Throughout, and to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments in the region have stood by and offered nothing in the way of serious and meaningful intervention, writes John Wight.
Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip, Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
By John Wight
Medium
No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atomic bomb. —Theodor Adorno
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed tirelessly to be acting in the name of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
In truth, the actions of his regime and military these past few months has placed them much closer to the guards than the inmates at Hitler’s death camps during this dark period in human affairs.
In other words, and put more simply, when your response to genocide is more genocide, you become precisely that which you claim to be against. This is precisely where we are now after four months of the IDF’s murderous and wholly indiscriminate military campaign against the people of Gaza.
Throughout, and to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments in the region have stood by and offered nothing in the way of serious and meaningful intervention. Supine and tepid calls for humanitarian pauses, temporary cessations, ceasefires, the provision of humanitarian aid; all have dropped and evaporated like snowflakes on the ground, such has been their impotence.
The result is 13,000 Palestinian children being thus far sent to their deaths under the missiles and bombs of a 21st century military machine in the hands of a government comprised of men with 14th century minds.
Netanyahu and his supporters will not be happy until the history, culture and entire existence of the Palestinians are relegated to the museum. This is both evident and implicit in the mad slaughter they have and are currently engaged in.
A twisted conception of the world as being fashioned on the basis of might is right and racial hierarchy has throughout human history produced monsters. And in this respect, Benjamin Netanyahu is merely the latest in a long line.
In this respect, too, he has inflicted a moral injury on every one of us still in possession of a beating heart and a conscience, not to mention consciousness.
In Washington there currently resides not the leader of the free world, but a man engaged in an exercise of trying to cover his own arse. Biden’s cognitive decrepitude is only matched by his moral turpitude; his lack of scruples only matched by his surplus of hypocrisy.
In providing Netanyahu with a blank cheque in Gaza in terms of military aid, while at the same time urging restraint, his is an administration with an ocean of blood on its hands and a desert of credibility. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” Shakespeare warned in words that are eminently applicable now, today, as these words are being written.
Light projection, Washington, D.C., Dec. 31, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
What Israel’s genocidal slaughter has done, over and above the destruction of Gaza and its people, is pull back the flowery curtain of human rights, democracy and international law to reveal the savage beasts of hegemony, militarism and white supremacy that in truth underpins the West’s engagement with the rest of the world, particularly the global South.
“The last Christian died on the cross,” Nietzsche claimed, and who could possibly argue that the most prominent misanthrope in world philosophy was wrong in that assertion?
Joe Biden could quite literally pick up the phone and put a stop to this now. With the requisite political will and basic common decency, he could halt the arms transfers to Israel and order an immediate ceasefire.
That instead he is allowing this madness to go on is a grim legacy that will forever define both him as a man and his tenure as president of the United States.
Turning to the U.K., the unelected incumbent in Number 10, Rishi Sunak, is what happens when a political system is allowed to become the wholly owned subsidiary of a country’s banking and financial sector. Mediocre is the very best that can be said of a small man with even smaller ideas.
Sunak and Netanyahu in Jerusalem in Oct. (Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0)
His opponent Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, seems intent on arriving in Downing Street after this year’s general election on a wave of lethargy rather than euphoria.
“Reds under the bed” has been replaced by “anti-Semites under the bed,” with he of the lacquered bouffant eagerly embracing the role of a latter day Matthew Hopkins, infamous 17th century English witchfinder general.
With his ongoing defenestration of the Labour Party of any residual dissenting voices when it comes to the U.K. riding shotgun for Israel, Starmer’s time as leader of the opposition has drilled home the profound truth that tyranny is less the product of totalitarian political systems and more the product of the totalitarian ideas that sustain political orthodoxy in any given space and time.
And whenever those ideas come under challenge, said democracy is exposed as a cloak behind which mendacity resides, ruthlessly seeking malcontents to expose and miscreants to punish.
In Sunak and Starmer, Netanyahu has himself patsies on whom he could not be more reliant. It is why when voters across the U.K. are asked to make a comparison come polling day later this year, on the issue of foreign policy at least they would be wise to ponder the words of Gore Vidal, one of the greatest wits in the history of American letters.
Vidal: “One does not bring a measuring rod to Lilliput.”
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
This article is from the author’s Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The West – meaning the US and its client states – were asked why they were allowing the mass murder of women and children in Rafah to take place – they simply answered: ‘Because we could’. But it was Israelis who led the charge against the unarmed and dispossessed. We have just borne witness to an abomination. Unfortunately there will be more in the pipeline; it’s in their nature.
