Published :
Updated :
For all latest news, follow The Financial Express Google News channel.
French president Emmanuel Macron, in a post on X last Thursday (on July 24) announced he would recognize Palestine as a state in September at the UN Nations General Assembly.
Before him Ireland, Norway and Spain did also decide to recognize a Palestinian state. Giving formal recognition of statehood for Palestinians is no doubt important, but what is more urgent at this moment is to keep them alive so they can enjoy the fruits of any freedom and statehood later. Shouldn't President Macron, who is now leading the movement for this Palestinian cause in Europe, and other governments there be convinced to create pressure on Israel to withdraw the food blockade and stop murdering the helpless Palestinians by forced starvation? In fact, it is a delayed response after a lot of prevarications, play of words and twists of facts to ignore the truth, to have reached a positive decision by at least some European leaders. It is hoped they would now also take forceful steps to allow the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza unhindered supply of food, water and medicine as those are being denied to them by Israel. As if that was not enough, soldiers of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) are pounding the hungry Palestinians trying to approach food distribution points with mortar and tank shells and bombs and bullets from aircraft. It is a kind of cruelty quite unheard of in the modern civilized world. But it is not happening in secrecy, the savagery is being brazenly live streamed for the whole world to watch. So, numberless Palestinian men, women and children, are dying every day. There is no point here counting the exact numbers, because they are being deliberately and systematically murdered by using the weapons such as hunger and bullet at the same time to show the world that the perpetrators can commit such crimes against humanity with impunity in defiance of all international laws and morality.
However, indiscriminate killing of Gazans by Israeli forces has been ongoing during the last 21 months and a week since the Gaza war started. Food carrying vehicles on land and by the sea dispatched by international agencies, sympathetic countries and organisations for the famished Palestinians have never been safe as those were constantly under Israeli attacks. But corralling the Palestinians like animals into a confined space and then shelling and bombing them when they are in desperate search of food is indeed a new dimension added to the Israeli atrocities and being done so with declaration since March last. A graphic description of the barbarity being committed was given to the BBC by a former US Army Special Forces officer who resigned from his role at the Israel and US-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GH). He witnessed 'the shelling of aid-seeking civilians. In an interview with the BBC last Friday (July 25), Lieutenant-colonel Anthony Aguilar said he had never seen such "brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian, an unarmed, starving population". "I have never witnessed that in all the places I've been deployed to war, until I was in Gaza at the hands of the [Israeli forces] and US contractors". "Without question, I witnessed war crimes by the Israeli Defense Forces, without a doubt. Using artillery rounds, firing tank rounds into unarmed civilians is a war crime". He recalled one instance in which a Markava tank fired at civilians, destroying a car as it drove away from the aid site. He also saw mortar rounds being launched into crowds "to keep them controlled". But despite these presentations of a glaring truth by a US army veteran, Israel continues to deny what the rest of the world says a man-made starvation being forced on Gaza. In this way, since May, the Israeli military and private contractors, basically American, have killed more than a thousand people trying to reach food at the distribution centre operated by GHF.
Clearly, it is a mockery of food distribution being enacted by the so-called food delivery centres.
The Western nations so vocal about any violation of human rights elsewhere in the world look quite muted when it comes to the case of Israel, and war crimes are committed against unarmed Gaza civilians. If this is not double standard, then what is?
Even so, one would like to appreciate President Macron for his noble effort at this desperate moment. One would also like to hope that the British prime minister Kier Starmer, despite his unhinged support to whatever Israel does, could finally be convinced (by Macron) to take some steps to prevail on Israel and stop the deadly game being played in Gaza in the name of food distribution to starving human beings.
The only Western world leader who, perhaps, can do something in this regard is the US president Donald Trump. But so far whatever occasional efforts he has made to enforce a ceasefire in Gaza ultimately fell through. But no further move is being made from his side in this regard. The Zionist lobby in his administration appears to have had a stronger influence on him so he may not make any further move in this direction.
But then why is this total dependence on the West, which was actually instrumental in creating Israel and offering blind support to whatever it did and has been doing till now?
What are the next door neighbours of the Gaza enclave and the West Bank like Egypt with its powerful military or those living in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan doing to help their blood brothers in Gaza and other Palestinians in the West Bank being massacred day in, day out by the Israeli forces as well as the Jewish settlers? What even other Arabs in the region doing to save the Palestinians being thus forced to die painful deaths by creating an artificial famine and through the cruel sport of food distribution to the victims of this unspeakable brutality? How can those in the nearby rich Arab countries even eat their sumptuous meals every day when their hapless, starving Palestinian brothers are being denied even a morsel of bread by the occupying Israeli forces engaged in a mission to carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinian by every means imaginable?
It is the moral courage that is required at the moment to say no to this morbid and gory scenes being enacted in real life in world leaders' plain sight. Will they have that courage?