by John Pickard
Benjamin Netanyahu is home from his trip to the USA, where he got a rousing reception and a standing ovation at a joint session of Congress. It is just as well he went there, because US politicians are just about the only friends the Israeli government has left. Even then, the ovation in Congress barely drowned out the noise of the massive demonstration outside the Capitol building when tens of thousands of workers and youth expressed their outrage at the visit of this war criminal to their country.
The International Court of Justice has consolidated the isolation of Israel by its ruling last week that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territories is “unlawful” and should be ended “as rapidly as possible.” It is important to note, however, that the ICJ decision, which really ought to have been made nearly sixty years ago when the territories were first occupied, has not been made now because wheels of ‘international law’ turn slowly. It is entirely due to the massive and global wave of protest over the genocide perpetrated in Gaza in the last ten months.
It is not just that so many have been killed by the merciless bombing of Gaza – and that is horrific enough – but the whole policy of the Israeli army appears to be aimed to make Gaza uninhabitable again. Added to the horrendous casualties, Israel has deliberately created a huge humanitarian crisis for the two and a quarter million Palestinians in Gaza.
Furthermore, using the war as a pretext, Israeli expansion in the occupied West Bank has been stepped up, with armed settlers and the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force taking more tracts of land and terrorising, brutalising and killing more of the local population. Thousands more from the West Bank have been incarcerated, almost all without any due process of law, to add to those captured in Gaza and interned in the most brutal conditions in camps in Israel.
Israel has complete military domination of Gaza
The israeli military has complete domination of the Gaza strip and the IDF continue to bomb schools and refugee camps at will. Hardly a day passes without some new outrage, as an alleged ‘Hamas target’ is the pretext for yet another massacre of civilians.
Desperate and homeless refugees are being pushed and pulled from one supposed ‘safe’ zone to another by the IDF. Some families have been displaced ten times as they try to avoid the relentless bombardments. According to Al Jazeera, the agency for Palestinian refugees estimates that “86 percent of Gaza” – which amounts to two million people – are currently under such forced evacuation orders. In case anyone should need reminding:
- Over 39,000 have been killed, equivalent for a country with the same population as the UK, to over a million and a quarter. Eighty per cent of casualties have been women and children.
- 90,000 have been injured, translated in terms of a UK population, as two and three quarter millions.
- The deaths include over 400 schoolteachers, 10,000 students, hundreds of medical personnel and reporters.
- Israel has devastated the entire civilian infrastructure of Gaza, irrespective of the lack of ‘military’ or strategic significance – homes, roads, schools, hospitals, water treatment facilities, electrical generation facilities and even water towers. This video on TikTok shows the latest wanton destruction of a water tower.
UK government considering arms embargo of Israel?
Even those western politicians who have in the past held out against any criticism of Israel, despite the exponential growth of the casualty numbers, are now being forced by public opinion to review their stance. Keir Starmer, now Prime Minister, has caught up with others – months too late – in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. According to Haaretz, the UK government is at long last considering suspending defence exports to Israel, something Starmer should have been calling for ten months ago.
It is highly unlikely to say the least, but the Turkish President Erdogan has even threatened to intervene in the War, comparing Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. Most western governments, not to mention those in the Middle East, are at the moment desperately attempting to limit the slow-burning war between the Lebanese Hezbollah and Israel, which seems always on the brink of exploding into all-out war.
In Israel, there is a widespread feeling among many of its citizens – the big majority of whom want to see the back of Netanyahu – that the government is only prolonging the war in Gaza, and possible seeking to extend it northwards into Lebanon, to stay in office. The monstrous one-sided war on the people of Gaza has liberated only a few of the hostages taken by Hamas last October, the big majority of those returned to Israel having come through the ceasefire last November.
Israel is divided as never before
Israel is a state divided as never before. There are those who support the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, armed to the teeth and conducting regular pogroms against Palestinian villages and farmers. They would, if they could get away with it, expel all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, to establish an exclusively Jewish homeland, ‘from the River to the Sea’.
But there are also those in Israel – probably a small minority at the moment – who will come to realise that there is no ‘peace’ and no ‘security’ for the Jewish population of Israel as long as that is at the expense of the national and economic rights of the Palestinian people. As many have been warning for years, the road that leads to apartheid leads only to war, social upheaval and conflict.
Even now, as a result of the war in Gaza, Israelis are on the brink of fighting other israelis. Those demonstrating in Tel Aviv in favour of a ceasefire and against the government have been met with police batons and tear gas. So bad has been the treatment of Palestinian prisoners that Israeli military police even raided one prison to arrest the IDF soldiers who were in charge.
IDF soldiers in stand-off with military police
This led, according to Haaretz, to a ‘stand-off’ between soldiers and military police. Haaretz reported that “soldiers used pepper spray at military police personnel”. One of them was recorded saying: “We will unite against the IDF arresting our fellow soldiers“. This was much to the annoyance of the Israeli Security Minister, Ben Gvir, who told reporters, “the spectacle of military police officers coming to arrest our best heroes in the Sde Teiman detention facility is nothing less than shameful”.
These are only the first signs of what will become an intense and bitter conflict within and among Israelis. The inhuman, wilful and genocidal destruction of Gaza shows the overwhelming power of the Israeli state. In military terms, it has accomplished an easy ‘victory’ in Gaza – and how could it be otherwise, in a war largely against a civilian population? But history will show that Netanyahu, a man who has built his entire political career on Israeli ‘security’, has this year engineered the greatest political defeat in that state’s entire history.
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