Over the last month, global opinion on Israel’s unending massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has shifted, at least rhetorically. Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Mark Carney called on Israel to cease fire and threatened to take “concrete action” should that not happen. Friedrich Merz, the new German chancellor, warned that Israel might be in breach of international law. He took a very dim view of Israel’s new assault on Gaza, Operation Gideon’s Chariot.
Starmer, in the early months of the war, had infamously defended Israel’s right to deprive Gaza’s civilian population of water and electricity. When his foreign secretary, David Lammy, said that Israel was in breach of its international obligations, No. 10 ostentatiously distanced itself from that categorical criticism. Israel, in Starmer’s mealy-mouthed formulation, was only “at risk” of breaching them. Given that the number of Gazans killed at the time was in the same ballpark as the present toll, it’s useful to try to explore what has caused this recent shift in tone.
It wasn’t just heads of State and government who were trying to tiptoe away from their unwavering endorsement of Israel’s genocidal killing. Newspapers, magazines, pundits and writers, who had doggedly maintained that civilian deaths were tragic collateral damage made inevitable by Hamas’s underground tunnels and therefore its responsibility, decided that ethnic cleansing wasn’t, after all, the hill they wanted to die on.
The Economist, which had editorially opposed a ceasefire in the name of erasing Hamas and had consistently cast doubt on the Gaza health ministry’s death toll, produced a considered estimate of mortality, which more than doubled that figure. The Financial Times, whose chief foreign commentator, Gideon Rachman, had hailed Joe Biden’s embrace of Bibi as a counter-intuitive masterstroke that would help moderate Israel’s assault, published an article accusing Israel of war crimes.
The Spectator’s editorial position on the genocide in Gaza has been indistinguishable from Likud’s. It recently carried an article which said that Gary Lineker’s position — that the only response anyone should have to the murder of thousands of children in Gaza is utter revulsion — was “… inarguable to anyone remotely sensible or decent.” Barney Ronay, one of The Guardian’s house liberals, even as he attacked Lineker for retweeting an anti-Zionist post overlooking its anti-Semitic rat emoji, grudgingly accepted that "Lineker was right on the basic point. The horror in Gaza has to stop.”
More than three hundred British writers signed a letter refusing to be “bystander-approvers” of genocide. One of them, Zadie Smith, had written a look-at-me piece in The New Yorker last year, accusing Columbia’s students demonstrating against the genocide of being insensitive to the feelings of Jewish students in the vicinity of their encampments.
Why did people like Zadie Smith change their minds? Why now? One reason was that the fig leaf that gave Western countries and pundits rhetorical cover and allowed them to support Israel’s shocking butchery was that golden oldie, their commitment to the two-state solution. Long after Israel’s government and virtually every political faction in Israel had ruled out the possibility of a sovereign Palestine, Israel’s Western supporters used the two-state mantra to deodorise their complicity in the pulverisation of Palestinians. The two-state two-step wasn’t a serious commitment; it was a way of pretending that the shrinking bantustans of Gaza and the West Bank were a state in the making.
Donald Trump gave the game away by declaring that he wanted to empty Gaza out and turn it into a Riveria on the Mediterranean. Starmer and the Europeans had justified their silence on Gaza by pinning their colours to America’s mast; they would do nothing to distract from a two-state solution that only the United States of America and Biden could broker. But the notion of America as an honest broker, absurd as it was, became a nonsense once Trump made ethnic cleansing a preliminary to his real estate project. It blew their cover and left them nakedly complicit in genocidal violence. The leader of the free world with whom these European countries had marched in slavish lockstep had cut them loose to straggle along tethered to a genocidal State and its blithe enabler. The criticism directed at Israel by these European countries is a rhetorical way of distancing themselves while they consider their next move.
The other cause for this concerted shift away from Israel’s genocidal war was aesthetic: the images generated by the war in its latest phase changed. One of the hardest things to understand about this war was the indifference of Europe’s mainstream pundits and their governments to the videos and photos of the havoc caused by Israel’s bombardment. Howard Jacobson, the English novelist, wrote a deranged article about the wickedness of the Western media for showing nightly images of dead Palestinian children. This, Jacobson declared, amounted to a modern version of the old blood libel that slandered Jews for kneading the blood of children into their bread. He needn’t have worried; these images seemed to make no difference to mainstream pundits and politicians. Horrible though the pictures were, the argument that these children were accidentally (not intentionally) killed had some traction amongst those who didn’t want to see.
Dead children could be deflected to Hamas; it was the images of living children, starving, that couldn’t be ignored. Sentient children, reduced to eye sockets and outsize heads and stark rib cages, were a horror from which ‘Hamas, Hamas!’ couldn’t deliver you. Dead children were tragic landfill; live ones, dying in slow motion, became an affront to civilised people everywhere. This was Live Aid empathy. Attributing these long, slow deaths to collateral damage was hard. Israel tried. It claimed there was plenty of food only Hamas stole it, but photos of starving children looking at the camera were harder to lie about than dead children with their eyes shut.
Filed away in our minds are images of children in famine: Sunil Janah’s pictures of the Bengal famine, the famine in Biafra, the famine killing children in Sudan right now. Famines frequently occur in times of war as militaries besiege civilian populations. Men make famines more often than not; Gaza threatens to become a textbook example of famine by fiat. The chilling premeditation and bundobast needed to starve people to death feels evil in a way that even carpet-bombing doesn’t. When Benjamin Netanyahu told his right-wing allies that Israel couldn’t afford to have images of starving children alienating its allies, he was right.
This doesn’t mean relief for Gaza. Israel continues to kill dozens of people every day. Netanyahu has sworn to occupy 75% of Gaza and speaks of transferring its population in keeping with Trump’s prescription. It is possible that Starmer, Macron and Merz will wring their hands and eventually acquiesce in ethnic cleansing. If Gaza’s Palestinians are bombed and starved out of their homes and forced into Sinai or Libya, we can probably rely on the likes of Starmer and assorted Western hasbarists to argue that there was no alternative, that it was for their own good.
Israeli soldiers fired at starving Palestinians milling around the trickle of food Netanyahu had let into Gaza recently. We shall see if there is a floor to Israel’s cruelty, an atrocity that will test the complicity of its allies.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com