As the massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues, so do the world’s silence and the stream of justifications for this latest Israeli attempt to crush the resistance movement Hamas and the besieged Gaza population. Israel has widened its ground offensive in Gaza, with the death toll mounting to 620 Palestinians, with over 3,000 injured. UNICEF reported that 121 of the dead are children. At least 87 people were reported killed on Sunday — 67 of them from the Shajaiya neighbourhood alone. On Monday, a child and 13 women, one of them pregnant, were among 40 people killed in two separate Israeli air strikes in Zeitun in central Gaza and Beit Hanun in the north. On Tuesday morning, a series of Israeli air strikes killed seven people. Hamas claims that it has killed 27 Israeli soldiers since the ground offensive began on Friday. This horrific death toll has not been enough to provoke outrage or criticism of Israel by the global community or the UN. Instead UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday reiterated his support to the people of Israel in their “dark hour” and described Hamas rocket fire on Israel as “shocking”, adding it must “stop immediately”. What is in fact shocking is the partisanship and justification for a massacre being given by the UN Secretary General despite other UN officials descrying the humanitarian crisis: “There is literally no safe place for civilians [in Gaza],” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) told a news briefing in Geneva. The Secretary General’s partisanship has been echoed in lame duck pleas by the Arab League. It is clear that at an institutional level Israel has virtual impunity thanks to its relationship with the US.
This is only the latest, thinly veiled attempt by Israel to destroy the political will of the Palestinian people, who have been subjected to a blockade and savage attack in Gaza. Simply put, Israel consistently uses military means including collective punishment to extract Palestinian concessions, and then reneges on agreements because of concocted ‘security risks’. The pattern has been clear for decades. This attack on the heels of the formation of a unified Palestinian government should be seen as another attempt to divide the Palestinian movement. The Israeli aim is clearly the complete subjugation of the Palestinian people. In the West Bank and Gaza, the expansion of settlements and ‘Israeli only’ areas coupled with the subhuman treatment of Palestinians in a police state, suggest that Israel is developing a South African-style apartheid regime, something human rights groups are beginning to recognise.
The silence of governments has not been imitated by ordinary people in countries like France, Germany, the UK and Turkey, where thousands have protested outside their respective Israeli embassies, with some protests turning into riots after police forcefully tried to remove demonstrators. The protestors’ anger lacks focus but the course of action they might take has perhaps been suggested inadvertently by as unlikely a source as the US. Following a rocket landing near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, several US airlines suspended flights to Israel until a ceasefire is announced, since the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine has made airlines wary of travelling over conflict zones. The US Federal Aviation Authority banned flights to Israel for 24 hours. The confluence of these factors suggests that world opinion can shift the balance by using its capacity to boycott Israeli goods and companies, or companies that do business with Israel, in order to force the Israeli state to change, applying lessons learnt from the international movement against apartheid in South Africa. In the past such anti-Israeli movements have been accused of anti-Semitism. However, it is not anti-Semitic to disagree with the actions of the Israeli state. Apartheid parallels are rarely drawn by international actors but even a limited boycott movement could help give focus to widespread public outrage and provide the impetus for the isolation of Israel. This appears to be the only way to halt this state in its attempted genocide of the Palestinian people. *