https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/the-uk-government-is-determined-to
Just once, couldn't we do the right thing?
Council Estate Media
and Ricky
Oct 16, 2024

When footage emerged of the horrific attack on Al-Aqsa hospital that burned innocent people like 19-year-old Sha’ban Al-Dalou and his mother alive, it seemed obvious to everyone with a shred of decency that action against Israel was long overdue. Some were even calling for the UN to take military action…

Phillip Proudfoot is perfectly correct here, there has not been a stronger justification to intervene in a conflict in decades. If nothing else, the fact Netanyahu keeps threatening and attacking UNIFIL troops means we should not pull UNIFIL out of Gaza, we should increase its presence. How is the use of white phosphorous against UNIFIL not enough for the UN to act? Are we saying Israel has a right to defend itself but UNIFIL doesn’t?

Even Joe Biden realises he must pretend to be doing something in order to save Kamala’s election chances. He has threatened to stop arms to Israel if they don’t sort out the humanitarian crisis in Gaza within 30 days. This is, of course, a hollow gesture because the people of northern Gaza have been deprived of food since a full blockade began on 1st October.

Another 30 days of starvation and the election will have been held and an awful lot of Palestinians will be dead. However, Biden is banking on the public believing he is at least trying to save them, as though Israel’s main arms supplier is some helpless onlooker. Israel will probably let in one truck of aid on day 29 and the US will say “that’s fine” and send another massive arms shipment.

While its efforts might be pathetic, the Biden administration has to at least pretend to give a shit, but Starmer’s government doesn’t have any such concerns. They won an election by a landslide, and despite them being possibly the least popular government in UK history, it seems we’re powerless to stop them.

David Lammy, possibly the least competent foreign secretary we’ve ever had, was so concerned about Israel’s brutality that he took to Twitter to post:

Despite repeated warnings, the dangerous actions of Iran and its proxies are driving further escalation in the Middle East. Following its ballistic missile attack on Israel, we are holding Iran to account and exposing those who facilitated these acts.

Yes, Lammy is sanctioning Iran who killed zero civilians, instead of Israel who just killed a large number of hospital patients. Just imagine Lammy posting the same about Israel following any of its daily massacres that were far more brutal, escalatory and illegal.

In his post, Lammy was quote-tweeting a statement from the UK Foreign Office which read:

Iran's regime continues to destabilise peace in the Middle East. We cannot allow them to succeed. Today we are sanctioning senior Iranian military figures and organisations following their role in the attack on Israel on October 1.

Lammy’s defenders might scroll down his wall and point to a tweet condemning settler violence in the West Bank and another condemning attacks on UNIFIL soldiers. While this might sound fair and reasonable, look at the difference in response.

David Cameron said on Radio 4 that as foreign secretary, he put everything in place to sanction Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for their support for settler violence, and Lammy won’t even go through with that. He just has to sign it off, and so far he hasn’t, therefore his condemnations of settler violence ring hollow.

The UK government sanctions a small number of settlers under the pretence of being even-handed when they should be calling for the arrest of Netanyahu as loudly as they do Putin. Everyone in the Israeli chain of command should be sanctioned and facing international arrest warrants. The government should be speaking out against any intimidation of ICC judges.

Any government with room for Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich is an extreme one. You don’t give cabinet roles to out and out fascists. Our government is pretending the problem in Israel is a small number of individuals, rather than the government and the wider Israeli public. This gives it the excuse to not take the required action, but the fact remains, it is treating extremists as allies.

Imagine spending your whole career fighting to get into government, only to jump through hoops trying to help those guilty of genocide avoid accountability. Imagine targeting the people who are trying to stop the genocide.

Iran launched an attack on military infrastructure that killed zero civilians, despite some of that military infrastructure being in civilian areas. Hezbollah killed Israeli soldiers who had been carpet-bombing Beirut and wiping out entire neighbourhoods. Yet, as the mainstream media tearfully reads out the names of dead Israeli soldiers, and suggests they were children(!), our entire political class shrugs at the death of the likes of Sha’ban.

Nineteen-year-old Palestinian software engineering students are unimportant, but 19-year-old Israeli war criminals deserve every sympathy. The contrast could not be more stark.

In one report, Sky couldn’t even call a child a child, instead referring to a dead girl as a nameless “three or four-year-old young lady”, and sounding apologetic to Israel while describing a bullet “accidentally” making its way into her vehicle. I used to think I lived a country with a bad history that sometimes repeats its mistakes. Now I think I’m living in a brainwashed cult almost as far gone as Israel.

