Bernard Spiegal

In what must be judged an utterly repellent gesture, the UK government along with other governments, has decreed that the Israeli flag be displayed on official buildings to indicate support for Israel. 

This performative act of perverse, inverted virtue signalling proclaims, by implication, that Jewish Israeli lives are more valuable than Palestinian ones.  For what other interpretation can be attached to such a vile gesture of approbation for a state whose defence minister, loudly and publicly, proclaims a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza Strip; that there ‘will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed’ because ‘we are fighting human animals and acting accordingly’.

No word of caution or restraint has meaningfully been uttered to Israel by these flag-flying governments. Rather, they rush to display support and sympathy, offering carte blanche to the Israeli violent onslaught on Gaza.  They are therefore heavily implicated in Israel’s war crimes, offering succour to a regime that, as a matter of course, enacts the collective punishment of Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank,and East Jerusalem.

The Gaza Strip comprises 2.3 million people trapped into a mere 365 square km.  As I write, the brave Israeli air force pilots, from the impunity of their cockpits, nightly – and throughout the night – direct missiles and bombs on a civilian population.

Euro-Med Monitor, as at 11 October, has recorded the destruction of at least 70 industrial facilities and 970 residential units, plus significant damage to approximately 7,920 residential units. Fourteen water and sanitation stations have been severely damaged, the statement said, affecting services for nearly half a million people.

Israeli warplanes bombed a house belonging to the Za’anin family in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, without prior warning, destroying the four-storey building where four families lived. The bombing resulted in the deaths of all 20 civilians inside, including 11 children and five women. High-rise residential buildings, mosques, hospitals, banks and other civilian infrastructure are the targets.

Israel’s self-proclaimed aim is to destroy Hamas. And many will think this a legitimate, indeed necessary, response to Hamas’s attacks on Israel.  But the lie is given to this limited ‘war’ aim by the racist-infused wider objective to ‘act accordingly’ towards the ‘human animals’; that is, the ordinary, civilian children, women and men incarcerated for seventeen years within the Strip. Incarcerated in the concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip. Here, the buildings are so tightly packed together, that the term ‘collateral damage’ is meaningless – hit one, and you collapse or damage another. 

Concentration camp: How else would you characterise 365 square km of land holding 2.3 million people, many of whom, as a matter of grim, unassailable calculation, will be killed, maimed, traumatised by Israel’s air, sea and land forces with no hope of safe shelter or escape.

What did you expect?

As you sow, so shall you reap. A cliché, true, one I’ve used in at least one previous article. But is there a better, more succinct summation that points to why at least some of the Hamas fighters, self-liberated from years of incarceration in the Gaza concentration camp, unleashed in Israel not only attacks on legitimate military targets, but also perpetrated a cruel blood-letting of Israeli civilians.

For it is the Jewish State – its own self-definition – that is the heel which for decades, to this day and onward, stamps on Palestinian lives, daily, relentlessly.  Amira Hass, the Ha’aretz, Jewish journalist living in Ramallah, summarises this well:

In a few days Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing – military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road, siege, fear, anxiety over loved ones, captivity, being targets of vengeance, indiscriminate lethal fire at both those involved in the fighting (soldiers) and the uninvolved (civilians), a position of inferiority, destruction of buildings, ruined holidays or celebrations, weakness and helplessness in the face of all-powerful armed men, and searing humiliation.

Therefore, this must be said once again – we told you so. Ongoing oppression and injustice explode at unexpected times and places. Bloodshed knows no borders.

Israel is author of its own pain, trauma and fear. The vast majority of Jewish Israelis had not the will, nor the intellectual or emotional intelligence to lift up their eyes and see what a monster they had created – an apartheid state that blinded itself to the evil it had spawned.

Even as it indulged itself – but a few days ago – in massive marches and protests in its quest to secure its democracy, it chose not to confront the bitter truth: that the ‘its’ referred to a democracy of and for the Jews of Israel. The Occupation, the frequent bloody assaults on Gaza were not matters for attention or concern.

But now the fug of complacency is viciously blown away. Israel is traumatised and confused, hurt to the quick, grieving for its loved ones, family and friends.

It is unavoidable, it needs to be said, that Israel now experiences what Palestinians in Gaza experience every day. But this justifies nothing, hurt is hurt, whomsoever suffers it.