International military intervention to stop Israel in Gaza is now overdue
It has been instructive in the extreme to witness the eruption of justifiable outrage over the latest of the by now countless IDF atrocities in Gaza. Said atrocity involved seven aid workers being killed in three separate missile strikes targeting the three vehicles they were travelling in. Six of the seven victims were white westerners from Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and one with dual Canadian-US citizenship. The seventh victim was 25-year-old Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, a Palestinian from Gaza.
I emphasise white westerners in the above paragraph simply because their deaths have generated the kind of righteous international condemnation and opporobrium that has been woefully absent over six months of unrelenting slaughter of Palestinians. Here we are called upon to invoke the searing j’accuse of Aime Cesaire contained in the pages of his classic work, Discourses on Colonialism, a book which sits proudly on my shelf and has done for many a year.
Cesaire:
What he [the white European Christian] cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.
The brutal deaths of this particular group of aid workers has generated the kind of international condemnation that has been woefully and conspicuously absent over the past six months of unrelenting slaughter by an Israeli military whose rules of engagement have demonstrably been that there are no rules of engagement whatsoever, other than shoot first and ask questions later.
The setting up of kill zones, the mass murder of women and children, the killing of three of their own escaped hostages, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the collective punishment of an entire population, the wholesale destruction of homes, mosques, hospitals, the massacring of people as they gather to receive desperately needed food aid, and the summary execution of journalists, doctors and clinicians — this is less a war of self-defence and more a mass exercise in pest control at the hands of a white supremacist state in whose eyes the Palestinians have been reduced to the status of vermin.
There have now been over 200 aid workers slaughtered in the past six months in Gaza, thus confirming that for the IDF aid workers are considered fair game, and thus confirming that for Israel the enemy is not Hamas it is the Palestinians of Gaza entire, along with those engaged in coming to their aid in the midst of their desperate plight in the context of an exercise in genocidal slaughter.
So why would Israel purposely target six Western aid workers in Gaza? Very simple. They did so as part of the objective of creating famine among a subject population they are determined to exterminate to the point of no return as a viable entity. Netanyahu and his malign coalition of Zionist extremists no doubt assumed that as hot as the heat might get in response to this particular atrocity, they would be able to weather it; just as they have weathered every backlash in response to the atrocities so far committed over the past six months.
Biden, Sunak, Scholz, these so-called leaders and others have gone out of their way to provide Netanyahu with diplomatic cover over six months of slaughter. That it has taken the deaths of white Western aid workers to produce any shift in policy towards the Israelis is repellent and rancid. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” Shakespeare reminds us, with the afore-named devils the human detritus dredged up from the bowels of mendacity that passes for politics in our time.
But here’s the thing though: there comes the point where even the most wooden hearted government and political leader has to place its and their own political fortunes, domestic support, and future electoral prospects above the interests of a strategic ally being led by a man, Netanyahu, who’s currently doing his level best to give King Herod a run for his money.
In a world underpinned by international law rather than hypocrisy, the Netanyahu regime’s total defiance of the ICJ ruling back in January, adjudicating that genocide may be occurring in Gaza, and more recently its defiance of UN Security Council Resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, should have been the basis for the deployment of an international military coalition to go into Gaza to confront the IDF and stop further atrocities taking place.
If these past six months have confirmed anything it that Israel is a rogue state, sick with murderous intentions towards an indigenous population which exists as a daily reminder of Israel’s own mode of existence as an apartheid supremacist state whose crimes would shame all the devils in hell.
The IDF’s willingness and ability to murder Palestinians with reckless abandon has shamed the world. The moral injury inflicted has been untold in the process of revealing that with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, it is the values of Hitler and the Nazis not the West and democracy that have prevailed.
Rwanda, 1994. Srebrenica, 1995. Gaza, 2023–24.
History is laughing. Humanity can no longer afford to. The Palestinians are in desperate need of butter. They also need justice. At this juncture, this will only be achieved at the end of the barrel of a gun. Israel, as things stand, is a failed experiment in structural oppression, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder. It is high time that this particular experiment was brought to an end.
End.
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