If we tolerate this, then our children will be next

I’ve spent more than a decade first researching and then writing almost exclusively on  a range of ‘environmental’ topics, with a special focus on climate change. I joined Twitter in 2010 using the @think_or_swim moniker, determined to use it as a channel for strictly environmental pursuits and networking.

However, in the first week of July, something changed. I began to tweet about the Israeli onslaught into Gaza. Hearing the Israeli Ambassador, the disgusting Boaz Modai brag on radio: “I don’t feel even a bit of shame, I feel pride” for the carnage his country’s military was unleashing on a virtually defenceless civilian population left me shaken and outraged.

After all, this wasn’t the psychopathic dictator Assad pounding civilians in Syria with barrel bombs, this was the suave and sophisticated Israel, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, the folks with sleek PR and friends and fans everywhere from Dáil Eireann to Capitol Hill that was, in full gaze of the international media, launching a massive (and entirely illegal) collective punishment assault against the hapless and besieged population of Gaza.

Monitoring the assault, often in real time, via Twitter became a ghastly and emotionally distressing daily, often hourly pursuit for the last several weeks. As the bodies, especially of children, piled ever higher, my sense of anger grew apace. The cold-blooded murder of four young boys playing football on the beach was one of the egregious early outrages. Dr Mads Gilbert, Norwegian volunteer surgeon put it plainly: “the Israelis are relentlessly killing and injuring children”.

For me, one five-day-old baby girl will always symbolise the Israeli pogrom of 2014. The infant named Shimah was delivered by emergency caesarean from the body of her mother, who was pulled from the rubble when her home was bombed; she quickly became known as the ‘Miracle Child’. The miracle was short-lived. Shimah died a few days later when the power to her incubator failed as a result of Gaza’s main power plant being bombed by Israel (deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is – yet another – war crime). It was a “telegenic death”, as the prime minister responsible for this double murder might well have put it.

Just a few weeks before the third round of slaughter unleashed by Israel on Gaza in the last seven years began, Charlie Flanagan was appointed as our Minister for Foreign Affairs. The timing was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. Back in 2010, Flanagan said this in an interview: “Israel has been demonised by an Irish media slavishly dancing to the Palestinian drumbeat for decades [yet] Israel has a far better and more progressive record on human rights than any of its neighbours. The truth must be told”.

The same truth-telling Flanagan is a member of the Oireachtas Friends of Israel group. I’m unsure whether he would be happy describing himself as slavishly dancing to the Israeli drumbeat, but it was instructive to watch Flanagan et al squirm as the naked racism and genocidal intend of Israel’s army and politicians (who enjoy 90%+ domestic public support for their latest bloody crusade into Gaza) drew widespread, perhaps even unprecedented, international odium on Israel.

I broke my own unwritten rule of trying to stay out of ‘politics’ to pen the below article, which appears in the current issue of Village magazine, under the heading ‘If Ireland were Palestine’.

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IT IS ALMOST 30 years since an IRA no-warning bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, killing five people. Its primary target, British PM, Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, escaped serious injury.

Thatcher defiantly responded by saying that “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail”. Her composure in the immediate aftermath of the blast won admiration even from among her critics. Just over a year after the attack, Mrs Thatcher and Dr Garrett Fitzgerald met in Hillsborough Castle in November 1985 to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Imagine for a moment that the British government instead chose to respond to this brazen terrorist attack the way in the style of the Israeli cabinet under prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. First off, air raids batter Dublin city. Large areas are leafleted, telling terrified citizens to flee. As they abandon their homes, some are blown to pieces in the streets. Others, unable or unwilling to leave, die under the rubble of their houses.

The brutality generates a reaction. More bombs explode across British cities, killing civilians. An army barracks is also targeted, while an effort to drive a lorry bomb to the House of Commons is foiled. This time, a massive wave of British armour sweeps over the border. Dundalk, then Drogheda, are pounded by 155mm mobile artillery pieces, while jets scream across the skies. Tens of thousands of refugees clog up the roads as they flee south.

