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This is no war in Gaza. A war is always between two states. In Gaza, it is simply a matter of a powerful, nuclear-armed state pulverising a suffering, unarmed population into unending fear through unabashed military might. Those who believe Netanyahu is waging a war miss the point or do not wish to see it. His soldiers have killed more than 8,000 Palestinians in pitiless nocturnal air bombardment over Gaza.
These 8,000 people were not combatants in the ongoing conflict. The family of the Palestinian journalist taking shelter in south Gaza were not soldiers or guerrillas waging war against Tel Aviv. They died when Israeli air strikes rained down bombs on them. In the days ahead, other Palestinians will lose their lives in a situation Netanyahu calls a war.
There is no war in Gaza. But there is the ferocity symbolised by a state against a people who have spent their entire lives in refugee camps. These are people who lost their country in 1948, people for whom Nakba was to be a terrible reality because they were forced out of their homes and villages, because those homes and villages were forcibly settled by people who had no right to those homes and villages.
And yet there are the loud voices in the West adamant about calling the current conflict a war. Observe the media in the West, which true to their disturbing reputation choose to begin their news reports and analyses through pinning the blame for the crisis on one side. Hamas indeed committed a grave mistake on 7 October by putting an end to the lives of innocent Israelis and taking many others hostage. The world is right to condemn Hamas for what it did.
Notice, though, that the media in the West keeps its focus on Hamas terrorism but stays away from commenting on the terror that the Israeli government has unleashed in Gaza and the West Bank. That makes you think. You thought that the media in the West actually believed in objectivity, in justice, in rule of law, in freedom of speech. But when you listen to those correspondents from CNN and the BBC reporting from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, you know without any ambiguity of thought that these men and women have taken sides, in the way their governments have decided to stand behind Netanyahu.
Rising public opinion against the murder of Palestinians, demonstrated on the streets of western capitals by tens of thousands of protesters, does not move their governments. Rishi Sunak does not feel the anguish felt on Palestine by all those demonstrators in London. Waving the Palestinian flag is a crime and police remove it from the rooftop or window where it has been placed by friends of Palestine. In Washington, a government spokesperson glibly informs the media that the Biden administration does not support a ceasefire in Gaza at present, meaning that nothing will prevent its friends in Tel Aviv from continuing on its disastrous course in the Middle East.
At the United Nations, people sit around the table in the Security Council debating the need or otherwise of a humanitarian ceasefire. And what kind of a ceasefire would that be? It would be anything but a cessation of the conflict. It would be for a pause in Israeli assaults in order to have humanitarian aid reach Palestinians who have lost many of their own and live each moment not knowing if they will survive a fresh Israeli air force bombardment in the night just ahead. And once the aid, though it just might be a trickle, goes through, the killing mission will resume. More Palestinian blood will be shed.
And Biden, Scholz, Sunak, Leyen and other friends of Israel will look away. At the UN, where hardly anything of note gets done --- remember how the League of Nations died --- the US ambassador stands ready to wield the veto against any resolution that may not be to Tel Aviv's liking. Observe the audacity of Israel's ambassador, who has no qualms about demanding that Secretary General Antonio Guterres resign. Because Guterres dared to let the Israelis know that what happened on 7 October did not happen in a vacuum, the ambassador was incensed.
In these difficult times for the Palestinians, only Guterres rose to the occasion with his demand that a ceasefire be put in place. No other figure has come forth to voice the same demand, for the good reason that no other person of conscience seems to be around. In this conflict that is not a war but a calculated military operation to push the present generation of Palestinians to another Nakba, global political leaders who one had thought would condemn the war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza and force a ceasefire into place are not there, in the literal sense. What the world has is mediocrity, men and women of power with little understanding of the lessons of history, with an absolute antipathy to the sufferings of a historically persecuted people.
The United Nations, be it noted, has been failing people everywhere. Good men like Guterres are caught in a straitjacket because of the flawed rules governing the working of the global body. The UN remains stymied in its own methods of operation. One of them is the archaic system of giving authority to five permanent members of the Security Council, authority which has been abused and misused since the founding of the organisation. Every time a resolution is vetoed by one of these global mandarins in the UNSC, the organisation goes through a fresh haemorrhage. The UNSC is a moribund body, but so is the General Assembly, where resolutions are non-binding.
So what's the point of keeping alive a structure which is bloated – try counting the staff numbers, the international civil servants peopling it --- and which has a Security Council whose work is often nullified by a veto, by a General Assembly which is not taken seriously by people? Such are the reasons why elements like Netanyahu gather the courage to inform the world that they will not accept a ceasefire in Gaza. He is a lucky chap, Netanyahu, for Hamas has unwittingly given him the respite he needed from all the corruption charges he was being investigated for and for the fierce public opposition to his attempts to clip the wings of the judiciary.
Not long ago, Jimmy Carter, every inch a gentleman and a statesman in a very large sense of the meaning, wrote a book on Palestine and bravely told the world that Israel's occupation of Arab land and the establishment of Jewish settlements on that land were illegal because they were a violation of international law.
An ailing Carter has gone silent. The principled Angela Merkel has walked away into retirement. The messianic Nelson Mandela died a decade ago.
The world is without leaders, without statesmen.