Mr. Netanyahu tends to express anger when journalists suggest to him that the Israeli Defence Force is not appropriately exercising a duty of care over the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Apologists for the Israeli Government come on to the Today Programme, or PM, on BBC Radio 4, to suggest that plenty of aid is entering Gaza, but that the United Nations are failing to distribute it, but rather allowing Hamas to steal it. Such assertions are in stark contrast to the eye witness accounts of aid workers on the ground, from such highly respected organisations as Médecins Sans Frontières, or Save the Children. In any case, representatives of the Israeli government indulge in a spot of whataboutery. What about Dresden? What about Stalin’s appropriation of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War? The West tended to blame all of that on Hitler. I have a notion that invocation of the spectre of the Führer is seldom helpful in the promulgation of any topical geopolitical argument.
The trouble is, Israel does not allow international journalists access to Gaza. It’s a war zone, too dangerous. Heaven forfend they are not allowed entry in case they report the truth. Of course, Gaza is not really a war zone in the conventional sense, war being a state of hostility between two (or more) states. Rather, this might be described as a “war on terror”, George W. Bush’s expression that led to Afghanistan, and Iraq. Israel wishes to destroy Hamas. Any collateral damage is unfortunate.
But here is another piece of whataboutery. Throughout the Troubles, the IRA used violence as a tool in pursuit of the goal of a united Ireland. They never carried out a single act as atrocious – at least in terms of scale – as that of Hamas’ attack, murder, and abduction of Israelis on October 7th 2023. On the other hand, they did attempt to wipe out the entire British government by detonating a bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Tory Conference. On February 7th, 1991, they fired three mortar rounds at 10 Downing Street, in an attempt to assassinate John Major and his Cabinet. Brutal acts were carried out on both sides. Remember Bloody Sunday in 1972. 26 unarmed protestors were shot in the Bogside, Derry.
But what the British government did not do was indiscriminately bomb Catholic enclaves in Belfast.
In its reportage, Mrs Thatcher insisted the BBC use an actor to dub the words of Gerry Adams, so as to deny him “the oxygen of publicity”. At one time, subsequent political developments would have seemed inconceivable: the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the rapport between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, Her Majesty shaking hands with Mr McGuinness, visiting the Republic and addressing the Irish President in Irish Gaelic.
It is said that the pictures of dehydrated, emaciated, starving children on our television screens have shamed the Israeli government into calling a temporary ceasefire and opening up the borders to aid. What they have also done has highlighted the pusillanimous nature of our international institutions. There has been much hand-wringing, but little by way of positive action. Surely it is possible for the free world to avert a human catastrophe. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Remember the Berlin Airlift. But we seem to have lost our capacity for concerted action, both at home and abroad.
It seems to me that the United Nations needs a radical makeover. Its centre of power is based on the way of the world as it was in 1945. Now, the permanent Security Council comprises the USA, Britain, France, Russia, and China. It is no coincidence that these are all nuclear powers. Might is right. Yet they are in a minority. Of over 200 nation states, only nine have the bomb. People who feel themselves to be powerful inevitably develop a sense of entitlement; they tend to throw their weight about. Look at President Trump. He thinks it’s okay to touch down on Scottish soil, alight from Airforce One, and lecture us on our wind farms, and immigration policy. It would be like Keir Starmer going into the Oval Office and telling Trump to fix the US gun laws by cancelling the Second Amendment, then re-establishing the Gulf of Mexico. I think he would be told to mind his own bleeding business.
Blessed are the peacemakers. There is a lot of talk just now about NATO members increasing their defence budgets to 3%, and ultimately 5%, of GDP. The Government is glooming us up seemingly for the imminent prospect of war. We are to be on a “pre-war” footing. The trouble with such prophecies is that they tend to be self-fulfilling. Might it not be better to put all that sovereign wealth into the creation – or rather further development, for it already exists – of a United Nations peacekeeping force? This would involve, to an extent, the voluntary relinquishing of a degree of sovereignty to an international body, such as it would have the power to identify a world crisis that has become intolerable, and do something about it.
jamescalumcampbell 