It has become common to describe what Israel has done in Gaza as “utterly unacceptable”. That is true, but it doesn’t begin to measure up to the barbarity of what is being deliberately and relentlessly perpetrated by the Israeli army. The UK in the 1970-80s suffered several terrorist atrocities which killed a number of our citizens, but the UK Government didn’t flatten west Belfast in retaliation. These killings in Gaza are on such a scale and so vastly out of proportion to the provocation that has occurred that they can only be adequately described as war crimes, and the UK Government should be joining with others in demanding that Israel should now be held to account in the international court for these crimes.

Yesterday Israeli forces shelled the UN Headquarters in Gaza. Two UN schools have been bombed, and 40 were killed. In another incident Israeli troops took more than 100 Palestinians to what was supposed to be a safe house; 24 hours later the Israeli military shelled that same house, killing 30 or more. The Shij’ia family health care centre in Gaza city, run by the Near East Council of Churches, was bombed. In order to kill a Hamas leader, an Israeli plane dropped a 1 ton bomb on a crowded residential area which killed not only all his family, but a large number of innocent victims throughout the surrounding area. Two days ago, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, at least 3 Palestinians were shot dead when Israeli soldiers were ordered to fire on a group of residents leaving their homes and waving white flags. There have been attacks on Red Cross and UN personnel and ambulances. Children and other civilians have been shot in the chest and the head. The UN Relief and Works Agency headquarters was attacked with white phosphorous which halted all aid, and the wing of the Shifa hospital was shelled.
Against a defenceless population Israeli forces have used F-16 jets, helicopter gun-ships, missiles, artillery, and tanks. The civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, including schools, mosques and power stations, and the sewerage system has utterly collapsed. At least 1,080 people have now been killed, 322 of them children, and about 90,000 have been displaced, including 50,000 chidren. It is clear that whilst the Israeli military may not target civilians, as their spokesment repeatedly say, they do not care whether they hit civilians or not. Indeed the Israelis have a stated policy of what they regard as acceptable civilian deaths, otherwise known in the military jargon as collateral damage. Itwas published in the Washington Post in 2006, and enunciated that it was fine to attack militants so long as there were only 3 civilians killed for every terrorist killed. It seems that the disregard for civilian life has been multiplied grotesquely in this conflict.
But it isn’t just the scale of the carnage, it’s the gratuitous callousness with which the whole population of 1.5 million, cooped up in a narrow strip of land between a prison wall and the sea, have been besieged by a tight economic blockade for several months before the present bombardment began. Long before 27 December there were acute shortages of food, drinking water, drugs, medical equipment and virtually everything else, because Israel had closed the crossing-points. As a result, nearly half the children and most of the women are anaemic. Along the seafront the smell of sewerage is overpowering because Israel has refused to allow the import of the parts needed to build an essential sewage plant, even though civil engineers are available and money has been committed, so that raw sewage flows into the sea. In addition, Israel blocked the import of EU-supplied fuel so that the power plant, which had already been partly bombed, had to stop operating and most of Gaza was cast into darkness.
Is all this justified by the rockets, which are only fired as an act of defiance against utter subjugation? Again according to B’Tselem the Israeli human rights organisation, in the 7 years between the first of these primitive rockets being launched and the start of the current massacre, the rockets killed 13 Israelis and 1 foreigner. Thos killings are wrong. But in the same period Israel killed 4,781 Palestinians, nearly 3,000 of them in Gaza, and 1 in 7 of them children. But this is not about the rockets. It is about domination and the ruthless exercise of untrammelled power; it is about the elections in Israel in a month’s time and the demonstration of a macho militarism to court a right-wing electorate; it is about trying to restore the aura of Israeli invincibility which was broken in Lebanon; it is about the chimera that there can be a military solution to the Palestinian question when in fact that is utterly counter-productive to Israel’s own long-term security. It will not stop the rockets. But what it will do is recruit a new generation of young men and women to extremist causes of violent revenge, for which Israel and the West will pay heavily.
In the face of this brutal blood-letting we are not helpless in this country. The EU, and our UK Government, need to be as resolute in defending the people of Gaza as they were in defending the people of Georgia against Russian aggression. The EU trading agreement with Israel should be suspended since it contains human rights clauses which have been manifestly breached. Arms sales to Israel should be immediately stopped. And as a potent symbol of our condemnation of Israel’s repeated flaunting of the Geneva convention and the international rules of war in respect of the protection of civilians, it would not be unreasonable to withdraw our ambassador to Israel and to send the Israeli ambassador back home.

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