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A dire impact of Donald Trump’s dominance of the world news agenda is that the daily slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is being largely ignored.
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 seeing in hideous detail the normalisation of evil as Palestinians – two million people with nowhere to escape to – are killed daily by the dozen before the eyes of the world. On 18 March, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ended the ceasefire and resumed the Israeli offensive. Israel has stopped food and medicine entering the Gaza Strip since 2 March. With Trump focusing on the Ukraine war, purging his opponents and setting up his tariff walls, few pay much attention to this escalating human catastrophe.
“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.
As the number of fatalities rises far above what people can easily imagine, the huge death toll becomes numbing rather than shocking. There is much angry but arid debate about whether or not the mass killings amount to a genocide, though nobody denies that a great number of civilians have died.
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.
Bad though the situation of the Gazans has been since the war started with a Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, 2023, it has deteriorated further during the last six weeks since Israel reimposed its blockade on 2 March. The UN says that the Gaza Strip now faces its worst crisis since the conflict began 18 months ago. “Kids are eating less than a meal a day and struggling to find their next meal,” Bushra Khalil, the policy head at Oxfam, said this week. “Malnutrition and pockets of famine are definitely occurring.”
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.
The Israeli government position is stronger since Trump entered the White House three months ago. In justifying its assault on American universities, the administration is claiming that all criticism and protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are antisemitic. Fearful of losing federal funding, educational institutions are running scared of the slightest mention of Gaza, even when there is no mention of Israeli actions.
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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Read MoreSome 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.
“It’s crystal clear that the renewal of the war is for political reasons and not for security reasons”, and has nothing to do with getting the remaining 59 hostages released, said Guy Poran, a retired air force pilot who helped organise the letter.
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.
Instead of moving to the second phase of the ceasefire, “the Israeli government instead chose to break the ceasefire and return to war in Gaza”. Since then, the letter reads, “we are back in a brutal war where the killing of 15 paramedics and their burial in a mass grave is again possible and risks being normal”.
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.
Had such letters demanding an end to the war and criticising the Israeli government been sent not by Israeli air force pilots and members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews but by staff at an American university, they might find themselves in deep trouble, with their federal funding withdrawn and non-American citizens at risk of deportation.
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.
Trump reportedly turned down an Israeli plan to attack Iranian nuclear facilities this month – something they can only do with US military support. The attack would have been from the air, but the plans also included an Israeli commando assault on Iran that would not, in any case, have been ready to proceed until October.
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 thoughtsWatching Trump purge the US federal government, I am reminded of the de-Baathification campaign carried out by the US occupation authorities after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nominally targeting senior members of the Baath Party, the supposed remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the purge opened wide the door to a tidal wave of corruption in which the Iraqi state turned into a kleptocracy – and it has largely stayed that way ever since.
The 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.
Central to the degradation of the Iraqi state was the self-destructive de-Baathification campaign during which everybody above a certain rank in the Baath party lost their job. This was partly explained by the new Shia-dominated government replacing the old Sunni elite, but many of those driving the purge had spotted a risk-free opportunity to make great fortunes by looting the Iraqi state.
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.
The chances of crooked politicians and officials being caught are going down by the day. “The Trump administration is retreating from some types of white-collar law enforcement, including cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “In some cases, the administration is effectively redefining what constitutes a crime.”
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.
Huge oil revenues meant that there was plenty to steal in Iraq, and tariffs – or rather, exemptions from tariffs – will play the same role in the US. Companies will all be looking for tariff exemption deals and will be prepared to pay for them. Republican donors will be rewarded with sweetheart deals and Democratic donors punished. During the first Trump presidency, when he imposed tariffs on China, watchdog agencies investigated and found wrongdoing, even if they could not do much about it. But now these over-zealous investigators of Trumpian inside deals are being sacked since Trump re-entered the White House.
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
I have always found the ferocious arguments about the legal definition of a woman – should it or should it not be based on biological sex? – perplexing. By what means did such a question, begging an obvious common-sense answer, become such an issue? How did small activist groups gain such influence and leverage over governments, media, universities, sports clubs, hospitals that they took up such counter-intuitive positions?
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.
“Women have been forced in to supporting actress roles, propping up the leading lady fantasies of especially demanding and sometimes dangerous men,” writes Kathleen Stock, an academic who is a famous victim of attacks by trans activists, in a scathing but illuminating piece in UnHerd. “And the progressive establishment has mostly nodded along, clapping like seals.”
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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