Israel’s lawlessness has a history that those in the West share with the apartheid state.

It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity.

In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.

This is true, certainly, but we must put Israel’s criminal conduct, which warrants another Nuremberg trial at this point, in its proper context.

When we do, we find that Israel’s lawlessness has a history, an etymology, and if there is a road to Western salvation it must start with a recognition of a past that those in the West share with the apartheid state.

We can say Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s 2.3 million children, women, and men are unspeakable, in other words, but this would not be right. They are altogether speakable, and it behooves us now to speak of them if we are to grasp where responsibility for this stain upon the human story truly lies.

Pankaj Mishra has just published a thorough and thoroughly remarkable piece on these matters in the London Review of Books.

The Indian author, essayist, and columnist takes up many things in “The Shoah After Gaza,” chiefly the extent to which Zionists have exhausted “the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption” — excellent phrase — in defence of a nation that, to quote Primo Levi, “was a mistake in historical terms.”

Here is a passage in Mishra’s piece that is to our present point:

“Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 — the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.”

I am not with Mishra on everything he writes in the LRB piece. Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine? Absolutely not. Unless you are into the demonisation ploy to which propagandists commonly resort, it is the Russian Federation’s war, not the Russian president’s.

Revanchist? Simply wrong, a very poor take on a purposely provoked proxy war that left Moscow little choice but to intervene.

But “dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945,” and “a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945”: It does not get much pithier in the essay genre.

At the same time, we must not take from these phrases the thought that the edifice was sound before Israel lit the fuses, or that the moral rupture we can now see plainly has come upon us suddenly or as a surgical cut.

I saw some pictures just this morning of Israeli soldiers photographing themselves while playing with lingerie Palestinian women left behind when the Israel Defense Forces displaced them.

“It was the tongue that stopped me cold,” Nina Berman writes in her commentary. “The tongue and the savage, shit-eating grin on the soldier’s face as he and his buddy mug for the camera.” Mondoweiss published the pictures and the piece.

IDF grunts have done vastly worse things in Gaza, but these “selfies” got me to thinking. As Berman says of them, “They join a long line of conquest images, from Abu Ghraib images to the spectacle of Jim Crow-era lynchings.”

Who we are condemning

But exactly, Nina. You trip us into just the historical context we need before we, setting ourselves on some Doric pedestal, cavalierly condemn the conduct of IDF troops as they storm through Gaza in the manner of a blitzkrieg.

Condemnable, yes. We had better take care to understand just who we are condemning.

In the decade before the American defeat in Indochina, the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

If we want to go further back in postwar history we can think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then we can think about Israel in Gaza: As of the start of this year — leaving us more than three months to count — it had dropped more than 70,000 tons of ordnance on a territory the size of Manhattan.

Torture of Palestinian prisoners — the beatings, the maiming, the waterboarding, the forced confessions: Is this so different from how the U.S. conducted the “war on terror?”

Long-term detentions in dungeons with no charges and no recourse to attorneys: There is no echo in this of what goes on at Guantánamo as we speak?

Those IDF soldiers in the photographs are nothing more than punks with guns, vulgarians with no shred of humanity in them. Can we rightfully describe the U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib any differently?

Israel ignores the International Court of Justice? Where might this impudence come from?

There is more, much more, that we can add to this list. Afghanistan merits a place on it. There is the West’s “back-to-the-Stone–Age” destruction of Libya in 2011. I confine myself to the postwar decades to allow us to take a good, clear look at that “edifice of global norms” of which Mishra writes.

When we do, we find the West has licensed the Israelis. They bear a pre-authorisation by way of many precedents. There is one for more or less every shameful act the Israelis perpetrate against the Palestinian population — this in the West Bank as well as Gaza.

And so we discover — or remind ourselves, depending on how attentive we have been to events — that the post–1945 edifice has looked from the start roughly as it looks now. Israel is at bottom an outcome, not the prime cause of anything.

Insidious mythology

Certainly the grotesque spectacle of mass murder and wholesale destruction we witness daily has marked a rupture, to stay with Mishra’s term. But to assert that this rupture lies in Israel’s conduct is to sustain an insidious mythology of innocence for the West.

