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Single atrocities – such as the Israeli strike in Khan Yunis on Thursday that killed at least 23 people including five children, four women and a man from the same family, according to the Nasser Hospital which received the bodies – no longer feel out of the ordinary. Killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza has become old news and, as the PR saying has it, old news is no news.
“We are witnessing in real time the destruction and forced displacement of the entire population in Gaza,” says Amande Bazerolle, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ emergency co-ordinator in Gaza, a place which has been “turned into a mass grave of Palestinians and those coming to their assistance”. Some 1,650 people have been killed since the war resumed, according to the Gaza health ministry, bringing the total Palestinian dead in the war to 51,700, though this figure is probably an underestimate as many bodies lie buried under the rubble.
Comparing the loss of life with other state-orchestrated massacres in the Middle East, loss of life in Gaza has now reached the same level as Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1988. A report by Human Rights Watch, based on seized Iraqi government documents, estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds were killed. The UK parliament formally recognised Anfal as a genocide in 2013.
Israeli military aggressiveness has increased ever since Trump put forward the idea of the permanent removal of Palestinians from Gaza as an option. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday that the blockade is one of “the central pressure tactics” on Hamas, whom he accused of syphoning off aid. Aid workers deny this, saying that the UN carefully monitors aid distribution.
Free speech stifled
A chilling example of how free speech is being suppressed is that of Canadian emergency paediatrician Dr Joanne Liu, who had been due to give a long-arranged lecture at New York University in March when the event was abruptly cancelled the night before. Dr Liu said she was told that some of her slides about Gaza “could be perceived as antisemitic” and others on USAid, dismantled by Trump, might be perceived as “anti-governmental”.
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Some of the strongest protests against Netanyahu doubling down on the war in Gaza are in Israel itself, where nearly 1,000 air force veterans signed a letter demanding an end to the war and accusing Netanyahu of continuing it to maintain the support of the extreme ethno-nationalist right for his government.
Stronger criticism of the renewed military offensive in Gaza is expressed in a scathing public letter signed by 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who say that “Israel’s soul is being ripped out”. They believe that “what is happening is unbearable, but our Jewish values compel us to stand up and to speak out”. They say that the hostages can only be brought home by peaceful diplomacy and not by military action.
The letter concludes by saying that “this most extremist of Israeli governments is encouraging violence against Palestinians” and “building more settlements than ever”. They add that Israeli society is bitterly divided, while democracy and the judiciary are under assault, with the police resembling “a militia”. The president of the Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, criticised the letter for not blaming Hamas for the end of the ceasefire.
The official Israeli goals in Gaza are the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas, but an openly discussed objective is the wholesale displacement of the Palestinians. Israel is in an unprecedentedly powerful position in the region with the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The US has launched a devastating bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, Israel’s sole remaining militarily active regional enemy.
For the moment, Trump has opted for negotiations, but this could change overnight – and the eruption of regional war might give Netanyahu the opportunity to drive surviving Palestinians out of Gaza.
Further thoughtsThe corruption was well-publicised at the time because those doing the stealing scarcely bothered to hide what they were up to, confident that they stood a minimal chance of being punished. Early on, the entire $1.2bn military procurement budget was stolen, though in theory spent on some obsolete Soviet-era helicopters from Poland and on a contract scribbled on a piece of A4 paper for the supply of infantry weapons from Pakistan. The handwriting was so bad that nobody knew what weaponry had been ordered until a paltry number arrived at the airport.
The US government under Trump is today undergoing its own Make America Great Again version of “de-Baathification”: regulatory agencies being downsized, stripped of experienced officials, their authority curtailed, and with Trump loyalists replacing the old leadership. As in Iraq 20 years ago, some of those driving these changes will have a very precise idea about how they can make money out of their new positions.
A Trump executive order says that bribery prosecutions hinder the ability of US firms to compete abroad but, with dozens of cases and investigations being upended, corruption is likely to become pervasive at home and abroad.
It did not take long after 2003 to turn the Iraqi state into a looting machine – and the US is heading fast in the same direction.
Beneath the radar
The Supreme Court this week ruled that the term “woman” in the Equality Act means a biological woman, and “sex” means biological sex. The judges made clear that if a space is designated as women-only, such as a changing room or toilet, somebody who was born male but identifies as a woman has no right to use that space or service.
The dispute has already left its mark on politics, helping to discredit the Scottish Government, and enabling the Maga Republicans to denigrate the Democrats during the presidential election for not knowing the difference between a man and a woman.
Cockburn’s picks
Reporting on Trump’s deportations, CBS’s 60 Minutes programme found that it could find no criminal records for 75 per cent of the Venezuelans the US sent to a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador, where they may be incarcerated for the rest of their lives.
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