US, western hypocrisy on Gaza

A file photo shows US president Joe Biden shaking hands with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they meet on the sidelines of the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 20. — Agence France-Presse/Jim Watson

Dr Habib Siddiqui : AS MILLIONS of people have poured onto the streets around the world in support of the Palestinian people as the Israel Defence Force pounds Gaza non-stop since the surprise attack of the Hamas inside Israel, the western powers, led by the US, have come to show their unrelenting support for the murderous apartheid state of Israel.

In this war, truth has once again been twisted to justify the genocidal crimes of the Netanyahu government. The US president, Joe Biden, did not waste any time to voice America’s support for the war crimes of Netanyahu. He called Hamas’s attack on Israel ‘pure, unadulterated evil,’ as he vowed, ‘We stand with Israel.’ ‘We’ll make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of itself,’ Biden said from the White House.

‘I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children,’ said Biden, who described the attack as the ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’.

Unverified claims about the beheading of Israeli children and sexual assault of hostages by the Palestinian armed group have gone viral on social media in the days following the October 7 attack.

A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently. We are told that ‘The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel, according to the White House.’

Netanyahu has long been known as a liar to sanitise the crimes of his government against others.

Hamas has denied claims that its fighters beheaded children and assaulted women, calling them ‘lies.’

Social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok have been swamped with fake news on the Israel-Hamas war, according to an Al Jazeera investigation.

As we all know too well, for the die-hard and unabashed supporters of the Zionist state, no excuse is required to justify Israeli violence—its decades-long brutality, barbarism and savagery against the Palestinian people and their neighbours anywhere. The Capitol Hill has long been serving as the ‘Amen Corner’ for the apartheid state. Anyone challenging the Israeli narratives or daring to speak out for the victims of apartheid is routinely censured.

Even before the Hamas attack on October 7, tens of thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered with the money and weapons pouring from the US and the European Union. More than 200 unarmed Palestinians were slaughtered this year alone by the trigger-happy Israel Defence Force and the Jewish illegal settlers before the surprise attack came from the Hamas. Elderly women were mercilessly beaten during Ramadan inside one of the holiest places of Islam. Palestinians, including children, women and elders, were pulverised with bombs dropped from the air; tanks and bulldozers demolished homes; water, electricity, and food were cut off; and armed Jewish settlers destroyed Palestinian properties. The entire Gaza Strip was seized and cut off from the rest of the world by air, sea and land, making it the largest concentration camp in our time.

Where was the outcry from the western leaders then? Do Palestinian lives matter? Surely, not to them. They never did, neither now nor before.

Remember all those hullabaloos about the human casualties of the Russian bombing campaigns inside Ukraine and how Putin’s war crimes were depicted as serious ones to secure the ICC to issue an arrest warrant against him?

May I ask: are the bombing campaigns against Gaza by the ‘only’ democratic country in the Middle East any less savage or brutal than those of Russia?

More than 2,700 Palestinian civilians, nearly a third of them children, have already been killed and more than 10,000 wounded since October 7, with hundreds of residential homes, scores of hospitals, clinics and mosques totally destroyed in a savage orgy of genocide. More than a million residents of Gaza have been displaced and forced to leave their homes, while they have no safe zone. Rafah, the only border crossing that remained partially open to the Gaza strip, was closed after damage caused by Israeli airstrikes. The dead casualty figure is already two times the number of victims inside Israel on October 7. And yet, we are warned that the worst of the Israeli ground assault is yet to come!

‘The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel has reached fever pitch,’ said Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. ‘There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale,’ she said.

She noted that Israeli public officials have openly advocated for another Nakba, the term for the events of 1947–1949, when over 770,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands during the hostilities that led to the establishment of the state of Israel. The Naksa, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, displaced 350,000 Palestinians.

‘Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war,’ the expert said. ‘Again, in the name of self-defence, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing.

‘Any continued military operations by Israel have gone well beyond the limits of international law. The international community must stop these egregious violations of international law now, before tragic history is repeated. Time is of the essence. Palestinians and Israelis both deserve to live in peace, with equality of rights, dignity and freedom,’ Albanese said.