No, the true rupture lies with those in the West who are sucked into Israel’s utter immorality and now come face-to-face with their amoral indifference or, for the best of them, discover the extent of their powerlessness despite their authentic efforts.

As to Israel, I am with Primo Levi as Mishra quotes him. “The Jewish state” had already proven a mistake when he made his much-disputed remark in 1985.

The truth of it has since been demonstrated a hundred times over. Israel has proven a failed experiment, incapable of conducting itself as a legitimate nation-state.

But whose mistake is Israel? It was the West, Britain in the lead, that created Israel by caving to the Zionists at the expense of indigenous Palestinians. This is the reality of power that should weigh most heavily on our shoulders. Israel ‘R’ us.

Britain’s abandonment of the 1920 Mandate brings us to one of the deeper characteristics of our time, our postwar edifice. This is the ever more complete disregard of those in power for the principles, standards and broadly accepted ethics that give form and coherence to a stable civilisation and keep its public space clean and well lit.

In our crumbling edifice, everything is done according to its value as an expedient to a desired outcome. This, too, is a kind of depravity. And it is this depravity that produces the depravity we watch as we watch Israel’s effort to destroy an entire people.

Republished from Consortium News, March 20, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/authorised-atrocities/

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In today’s America, defenders of the indefensible don’t have to do much to convince people that they have something new and interesting to say.

This explains why Time Magazine gave Harvard law professor Noah Feldman space to write an analysis of anti-Semitism, which looks balanced and thoughtful but is yet more propaganda for the Israeli state and its actions. And why the article has attracted attention in cyberspace.

Like many liberal Zionists these days, Feldman seems confused. Not long after the Time article appeared, he wrote in The Washington Post  about ideas in his new book on Jewish identity. 

The article is far from perfect, but it does acknowledge that young American Jews have good reasons for rejecting the Israeli state. It also assumes that opposition to the state will become a fixture of American Jewish life and discusses how Jews who reject it may live out their Jewishness. All of this is only possible if rejecting the Israeli state is a legitimate choice.

But that is not what Feldman writes in Time. His article purports to discuss why anti-Semitism, and anti-Jewish racism, survive. But, stripped of its veneer, his analysis is yet another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists. 

And so, like others before him, he draws attention away from real hatred of Jews. He also unwittingly encourages it by associating an entire people, the Jews, with the actions of a violent state.

Old Tactic

This is not a new tactic. As my book Good Jew, Bad Jew shows, the Israeli state and its supporters have been using claims of anti-Semitism against critics of the state’s racism since the 1970s. 

They do this by claiming that there is a “new anti-Semitism” that demonizes Jews by targeting the Israeli state, ignoring the obvious difference between a state — and the ideology that underpins it — and a people. 

Western governments have jumped on the bandwagon: they eagerly shred core democratic values such as freedom of speech as they demonize the supposed racism of the Israeli state’s anti-racist critics.

Feldman seems to know that, despite its success, this tactic has been crude and often laughable. Many people accused of hating Jews are themselves Jewish. 

What the targeted people are saying is obviously not racist; opposing nuclear energy was branded as anti-Jewish racism because it would strengthen the power of oil-owning Arab states. 

Feldman has attracted attention because he tries to seem more tolerant and open to debate. But the difference between him and other muzzlers of anti-racism is one of style, not substance.

Unlike others who weaponize claims of anti-Semitism, Feldman acknowledges that, “It is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel.” He warns against tarring all critics of the Israeli state with an anti-Semitic brush. 

He adds: 

“To deploy the charge of antisemitism for political reasons is morally wrong, undermining the horror of antisemitism itself. It is also likely to backfire, convincing critics of Israel that they are being unfairly silenced.” 

He notes that: 

“Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isn’t inherently antisemitic.”

Having established his democratic credentials, he spends a large part of the article doing precisely what he has criticized.

