Peter Reynolds

The slaughter, rape and capture of Israeli civilians by Hamas is a crime of dreadful proportions.  It warrants unreserved condemnation and those responsible should be hunted down like rabid dogs.

Yet the rush by Western politicians to offer unconditional support to Israel is an awful mistake. The monster that is Hamas is the product of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. Though much Israeli blood was spilled over the weekend, it is a few drops compared to the gallons of Palestinian blood that Israel has been responsible for.

Already, Israel is enacting brutal, disproportionate revenge. Half of Gaza’s densely packed population is children and the IDF is raining down missiles, bombs, artillery shells on them, including banned phosporous munitions which cause agonising burns, even to internal organs.

Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron gave the go ahead for this. They and other Western leaders have encouraged it. The spectacle of Downing Street being lit up with the blood-drenched Israeli flag sickens me. These vile, self-serving, craven hypocrites are beneath contempt and they place themsleves in the same category as Netanyahu. As far as I am concerned they are war criminals and they should be taken to the Hague, locked up and put on trial.

This will never happen, although if he lives long enough, Netanyahu might be the exception. A few days from now these same politicians will be urging restraint on Israel but it will be too late. The beast has been unleashed and it will turn Gaza into an abbatoir.

Israel is the aggressor in this conflict. In 1948, the Western powers led, to our eternal shame, by Britain, forcibly expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their own land to create the state of Israel. From that moment on, Palestine has been acting in self-defence.

This forced explusion was an act of genocide, a war crime, yet the culprits stitched-it up into an international agreement to give it a fraudulent legitimacy. Ever since they have tacitly and sometimes explicitly supported Israel in its unlawful oppression of Palestine.

I suppose the hope was that eventually Palestinians and Israelis would live together peacefully and most do. For decades the ‘two-state solution’ seemed to be the conclusion that would bring conflict to an end. It is primarily extremist Israelis who have sabotaged this, the religious extremist Zionists who believe God gave them the land. In recent years, when most reasonable people were expecting the situation to improve, they have made it worse. Under Netanyahu, an apartheid system now exists where Palestinians are the lowest of the low. Through all this the West has sat on its hands. Much blame lies with Republicans in the US Congress but Britain and the EU cannot escape responsibility.

Where this goes now I cannot predict. Too many devious actors are at play but it is going to get much, much worse before, if ever, it gets any better. The mix of Iran, Russia, the Ukraine war and now this could lead to a final conflagration.

Within my world, those who I was entitled to rely on for prudent statesmanship, British politicians, have disgraced themselves yet again. There are no great leaders anymore. There are no leaders of any worth. They are small, contemptible rats in the failing experiment of humanity.