RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesNow is the time to impose real and immediate economic costs on Israel for its actions in Gaza and the West Bank, World affairs editor Sam Kiley writes
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I t is impossible to read the chilling reporting of the killing of Mariam Abu Dagga in a double-tap Israeli attack on the Nasser hospital in Gaza without giving in to righteous, visceral rage.
But the systematic mass killings in Gaza , the systematic targeting of medical personnel and journalists and the gigantic civilian death toll require a cold intellectual response.
And that is a demand for sanctions against Israel .
Imposing real and immediate economic costs on Israel for its appalling campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank - where armed ethnic gangs of land thieves are stealing farms and killing Palestinians with impunity under the protection of Israel’s armed forces - is both the right and sensible thing to do.
The regime of Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi was attacked by European Nato forces, including the UK, in 2011 because he and his son Saif had threatened the city of Benghazi with bloody retribution verging on genocide.
Syria’s dictator Bashar al Assad was subjected to international economic sanctions because of his attacks on the nation’s civilian population.
The Trump administration used the allegation that Iran’s theocracy had killed 30,000 civilians putting down demonstrations earlier this year, in part, as justification for the combined US-Israeli attacks on the country that continue today.
So there is plenty of precedent for action. When it comes to Israel, it is only soft action that is required.
Israel’s military has killed an estimated tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza since around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023.
Israel’s far-right government is deeply invested in a culture that celebrates the razing of Gaza and the land theft on the West Bank.
The legislature has imposed a mandatory death penalty for “terrorist” murders, by Palestinians in occupied territory and inside Israel, that applies only to Palestinians.
Israeli security minister Itamar Ben Gvir recently showed off the gallows, complete with viewing area, which is being built only to swing ethnic Palestinians.
Convictions without the right of appeal will be handed down for alleged killings on the West Bank by military tribunals who have a “successful” conviction rate of around 90 per cent.
If this sounds almost as sick as the Iranian regime’s practice of dangling alleged killers and apostates from cranes by the neck, that is because it is.
For decades politicians and commentators, like this writer, have refused to be sucked into the morass of the debate over the “moral equivalence” between militant Palestinian groups.
There could be no ethical comparison between groups or individuals who used terror, the application of violence against civilians to create widespread fear for political ends, with the State of Israel.
The latter was bound by international law and its own democratic norms and processes.
But that is no longer the case. Israel has become an all-too-familiar Middle Eastern State.
It rules over or controls the lives of around 7.7 million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. Since 2018 hit as been legally defined as being an ethnic-religious state giving only Jews the right of national self determination.
It is a nation that has been under attack since it was born in 1948.
It is also a state that has attacked its neighbours and forcibly displaced non-Jews from their homes, as graphically illustrated by Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris, to make way for Jewish settlement. It has nuclear weapons that it refuses to acknowledge, much less wrap into the global Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Israel has fought for its life as a Jewish State, and still does, because there are regimes, Iran and many people across the Middle East who want to see it destroyed. It is rightly paranoid.
But that does not mean that Israel can be allowed to get away with the crimes against humanity identified by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“In East Jerusalem and the verge of the West Bank, Palestinian House demolitions and rampant settler violence - with the connivance of the Israeli army and police - amount to ethnic cleansing. Palestine is being erased before our eyes,” 102 former French and British ambassadors wrote to their respective governments last week.
Their intervention came after the UK condemned Israel for advancing its plans to cut the West Bank in two, with a vast development east of Jerusalem known as E1.
British foreign secretary Ed Miliband threatened sanctions against Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories if this went ahead.
The ambassadors said sanctions should be applied against settlements immediately, along with an arms embargo and an end to talks over an EU and a UK Israeli trade agreement.
First, Israel must be guaranteed that if it were ever to reactivate a peace process with the Palestinians its population would be defended, not annihilated, by its neighbours.
Israel needs to know that it cannot continue with its campaigns against the Palestinians. The only way to do that is to impose economic and cultural pain through sanctions against the whole state - not just the illegal settlements.
Many, perhaps most, Israelis are appalled at what has happened in Gaza and on the West Bank. They will get the chance to express this in elections later this year.
They all need to know that the outside world does not condone ethnic cleansing and the construction of gallows for one kind, the Arab kind, of human.
They need to know that thanks to the reporting of people like Mariam we will not turn blind eyes to the kind of atrocity that took her life in a deliberate attempt to blind us.
Anything less and one be be right to assume that Arab lives are less...
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