Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis

Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families.

“People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, told Doctors without Borders, a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.”

Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis.

Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time issued a joint statement criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions.

At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “fighting human animals” as he announced a complete siege of the territory.

“It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!”

Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months.

Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been hyped in some quarters as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide fired, raided, arrested and deported.

UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a retired British surgeon, those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been arrested by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government.

Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results.

For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post publishes opinion pieces decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations.

But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours.

One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson.

The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital.

The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to blow the whistle. In Australia, journalists have complained that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports.

It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps.

During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”.

When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry.

It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”.

As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial.

Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action.

All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn.

States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on a handful of West Bank “settlers”. The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians.

As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven.