by Seumas Milne
Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, in protest against her government’s “morally indefensible” stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the suspension of arms export licences to Israel.
Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, in protest against her government’s “morally indefensible” stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the suspension of arms export licences to Israel.
Last week it was Ed Miliband who condemned Israel’s invasion and the prime minister’s “silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians”. Even the United States administration denounced its strategic protege’s “disgraceful” bombardment of a school, while Barack Obama described Palestinian suffering as “ heartbreaking” – as if he had nothing to do with it.
Now
that Israelis and Palestinians have arrived in Cairo to turn the
ceasefire into something more long-lasting, perhaps it feels safer to
take a stand. But a month of indiscriminate brutality in which 1,875
Palestinians and 67 Israelis have been killed is still presented,
grotesquely, as a war of Israeli self-defence – rather than as a
decades-long confrontation between occupier and occupied, in which
western governments stand resolutely on the side of the occupier.
And
while the overwhelming majority of Palestinian dead are civilians – 430
of them children – and 64 of the Israeli dead are soldiers, it is Hamas
that is branded terrorist, rather than the Israeli armed forces armed
with the most sophisticated targeting technology in the world.
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