Bernard Spiegal

Do they, Biden and Sunak, turn away their faces, avert their eyes, block-up their ears, against the images and sounds of Gaza so desperately pleading for their attention?  

Paying the cries no heed, committed only to perverse, bloodless political calculation, the USA, the UK, the West in general, now are Israel’s collaborators in an ethnic cleansing joint enterprise.

I say ‘collaborators’ in a ‘joint enterprise’ because each – USA, UK, the West – has, to a greater or lesser extent, the means to insist, to cause, Israel to halt immediately its onslaught on Gaza.

‘Collaborators’ and ‘joint enterprise’ because each, to a greater or lesser extent, is politically and militarily fuelling by arms supply and political cover the wild murderous fire that Israel has unleashed and stokes. Israel shows no meaningful signs of relenting until it has achieved its goal: a further step in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza; and, indeed, of the West Bank and East Jerusalem too. 

The USA, UK, the West, have allied themselves to a state that is essentially spiritually and morally ill, addicted, as to a hallucinatory drug, to the pursuit of a Jewish supremacist state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And while Western leaders cosset and protect this renegade state, civil societies across the continents of the world watch in mute horror as death, maiming and now starvation is enacted before our eyes.

Whilst Israel deploys directly the means – its unrelenting military assault on the civilian population – of ethnic cleansing against Gaza’s Palestinian population; and also, plausibly pursues genocidal intent and action, the USA, UK and West, too, carry a high degree of culpability. For they have chosen – chosen – not to exert the power at their disposal to bring halt to Israel’s onslaught. 

In an earlier blog, I wondered whether Israel has the internal resources – ethical, psychological, imaginative, political – to reflect upon itself critically; to shed its self-imposed, self-defeating burden of maintaining and justifying a state founded on Jewish Supremacism.  I came to the conclusion that it did not. It appears that Israel is unable to see, think or apprehend beyond its self-contained myopic world of perpetual self-justification.

In a court of law, once a guilty verdict is handed down, the court turns its attention to the question of mitigation. Mitigation not affecting the verdict, but what might be done, or not done, in the light of it.

In mitigation, one might understand Israel as a state and society that is ethically sick. That since 1948, and at gathering pace, it has severed or treated with disdain, the bonds that could have connected it to an ethical framework grounded in universalist values. Values that are negated by the ideology of Zionism.  

Instead, it has welded itself to an essentialist, ethnonationalist worldview, and therefore to all the cruelties towards the Other – Palestinians – that such a worldview requires and enables. This has led, inexorably, inevitably perhaps, to an Israel that pounds without mercy Gaza’s civilian population; and an IDF that appears to rejoice in that.

The West, along with those Jews who have enveloped Israel in a protective bubble such that no criticism or rebuke is allowed to break through, have protected Israel, but to its own detriment.  For in eschewing any criticism or censure Israel has been robbed of the capacity to see itself as it truly is. Instead, it lives in a bubble of protected illusion believing, or purporting to believe, that it is a genuine democratic state; and that all criticism is motivated by antisemitism.

And so, paradoxically, the state that thinks of itself always as a victim, is in fact the victim of those that declare themselves as friend.