EDITORIAL: Israel’s genocidal war in the Middle East took yet another deadly turn on May 7 with the country, sending tanks into Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, and seizing control of an important border crossing and cutting off most aid going into the territory.

Even with international pressure on Israel mounting to not launch an offensive in a part of Gaza that is sheltering more than one million people displaced from other parts of the Strip, its government clearly remains steadfast in its disregard for sanctity of life and international law.

Despite Hamas announcing on May 6 that it would accept a proposal for a ceasefire deal put forward by Qatari and Egyptian mediators – which would have resulted in a permanent end to the war – Israel is persisting on its murderous path, providing further proof that its government has been hijacked by far-right parties that oppose any concessions to Hamas, even if this obduracy results in prolonging the detention of hostages in Hamas’ custody.

As leading public intellectual Naomi Klein has very aptly put, the Israeli state is viewing “Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats”, and hence its insistence on continuing the massacre in Gaza.

A lot of blame for Israel running roughshod over basic norms of human decency has to go to its Western backers, with their unquestioning support for Tel Aviv fuelling the war in Gaza.

It took the slaughter of more than 30,000 Palestinians before US President Joe Biden made some belated weak attempts to rein in Israel’s bloodlust, with his administration pausing a shipment of weapons to Tel Aviv last week.

Instead of exerting meaningful pressure that would end the slaughter of innocents, the American establishment remains bent on silencing those protesting Israel’s genocidal acts, as evidenced by the brutal crackdown on student protestors in universities all across the US.

The American president would do well to pay heed to the increasing comparisons being made by members of Western intelligentsia, between the war in Gaza and the way the Vietnam War shaped up following the 1968 Tet Offensive, which was a surprise attack launched by the Viet Cong (VC) North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) against South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the US forces stationed in South Vietnam and their allies with the aim of sparking a resurrection in that part of the country.

Although the US Army was able to suppress this attack, it proved to be a pivotal moment as far as support for the war among the American public was concerned.

In a crucial election year, the then US president came under increasingly strident criticism with respect to the course the war had taken. Protests broke out in Columbia University as well as in other American institutions over their ties to the military-industrial complex, resulting in ruthless police crackdowns on protestors. A recent article in Politico, for example, notes, “televised images of battles across South Vietnam … shattered the political foundations” of America’s Vietnam policy.

Something strikingly similar appears to be happening across America and Europe today. Social media images of the brutalities that Palestinians have suffered in recent months have sparked the conscience of millions of people in the West, who are now imploring their governments to change tack with respect to their Middle East policy.

The decades’ long unfaltering Western support for Israel, fuelled in large part in the US by Christian fundamentalist ideology, has come under increasing fire by a younger generation horrified by their governments’ complicity in the brutalising of the Palestinian people.

President Biden would do well to finally acknowledge the US role in encouraging Israel’s horror-inducing conduct and take meaningful measures that would dismantle a system that turns a blind eye to the slaughter of innocents. His failure to do so may result in dire consequences for his political future in an election year.

Last but not least, the US President must not lose sight of the fact that he has been humiliated by the Israeli government day in, day out ever since he said that arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches an offensive in Rafah (“I won’t give Israel offensive weapons to attack in populated parts of Rafah”).

Unfortunately, however, not only have prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his cabinet colleagues denunciated his highly plausible warning, the government figures in occupied Jerusalem have indicated that the military would push ahead regardless. President Biden, hasn’t the state of Israel gone too far?

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024