Vultures’ Ball
Jabalia camp, 22 February. Jaber Badwen, Creative Commons 2:0Today, it is exactly two years since 6,000 Hamas and Hamas-affiliated militias carried out its Operation al-Aqsa Flood attacks on Israeli army bases and settlements in southern Israel. In the course of these attacks, 1, 175 Israelis were killed, most of whom were unarmed civilians, and 247 civilian and military hostages were kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. In response to the bloodiest single day in Israel’s history, the Netanyahu coalition government unleashed a punitive war of annihilation on the largely defenceless Palestinian population of 2.4 million people, that has reduced much of the Gaza Strip into a heap of rubble.
According to data gathered from the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli authorities by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) , there were 65,062 reported fatalities in Gaza as of 17 September this year, and 165, 697 maimed and injured. These confirmed casualties include 18,430 children, 9, 735 women and 4,2429 elderly. Many more bodies are buried under the rubble.
The OCHA’s figures paint a staggering picture of devastation and societal collapse that is difficult to comprehend. 78 percent of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged, 92 percent of housing has been destroyed, and 1.98 million people are currently in need of emergency shelter. At present, 500,000 people in Gaza are living in Phase 5 food security conditions characterized by ‘starvation, destitution and death’, 454 Palestinians have already died of starvation, and Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.
In the course of these operations, Israel has razed entire towns and neighbourhoods, wiped out families, and deliberately targeted aid workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and journalists. According to a study by Brown University’s Cost of War Project (CWP), more than 250 journalists had been killed in the Strip by August this year - a figure higher than all the journalists killed in two world wars, and in the wars in Vietnam, Laos, Korea and Cambodia.
By October 2024 alone, Israel had bombed 40,00 targets in the Gaza Strip, and its estimated tonnage had exceeded the combined bomb tonnage dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg during World War II. All this, according to Israeli figures, has resulted in the deaths of between 17,000 and 23,0000 of Hamas’s estimated 30,000 fighters.
Given Israel’s very loose and often evidence-free definition of what constitutes a combatant, these figures can be taken with more than a pinch of salt, and the military and counterinsurgency objectives of this war have long been subsumed into what has become a war of massacre, of killing for the sake of killing, destruction for the sake of destruction, aimed at humiliating and starving the entire Palestinian population, and eradicating the material basis of Gazan society.
All this has taken place in full view of the entire world, despite Israel’s ban on foreign journalists entering the Strip, and with the direct complicity and collusion of some of the most powerful democratic governments in the world. It was not many years ago, when these countries launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, because, their leaders insisted, the world could not stand idly by and watch dictators and autocracies oppressing women and minorities, or carrying out massacres against ‘their own people.’
These were heady days, when British politicians filled with interventionist made lofty Gladstonian speeches in parliament, and liberal and conservative journalists alike took time off from long lunches to tap out urgent calls for cruise missile strikes on the latest dictator du jour.
For the last two years, Britain and its allies have provided direct military assistance, diplomatic cover, or merely the silence that enabled Israel to wage a war that scholars, international and Israeli humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations have denounced as a genocide. All this was underway long before the Trump gangsters took power. Samantha Power, the author of ‘“A Problem from Hell”: America in the age of Genocide, had nothing to say about his one when she served in Biden’s administration, and nor did her boss. This time, we knew, people used to say, about the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. This time, we also knew, but the governments that might have stopped or condemned it were too busy enabling it or averted their eyes.
Labour’s CowardiceUntil recently, Conservative and Labour governments alike were ready to join in any war at the drop of an American hat, in order to prevent massacres that had not even happened. Now they can barely raise the voices to condemn a massacre that is staring them in the face. Last month, David Lammy solemnly announced that HM government ‘has not concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza’ and that therefore, ministers were absolved of any responsibility to act in accordance with the 1948 genocide convention.
Clearly the government has given the matter some thought, though one suspects the process didn’t take long. And like its counterparts in Europe and the United States, the British government has been less circumspect, and considerably more energetic, in repressing protests against the genocide that it has concluded is not happening, than it has in condemning it.