Consistent with his concern for public relations, Feldman never says critics of the Israeli state are anti-Semites. Instead, they “run the risk” of anti-Jewish racism or might “veer” into anti-Semitism. But this is a difference without a distinction. The intent is exactly the same as that of his “crude” predecessors, to silence critics of the state, particularly its Jewish opponents.

Repeating Smear Tactics

Feldman repeats most of the smear tactics of writers on the “new antisemitism.” Like them, he insists that anti-Semitism has shifted shape and is now directed at the Israeli state. Like them, he claims “well-meaning” people can be anti-Semitic without knowing they are. 

Like them, he insists that the Jew-hatred of the right is no longer the core problem because “the most perniciously creative current in contemporary antisemitic thought is more likely to come from the left.” All this is as convenient to the Israeli state as it is devoid of substance.

As the British scholar of anti-Semitism, Anthony Lerman, points out in his recent book Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?, the claim that people who oppose a state are expressing racism to a people is a basic “category mistake.” 

A state is not a person or a group of people and claiming that opposition to Israeli state racism is anti-Jewish is no different to the claim that opposing the apartheid state betrayed hatred of whites. 

The claim that you can be an anti-Semite even if you don’t dislike Jews is a blank cheque to label all critics as racist when they are clearly not. The left is always a target of this propaganda because it calls out Israeli state racism; no left-winger has murdered people in synagogues simply because they were Jewish as a right-wing racist in the U.S. did, not that long ago.

Feldman is eager to show that opposition to the Israeli state is so clearly based on falsehoods that anyone who opposes it must be racist. Like all other attempts to defend the indefensible, his effort is full of holes and borders on the unintentionally comic.

Settler Colonialism 

He insists that the Israeli state is not a settler-colonial enterprise. The theory of settler-colonialism, according to Feldman, is meant to explain countries whose colonists wanted to displace the local people, not exploit their labor. He insists this does not apply to the Israeli state because it was created by a U.N. resolution establishing a Jewish and Palestinian state.

This reads very much like an exercise in Spot the Deliberate Error, in both fact and logic.

Settler colonialism does not only describe states that tried to displace their indigenous people. It was also applied to apartheid South Africa, which tried to both displace and exploit the labor of black people. Nor is it clear why Feldman makes this point since the Israeli state is precisely the type of settler colony he says the theory is meant to explain: it is built on displacing Palestinians, not exploiting their labor.

His first attempt to explain this away commits a basic logical error. It assumes that what the U.N. decided is what the leadership of the Zionist movement that founded the state wanted. It wasn’t. 

The U.N. might have hoped to establish two states living side by side but the Zionists went along with this only because they thought it was the best they could get at the time. Their aim was always to expand as much as they could, which they have been doing with vigor ever since. 

The state’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, told his son in a 1937 letter that the Zionist movement would accept what became the U.N. proposal because: 

“The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is … a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.”

Feldman’s argument is a bit like insisting that South Africa’s apartheid leaders didn’t want to dominate black people because U.N. resolutions said they shouldn’t.

The displacement of Palestinians began, as Israeli historians showed long ago, immediately as the Israeli state was formed — a key goal of the war that the state fought at the time was to displace as many Palestinians as possible, producing the Naqba, or catastrophe, which Gaza’s residents are again experiencing.

The Naqba

Feldman knows all this and so he offers a lame account of the Naqba which does his argument no favors. He acknowledges that Palestinians did not, as Israeli state propaganda at the time claimed, leave on the instructions of “Arab states,” but were driven out: 

“Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the U.N., those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Then, in the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were conquered by Israel.” 

It is unclear how any of this supports Feldman’s claim that the Israeli state did not want to displace Palestinians.

Logical errors and factual omissions appear again when Feldman tries to show that only bigots would accuse the Israeli state of white supremacy. He writes that half of Israeli Jews are of European descent but that Europe did not consider Jews to be racially white. 

The reality was more complicated. But, even if it was not, the fact that bigots thought Jews were not white does not mean the bigots were right. Similar prejudices were expressed about very white Irish people. Nor does it mean that these European Jews did not see themselves as white. My book argues that this is precisely how they saw themselves and that a Jewish state was meant to turn them into white Europeans.

