What Means This War?

I wrote about the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict all through my thirties, and always with the outcome of being called an antisemite for questioning the disproportionate use of force, targeting of civilians, hospitals, first responders and journalists by the IDF and Israeli settlers. I have been called antisemitic for saying that the intentional maiming of unarmed peacefully demonstrating Palestinian youth during the March of the Great Return was further evidence of crimes against humanity carried out by a rogue nation, belligerent in its confidence that there would be no consequences, as indeed, there were not. There is nothing antisemitic in calling for peace; in calling for an end to apartheid; in calling for the Human Rights of a people who have been imprisoned collectively since 1948. It is not, nor has it ever been antisemitic to oppose racist, exclusionary and dehumanising settler colonialism, and that is precisely why western media and leadership obfuscate the situation: should we confront the racist policies of settler colonialism inflicted by Israel on Palestine and the Palestinians, how could we turn a blind eye not only to historical settler colonial policies, but also to those still embraced by the nations that call themselves the leaders of the Free World? 

Were the UK and the US to honestly approach this ongoing genocide, they would have to contend with the genocides with which their own hands are stained. Were the American and British governments, presses, academics and peoples to honestly support a peace process in Israel-Palestine, then how could they then not see the necessity of such processes where the lingering effects of racism, dehumanisation, apartheid — in short, the policies of settler colonialism — continue to fester within their own national and cultural bodies? How could we not consider such questions as reparations to the descendants of slaves and dispossessed First Nations people, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, or the illegality of the fossil fuel industry to steal and decimate Indigenous territories with US law enforcement there to act as personal protector? How could we not address environmental racism, disproportionate representation among carceral populations, maternal mortality rates and all of the other statistics stemming from our own settler colonial societies, and the racist divisions inherent within these systems? 

To insist that the Israel-Palestine conflict is too long standing to be resolved, the parties involved too intransigent is reductive propaganda — it is an argument made to avoid asking questions or probing the proffered narrative: the Palestinian people, like all Arab people, are terrorists by nature and will not stop until they have wiped Israel from the map, therefore the US and UK must continue sending billions of dollars in money and weapons to Israel, every year to protect our interests (which are, coincidentally, never expressly defined) while continuing to turn a blind eye to what is happening in what has been called for decades the world’s largest open-air prison. It was revealed over the last week that the Israeli government has been explicitly clear with the Biden Administration that they intend to forcibly remove all Gazans from Gaza, driving them south whilst continuing arial bombardment, into camps in Egypt, a country that traditionally keeps its borders closed fleeing Palestinian refugees, and to seize control of the Gaza Strip, thus acquiring more territory for the state of Israel. The Biden Administration has been made explicitly aware of this, and has not wavered in its support of the Israeli government’s objectives. 

This is genocide and ethnic cleansing, and any person or entity involved in or aiding this regime is involved in genocide and ethnic cleansing — the original sins of settler colonial society. 

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