Erasing a genocide with the ‘Art of the Deal’
It will soon be two years since Hamas launched its “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack on southern Israel. Israel’s retaliatory “war” has since reduced Gaza to an uninhabitable wasteland and caused—at a very conservative minimum—more than 66,000 Palestinian deaths, with some 83 percent of them, according to Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) data, being civilians. Since Israel broke its January ceasefire agreement and resumed its offensive in March, 15 of every 16 out of the 16,000 Palestinians the IDF has killed have been civilians.
In the aftermath of October 7 there was enormous support for Israel, especially in the West. But as the “war” ground on, with no apparent end in sight and ever-mounting civilian casualties, the tide of Western public opinion turned. Recent pressure led several Western governments to reluctantly berate Israel for its “intolerable and unacceptable” and “utterly reckless and appalling” actions—while doing precious little to stop them.
Despite the chorus of condemnation, we have seen nothing approaching the battery of sanctions that played such a large part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa, not to mention the swingeing economic, political, and cultural sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia immediately following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
This paralysis on the part of the “international community” is remarkable, given that what is at issue is increasingly being recognized as a genocide—the worst of all crimes under international humanitarian law. But it is not, perhaps, surprising. Given their previous support for Israel, not to mention their vulnerability to economic bullying by Trump’s US, Western leaders found themselves tossed on the horns of an impossible dilemma. (more...)
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