I would like to add Macron to the list of evildoers, lamenting the terrible antisemitic acts of Oct 7 . That’s all.
One disagreement with the article- the Israelis’ actions are NOT indiscriminate. Along with children, the targets are very carefully chosen among men and women and institutions- writers, poets, journalists, community leaders, schools, universities, mosques, health centres, apartment buildings with whole influential families destroyed. The rest of the infrastructure and “ordinary human animals” is just collateral damage to these chosen invaders.
“A twisted conception of the world as being fashioned on the basis of might is right and racial hierarchy has throughout human history produced monsters. And in this respect, Benjamin Netanyahu is merely the latest in a long line.
In this respect, too, he has inflicted a moral injury on every one of us still in possession of a beating heart and a conscience, not to mention consciousness.
In Washington there currently resides not the leader of the free world, but a man engaged in an exercise of trying to cover his own arse. Biden’s cognitive decrepitude is only matched by his moral turpitude; his lack of scruples only matched by his surplus of hypocrisy.”
And this; “What Israel’s genocidal slaughter has done, over and above the destruction of Gaza and its people, is pull back the flowery curtain of human rights, democracy and international law to reveal the savage beasts of hegemony, militarism and white supremacy that in truth underpins the West’s engagement with the rest of the world, particularly the global South.”
Great truth here. Love this article. Someone is saying out loud what I see as well, and certainly much better than I could.
Reading Laurent Guyenot’s book, From Yahweh to Zion: Three Thousand Years of Exile, I wonder if the agenda is the same as what is in the Torah, and has WEF adopted that age old religious plan along with the Zionists?
Shameful…hiding behind the Holocaust. Palestinians had NOTHING to do with the Holocaust and yet…israel keeps friendly relations with Germany. As for the Arab nations in that area…backstabbers. And a large doses of RACISM too….Ethnic cleansing of non whites.
We must add David Cameron to Sunak and Starmer to round out the coterie of patsies on whom Netanyahu can rely.
Underlying all this madness and murder lies global capitalism. Our foreign policy is predicated on feeding the ever ravenous beast which is never satiated. It’s killing life on earth. I don’t see humanity turning this around until we face the reality that this system being shoved down our increasingly unwilling throats is unsustainable on every level.
For now, calling these criminals in every country out and demanding prosecutions for genocide is the first priority. It has to be huge masses of people everywhere in a sustained movement. This is critical if we are to retain any semblance of our humanity. Free Gaza!
Regarding “to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments….” I would just like to point out that there is a significant difference between The West and Arab governments in the region. The West has approved of, encouraged and generously helped pay for the genocide. Arab governments in the region realized that if they entered the conflict by helping Palestine even in the slightest, they, too, would experience the same fate as the Palestinians.
apart from, perhaps, the Indonesians (who lost their hospital in Gaza but whose doctors decided to stay in Gaza – hxxps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/25/gazas-indonesian-hospital-in-ruins-after-israeli-raid-days-long-siege) and whose FM, Retno Marsudi has been very active, although within the confines of diplomacy – hxxps://www.lemonde.fr/en/asia-and-pacific/article/2023/11/26/indonesia-outraged-over-israeli-assault-on-indonesian-hospital-in-gaza_6289289_153.html
That most definitely doesn’t apply to the Yemenis. Ansar Allah have responded above and beyond their moral duty
The only thing which distinguishes the Arab from the Western governments is the fact that, unlike the West, the Arabs never claimed to stand up for universal human rights.
That they’re corrupt is very clear, but their culpability is not comparable to that of the West who have sanctimoniously been wearing hair shirts in public to overtly demonstrate their extreme humanitarianism, … only to drop all that without a comment when it came to the most heinous abuses since WWII.
“Throughout, and to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments in the region have stood by and offered nothing in the way of serious and meaningful intervention” thereby limiting their eternity in many matters not limited to shame.
Excellent. This is what we need: call a spade a spade.
As with:
“In truth, the actions of [Netanyahu’s] regime and military these past few months has placed them much closer to the guards than the inmates at Hitler’s death camps during this dark period in human affairs.”
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” Shakespeare warned in words that are eminently applicable now, today, as these words are being written.”
“Reds under the bed” has been replaced by “anti-Semites under the bed,”
“. . . democracy is exposed as a cloak behind which mendacity resides, ruthlessly seeking malcontents to expose and miscreants to punish.”
“Vidal: “One does not bring a measuring rod to Lilliput.”
Here’s another one. “When small men cast long shadows, the sun is about to set.”