Feldman adds that the other half of the state’s Jewish population, mainly Mizrahi or Eastern Jews, is not racially “white” so they can’t possibly be white supremacists. 

But who is and who is not white is a product of society, not biology; people who have not been seen as white in some countries have “become white.” The Mizrahi may not hail from Europe but they identify with white Europeanness and so they tend to vote for parties that, in their view, express a white, European, identity. 

This partly explains why the right-wing majority among Jewish Israelis expresses anti-black bigotry alongside its contempt for “Arabs.”

Identifying the Israeli state as a racist enterprise is not an anti-Semitic prejudice, it describes reality. Feldman’s liberal and “balanced” defense of the state is, at bottom, still a defense of racial domination. The difference lies only in the packaging. This makes it hardly surprising that his response to current events repeats the biases of the apologist mainstream from which he wants to distance himself.

Here, Feldman’s phony liberalism is again on view. Responding to the charge of genocide brought against the Israeli state at the International Court of Justice, he offers platitudes regretting the killing of Palestinians and statements by Israeli state power-holders promising to wipe them off the face of the earth. 

He then declares that, despite all this, the Israeli state’s actions are not genocidal because its “military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war.” Since there are many interpretations of this law, he suggests, its interpretation is as good as any other.

Denouncing Hamas

The Israeli state is allowed to use severe violence, he adds, because it is responding to the evil of Hamas which, like the rest of the Israeli state’s supporters club, he treats as the American mainstream once treated communism: as something to be denounced, not understood. 

Hamas, he writes, is anti-Semitic. “During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women.” Its charter “calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.” Despite these obvious sins “…the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.”

For lovers of English literature, this recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which an attempt by the main character to cloak colonialism in civilizing clothing collapses into the appalling demand that the African “brutes” be exterminated. The liberal mask is removed to reveal the real face of the colonizer and its apologist.

Feldman offers no evidence for his claims against Hamas. The charter he denounces was written many years ago and Hamas has discarded it. Even if it still existed, an Ivy League professor of law should know the difference between defeating a state and attacking a people. 

Harvard law professors should also know the legal principle that accusations of criminal behavior must be backed by evidence. The claim that children were murdered has been dropped even by most who made it while the rape claims are yet to be backed by evidence that would pass muster in a court. 

Nor is there any mention of the context of the Hamas acts. Nothing about a decade and a half-long blockade of Gaza, nothing about overturning Hamas’ election victory, and absolutely nothing at all about Hamas’ multiple offers of a long-term ceasefire which were rebuffed by the Israeli state and its American patrons. While none of this justifies killing civilians, a serious jurist would take it into account before reaching a verdict.

But serious jurists also do not decide the outcome of court cases until they have heard the arguments of both sides. Yet Feldman’s law training does not deter him from declaring the outcome of the ICJ case before the substance of the proceedings has begun. His claim that a state can’t be guilty of genocide if it claims that it is applying international law gives a handy excuse to apologists for racial violence everywhere.

These failures to apply basic legal principles are no surprise. His article shows that Feldman is a cheerleader first, a jurist third. Like many in the Western academy, his scholarship gives priority to the demands of power, that of the Israeli state and of its chief backer.

Near the beginning of his article, Feldman describes himself as “a proud citizen of the freest country in the world, in which Jews have been safer than in any other country in history.” 

The rest of us might wonder whether a country in which police are regularly accused of killing black men because they are black or where strenuous efforts are made in some states to deny racial minorities the vote, or where academics are afraid to speak their minds about Gaza for fear of punishment is free at all. 

South African Jews may also wonder why Jews in the U.S. who are murdered in synagogues are safer than those of us in this and many other countries who have thankfully been spared that fate.

But, in America’s mainstream, evidence matters as little as legal principle. All that matters is to defend the West and its allies from the hordes who are yet to reach its level of arrogance.