The RAF cripples Ireland’s airports while the Royal Navy imposes a blockade on our ports. Goods can only enter or leave the country with direct British oversight. Food piles up and rots at the ports while officials refuse to allow it to be shipped. Imports are reduced to a trickle.

A police station in Manchester is blown up. The British retaliate to this ‘vicious act of terror’ by bombing Dublin’s main water treatment facilities. Next, they target power stations, permanently disabling Moneypoint in one air raid, while the Aghada and Tarbert stations are next to be destroyed. The Whitegate oil refinery in East Cork is also bombed. Most of Ireland is in darkness, with no clean running water and a growing health crisis as a result of untreated sewage.

International observers are shocked when British ground forces begin shelling UN-run schools and hospitals, where thousands had crowded for shelter as the attacks intensified. A British army spokesman explained how their military were the most moral in the world, and went to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Who knows, the attacks on hospitals and schools may have been IRA mortars that mis-fired, he explained.

British army howitzers pound Dublin’s Beaumont hospital, killing 18 and wounding 60, mostly patients and medical staff. “The civilian deaths, if they were as a result of our measured response, are regrettable, but the IRA terrorists bear the full responsibility for operating near a hospital”, the British army spokesman added.

Vatican-based journalist David Quinn, reflecting on the deaths of some 1,900 Irish (85% civilians, including 400 dead children), for the loss of around 60 British troops and three civilians, explained: “Britain* has the right to defend itself against brutal foes that are hell-bent on destruction”.

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The above vignette may seem a little fanciful, but it’s one way to try to bring home the savagery of the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign waged by the world’s fifth most powerful army against a defenceless enclave.

Rather than cowering in shame for his army’s criminal rampage into Gaza, Israel’s prime minister instead took the time to ridicule the “telegenically dead” Palestinian babies and children being piled up just to try to make his army look bad.

And it certainly does look bad, and not just for the Israeli army. Former US president Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson jointly penned a devastating critique of the latest Israeli incursion in early August. What is not widely reported is that Israel’s brutal assault was both tactical and entirely premeditated.

“This tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move towards peace, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April”, wrote Carter and Robinson.  Hamas had in fact made a huge concession, agreeing to open Gaze to joint control under a consensus government with no Hamas involvement.

The likelihood of reconciliation among the Palestinian factions leading to a peaceful framework for resolving conflict in the region with international approval and oversight was clearly a step too far for Israel, which prefers its own ‘open prison’ policy, where it keeps a semi-starved, humiliated and terrorised population on the edge of despair, presumably in the hope that they will eventually just beg to be deported from their own homeland.

“The new (Palestinian) government also pledged to adopt the three basic principles demanded by members of the International Quartet (UN, US, Europe, Russia): non-violence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements. Tragically, Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has until now succeeded in preventing the new government’s deployment in Gaza”, they wrote.

While Israeli’s latest attack on Gaza is entirely illegal under international law, its conduct went even further this time: “There is no humane or legal justification for how the Israeli Defence (sic) Force is conducting this war, pulverising with bombs, missiles and artillery large parts of Gaza, including thousands of homes, schools and hospitals, displacing families and killing Palestinian non-combatants.

“Much of Gaza has lost its access to water and electricity completely. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. There is never an excuse for deliberate attacks on civilians in conflict. These are war crimes”, wrote Carter and Robinson, who also called for international judicial proceedings “to investigate and end these violations of international law”.

The appropriate channel for such an investigation should be the International Criminal Court (ICC) but neither Israel nor its sponsor-in-chief, the United States, accept the jurisdiction of the ICC, which conveniently keeps their personnel beyond the reach of the law.

Within Israel, the mood is increasingly hawkish, with some 90% of Jewish Israelis fully supporting the attack on Gaza, and just 4% feeling the slaughter indicated the IDF used “excessive firepower”. A popular view in Israel is that since the people of Gaza voted Hamas into power, the entire population is somehow culpable and therefore subject to the war crime known as ‘collective punishment’.

