WE are expected to accept that, in their foreign relations, the states that make up the imperial power nexus centred on the United States are the guardians of universal values. That without this rules-based international order our security would be in danger.
It now turns out that there are two sets of rules. One applied by Force Majeure to states of a lesser order and one that the imperium regards, when applied to themselves, as little more than an instantly discharged fashion accessory.
If that is the global context in which these things work, the domestic context is equally transparent. We are allowed free speech so long as is not dressed in the red, black, green and white colours of Palestine or, it seems, if the crimes of Benjamin Netanayu catch cartoonist Steve Bell’s eye.
The rights of the unborn child are held to be sacrosanct — except in the case of the 50,000 pregnant women of Gaza.
Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip has created, in the words of a consortium of international aid groups, a “dire humanitarian crisis.”
Supplies of food, water, fuel and electricity have been cut off. Crammed into a tiny strip, surrounded by barbed wire, with inadequate water and barren land nearly two thirds of the 2.2 million Gazans depend on foreign humanitarian aid for food and water.
More than half of Gaza’s residents live below the poverty line and about three-quarters of Gazan households need food aid from the United Nations
In blockading Gaza and instructing its people to vacate the larger and more inhabited part of their tiny domain — or face an intensified bombardment — Israel is committing a war crime and giving notice of its intention to commit even more crimes. The UN said the order for the mass evacuation was “impossible” without major humanitarian consequences.
Israel knows it is impossible for the bulk of people living in the Israeli-designated free-fire zone to evacuate even if there was somewhere for them to go. The most vulnerable — women, children, the elderly, disabled and ill — are now the most at risk.
By the brutal metrics of this war, the Israelis have already extracted their Biblical eye for an eye. The Gaza death toll is reaching towards 2,000 with nearly half a million displaced by the bombing.
The evacuation order is designed to give cover to Israel over the civilian deaths that will inevitably accompany both the continued air assault, the shelling and a ground assault.
The closest parallel to the operation the Israelis threaten is the Nazi assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. We can expect the same kind of resistance that a people faced with an industrial-scale pogrom will offer.
It is instructive that the US military compared the impending operation with the assault on Fallujah in Iraq, a battle that saw the use of white phosphorus by the invader.
The death toll will include not only Palestinian civilians and Hamas soldiers but many, many Israeli soldiers to add to those killed in the earlier assault.
With Starmer marching in military lock step with the Tory government, the humanitarian impulse to end the bloodshed and lay the basis for a just end to the Palestinian national tragedy can only come from popular opinion
To understand the Palestinian people’s anger at their dispossession and the continuing repression that drove the Hamas assault is not to condone the killing of non-combatants.
To understand the feelings of Jewish people shocked at being the victims of indiscriminate killing is not to condone the war crimes committed nominally in retaliation.
Britain should be seeking a ceasefire — not condoning a catastrophe.