Despite his supposed nuance, this Harvard law professor is a loyal servant of that project. And so he becomes yet another voice that makes the fight against anti-Jewish racism a little more difficult by turning a very real hatred into an excuse for the violence of a state.

Steven Friedman is a research professor in politics at the University of Johannesburg. His most recent book is Good Jew, Bad Jew (2023).

This articles is from Africa is a Country.

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SEE ALSO: https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/22/when-criticizing-israel-wasnt-anti-semitic/

The UN Security Council has passed a resolution calling for an "immediate ceasefire" in Gaza, after the US refrained from vetoing the measure in a change from its previous position.

The text also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.

The Security Council had been at an impasse since the war began in October, failing to agree on a ceasefire call.

The move by the US signals growing divergence between it and its ally Israel over Israel's offensive in Gaza.

Washington has criticised Israel over the escalating death toll in Gaza, where more than 32,000 people - mainly women and children - have been killed by Israel's bombardment, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry. 

The US has also pressed Israel to do more to get aid delivered to Gaza, where it says the entire population is suffering severe levels of acute food insecurity.

The UN has accused Israel of obstructing aid; Israel has blamed the UN, accusing it of failing to carry out distributions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68658415

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Consortium News was in Port Botany in Sydney, Australia on Sunday to capture these dramatic images of police aggressively arresting protestors trying to block export of military aid to Israel. 

Video and article by Cathy Vogan
Special to Consortium News

Paul Keating, branch secretary of the Australian Maritime Union (AMU) spoke for fellow members in solidarity with the Palestinian community and faced off with police, when he and several hundred protestors blockaded Sydney’s Port Botany on Sunday to protest Australia’s export of military aid to Israel. 

The protestors’ target is ZIM Shipping, a well known Israeli company that trade unionist Ian Rintoul says supports and is connected with Israel. “It offered its services to the Israeli state for the conduct of the genocide,” he told Consortium News. “Zim Shipping has actually been a target of protests at ports all around the world in the United States and Italy, Europe [and elsewhere in Australia]”. 

Keating, who also spoke to CN, called on all of the other workers’ unions to stand with the AMU and for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to place sanctions on Israel for what the International Court of Justice has called a plausible case of genocide.

He told the police chief at the scene: “This is an international working class issue”, and in his speech reiterated: 

“On behalf of the MUA, we stand with our communities and throughout the generations we fought against the establishment who have supported apartheid, like we saw with South Africa, like we’ve seen with the wars that have forced ordinary working class men and women like ourselves and our communities into the most desperate of situations. We oppose war. Peace is union business, and this is our business”.

Deputy Leader of the Greens Mehreen Faruqi also spoke in favour of the blockade and condemned the government’s current policy.  She said:

“It’s been 169 days of Israel’s genocide on Gaza. 169 horror-filled days for Palestinians. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israel. More than 1 million Palestinians are being starved by Israel. Famine and disease loom large in the ruins of Gaza. That’s the reality on the ground right at this moment. And how bereft, how bereft of humanity, of morality, of head and heart can the Labor government be to not do anything to stop these war crimes, this collective punishment, these atrocities and this genocide? How ruthless and cruel can you be to aid, abet and arm Israel?” 

The blockade was short-lived and was broken up by police. Keating and 18 others were arrested and now face fines of up to AUS $22K and two years jail for obstructing traffic in the maritime zone.  

Cathy Vogan is the executive producer of CN Live!

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/25/watch-nabbed-stopping-military-shipment-to-israel/

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From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalized accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are serving as propagandists, writes Jonathan Cook.

By Jonathan Cook 
     Declassified UK

The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.

Liberal democracy is not what it seems.

It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.

But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies — invariably referred to as “the West” — are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?

Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.

What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?

And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.

The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.

The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.

Depravity on Show

The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.

They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.

There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry — a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years — that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.

Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?

To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.

Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.

Starved by Israel

To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage — especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.

