When you live to be over 70 it is sometimes tempting to think that you have seen it all and that nothing much will shock you. Then you hear something that stops you in your tracks, causing you to re-assess your definition of evil.
A Gaza doctor’s account
I turned on the radio recently to hear an interview with a doctor working in Gaza. He told the BBC that he was treating people who had been shot whilst queuing for food. Then he spoke quietly and calmly about something truly horrible.
He reported that every day, he sees a remarkably high number of injuries in a particular part of the body. One day the bodies will arrive with injuries to the head. The next it will be the stomach. There was even a cluster of shots to the genitals. The soldiers were clearly entertaining themselves by challenging each other to target particular parts of the body on different days.
When I looked to find this shocking and revealing report online, I couldn’t find it on the BBC website. What I could find was evidence from former Israeli Defence Force soldiers that hungry people were being deliberately shot in bread queues organised by the Israeli government and the United States government.
Ethnic cleansing in Gaza
I say the Israeli and US governments for a very clear reason. Crimes are committed by individuals not by entire nations or by entire races. Donald Trump has openly declared his enthusiasm for cleaning out the whole of Gaza to make way for seafront property developments.
The Israeli government has ordered that the last remnants of any standing buildings across huge areas of Gaza should be flattened. It has also told Palestinians that they will be herded into a small area where there will be little food, no jobs or prospects, but allowed to leave for other countries of their own free will. How is it possible to describe these policies as anything other than deliberate ethnic cleansing?
Slippery slope to dehumanisation
When their own government is openly advocating land theft and the removal of entire populations, it becomes frighteningly easy for the soldiers that are asked to do that job to cease to regard people of another race as being of any value. Target practice on living people can become the norm when you categorise a people as the other.
What is truly alarming about this attitude is that it’s not wholly unique to one nation or race, but instead all cultures contain some proportion of people who would behave in this way given similar encouragement. The actions of those Hamas supporters who killed, kidnapped or raped Jewish people who were simply enjoying a trance festival were not the product of live-and-let-live attitudes.
As soon as an entire people are defined as the enemy it becomes all too easy to commit great evil. As we all should have learned from Nazi Germany. The actions of Nazi party members were only possible because a lot of ordinary and supposedly decent German citizens allowed themselves to become carried away by the mood of the time. They ceased to care about what happened to their Jewish neighbours, the Gypsies, and the disabled.
Many in Israel resist Netanyahu’s war
Fortunately, there is also a much more positive side to humanity. Just as every community contains some unpleasant people who can easily be induced to commit acts of evil, it also contains people who respect the rights of others and want to find routes to peaceful co-existence. It must never be forgotten that before the Hamas attacks took place there was a powerful series of demonstrations building in strength across Israel against the Netanyahu government.
The majority of Jewish people in Israel have consistently told opinion polls that they want the war to end and hostages to return. Netanyahu rules at severe risk of being indicted for corruption. He is thought by many to have only brought far-right enthusiasts for ethnic cleansing into his cabinet in order to avoid going to prison.
It is also the case that there are huge numbers of realists who support the Palestinian cause but recognise that the time has come to support the right of all the peoples of Israel to live in peace and freedom. Not everyone who backs the rights of Palestinians is happy to sign up to notions of cleaning out Jewish people from the river to the sea. Many are consistent enough to oppose genocide and war crimes from whichever side they stem.
We have a moral imperative to speak up, now
The solutions to the Middle Eastern crisis are relatively easy to state. They consist of equal respect for the lives and the property of all in the region and an end to apartheid style policies with an agreement to live and let live. No-one in the region is safe in the long term, unless all of the people from all communities are safe.
It is much harder to achieve this. Especially at a time when government after government, unfortunately including the British government, is still prepared to sell arms, supply targeting information and welcome the military commander in charge of those troops committing blatant war crimes in Gaza.
It ought to be possible to build a consensus between those who are prepared to recognise that those who are different to them also have rights. It also ought to be possible to draw in money from wealthy Arab states to build a more stable future for the region.
None of that will happen while policy is being driven forward by an Israeli government driven by hatred and fear of the other. None of it will happen while the US government supplies weapons and enthusiastically endorses the forced removal of two million people. None of it will happen while the British government utters strong words but acts in ways that enable the genocide.
When great evil is in progress it is important to call it out and stand firmly against it with all your power. Keir Starmer’s government has not passed that test. Instead, it is busy inviting the prime suppliers of weapons and of verbal justification for the slaughter to take tea with the King.
