There are no excuses for ignoring where Israel’s onslaught against Gaza would lead. After slaughtering seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, three Britons among them, Israeli authorities will subject us to a well-trodden strategy: deflect, delay, deceive, muddy the waters, hope attention moves elsewhere. We have seen this all before. As the Tory MP and chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Alicia Kearns, notes, nearly 11 weeks on, there has still been no explanation for why Israel bombed a Medical Aid for Palestinians compound in an official safe zone in mid-January.
These latest aid workers were travelling in a “deconflicted” zone, had coordinated their movements with Israeli forces on a pre-agreed route, and were in vehicles marked with large World Central Kitchen logos. They were struck three times, over the space of nearly a mile and a half; survivors even scrambled into the remaining cars before being hit again.
“Our forces unintentionally hit innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, glibly declares, while IDF sources tell the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that ill discipline by local commanders was responsible. They would have us believe the Israeli army is a ragtag coalition of warlords doing as they please. In reality, Israel’s scorched earth policy made this latest horror inevitable.
About 200 aid workers have been butchered by Israeli forces since October, an unprecedented bloodbath in recorded history. But they were mostly Palestinian, their lives cheap, their deaths largely ignored. What’s the plausible explanation for the mass killing of those charged with delivering aid?
Consider the context. Aid is vital: imminent famine leaves Palestinians eating animal feed or starving to death. According to the British foreign secretary, David Cameron, Israel is preventing aid from entering Gaza, variously, with “arbitrary denials by the government of Israel and lengthy clearance procedures”. Israel, he makes clear, fails to open enough land routes, hasn’t fully opened a crucial port, and closes the Kerem Shalom crossing for the Sabbath. No wonder World Central Kitchen’s CEO, Erin Gore, declares that “food is being used as a weapon of war”. After the latest strike, ships carrying 240 tons of aid were turned around, and many aid agencies said they were suspending operations.
Well, we could go on. Israel targets police guarding aid convoys as security collapses because of a starving population, ignoring even the pleas of the US administration. It has waged a smear campaign against Unrwa, Gaza’s main humanitarian agency, without offering the UN evidence. It has ruined Gaza’s agriculture and domestic food production.
When contemplating why Israeli forces kill aid workers and hasten starvation, we can point to endless public statements by Israeli leaders, officials and media outlets with genocidal implications. But it is the 9 October statements by the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, that are most damning. He declared Israel was imposing “a complete siege” on Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.” The next day he told Israeli troops he had released “all restraints”, while promising “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.” Of particular relevance after the World Central Kitchen massacre, Giora Eiland, a former IDF general who is reportedly an advisor to the defence minister, wrote that same month that: “In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.”
Why didn’t these words alone shape all coverage and understanding of Israel’s onslaught? The man in charge of the Israeli army publicly told the world that his state would starve Gaza’s population – and deprive them of the essentials of life. He declared the Israeli army would enjoy total impunity. These aren’t excerpts from leaked documents: he just went out and said it all, on camera. Yet our political leaders and most media outlets act as though we live in a parallel universe in which such genocidal statements are irrelevant, and at best we can discuss whether Israel’s military onslaught is “proportionate”, where we can agree to disagree. So when considering how these aid workers were butchered, remember Gallant’s words.
Back in October, I penned a column entitled “Israel is clear about its intentions in Gaza – world leaders cannot plead ignorance of what is coming”. It required no special insight, no prophetic magic. You simply had to listen to what Israeli leaders and officials said they were going to do, which they did, to the letter.
Look where we are now. You are witnessing what one former senior UN official described as “probably the highest kill rate of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994”. One of the great crimes of our age, and it was entirely predictable, and it was predicted.
As the guilt of those complicit in this frenzy of mass killing becomes impossible to suppress, some will simply double down, taking themselves to ever darker places, howling that the real extremists are those who oppose this butchery. Others will deploy the strategy of one US official in early November who declared: “If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a reference to the mildest and most futile hand-wringing amid overwhelming connivance.
From the start, Britons overwhelmingly backed a ceasefire, a public consensus the vast protests on our streets faithfully represented – which is why those actions were so demonised. With three Britons added to a death toll of tens of thousands of Palestinians – and the British government reportedly suppressing legal advice Israel is committing war crimes – they should finally be listened to. There must be an immediate arms embargo and sanctions on Israel, let alone an end to stated support for the slaughter. Then must come accountability, because without accountability these horrors will repeat themselves again and again and again.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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