How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/22/how-western-media-built-the-case-for-genocide/

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Faced with war across Europe, nineteenth century poet William Wordsworth asked, ‘What a fair world were ours for verse to paint, if Power could live at ease with self-restraint?’ He was following sixteenth century John Donne’s recognition of human interdependence, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…’

Contemporary poets have painted a similar vision. In ‘All One Race’ Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Nunucaal declared, ‘I’m international, never mind place, I’m for humanity all one race.’ In ‘Human Family’, Afro-American Maya Angelou wrote, ’I note the obvious differences, between each sort and type, but we are more alike my friends than we are unalike.’

In ‘Time for Outrage’, an architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the French poet and diplomat Stephane Hessel asked citizens to protect the ideals inherent in the notion, a common humanity. He insisted, ‘Anyone who is not outraged by injustice loses touch with their own humanity.’

In her comments on the disdain for humanity shown by brutalities in Gaza, Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa has summarised Palestinian deaths and destruction as ‘war, genocide. holocaust.’ Author Max Blumenthal calls Gaza ‘The Trail of Tears’ of our time.

From these poets’ visions, from each author’s advocacy, qualities of a common humanity become glaringly obvious: recognition of the interdependence of all people, a life enhancing use of power, respect for everyone’s dignity, courage to oppose injustice whatever the costs.

My dismay at the hell of Gaza, ‘an inferno teeming with innocents’ says Abulhawa, has been made worse by the absence of serious commentary about a common humanity. Instead, politicians and their advisers have calculated the level of killing which might be tolerated, have judged whether criticism of a war would be dubbed anti-Semitic, weighed whether arms sales to Israel could be coupled to claims about a ceasefire, and whether condemnation of Hamas has been sufficiently loud.

When considering the Hamas murders on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli killing of 31,000 Palestinians, two thirds women and children, I have learned as much about humanity by observing cowardice as by counting courage. This sad irony occurred when listening to certain individuals’ reasons for refusing to support a ‘Gaza Plea for a Common Humanity’ to be presented to the Australian Federal Parliament on March 28.

The Plea argues that respect for a common humanity would outlaw violence and could contribute to peace with justice to benefit Israelis and Palestinians. The Plea included criticism of policies to cease humanitarian aid to Gaza, wondered why powerful governments refused to support South Africa before the International Court of Justice, why governments stayed silent about the ICJ’s interim findings about genocide in Gaza.

From all walks of life, over one thousand citizens responded to this Plea for Gaza. They said, ‘Count me in’, but their enthusiasm was offsets by those who refused to support the Plea, their decisions apparently fueled by fear and cowardice.

Refusals came in several forms, beginning with the avoidance technique, not wanting to know, not replying to texts, phone calls or emails.

Then came quibbling about the prose in the Plea. One quibbler asked ‘can you be more nuanced in the opening paragraph.’ Another requested, ‘I’d sign if you made it shorter and said more about Hamas.’

Perhaps meant to be helpful, nevertheless these responses looked like means of ducking for cover, refusing to protest openly the carnage in Gaza.

Some refusers acknowledged their fear of offending supporters of Israel, a point made by one high profile respondent who said he could not afford to be damned by the ‘you know who lobby.’

I was astounded by those whom I thought knew something about justice but who feared to support a Plea because it had been written mostly by ‘a consistent critic of Israeli policies.’ The common humanity argument failed to impress. They feared to take what they thought was a risk.

First prize in the cowardice stakes must go to individuals, including leaders of public institutions who said they might support the Plea if they knew which other significant people were supporters. Such a response suggested that the principle, to have the courage of your convictions, was unknown, or in relation to controversy over the carnage in Gaza, should be discarded.

However disappointing, the conduct of the refusers can be accepted as their right, yet to maintain stamina for any struggle for justice, it’s the common humanity pleas of philosophers, poets and gutsy local activists which gives hope through rewarding examples of courage in public life.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt taught that anyone who wanted to address the goals of a common good would have to make the transition from the private to the public realm. In contrast to any preoccupation with the necessities of a private life, she contended that commitment to a common humanity would be the means of staying relevant and alive.

Although the Gaza Plea for a Common Humanity encourages the philosophy, language and practice of non-violence as the means of crafting peace for Palestine & Israel, it also considers evidence about terrorist violence by Israeli forces not just by Hamas.