Our government has immediately moved to sanction Iran, absurdly for “escalation”, when we all know Netanyahu is doing everything he can to escalate. The West supported the sheer brutality of attacks on Lebanon as “self-defence”, but when Israeli soldiers are killed in a war, we’re told these are war crimes.

Israel can use illegal cluster munitions and chemical weapons on civilians and peacekeepers, and we hear only minor disapproval at worst. Starmer even ruled out an arms embargo on Israel, defying the ICJ by arguing you can’t remove a country’s right to self-defence, but we removed Palestine’s right to self-defence, we removed Lebanon’s right to self-defence.

Belligerent occupiers have no legal right to self-defence. Either our government is diabolical at assessing these things or it’s deliberately getting it wrong. Given half the cabinet were once lawyers, including Starmer and Lammy, we all know the answer.

If Lammy were to act consistently, he would have stopped all arms to Israel long ago, instead of apologetically suspending 8% of contracts. He would be emphasising that people in Lebanon and Palestine have just as much right to safety and security as Israelis. He would be saying it’s not okay to massacre one group of civilians under the pretence of protecting another. He would be expelling monsters like Tzipi Hotoveli and never letting them on the airwaves to tell us why Palestine has no right to exist again.

Remember how long it took for us to sanction Russians and ban RT after the Ukraine invasion? Every day we platform Israelis who are guilty of genocidal talk far more extreme than anything I’ve heard from a Russian.

Hotoveli once told LBC "every school, every mosque, every second house, has an access to tunnel," arguing they all should be destroyed - and that’s exactly what Israel did. Yet sickeningly, Hotoveli and her friends are treated as having respectable views. They were even partying with government ministers at the Labour conference.

If I went on TV (something I would never do!) and said Israel has no right to exist and there are no innocents in Israel and it’s fine to carpet bomb Tel Aviv, not only would I never be allowed on TV again, I’d be arrested. We are not allowed to say about Israel what Zionists say about Palestine.

The thing is the government is well aware of how ridiculous this all is. They wheeled out Emily Thornberry (someone who is desperate for a cabinet role) to defend this crap, because no one else was willing to do it. Even soulless ghouls like Lammy and Streeting were not keen to show their face on camera after hospital patients on IVs were incinerated.

Thornberry gave the least convincing and most despicable defence of Israel when she tried to both sides it without both sides’ing it. She tried to pile all the blame on Iran and Hamas when questioned about the Al Aqsa hospital attack.

“There are war crimes that have been committed by… by, um, by Hamas, by, by, by, by, uh, uh, Iran, I mean on all sides,” Thornberry said.

“Do you think there should be any red lines for Britain’s political support of Israel?” asked Krishnan Guru-Murthy and all Thornberry could muster was the usual “Israel has a right to defend itself”. If Israel nuked Tehran tomorrow, neoliberals would remind us the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki as though nuking is okay now. There is no red line for Israel.

Thornberry used the lazy excuse that it’s not her place to decide when war crimes are being committed, as this is for the courts. However, it is absolutely the role of governments to make that call and then act appropriately to stop the war crimes. This would be like a police officer seeing an assault take place and saying: “Well, I’m not supposed to stop this, only the court can decide if this is a crime”.

It’s your job to make that call, Emily! Don’t take it from me, take it from the ICJ which has already laid out what you need to be doing and you’re refusing to comply. Even worse, Netanyahu is now threatening the judges of the ICC and the secretary-general of the UN. If you cared about “the courts”, surely you would have something to say about this.

Thornberry said “the accusations fly in all directions”, but I don’t care about accusations, I care about actions that we can see with our own eyes. Actions that Israel keeps admitting to. Just look at Israel’s current starvation policy in northern Gaza. Last time I checked, Iran was not starving something between 400,000 and 1,000,000 people to death.

You’re not allowed to use starvation as a weapon of war because this violates the Geneva Conventions. Starving a single person is a war crime. Starving hundreds of thousands of civilians is a genocide.

Israel has stopped all food and supplies since 1st October, and given Hamas will surely have stores of food as well as tunnels to resupply, the people who will starve are the ones who are too afraid to relocate because Israeli drones keep shooting at them.

When you see a genocide taking place, you are supposed to intervene. Hell, intervention used to be our thing, and now we’re punishing Iran for intervening in a minimal way. Why is Iran being punished for trying to stop a genocide? Why are we banning people like Nelson Mandela’s son from even talking about the genocide? If that’s not an indication we’re on the wrong side of history, what the hell is?