tps://inews.co.uk/opinion/rishi-sunak-exploit-gaza-conflict-morally-bankrupt-2933887Rishi Sunak’s bid to exploit the Gaza conflict is morally bankrupt
NEWSLETTER (£)British and American politics are being toxified by the slow-motion massacre
The hatred born out of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing destruction of Gaza and its people is being deliberately injected into British politics by the Government.
As Israeli forces fire on starving Palestinians desperately seeking food in an incident in which 112 people died and 760 were injured, Rishi Sunak describes overwhelmingly peaceful marchers calling for a ceasefire as “a mob”. He refuses to denounce as a straight lie Lee Anderson’s claim that Islamic extremists have taken control of the streets of London.
The landslide victory of George Galloway in the by-election in Rochdale, after he campaigned almost exclusively on the issue of Gaza, shows how the slaughter has moved to the centre of British politics. The Tory and Labour political establishments may be unmoved by watching a nightly massacre on their TV screens, but the public is demonstrably horrified by what they see. The size of Galloway’s majority shows that it was not just Muslims who voted for him.
In a speech on Friday night responding to Rochdale and pro-Palestinian protests, Sunak characteristically tried to have it both ways, calling for national unity and tolerance while pretending that real -life opposition to his Gaza policy has been hijacked by dangerous jihadi extremists.
A slow-motion massacre
When the Gaza crisis first erupted five months ago, it was widely expected that it might destabilise the Middle East and the Arab world. This may be happening, but, contrary to expectations, it is British and American politics which are being toxified and shaped by the slow-motion massacre in Gaza.
In the US, Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel may lead him to lose the presidential election in November. His stubborn opposition to a ceasefire is unaffected by the well-attested mass killing of Palestinians around an aid convoy in northern Gaza this week, with the US vetoing a UN Security Council statement blaming Israel for this dreadful event.
In the UK, a lame-duck Government is seeking to plug into the Gaza crisis at one remove to escape electoral oblivion. In an act of grotesque irresponsibility, it is busy sowing fear between Muslims and Jews by falsely portraying legitimate demands for a ceasefire as violent Islamic extremism.
Letting devils loose
Fanning the flames of religious and communal animosities in wartime lets loose devils that it will be difficult to put back in the box. More than a century ago, the Tory party exploited the issue of Irish Home Rule, “playing the Orange card” to its own political advantage, as Randolph Churchill, a leading Tory, put it. By endorsing sectarian slogans like “Home Rule means Rome Rule”, this tactic deepened divisions between Catholic and Protestant, thwarting the peaceful resolution of the Irish Question.
Fast forward to the present and Sunak is seeking to play an updated version of “the Orange card” in the form of an “anti-Islam card”, demonising overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators against Israeli government actions and policies as hostility to the Jewish community. Understandably enough, Jewish people feel unsafe when they hear peace marches described by senior ministers as “hate marches” targeting their community.
It is as if, during the giant Vietnam war protests in London in the 1960s, the British government had announced that the demonstrations had nothing to do with US actions in Vietnam, but were solely inspired by hatred of Americans as a people. Had government ministers then been as cavalier with the truth as their present-day successors, they might have said something like this and persuaded Americans living in London that they were in danger.
Torrent of inflammatory rhetoric
Will the Government’s threat inflation succeed, enabling it to champion law and order come an election later this year? Will the torrent of inflammatory rhetoric – like the claim, since withdrawn, that districts in British cities with a significant Muslim population are no-go areas for the police – cut through to voters? Mostly they come undiluted out of the political playbook of Donald Trump, who constantly claims that whole American cities are under the sway of alien radicals.
Fortunately, what plays well in American politics often flounders in Britain, where racial and cultural animosities are far less pronounced. Yet we should not be entirely comforted by this, as bans or severe restrictions on previously peaceful pro-Palestinian marches might, given rising political temperatures over Gaza, provoke the violence and riots that they hypocritically purport to avert.
What happens next on the streets and at the polls in Britain will be largely impacted by the appalling events in Gaza. There have been other mass killings of civilians in recent decades, but Gaza differs in important ways from them.
Some 30,035 Palestinians have died so far, a number accepted by the World Health Organisation, which is far larger than the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims killed at Srebrenica in 1995. The Gaza death toll is still far less than the more than half a million – the figure could be twice this – largely Tutsi victims of the Rwanda genocide of 1994.
What makes Gaza so deeply shocking
Yet the slaughter in Gaza differs from earlier massacres in two unique ways. To an unprecedented degree, the killings take place before phone and television cameras and are visible to the whole world as Srebrenica and Rwanda were not. Civilians are shown being shot down in the street, as are the mangled bodies of wounded children being rushed to half-wrecked hospitals.
I was in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, only hours after Christian militiamen under Israeli auspices had shot and killed more than a thousand Palestinians. I could see and describe the bloody bodies piled up in houses and side streets, but however graphic my description, it did not have the impact of film showing the actual act of killing, which is what makes Gaza so deeply shocking.
The other unique aspect of the Gazan bloodbath is that it has been effectively greenlighted by the US, UK and several of their allies. Without the US continuing to supply arms, ammunition and diplomatic cover, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military onslaught on Gaza could not continue, according to experts.
Remarkably, Western powers have continued to support Netanyahu’s government, the most anti-Palestinian in the history of Israel, which is likely to fall apart as soon as the war is over, and has no incentive to bring the violence to an end.
Israel’s declared goal, the total elimination of Hamas, is unattainable, say US intelligence officials briefing Congress, given that the death of so many Palestinians will only increase the armed resistance of survivors.
The political establishment in the US and UK has made series of miscalculations over Gaza, beginning with wishful thinking that the Palestinians could be marginalised and forgotten. They compounded the error by believing that in backing Israel they were betting on a winner. They ignored the extreme Israeli leadership, senior members of which have long advocated the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
Most damagingly of all to their own political interests, they blundered in imagining that people in their own countries would soon forget about Gaza, something disproved by the 100,000 anti-war ballots marked “uncommitted” cast in the Michigan primary, enough to lose Biden this crucial state come November. Voters of Rochdale, have made much the same point that the horrors of Gaza are gripping the public mind.
“The poison of Palestine” was a phrase used by a senior British diplomat to describe the hatreds inseparable from the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It takes real moral delinquency, as well as poor political judgement, for Sunak and his party to try to exploit this terrible tragedy to their own political advantage.