In a terrifying escalation, some politicians are now openly debating the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza. Martin Sherman of the Israel Institute of Strategic Studies published the following in the Jerusalem Post on July 31st last: “To prevent an even more brutal and extreme successor from taking over, Gaza must be dismantled and the non-belligerent population relocated.” The ICC regards “incitement to genocide” as a crime against humanity.

The delusional Sherman continued: “As counter-intuitive as it might sound, the policy of restraint fuels orgies of delegitimisation and demonisation of Israel across the world.” To his mind, the slaughter of 1,800 people, wounding of 10,000 more, the levelling of entire neighbourhoods, the repeated bombing of hospitals and UN-run schools, the destruction of vital civil infrastructure such as water, power and sewage treatment plants and the killing of 400 children all result from a “policy of restraint”.

Knesset member Ayelet Shaked took this ethnic hatred to its logical conclusion when demanding the deliberate slaughter of Palestinian mothers and their “little snakes”. She explained: “They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.”

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, our Foreign Minister is a proud member of group known as the ‘Oireachtas Friends of Israel’, along with minister Leo Varadker, former minister Alan Shatter and Labour’s Joanna Tuffy. Ireland has to date pledged 500,000 euros to help rebuild Gaza ahead of the next Israeli blitz.

A far more useful step might be to offer the Palestinians some of the US-made Javelin anti-tank missile systems that the Irish military, at enormous expense, purchased. These compact weapons can destroy Israeli Merkava main battle tanks at a range of up to 2.5km, and would be ideal as a purely defensive weapon – and deterrent – against any future armoured assault on Gaza. When violence no longer pays as state policy, Israel may be forced to resort to politics.

[The seeds of the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when over 750,000 were driven from their ancestral homes and lands by Israeli terrorists, can be traced back to even before the Second World War. In 1938, historian George Antonius wrote: “the cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress on an innocent and peaceful population”.

A year earlier, in 1937, Winston Churchill ruminated that “if ever the Jewish army reached the point (of being extremely powerful), who can be sure that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge out in the new undeveloped lands that lie around them?” This chillingly prescient observation is recalled by Bob Fisk in his definitive tome, The Great War for Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East. It’s recommended reading on the roots of the Palestine tragedy as well as the wider imbroglio in the region.]

 

ThinkOrSwim is a blog by journalist John Gibbons focusing on the inter-related crises involving climate change, sustainability, resource depletion, energy and biodiversity loss
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3 Responses to If we tolerate this, then our children will be next

  1. Christophe Meudec says:

    +1

  2. Contrapunctus says:

    Thank you for articulating so well the horror and rage that I and so many have felt at the Israeli Gaza onslaught this summer. We all know this regime could not behave like this if not bankrolled by the US and its most powerful propaganda networks. It is still shocking however that such an obviously evil campaign could be ‘normalised’ in the mind of the general populace.
    The Ukraine crisis has been staged managed by US and western media propaganda in a similar fashion since February, with so little attention given to the real suffering of several hundred thousand displaced people there. Seamus

  3. johngibbons says:

    Thanks for feedback Seamus. Was a little uneasy about straying from my well-travelled path of climate/environment into ‘pure politics’ but, as explained above, I really couldn’t help myself this time. The normalisation of atrocity, the gradual ratchet effect whereby we all seem to just become inured to events, no matter how grisly or murderous, is a whole other day’s posting. I could parallel it with the normalisation of the ongoing rape and plunder of the biosphere in pursuit of, well, more of everything.

    Anyone with half a brain can figure out fairly quickly that destroying the very basis of our existence in pursuit of a quick buck is the ultimate in short term strategies. But while we may be individually gifted, collectively, we display all the brains, sensitivity and subtlety of a bag of hammers. Any species that eats it young and preys on its own kind does not have a long term future. In our case, it looks like we don’t even have a medium term future. The sickness that affects us collectively was clearly manifest in that ghastly few weeks of hell in Gaza. And the disease appears to be gathering strength and spreading quickly…

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