https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/starmer-lied-in-saying-israel-isnt
We may be exhausted by 13 months of lies, disinformation and smears. But we're not voiceless, or powerless. Our leaders seek to bully us into silence because they fear what we have to say
Jonathan Cook
Nov 18, 2024

Below is the text of a speech I delivered in Bath on Saturday 17 November 2024, organised by the Bath Campaigns Network. A section of the talk – on Keir Starmer’s lies about Gaza – can be watched in this video, kindly filmed by Nicola James.

For 13 months, western governments and the establishment media have shown us who they are.

They are indifferent to the mass murder of children in Gaza. In fact, the West supplies the weapons and intelligence to help Israel slaughter more Palestinian children.

Western leaders seem fine too with an aid blockade denying water, food and power to more than 2 million people – starving them. Our politicians and media call it “self-defence”.

Similarly, the West has quietly consented to Israel’s war on the United Nations and its banning of UNRWA, the only refugee agency able to feed and care for Gaza’s families.

Western leaders have gradually resigned themselves to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres, as well as the documented killing, kidnapping and torture of medical workers.

Western politicians and media have shrugged their shoulders as Israel has picked off more than 150 journalists in Gaza – the largest massacre of media workers in history. Israel prefers to carry out its crimes unobserved.

Israel has carved up tiny Gaza into a northern and a southern zone, and is terrorising 400,000 Palestinians out of the ruins of north Gaza into the ruins of south Gaza.

They are being herded into a south Gaza of so-called “safe zones” bombarded and starved nearly as intensely as north Gaza.

The West has watched mutely as Israeli leaders declare the Palestinians of north Gaza will never be allowed back – that is, that they are being ethnically cleansed, as they were earlier by Israel, in 1948, during the Nakba.

Day by day, Israel shrinks the space for Palestinians in what was – even before Israel’s genocide in Gaza – one of the most overcrowded, besieged, attacked and surveilled places on the planet.

Israel is making a hell on earth for Palestinians ever more hellish.

And yet the West’s leaders have barely bothered to call for restraint. Even after 13 months of a genocide, we are told this is a necessary “war against Hamas”.

Even Israel’s aid blockade and starvation of Gaza’s population – an indisputable crime against humanity – is framed as an author-less “humanitarian crisis”.

Industrial-scale murder in Gaza – carried out with the supply of British weapons and intelligence – has become so routine the BBC hardly bothers to report it any more.

And our protests are smeared as antisemitism.

Like Israel, the West has stood on its head the very international legal order it developed after the Second World War to stop a repeat of the Holocaust.

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, says not enough people in Gaza have died yet for us to call it a genocide – as though accountants and mathematicians are the ones to decide when crimes against humanity are committed.

As though the goal is simply to identify a genocide for the historical record, after it is completed, rather than stop it in its tracks.

In any case, Lammy knows that Gaza has been so utterly devastated that it now has no capacity to count its dead. He knows that, according to experts, Gaza’s death toll is more likely in the 100,000s than the 10,000s.

Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, spoke this past week in the House of Commons to tell us two things.

First, that any questioning of Israel’s conduct is improper – unless it is preceded and overshadowed by condemnation of Hamas’ actions more than a year ago.

And second, that, as an expert in human rights law, he can categorically say no genocide is taking place in Gaza.

Today, Starmer excels as one thing: a grubby, cynical, craven politician – one utterly subservient to the American empire and its interests in the oil-rich Middle East.

But Starmer is right. Indeed, he does know the definition of genocide.

In 2014, he defined genocide to the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the world, in a war crimes hearing into Serbia’s three-month siege in 1991 of the Croatian city of Vukovar.

He would prefer we forget his words. So let me recall them now.

Starmer said, and I quote:

Serbian forces carried out a sustained campaign of shelling, systematic expulsion, denial of food, water, electricity, sanitation and medical treatment – bombing, burning, brutal killings and torture, which reduced the city [of Vukovar] to rubble and destroyed its Croat population.

Starmer defined Serbia’s actions as genocidal because they were a “radically disproportionate attack deliberately intended to devastate the town and its civilian population”.

Israel’s crimes in Gaza are immeasurably worse – on a far larger scale and far more sustained – than anything suffered by Vukovar.

And unlike the case of Serbia, there can be no doubt about intent. Israel’s leaders have endlessly repeated that the goal is to lay waste to Gaza, to make it uninhabitable, to starve the population.

This week, an eminent British doctor who has volunteered in Gaza explained how Israel dealt with Palestinian children it failed to kill with its bombs.

Dr Nizam Mamode broke down as he told a parliamentary committee that, after refugee shelters were struck, Israel would send in small, armed drones to identify and shoot survivors.

Children he operated on would tell how the drones hovered over them as they lay on the ground and then shot.

He called it a deliberate and persistent targeting of children.

UN figures show that 70% of verified violent deaths in Gaza are women and children, with the highest proportion from the age group five to nine-year-olds.

Is this not genocide, Sir Keir, as you defined it in 2014? Is it not genocide, as the Genocide Convention defines it.

And if it is not, Sir Keir, you urgently need to explain why.

From their own mouths, Lammy and Starmer have told us who they are. They are genocide deniers. They are enablers of genocide. They are conspirators in genocide – just like those who preceded them in the British government.

We may be exhausted by 13 months of lies, disinformation, smears and gaslighting. But we are not voiceless – or powerless. Our leaders seek to exhaust us, to smear and bully us into submission and silence, because they fear what we have to say.

Because every time we raise our voices, we shame them. We expose them. We remind ourselves and others that this is not normal. That we are led by moral monsters.