‘The United Nations and its member states must intensify efforts to mediate an immediate ceasefire between the parties before we reach a point of no return,’ said Albanese. ‘The international community has the responsibility to prevent and protect populations from atrocity crimes. Accountability for international crimes committed by Israeli occupation forces and Hamas must also be immediately pursued,’ she said.

Not surprisingly, this genocidal campaign by Israel, like all its previous mass murders, has been falsely portrayed by its supporters as an act of reprisal. The facts are that the state of Israel, since her illegitimate birth in 1948, has been murdering Palestinians since its Zionist leaders declared war against the Palestinians. They have terrorised, robbed, dispossessed, and forcibly exiled the native Palestinians — dropping bombs, using chemical weapons, killing people, including journalists and medics, demolishing mosques, homes, schools, universities, clinics, hospitals, markets, utilities, and everything that matters for a society to thrive on. In this process of settler colonisation, they have traumatised and dehumanised their victims of aggression, yet they have the Pharaonic audacity to claim the moral high ground. How absurd!

But where is the western outrage? Why is Netanyahu not summoned to the Hague for his crimes against humanity—past and present? Why don’t they condemn Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant’s highly offensive and racist remark about the people of Gaza: ‘We are fighting against human animals’ when he announced a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza? Is the slaughter of Palestinian civilians by the IDF and Jewish settlers in Israel anything less than ‘pure unadulterated evil,’ president Biden? Why do you allow the slaughter, maiming and starvation of the people of Gaza?

No, we don’t expect any honest answer from either president Biden and his administration or his western partners on such probing questions about Israel. The apartheid state has long been given carte blanche on all such matters by the West, which sponsored and implanted it.

Biden has been an avowed Zionist since at least his senatorial days in the 1980s, when I moved into his neighborhood. During his latest meeting with Israel’s president Herzog, Biden repeated a line he famously said in 1986: ‘If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.’ Back then, he was a member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Biden’s frank comments make clear that the US-Israel ‘bond’ is not about defending democracy. Rather, it has always been, and still is, about American imperial interests in the region. The US sees Israel as a critical ‘strategic ally’ in the Middle East.

So, as rightly noted by many area specialists, scholarly experts and human rights organisations, if this bond is simply about naked self-interest, where Israel, much to Theodor Herzl’s vision of forming a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’, why all the fuss about whether Israel is labelled a democracy or an apartheid and racist state?

The narrative that the US supports Israel because it is the only democracy in the Middle East is patently false. The fact is: Israel is a settler-colonial state that practises an apartheid system in which the indigenous Palestinians are treated as unequal and less than human beings, as once again confirmed by Yoav Gallant. Thus, genocidal crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people, past, present and future, instead of being seen as egregious crimes, are seen only as kosher tasks by their very planners and executioners. The bombing of an entire neighbourhood under the pretext of killing a suspected Hamas agent does not raise any feelings of guilt or remorse.

Any critic of the Israeli apartheid system and its long-term impact, on the other hand, is accused of antisemitism to silence and censor them, a policy that is religiously followed by the ‘Amen Corner’ in the US Capitol Hill and many citadels of power in the western world, which is also parroted by the western press that is mortgaged to the Zionist power. Expectedly, waving a Palestinian flag has become illegal in Rishi Sunak’s UK and Macron’s France.

Thus, sadly, what we have is something that is pure, unadulterated evil, a wholesale genuflection on the altar of Zionism. In this, the notions of right and wrong, democracy, human rights and dignity have lost their true meanings. Israel is seen as a small and necessary investment and not a four-billion-dollar yearly burden by Biden and many western leaders. They now see Nelson Mandela and Apartheid South Africa as dead and matters of a distant past with nothing to remember or learn from.

Two US Secretaries, Blinken and Austin, have been dispatched to the region to relay the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the genocidal maniacs in Israel and warn others in the region not to meddle. Two aircraft carriers have also been dispatched to the region to bolster the racist, mass-murdering government of Netanyahu.

If this is how the western leaders in the USA and the EU define their moral high ground, they ought to drop the charade of respecting human rights and dignity. They are morally bankrupt. They can pat each other on the back, but such self-adulations will not fool the better-informed global citizens of our time, as clearly testified by massive rallies held in support of the Palestinian people in various cities, including Philadelphia, where many anti-Zionist, peace-loving Jews participated, blaming Israel for the current crisis.

Dr Habib Siddiqui is a peace and rights activist.