{"id":245897,"date":"2023-10-16T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=245897"},"modified":"2023-10-10T05:15:36","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T04:15:36","slug":"the-wests-hypocrisy-towards-gazas-breakout-is-stomach-turning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/the-wests-hypocrisy-towards-gazas-breakout-is-stomach-turning\/","title":{"rendered":"The West\u2019s Hypocrisy Towards Gaza\u2019s Breakout Is Stomach-Turning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

There will be little sympathy in the West as, yet again, besieged Palestinians are bombed by Israel, their immense suffering justified by the term \u2018Israeli retaliation.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

8 Oct 2023<\/em> – The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.<\/p>\n

Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by western politicians or publics.<\/p>\n

The West\u2019s hypocrisy<\/a> over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged\u00a0Gaza<\/a>\u00a0is stark indeed.<\/p>\n

This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage<\/a> in 2007, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea and air.<\/p>\n

Western media are calling the jailbreak and attack by Palestinians from Gaza \u201cunprecedented\u201d \u2013 and the most dismal intelligence failing by Israel since it was caught off-guard during the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago.<\/p>\n

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused<\/a> Hamas, which nominally runs the open-air prison of Gaza, of starting \u201ca cruel and evil war\u201d. But the truth is that the Palestinians have \u201cstarted\u201d nothing. They have managed, after so much struggle, to find a way to hurt their tormentor.<\/p>\n

Inevitably for the Palestinians, as Netanyahu also observed, \u201cthe price will be heavy\u201d \u2013 especially for civilians. Israel will inflict on the prisoners the severest punishment for their impudence.<\/p>\n

Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term \u201cIsraeli retaliation\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The real lessons<\/strong><\/h3>\n

All the current analysis focusing on Israel\u2019s intelligence \u201cblunders\u201d<\/a>\u00a0distracts from the real lesson of these rapidly evolving events.<\/p>\n

No one really cared while Gaza\u2019s Palestinans were subjected to a blockade imposed by Israel that denied them the essentials of life. The few dozen Israelis being held hostage<\/a>\u00a0by Hamas fighters pale in comparison with the two million Palestinians held hostage by Israel in an open-air prison for nearly two decades.<\/p>\n

No one really cared when it emerged that Gaza\u2019s Palestinians had been put on a \u201cstarvation diet<\/a>\u201d\u00a0by Israel \u2013 only limited food was allowed in, calculated to keep the population barely fed.<\/p>\n

No one really cared when Israel bombed the coastal enclave every few years, killing many hundreds of Palestinian civilians each time. Israel simply called it \u201cmowing the lawn\u201d<\/a>. The destruction of vast areas of Gaza, what Israeli generals boasted of as returning the enclave to the Stone Age, was formalised as a military strategy known as the \u201cDahiya doctrine<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n

No one really cared when Israeli snipers targeted nurses, youngsters and people in wheelchairs who came out to protest against their imprisonment by Israel. Many thousands were left as amputees<\/a> after those snipers received<\/a> orders to shoot the protesters indiscriminately in the legs or ankles.<\/p>\n

Western concern at the deaths of Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian fighters is hard to stomach. Have not many hundreds of Palestinian children died over the past 15 years in Israel\u2019s repeated bombing campaigns on Gaza? Did their lives not count as much as Israeli lives \u2013 and if not, why not?<\/p>\n

After so much indifference for so long, it is difficult to hear the sudden horror from Western governments and media because Palestinians have finally found a way \u2013 mirroring Israel\u2019s inhumane, decades-long policy \u2013 to fight back effectively.<\/p>\n

This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals.<\/p>\n

Hypocrisy distilled<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Distilling that hypocrisy is Volodymr Zelenskiy, Ukraine\u2019s president. At the weekend, he issued<\/a> a lengthy tweet condemning Palestinians as \u201cterrorists\u201d and offering Israel his unwavering support.<\/p>\n

He averred that \u201cIsrael\u2019s right to self-defense is unquestionable\u201d, adding: \u201cThe world must stand united and in solidarity so that terror does not attempt to break or subjugate life anywhere and at any moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The inversion of reality is breath-taking. The Palestinians cannot \u201csubjugate life\u201d in Israel. They have no such power, even if a few briefly managed to break out of their cage. It is Israel that has been subjugating Palestinian life for decades.<\/p>\n

Not all forms of \u201cterrorism\u201d, it seems, are equal in the eyes of Zelenskiy, or his patrons in Western capitals. Certainly, not the state terrorism of Israel that has made Palestinian lives a misery for decades.<\/p>\n

