Dichotomy in approach to Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Photo by Mohammed Abubakr on Pexels.com

What Hamas carried out on 7 October is certainly justifiable. We have to recognise that those freedom fighters created a terrible massacre that belies all humanity.

The world got to see the scale and brutality of Hamas’s grisly attack on Israel, in which at least 1,300 Israeli men, women, and children were brutally murdered. Understandably, those pictures got many people angry. The attack has understandably triggered a massive outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with Israel from around the world, particularly in the United States, Europe, and other Western nations.

In response to the mass terror attack, Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment of Gaza, the most devastating the besieged enclave has ever seen. Soon more than 10.000 Palestinians got killed, including 4500 children, and thousands injured. Entire neighbourhoods have been levelled, leaving over 1 million people internally displaced, whilst Israel’s decided to cut all water, food, fuel and medical supplies to Gaza — considered a grave war crime under international law and something Western officials have elsewhere decried as “acts of pure terror” — elicited not so many protests from western governments and even occasional defences.

Until eventually the pressure from several citizens and peace movements had become too much and politicians had to show their faces to avoid losing popularity. Marches were organised all over Europe to call for an end to this senseless horrific massacre.

On the commemoration day of the end of the First World War, hundreds of thousands of people gathered to march peacefully through central London to protest against the ongoing Israeli bombing of Gaza, following a week of intense political debates over the control of sensitive demonstrations.

As usual, police estimated the number of protesters lower than the organisers. The Metropolitan Police said about 300,000 people had come to the capital from all parts of the country, while organisers of the pro-Palestinian rally estimated the number closer to 800,000 and claimed it was one of the largest marches in British history.

In Paris there were fewer people, but many more politicians showed their faces. By the senior politicians, we could find previous presidents, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, and several former prime ministers, but Emmanuel Macron, the present French president, did not take part. He had said earlier he would be there

“in my heart and in my thoughts”,

adding that there could be

“no tolerance for the intolerable”

and France must be

“united behind its values, its universalism”.

Previously he also had said in the newspaper, Le Parisien, that

“A France where our Jewish citizens are afraid is not France.”

Gérard Larcher, the French senate speaker and a co-organiser of the largely peaceful demonstration, said as it got under way:

“Our order of the day today is … the total fight against antisemitism, which is the opposite of the values of the Republic.”

Family members of some of the 40 French citizens killed in the initial Hamas attack on 7 October, and of those missing or held hostage, also took part.

The presence of the far-right camp in France was notable, however. The party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, said the march should also mark resistance to “Islamic fundamentalism”, one of her party’s key talking points. She described objections to the presence of Rassemblement National or National Rally (RN), whose recent support for Israel has been widely seen as an opportunistic attempt to bury its antisemitic past, ludicrous.

The Communist party leader, Fabien Roussel, refused to march alongside the anti-immigrant party’s MPs, saying it had been founded by people who were

“repeatedly condemned for antisemitic remarks”

who “collaborated” with Nazi Germany.

Socialist and Green MPs, along with trade unionists and youth groups, also marched but under a separate banner, distancing themselves as far as possible from the RN and other representatives of the far right, including the anti-immigrant polemicist Éric Zemmour, who were surrounded by bodyguards.

 

Many claim that Israel does have the right of self-defence, though they seem to forget that might be done only in precisely the same way other countries do. Was the present situation not the fault of nobody calling the right-wing Israeli government to a halt for taking the houses and grounds of Palestinian civilians?
In fact, the only unique factor about Israel here is that it is the only country to have been found by the International Court of Justice specifically to have abused and exceeded the concept of right of self-defence, in its treatment of the Palestinians.

Now that we are a month on, we can only note that war crimes are being committed on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

The Israeli prime minister Netanyahumay think that Hamas fighters are beasts and belong to a terrorist movement, but that does not give him the right to play the beast himself and take innocent victims like women and children hostage.

Israel cannot use “self-defence” as a trump card to tear up international law in the current situation in Palestine. The use of collective punishment against a civilian population — including via starvation, thirst and deprivation of medicine, the carpet bombing, the use of white phosphorus, the attacks on medical facilities, the attacks on medical staff, the execution of prisoners, the clearly genocidal attempt — none of these war crimes is excusable as “self-defence.”

For years, soldiers allowed settlers to simply take away Palestinians’ property and chase them away. If those Palestinians resisted, if they did not react quickly they were simply shot dead, while the murderers, unprosecuted, could simply continue their way and still continue.

The United Nations’ secretary general António Guterres said the 7 October attacks by Hamas were “appalling” but did not happen in a vacuum.

“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,”

he said.

“They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

Such comment was not at all savoured by the Israeli government.  and therefore Israel vowed to ‘teach the UN a lesson’. Israel’s envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign immediately, accusing him of being detached from reality.

“His comments … constitute a justification for terrorism and murder. It’s sad that a person with such views is the head of an organisation that arose after the Holocaust.”

At the UN meeting, the Israeli delegation decided to put on a yellow Star of David, which offended several and could also be seen as spitting on and hurting Jews.

Guterres told reporters at the UN.

“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day.”

Efforts at the UN security council to negotiate an agreed resolution calling for a ceasefire are deadlocked, with the 10 non-permanent members doing their best to reach an agreement on wording and emphasis. Pressure will then be applied to prevent one of the five veto-wielding permanent members, most likely the US or Russia, from blocking the text.

The chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said Hamas leaders already regretted their attack and would continue to pay for it.

“This war has one address: the Hamas leadership and all those who acted under its command. They will pay the price for what they did,”

he told the media near the Gaza border.

The country’s prime minister also made it clear that fighting would not stop until the last Hamas fighter was driven off the face of the earth.

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Preceding

Zionism comments and the place of Jerusalem in the world

Horror for a cornered people

Imprisonment and slaughter in the Gaza Strip

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Additional reading

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31. Politic headlines on Friday 2023 October 13
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