This Plea appeals to the moral fibre needed to express outrage at plans to shift over a million people in Rafah so that a supposed extermination of Hamas can continue, but it also acknowledges the fear of the sixteen-year-old Gazan girl who told BBC World on March 18, ‘The only solution is to die, to give up to death.’

What price humanity if that frightened teenager’s fate is of little consequence?

Enthusiasm for a common humanity imagines a future that was not there before. In rejection of oppression and colonisation, it advocates courage to achieve freedoms. In the spirit of poet John Donne, inclusiveness means justice for Palestinians but also world solidarity in the face of poverty, ecological disasters and pandemics.

In any context, language to paint images can give hope or at least show the extent of inhumanities.

Response to atrocities in Gaza must say it is time to stop the quibbling over words, time to overcome fearfulness, to stand up and be counted, time to discover universal benefits from displaying the courage of convictions.

Reasons for making a ‘Gaza Plea for a Common Humanity’ have world-wide implications. They occurred in opposition to violence whether by Hamas or the Israeli military, but refer in particular to the wholesale destruction of Palestinians’ lives.

Reasons to plead for a common humanity have also been bolstered by the courage of Russians who gathered around the grave of Alexei Navalny.

‘Gaza Plea for a Common Humanity’

Palestine- Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem

To the Australian Parliament: Pleas for a Common Humanity

In Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government must end slaughter, starvation, wasting of children, injuries to thousands, detention and torture of thousands, the destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, houses, water and electricity infrastructure, banks, the legislative assembly, the killing of doctors and journalists. So too must Australia end complicity in genocidal acts as identified by the International Court of Justice.

The Australian government’s silence in response to the Court’s interim Finding of Plausible Genocide and its Orders for immediate cessation of genocidal acts is incomprehensible. Its inaction over the scale of death in Gaza represents abandonment of principles of a common humanity, and indifference to shared responsibility for the interdependence of all peoples and all living things on planet earth.

We plead with the Australian government and with all Federal politicians to cease appeasing Israel against the supposed political costs of taking seriously the human rights of all Palestinians. We implore Australia’s leadership to consider principles of a common humanity, which includes reference to Israelis’ lives, and to the moral imperative to prevent genocide.

We are grateful for the Australian government’s decision to resume funding of UNRWA but we deplore the Opposition’s inhuman claim that resuming funding for starving people is dangerous.

We regret the government’s refusal to support South Africa before the ICJ, its failure to respond to the ICJ’s genocide ruling, and turning a blind eye to Australian arms sales to Israel. Our government seems to fear to condemn the policies of a state intent on the brutal elimination of a whole people.

Australian governments have joined the US war on terror that now extends to Hamas. Israel’s carnage in Gaza is not as its leaders claim against Hamas but against all the Palestinian people. It is state terror, collective punishment and probable genocide. In defiance of the ruling of the ICJ, in breach of obligations under international law, an Australian government has no right to support this Israeli government policy.

Respect for a common humanity means that Australia vigorously advocates the attainment of the human rights of all Palestinians, a goal which necessitates the dismantling of any racist, apartheid Israeli regime. Adherence to principles of a common humanity will benefit all Israelis. Justice for Palestine means security for Israel.

Pleas for a common humanity include urgent, practical objectives:

• Join 139 countries in implementing the decision of the Labor Party general conference to recognise the State of Palestine.
• Implementation of the rulings of the ICJ
• Demands for a permanent ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza.
• Insist on return of all hostages
• Consider expulsion of Israeli Ambassador to Australia, recall of Australia’s Ambassador to Israel
• Ending any Australian military support for Israel
• Developing plans for peace with justice in which Palestinians from all walks take a lead.
• Consider proposals for an international peace conference to address Palestinians’ rights to self-determination and refugees’ rights of return.
• Support for a UN led emergency humanitarian program to address the immediate medical, food and housing needs of Gazans

https://johnmenadue.com/moral-cowardice-hinders-pleas-for-a-common-humanity-in-gaza/

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