The US and friends continue in the same witless arse-bound spiral in their support of the current Israeli genocide of the people of Palestine while finding that same genocidal behaviour to be unconscionable. The cognitive dissonance this is inducing in the West may well rip apart the space-time continuum.
As I write, Israel is lining up its tanks and bombs to attack Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are trapped while America and its friends yell ‘Don’t do it!’ To this Netanyahu holds up his middle finger of one hand while happily begging his allies’ military with the other. If he had a third hand, it would be holding the starting gun for that assault on Rafah.
Adding to the West’s conundrum, international courts and the lawyers of individual governments have come out saying Israeli actions ‘may be’ a war crime …
Whoa! Let’s hold this narrative a second! Thirty-two thousand confirmed deaths — the vast majority children, women, elderly — food and medical aid deliberately withheld, refugees deliberately targeted, hospitals and UN aid workers deliberately targeted, starvation employed as a weapon of war, and we need courts and lawyers to tell us ‘there may be reason to think’ there are genocidal war crimes in progress? ‘May be’? ‘Think’?
Back to the narrative. The laws in the UK and the US forbid those countries from arming nations that are engaged in war crimes. The US and UK have neatly sidestepped this little inconvenience by simply suppressing or ignoring the reports from their own lawyers. In order to salve public opinion and their own consciences these countries and others have been airdropping supplies to the besieged Palestinian people, but in quantities insufficient to prevent starvation.
In the news yesterday (March 30th), the US has just approved a massive package of weaponry to Israel despite its own public misgivings and the advice of those courts and lawyers. (Quick shout out to Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, which, in stark contrast to their friends and neighbours, have made the courageous decision to follow their own laws and stop shipments of military equipment to Israel.)
The incoherent Isreal stance has put Biden and chums into that previously mentioned spin. What are they to do? It’s an election year and a huge part of the electorate supports Israel whatever it does, another huge tranche supports the Palestinian people, and another massive swathe has no idea about anything other than where their next bucket of trans fats is coming from. Lobbyists from the arms industry are leaning on Biden so much he’s getting dents in his shoulders and then there’s the fluster he’s in about keeping Israel as a proxy against Iranian/Russian influence in the Middle East.
The answer — and, doh! how they are going to kick themselves when they finally see it right in front of their faces all along — is stop fucking arming Israel and treat Israel like the pariah state that it is. What kind of moral calculation is it that electioneering and geopolitical jostling is worth more than the lives of children?
In the end the US and friends continue to arm the thug and daub ineffectually at the blood stains he leaves.