, done nothing to exert meaningful pressure. Worse, they have rewarded Israel with endless military, financial and diplomatic support.
● Where does this endless indulgence from the West ultimately lead? Already, Israel is emboldened to make much more explicit its policy towards Gaza’s two million inhabitants. There is a word for that policy, one we are not supposed to use to avoid causing offence to those implementing it, as well as those who quietly support its implementation. Whether by design or outcome, Israel’s starving of civilians, leaving them with no power, depriving them of clean water, and preventing hospitals from treating the sick and wounded – from treating those Israel has bombed – is a genocidal policy. Western governments know this too. Because Israeli leaders have made no secret of what they are doing.