The World has failed the Palestinians

"Future generations will ask incredulously how this was all allowed to happen in plain view and why it was never stopped."

Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 19, 2024.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is already wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, is now mounting what may be the largest and most calamitous war crime of this century and possibly the last one too. The Israeli military is following his orders and is in the process of driving a million walking skeletons out of Gaza City and then occupying the ruins. Even as he prepares for this final onslaught, comparisons are being drawn with the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis and the subsequent complete destruction of the City of Warsaw in its aftermath. This comes in the as Egypt and Qatar had brokered a ceasefire deal, similar in almost every way to that brokered a few weeks earlier by the US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. It was accepted by Hamas, but the answer from Netanyahu was a cavalcade of advancing tanks.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer had asked Netanyahu to ‘re-consider’ his plans. He made no mention of what might happen if he did not. But then Netanyahu has always known that Britain, clinging as it does to its mythical ‘special relationship’ would do nothing and that the United States would give carte blanche to whatever he wished to do and that the European Union and most of the Arab World would either collude or sit by, wringing their collective hands in pathetic impotence. Meanwhile, in Britain, it was reported in Private Eye magazine that the Ministry of Defence was reviewing tenders from Raytheon and Elbit Systems – who are Israel’s largest military company – for a training contract for 60,000 British troops worth over 2 billion pounds a year. The question as to what kind of ‘training’ will be on offer has not as yet been raised.

The World has failed the Palestinians.

Not the thousands of Palestinian doctors, nurses and medical staff, many of whom have been targeted, arrested or killed (over 1,500 at the last count). Not the brave journalists inside Gaza who have live streamed a genocide and who have witnessed over 200 of their colleagues being killed, often methodically and deliberately. The Israelis are now so high with their blood-lust and utter contempt for human life, that they boasted openly of killing Anas al-Sharif and al Jazeera crew. So seriously do they take the occasional reprimands from their allies, they can’t even be bothered to provide the evidence they claim that Anas was in some way a ‘Hamas operative’.

The World has failed the Palestinians.

Not the Non Governmental Organisations; the brave staff of the United Nations agencies and other charities who have fought against desperate odds to get food and medicine to a starving population and not the volunteer doctors and nurses who for so long have told the World what they are having to do and of the horrors of what they are witnessing. And not by the millions across the World who have marched and demonstrated and shown up their morally vacuous, capricious, colluding, leaders.

The World has failed the Palestinians. It has failed the 60,000 plus civilians mainly women and children killed, 70% of whom had been living in residential buildings; the incalculable number of Palestinians lying dead under the rubble and the almost 2000 half-starved people shot dead while running the gauntlet of the Israeli army in order to try and reach the wholly inadequate amount of aid being policed by mercenaries working for the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Fund’. It has failed the hundreds of thousands wounded, often lying and dying in agony for want of the most basic medicines. It has failed the numerous children brought into collapsing hospitals with bullets in their heads; or the groups of children brought whose testicles were targeted by drones. Each passing day there is the equivalent to a Sharpeville Massacre; one of the most defining events of the struggle against apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa.

The Palestinians have been failed by the leaders of the so called ‘free World’, the United States in particular, whose taxpayers have paid for Gaza to be turned into a near uninhabitable moonscape. These countries used to talk of an ‘international rules-based order’, they made great play for the need for human rights to be observed, but as we were to discover these rules and norms were to apply to occupied Ukrainians, and not to occupied Palestinians. The Palestinians have been failed by the Europeans and in particular the former colonial power, Britain, which bears such heavy historic responsibility for the mess it helped leave behind from Balfour to the ignoble retreat from its Mandate, but also by Germany whose leaders give every impression of having failed to learn from their own history of igniting genocide in South West Africa and their holocaust against European Jewry.

The Palestinians have been failed by Hamas who gave Netanyahu the opportunity to unleash what he had hankered after for 30 years and by the enfeebled gerontocracy of the Palestinian Authority personified by Mahmoud Abbas. They have been failed by the Arab World; by the Saudis, UAE and Egypt, all of whom could have put real pressure on President Trump, or opened their borders, but who have stood by and watched as their brothers and sister have been massacred. And the Palestinians have been failed by an ineffectual UN Secretary-General, given to mouthing platitudes. (It is a little-known fact that the UN Secretary-General and President Trump have not even spoken directly since the latter was re-elected, which gives a fairly clear indication of how much clout the United Nations now has). The Palestinians have been betrayed by big-tech and the arms companies who have made great profits and been able to experiment almost at will on over 2 million people living in the most densely populated 30 square miles on the planet. Big Tech has colluded wholeheartedly with the Israelis, storing information and enabling Israel to use it with deadly effect, and in retribution. AI has enabled the Israelis to decide how much collateral damage, ie how many civilians can be exterminated in pursuit of a suspect. Big tech has enabled the rules of war to be stood on their head. All of this will have enormous ramifications for each & everyone of us in the future. Impunity cuts all ways, and with the return of the law of the jungle none of us is actually safe.

Future generations will ask incredulously how this was all allowed to happen in plain view and why it was never stopped. All of us need to think very carefully before answering because we need to be able to explain to them what we actually did.