The most egregious example of this was the banning of Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organization. So far, neither Yvette Cooper nor Shabana Mahmood has offered any substantive evidence to justify a decision that has effectively placed vicars, pensioners and disabled protestors on the same level as Islamic State, resulting in hundreds of arrests that have done nothing but confirm the cowardice of the government that introduced this shameful legislation.
Last week, Mahmood was at it again, when she called on protestors to cancel Saturday’s Defend Our Juries protest, because of the despicable attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. The organisers refused to accept the implication that their protest was directed against Jews, and the protest went ahead anyway, resulting in hundreds more arrests, Mahmood doubled down, and promised to introduce further restrictions to prevent such protests in the future.
On one level you can’t blame her. Labour has now reached the point when the political costs of drawing back from this confrontation are greater than those of withdrawing from it. The government will lose in the end, because the law makes no sense, and its authoritarianism is a confirmation of cowardice, not strength.
And throughout all this, both Conservative and Labour governments have continued to back Israel to the hilt. Despite Starmer’s recognition of a Palestinian state - a gesture which is effectively meaningless when Palestinians are being slaughtered in unprecedented numbers - there has literally been nothing that Israel has not been allowed to do that this government has not found a way to accept.
Even when Israel unilaterally bombed Iran, Starmer immediately offered to help Israel ‘defend itself’, even though Iran was the country being attacked. From time to time, ministers have frowned and used a few cross words to criticize Israel’s failure to observe humanitarian protocols or protect the civilian population .
But for the most part, the British government, like so many others, has accepted such deaths as a tragic necessity for which Hamas, not Israel, is primarily responsible. Even when Starmer has described the ‘suffering’ in Gaza as ‘unspeakable and indefensible’, neither the British nor any other government has taken any serious action regarding the country responsible for this suffering. In July, Britain was one of 25 Western countries condemning the ‘inhumane killing’ of hundreds of Palestinians trying to collect food at the lethal food distribution sites that replaced UNRWA.
Inhumane is the very least you can say about shooting starving unarmed civilians to a food distribution site that you have set up. Of course, Britain doesn’t have the power to compel Israel to do anything by itself. As the world well knows, the United States is the main supplier of weapons to Israel, regardless of whether the government consists of Biden Democrats or MAGA mafiosi. Labour’s collusion and cowardice is part of a generalized moral failure.
We tend to associated genocide with extremist movements from outside the ‘international order’, with Nazis and the SS, with the Ustashe, Serb paramilitaries or machete-waving Hutu. This one has been entirely different. It has been carried out within the liberal democratic framework of treaties, rules, and conventions that were supposedly designed to prevent such acts, with the passive or active support of countries that are part of this framework.
Erasing the conflictHow did this happen? The most obvious answer, is the horror of 7 October itself. Most defenders of the war cite the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, including the taking of Israeli hostages, as a justification for everything that followed. But this is only part of the explanation. If the hostages were the point of Israel’s operations, there have been opportunities to negotiate their release, which Israel has either ignored or deliberately sabotaged, essentially because the Netanyahu government has no interest in bringing the war to an end, and saw it as an opportunity to achieve wider political objectives.
There is no doubt that Hamas carried out horrendous crimes on 7 October, even if some of these atrocities were fabricated. But the brutality of these operations was a consequence of a conflict that is more than a century old. Too many governments and too many people have refused to recognize this, either because they already supported the Zionist project, or because of sheer ignorance and laziness. Some of the most bloodthirsty commentators - you know who they are - have made spurious comparisons between Hamas and Nazi Germany or Japan, the better to present Gaza City as the 21st century’s equivalent of 1939 Berlin, Dresden, or Tokyo.
But Hamas is not the government of an industrialized, militarized state with the capacity to engage in aggressive wars of conquest against its neighbours. It is the political representative of one section of the Palestinian people living under occupation - segmented and isolated under the guise of the Gaza ‘withdrawal’ for nearly two decades in order to postpone - indefinitely - the realisation of Palestinian political aspirations.
Throughout those years, the ‘international community’ denied the legitimacy of a government that Gazans had voted for, and accepted Israel’s framing of Hamas as a threat to its security and existence. In the months leading up to 7 October, Israel and the Gulf States were on the brink of normalising relations, which would have marginalised Gaza even more than it already was.
