Bernard Spiegal

Has the moral abasement of our political class, along with the bulk of mainstream media, including the public-funded – that’s you and me – BBC reached its nadir, or will it descend still further into an ethic-less abyss of its own creation? How comes it that this coterie of comfort and ignominy so tenaciously cleaves to Israel – a state committed to perpetuating, but also refining, its methodologies of evil against Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians?

Israel has re-written the dictionary. Excised the word ‘civilian’, drained it of meaning, replaced it with ‘terrorist’ and ‘antisemitism’ – thereby justifying slaughtering anyone: child, woman, man. There are now no such people as Palestinian or Arab civilians.

Who is more guilty? Israel, the direct perpetrator of unending, unspeakable horrors, or the enablers and protectors of that state, the UK, USA, Germany much of the West, with Spain and Ireland being the exception? Or is culpability evenly distributed?

Mainstream media: Hush! Don’t say a word – the practice of avoidance and misdirection

At the same time, while mainstream media busies itself tracking the ritualised dance of negotiations for a ceasefire, it strenuously avoids reporting – of documenting – the daily here-and-now of Israel’s unrelenting, murderous assault on the Gazan population and the violent destruction of the very means required to sustain life. Be it in Gaza, Lebanon or Syria Israel’s aim is regional dominance. The method: indiscriminate slaughter.

Israel’s menu of killing embraces all possibilities. Be you child or adult, Israel can kill you slow – by malnutrition, by hypothermia, by woundings that suppurate, leaking infection into already weakened bodies, by contaminated water, by the destruction of medical care – or it can kill you fast: by explosion, by automatic gun fire, by F-35, by missile, by bomb.

Limbs and lives amputated by USA, UK and German arms. The delivery vehicle: Israel.

Anomalies, disjunctions

Moral abasement is a highly infectious disease, its vehicle of contamination, words. Words once thought to have a core of stable meaning, now turned-in on themselves, the aim not to illuminate, but to obscure.

Thus, whilst tenaciously doing little or nothing to halt the genocide in Gaza – or the West Bank and East Jerusalem – the Labour Party eulogises its Prime Minster and party leader Keir Starmer: His entire career has been about securing justice for those that need it. Is it possible to utter such a sentence without doing violence to the very idea of ‘justice’ and ‘need’? Palestinians, slaughtered daily, may wonder what further ‘needs’ they are required to display in order to qualify for the ministering balm of Starmer’s ‘justice’. A man who cannot say ‘genocide’, even as it unfolds before his eyes.

Our Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is a man of professed Christian faith. As are a number of Labour government minsters. But it is Lammy that concerns us here.

As reported in the Church Times , in November 2022, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, David Lammy spoke explicitly about how Jesus Christ was the inspiration for his politics as well as his lifelong faith. In his speech, he described the example that he kept in his sights: Jesus, ‘a man willing to challenge power: not simply saying “This is sad” but ‘This is wrong.’

And Lammy, at the UN Security Council meeting of November 2024, did lay out a list of wrongs perpetrated by Israel.

I confess to surprise on reading Lammy’s speech. The title is, seemingly, telling: ‘There is no excuse for Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid’.

The speech was formatted as though it were a poem. Short, stand-alone sentences, direct words. Clearly, Lammy wanted to introduce a sense of urgency into his speech, the phrasing has a driven quality. Here’s an extract – the entire speech can be found here – laid out as it is on the UN website but with added italics:

The situation is devastating and frankly beyond comprehension.

And is getting worse, not better.

Winter is here.

Famine is imminent.

And 400 days into this war, it is totally unacceptable that it’s harder than ever to get aid into Gaza.

In October, just 37 humanitarian trucks entered the Strip each day.

It’s the lowest average in the last year.

The situation in northern Gaza is a nightmare of disease, destruction and despair.

Over three hundred aid workers have now been killed.

It’s the highest number in UN history

Nevertheless, two lines in the wider speech stand in counterpoint to any sense of urgency: ‘When the opening comes, we must be ready to seize it’ but with no sense that the opening must be made, not waited upon.

Similarly, when Lammy says: ‘We must bring this multi-front conflict to an end’, there is no suggestion as to how; or that sharp, focused action against Israel is necessary. The ‘how’ of course cannot be said, still less done: cease to send arms; enjoin the USA not to send arms; cease to offer political cover to Israel, institute sanctions.

And so Lammy, along with his Prime Minister, deploy fine words, only then to drain them of meaning. Moral abasement, and political cowardice attend their utterances, their words merely mapping the distance between meaning and intent.

And the USA has now (04.01.2024), announced its intention to sell $8 billion in additional arms to Israel. The UK has not condemned this.

You find the words. I can’t.