How does Israel have an \u201cunquestionable right\u201d to \u201cdefend itself\u201d from the Palestinians whose territory it occupies and controls? To apply Zelenskiy\u2019s logic, how does Russia then not have an equal claim to be \u201cdefending itself\u201d when it kills Ukrainians trying to liberate territory from Russian occupation?<\/p>\n

Israel, the much stronger, belligerent party, is now laying waste to Gaza \u201cin retaliation\u201d, as the BBC puts it<\/a>, for the latest Palestinian attack.<\/p>\n

So on what grounds will Zelenskiy or his officials be able to condemn Moscow when it fires missiles \u201cin retaliation\u201d for Ukraine\u2019s strikes on Russian territory? How, if Palestinian resistance to Israel\u2019s occupation of Gaza is terrorism, as Zelenskiy asserts, is Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation not equally terrorism?<\/p>\n

No hiding place<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By indulging Israel in its deceptions, Israel\u2019s allies have allowed it to perpetrate ever more outrageous lies. At the weekend, Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to \u201cleave now<\/a>\u201d because Israeli forces were preparing to \u201cact with all force\u201d.<\/p>\n

But Netanyahu knows, as do his Western enablers, that Gaza\u2019s population has nowhere to flee. There is no hiding place. Palestinians have been sealed into Gaza since Israel besieged it by land, sea and air.<\/p>\n

The only Palestinians able to \u201cleave Gaza\u201d are the armed factions who broke out of their Israeli-imposed jail and are being denounced as \u201cterrorists\u201d by Western politicians and media.<\/p>\n

Western governments so horrified by the Palestinian attack on Israel are also the governments that are remaining silent as Israel turns off the electricity to the prison that is Gaza \u2013 again in supposed \u201cretaliation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The collective punishment of two million Palestinians in Gaza, dependent on Israel for power because Israel surrounds and controls every aspect of their lives, is a war crime<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Strangely, Western officials understand it is a war crime when Russia bombs power stations in Ukraine, turning off the lights. They scream for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be dragged to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. So why is it so difficult for them to understand the parallels of what Israel is doing to Gaza?<\/p>\n

Daring escape<\/strong><\/h3>\n

There are two immediate, and contrasting, lessons to be learnt from what has happened this weekend.<\/p>\n

The first is that the human spirit cannot be caged indefinitely. Palestinians in Gaza have been constantly devising new ways to break free from their chains.<\/p>\n

They have built a network of tunnels, most of which Israel has located and destroyed. They have fired rockets that are invariably shot down by ever more sophisticated interception systems. They have protested en masse at the heavily fortified fences, topped by guntowers, Israel surrounded them with \u2013 only to be shot by snipers.<\/p>\n

Now they have staged a daring escape. Israel will batter the enclave back into submission with massive bombardments, but only \u201cin retaliation\u201d, of course. The Palestinians\u2019 craving for freedom and dignity will not be diminished. Another form of resistance, doubtless more brutal still, will emerge.<\/p>\n

And the parties most responsible for that brutality will be Israel and the West that supports it so lavishly, because Israel refuses to stop brutalising the Palestinians it forces to live under its rule.<\/p>\n

The second lesson is that Israel, endlessly indulged by its Western patrons, still has no incentive to internalise the fundamental truth above. The rhetoric of its current government of facists and Jewish supremacists may be particularly ugly, but there is a broad consensus among Israelis of all political stripes that the Palestinians must continue to be oppressed.<\/p>\n

Which is why the so-called opposition will not hesitate to support the military pounding of the long besieged enclave of Gaza, killing yet more Palestinian civilians to \u201cteach them a lesson\u201d, a lesson no one in Israel can articulate beyond asserting that Palestinians must accept their permanent inferiority and imprisonment.<\/p>\n

Already, the \u201cgood Israelis\u201d<\/a> \u2013 opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz \u2013 are in discussions with Netanyahu to join him in an \u201cemergency unity government\u201d.<\/p>\n

What \u201cemergency\u201d? The emergency of Palestinians demanding the right not to live as prisoners in their own homeland.<\/p>\n

Israelis and Westerners can continue their mental gymnastics to justify the Palestinians\u2019 oppression and refuse them any right to resist. But their hypocrisy and self-deceptions stand exposed for the rest of the world to see.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of: <\/em>Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); <\/em>Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008); and <\/em>Disappearing Palestine: Israel\u2019s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the <\/em>Martha Gellhorn Special Prize<\/em><\/a> for Journalism. The same year, <\/em>Project Censored<\/em><\/a> voted one of Jonathan\u2019s reports, \u201cIsrael brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank\u201d, the ninth most important story censored in 2009-10.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jonathan-cook.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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