None of this makes Hamas good guys or heroes. It doesn’t mean that what Hamas did on 7 October was inevitable, or that the world should ‘rejoice’ in the 7 October raid, as the SWP once disgracefully suggested.
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Hamas bears moral responsibility for the crimes carried out against civilians on 7 October, and also for exposing the population of Gaza to the killing and devastation it knew would follow. That was a political choice, and Israel also made a political choice, when it unleashed a war of total destruction, and no amount of propaganda about national survival and Palestinian ‘terror’ can conceal who is the most powerful protagonist here.
Too many governments that should know better had already accepted every Israeli cliché about Arab/Muslim terrorism as the primary cause, rather than a symptom of the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ even before 7 October, and too many saw the Hamas raids as a confirmation of this framework. Too many have acted as if Hamas was al-Qaeda or Islamic State. By denying any rationality to Hamas as political actors , and presenting Hamas as a threat to its national survival, Israel has created a moral climate in which blowing the limbs off children, burning patients in hospital beds, and shooting five-year-old girls in their parents’ car could seem justifiable, or at least unavoidable consequences of the ‘horrors of war’.
Israel had its own reasons for framing the conflict as a war against terror, and nothing else. But it beggars belief that so many governments have accepted this disingenuous and shallow version of political conflict. However much some politicians and commentators who support the war, may whitter on about Palestinian ‘suffering’, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that too many people simply do not see Palestinians, especially Gazan Palestinians, as human beings with the same rights as Israelis or citizens of their own countries.
They may wring their hands. But in practice, Palestinians always come second, and this is why Gazans have been killed, maimed and starved for two years. Now, Western democracies and Arab autocracies are falling over themselves to support the ‘peace plan’ concocted by a venal cabal of real estate magnates and billionaires, with the inevitable participation of Tony Blair.
These are the vultures now circling over Gaza’s field of corpses, some of whom are looking to make money out of it. And the fact that this plan has been devised without any Palestinian participation, demonstrates once again that Palestinians are seen by Israel and its supporters -regardless of who they are - as savage children, pawns to be moulded and shunted around by Israel, or the sinister cabal of Gulf autocrats and pseudo-humanitarians who are now dreaming of building skyscrapers, freeways and casinos on the bones of Gaza’s dead.
Everything about the plan is framed to suit Israel, from its proposal to make Gaza ‘a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours’ to its call for ‘an interfaith dialogue process…based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence to try and change mindsets.’
The fact that Israel has bombed Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Qatar, might suggest that Israel, not Hamas, is the greater threat to its ‘neighbours’. And ‘interfaith dialogue’ reeks of Tony Blair’s happy clappy Christianity, and will not do a single thing to resolve a conflict based not on the absence of dialogue, but on occupation, displacement and competing claims for the same territory.
The Trump plan also intends to ‘reform’ the Palestinian Authority and make it fit to govern Gaza, regardless of whether Gazans want it. Should Israel also be ‘reformed’, as settlers and the army seize more and more territory in the West Bank, killing Palestinians and destroying their homes in territories under the Palestinian Authority’s control? None of this interests the ‘international community’, which, to paraphrase Brecht, is once again trying to dissolve the Palestinian people and make another.
The ‘plan’ has one single virtue: it may halt the slaughter and bring relief to the people of Gaza. It will also bring some political relief to governments that have supported all this throughout, despite rising public sympathy for the Palestinians and horror and outrage at what Israel has done.
Some of these governments may well try to give the orange gangster his peace prize, and in these crazed times, he might even get it. But the ‘peace’ in this plan is not the negotiated peace that brings conflicts to an end. It is the peace inflicted on the Biblical Amelekites, in which ‘Nothing could serve as a reminder of Amalek’s name—not even an animal about which it could be said.’ It is the desolation that Tacitus once put in the mouth of a British chieftain.
It is a peace that merely confirms the moral bankruptcy of those who inflicted this devastation, of the individuals and countries that facilitated it, and who have between them created a moral calamity and a humanitarian catastrophe that will haunt the 21st century, just as the 1948 Nakba haunted the twentieth.
