Palestinians Flee as Israeli Forces Return to Gaza’s North

A World Watching: Gaza’s Plight and the Global Failure of Conscience

As the great George Orwell once said, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And what a deceit we find ourselves in, as the blood-soaked sands of Gaza bear witness to a tragedy of biblical proportions.

The Israeli war machine, fuelled by Western complicity and arms, continues its relentless assault on a population already brought to its knees.

Once again, we see Palestinians flee their homes, this time in Gaza City’s Shejaiya district. Palestinians fled eastern Gaza City on Thursday under heavy bombardment as the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area it had previously declared clear of Hamas militants.

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This comes while our fair isles teeter on the precipice of electoral change, a stone’s throw away across the azure Mediterranean, a sliver of land called Gaza has been reduced to a moonscape of rubble and despair. yOU cannot help but wonder: where are the voices of our would-be leaders in this hour of moral crisis?

Messrs Sunak and Starmer, those alleged paragons of political propriety, have not merely misplaced their moral compasses – they seem to have jettisoned them entirely. Their silence in the face of this ongoing slaughter is not merely deafening; it is a thunderous indictment of their moral bankruptcy.

We are compelled to ask: do Palestinian lives not merit even a modicum of consideration in the gilded halls of Westminster? Or is it simply that, bereft of ballot papers, these distant victims are deemed unworthy of our leaders’ concern? You cannot help but suspect that our esteemed politicians, ensconced in their ivory towers, care little for those who cannot boost their electoral prospects.

These men, who fancy themselves statesmen, have revealed themselves as nothing more than craven opportunists, cowed and neutered by the siren song of realpolitik. Their tongues, so often wagging with hollow promises and empty rhetoric, fall silent when true moral courage is required.

Unless, of course, it’s to parrot that tired, insidious phrase: “Israel has the right to self-defence.” This soundbite, as ignorant as it is insulting, has become the last refuge of the morally bankrupt. It is a fig leaf too small to cover the naked hypocrisy of those who utter it, a pathetic attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

In their craven acquiescence to this ongoing atrocity, Sunak and Starmer reveal themselves as nothing more than puppets, their strings pulled by forces that care nothing for human life or international law. They stand as living proof of Orwell’s prescient warning that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Nothing says this more than Starmer backing genocide in Gaza. In an act of utter tone-deafness, Sir Keir Starmer has labelled Hamas “terrorists” while affirming Israel’s right to pummel Gaza. To him, this is no complex conflict, but a medieval morality play with rights and wrongs starkly defined.

The UN pleads for humanitarian access to relieve #Gaza's agony. But Labour's leader ignores this cry, fixating on Hamas rockets as the source of conflict. His rhetoric perpetuates a medieval siege mentality that prolongs suffering, rather than uniting moderates for peace. pic.twitter.com/uMBQyDlGTr

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) October 11, 2023

Meanwhile, fears grow of a wider regional conflagration involving Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s threat to send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age” is particularly rich. It’s as if Israel, in its infinite wisdom, has appointed itself the arbiter of which nations deserve to exist in the modern world. One might ask Mr Gallant if he’s considered the irony of his statement, given the Stone Age morality his government seems to be operating under.

The numbers speak for themselves: over 37,760 Palestinians dead, mostly women and children. This isn’t a war; it’s a slaughter. It’s collective punishment on a scale that would make even the most hardened colonial oppressors of yesteryear blush. And yet, our political leaders – the Sunak’s and Starmer’s of this world – continue to parrot the absurd notion that Israel has a ‘right to defend itself’. But we all know to stand and watch a genocide unfold live on our televisions and do nothing but claim Israel has the right to self-defence is a moral failure of epic proportions.

The scenes unfolding in Gaza are nothing short of apocalyptic. What was once derided as an ‘open-air prison’ now more closely resembles the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno. Its people, abandoned to a fate worse than death, endure a living hell while the world watches on, clucking its collective tongue in faux concern.

As we watch the Palestinian people being systematically erased from their homeland, one can’t help but recall the words of Tony Benn: “Don’t Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die?” I guess we can now add Palestinian women to that list too…

We see the International Criminal Court continues to investigate Israel for war crimes – a development as overdue as it is welcome – the relentless military machine grinds on, crushing lives and hopes beneath its treads. All this in the name of ‘self-defence’, a concept stretched so thin as to have lost all meaning.

The true objective of this carnage becomes clearer with each passing day, each new atrocity. It is not about Hamas, or security, or any of the other paper-thin justifications trotted out by Netanyahu and his cadre of apologists. No, this is about the realisation of a ‘Greater Israel’, a concept as morally repugnant as it is geopolitically destabilising.

We are bearing witness to the systematic erasure of the Palestinian people from their ancestral homeland. It is a process as old as time itself, yet no less shocking for its familiarity. In the end, what we’re observing is nothing short of genocide, dressed up in the respectable clothes of ‘anti-terrorism’ and ‘self-defence’.

It is a damning indictment of our times that such barbarism can be carried out in full view of the world, met with little more than stern words and meaningless resolutions. Again, I’ll reference Tony Benn who so eloquently put it, “All war represents a failure of diplomacy.” In Gaza, we are witnessing not just a failure of diplomacy, but a failure of humanity itself.

The question now is: how much longer will we allow this travesty to continue? How many more innocent lives must be sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical expediency before we say ‘enough’? The answer, I fear, may be more than our collective conscience can bear.

So as the bodies pile up and the rubble of Gaza grows, one thing becomes crystal clear: the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice on its own. It needs to be bent, forcefully and deliberately, by those who still believe in the radical notion that all human lives are equally valuable. The question is, are we up to the task?

And looking at the sorry lot we have to offer as our world leaders – from the blundering bureaucrats in Brussels to the moral pygmies in Westminster and Washington – we can hardly muster much hope. Our political class seems more concerned with poll numbers and donor dinners than with the cries of the oppressed. They offer us platitudes instead of principles, soundbites instead of solutions.

But perhaps, we’ve been looking in the wrong direction all along. For if there’s any hope to be found in this dismal state of affairs, it lies not in the corridors of power, but in the streets and squares where ordinary people still dare to dream of a better world. It’s in the protests that erupt in our cities, in the voices raised in solidarity across continents, in the stubborn refusal to accept injustice as inevitable.

One more from Tony Benn before you go “There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again.” And in this battle for the soul of our world, it is the people – you and I – who must take up the standard that our so-called leaders have so shamefully abandoned.

For if we cannot trust in the moral fortitude of our governments, then we must place our faith in the indomitable spirit of humanity itself. It is a heavy burden, to be sure, but one we must shoulder if we are to salvage any shred of decency from the wreckage of our collective conscience.