How have Israelis let this genocide happen?

As I write, the news headlines on the radio remind me that Amnesty International has accused Israel of "the crime of genocide in Gaza by killing Palestinian civilians and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about Palestinians’ physical destruction". Its verdict is, in effect, that the Armageddon that is at present an everyday reality of life in Gaza is not the result of a complex of forces unaccountably aligning to create a unique situation where difficulties acquiring and distributing food, etc, are responsible for the present outrage. No, the overwhelming conclusion now is that the current starvation is the result of a decision of the Israeli government to starve the people of Gaza into submission.

There are prevailing circumstances of course that exacerbate the Gaza famine: hospitals are overwhelmed; thousands of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and the infrastructure that, in other circumstances might have sustained a response, has collapsed after years of mayhem.

By September an analysis by a reputable body predicts that two out of three famine thresholds have been reached: plummeting food consumption and acute malnutrition. The third, deaths from malnutrition, cannot be shown, though the overwhelming evidence is that the third famine indicator – that widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths – is obvious to all.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, sums it up: "The facts are in, and they are undeniable. Palestinians in Gaza are enduring a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. This is not a warning. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes."

And gradually and perceptively, it is emerging that voices heretofore accusing Israel of genocide didn’t emanate from rabid anti-Semitic prejudice intent on condemning Israel but represented a truth that is now (to use Gutteres’ word) ‘undeniable’.

And as if to underline that truth, Israel has announced that it intends to launch a new offensive to seize control of Gaza’s largest urban centre by forcibly displacing one million people from Gaza City. One report sums up the obvious fallout from a plan that has raised international alarm: "Palestinians in Gaza – displaced repeatedly, forced to live in tent camps or amid the ruins of their homes, stricken by hunger and deprived of medical supplies – are bracing for another humanitarian disaster."

Some, including Palestinians – who have lost every discernible support in the deaths of family members, the destruction of their homes, the loss of jobs, food, medical care and the usual benefits that human beings are meant to enjoy – have been displaced up to six times as they are forcibly moved here and there to facilitate the Israeli killing machine.

We don’t need experts in moral truth to tell us why what’s happening is wrong, unacceptable, immoral. We see it every evening on the television news when the newsreader adds to his or her introduction a staple comment to the effect that ‘what follows may upset some viewers’. We even see it in the adverts as picture after picture of emaciated children demand our attention and our euros - if our consciences have not already moved us to help. The whole scene of devastated buildings reduced to dust while their former owners scrape through the rubble looking for mementoes of a past life is a picture of unending despair.

How could it all have come to this? How could such a talented race carry out with such menace such a morally suspect scorched-earth policy on so many innocent people. Yes, Hamas and those who have sought to obliterate the Jewish people over the centuries are to blame too. That goes without saying, and it needs to be said again and again, if only to avoid the easy slur of casual anti-semitism.

This is not to incorrectly quote Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet – How odd of God, To choose the Jews – as an implied judgement on God’s chosen people. Or to blame the Jewish people for being obsessed with the ‘Final Solution’ mentality and its horrific consequences (as of course they have every right to be be) or even to wonder how that particular ‘solution’ might seem to echo what’s happening in Gaza now.

Judaism, the religion into which Jesus was born, now often seems a confused dolly-mixture of beliefs. In a compelling recent article in The Guardian, the writer Naomi Klein, a Jew herself, establishes an ocean of clear blue water between what Judaism represents and the Zionism that has shaped Netanyahu and that he is intent on shaping for others.

Part of the demented justification for Netanyahu’s immoral and bloody campaign is that razing Gaza to the ground is helping to secure what was intended as God’s ‘Promised Land’ for the Jewish nation. But the truth is that God did not promise that land to the Jews. Yes, he wished the Jewish people to live in Palestine but alongside others – not displacing them. And theologians have quoted biblical chapter and verse to show that God was completely opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. The famous theologian, Martin Buber, once equated the aspiration for a Jewish star with idol-worship, pointing out that God alone owns the land. (Leviticus, Chapter 25, verse 23) 

In a recent commentary on this, the Dominican, Bernard Treacy, the editor of Conversations, concluded: "It is good to remember that the Jewish mind and voice include traditions that are much more compassionate and more humane than what we are accustomed to hear emanating from the present leadership in Israel."

It bears repeating.