Patrick Lawrence: Waves Upon the Sea of Silence
A couple of weeks after Israel began its campaign of terror in Gaza two Octobers ago, a journalist and novelist named Omar El Akkad published a note on X, formerly known as Twitter, that has stayed with me ever since:
Pure pith, if you ask me, a trespass onto that forbidden land where humanity’s taboos are ignored and acid truths openly articulated.
El Akkad, an Egyptian by birth who has lived, reported and written in Canada the whole of his adult life, already had some honored novels to his credit — “American War,” 2017, and “What Strange Paradise,” 2021 — by the time he offered the above observation. This past winter he published his bitter reflections on Gaza and the West’s hypocrisies thereupon under the title One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The thought altogether merits the recycle, digital media message to hard covers.
I have wondered lately whether the day El Akkad anticipates with raw indignation may be hard upon us. Those who purport to lead and speak for the Western world — parliamentarians, senior foreign policy people, various corporate media — seem to be breaking their disgraceful silence 18 months after they ought to have spoken up in condemnation of the Zionist state’s primitive savagery.
There is a great, often untraversed distance between words and action, what is said and what is done, in our post-democracies. So I cannot usefully speculate where these recent expressions of outrage, confessions of error and misplaced sympathies prominent among them, will lead. Turns in sentiment, however, nearly always precede turns in policy and conduct. Anyone who lived through the Vietnam War years knows this.
I have suspected from the earliest days of the Israeli military’s real-time barbarities that “the Jewish state” was bound to overplay its hand at some point. The rest of the world can take only so much pretending that the murder spree in Gaza is a Biblically authorized war against — How does this work? — the descendants of those phantom, Jew-hating clans known as Amalekites. The Zionist project is at bottom an attempt to make the modern world recognize invocations of ancient wars of revenge, annihilation and race-paranoia, whether or not they ever took place, as legitimizing unspeakable horrors in the third decade of the 21st century. Sooner or later, I figured, the rational would prevail over the imaginary and mythological — Athens, as the scholars think of it, over Jerusalem.
Has this moment come at last? Good enough it is worth posing the question. A highly significant emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on May 13 suggests that the West’s unconscionable support for Israeli terrorism now wears very thin. So does a marked turn toward plain-spoken truths about Gaza in some Western media. (And how novel is this?) We also begin to hear a few disavowals coming from political figures who have until now defended the indefensible. There is often a danger of over-interpretation in times such as these, but a shift of sentiment seems to me in the offing, if it has not already arrived.
The chronology of events, easily enough read, indicates that Israel crossed its bridge too far in early March, when it was step-by-step betraying the phased ceasefire agreement it had entered upon in January. On March 2, the Netanyahu government announced that it would block all humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. On March 18, the Israeli military resumed its bombing campaign, marking a decisive breach of its recent commitment.
Blockades and bombs are hardly new to the Palestinians of Gaza. But this time the terrorist state declared its intention to escalate the violence beyond the previous 16 months, until all remaining hostages were released and Hamas was eliminated. This is to be totalized extermination just as we can read of it in Deuteronomy, Samuel and Chronicles — or in any good history of the Reich, I will add. By early April, when the World Food Program announced it was running out of food stocks, it was clear we were witnessing a campaign of savagery that simply has no limits.
My first intimation that the winds were shifting, if I did not miss an earlier sign, came by way of an editorial in The Economist, published April 9 under the headline, “Israel is intent on destroying Gaza.” Shockingly honest, I recall thinking — most unlike The Economist in these sorts of matters. Ever the Atlanticists, the British weekly’s editors looked to President Trump to avert a disaster no one could gloss or justify and expect to be taken seriously. “The outlook is bleak,” they wrote. “Without pressure from him, it is hard to see anything else that could prevent Israel’s final destruction of Gaza.”
A month later we have had a flood of media reports and official statements in this line. As other commentators have noted, the Financial Times published a blistering editorial on May 6 — signed by the editorial board, a measure of its gravitas — under the headline, “The West’s shameful silence on Gaza.” Wow, the FT no less. After noting Israel’s post-ceasefire blockade of water, food, medicine and all other forms of humanitarian aid, the prominent British daily levels this one at the West’s leaders:
… the US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.
Further on, the FT recites the mess President Trump has made with his incoherent policies and somersaults — Gaza as a luxury resort, support for the ceasefire, dispensation to breach it, all the while more weapons. And then this conclusion:
The global tumult triggered by Trump has already distracted attention from the catastrophe in Gaza. Yet the longer it goes on, the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.
Total destruction, shame, complicity: Let us all listen intently now that mainstream media are saying what independent media have been saying the whole of this crisis.
Last weekend the liberal Independent published its own editorial, “End the deafening war on Gaza — it is time to speak up.” A snippet here:
It is time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.
And, a day later, The Guardian stepped forthrightly up to the plate with “The Guardian view on Gaza: Trump can stop this horror. The alternative is unthinkable.” “What is this, if not genocidal?” the paper’s editors ask. “When will the U.S. and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”
The horror, the horror: The mind goes back to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” exactly as it should: Bibi Netanyahu as Mr. Kurtz, the Zionist project as the true face of Western “civilization.”
You get some herd instinct among mainstream media when touchy questions of ideology and geopolitics arise, as I have seen in years gone by at very close range. And as you will have noted, the recent outpouring of media outrage has been confined mostly to the British press. Of this kind of thing there has been nothing in the Zionist-supervised New York Times and very rarely anywhere else in mainstream American media. This is the Israeli lobby at work, to state what ought to be obvious.
The same holds for the political figures who have at last broken the silence.
Josep Borrell, the blunt-spoken Spaniard who previously served as the European Union’s foreign policy director, said at a May 9 award ceremony in Spain (as quoted in The New Arab): “We’re facing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War in order to create a splendid holiday destination once all the millions of tonnes of rubble have been cleared from Gaza and the Palestinians have died or gone away.”
Mark Pritchard, a Tory MP, addressing the House of Commons last week:
For many years — I’ve been in this House 20 years — I have supported Israel pretty much at all costs, quite frankly. But today, I want to say that I got it wrong and I condemn Israel for what it is doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza and indeed in the West Bank, and I’d like to withdraw my support right now for the actions of Israel, what they are doing right now in Gaza…. I’m really concerned that this is a moment in history when people look back, where we’ve got it wrong as a country.
I hope Omar El Akkad is listening to all this up there in Toronto.
■
All this suddenly seems prelude as of Tuesday, when the Security Council met in the aforementioned emergency session at the Secretariat in New York to consider a reality no amount of “right-to-defend-itself” nonsense can be deployed to explain. Israel has brought the 2.2 million residents of the Strip to the brink of mass starvation, dehydration and disease. Photographs, videotape, and press reports coming from those courageous journalists still working inside Gaza are about to get a great deal more horrible than they have been these past many months. There cannot be an attorney alive — apart from corrupt hacks at the State Department and elsewhere in Washington — who will not call the Israelis’ siege since March a war crime and a crime against humanity.
Suggesting the shifting sands in the West, it was Britain, France, Denmark and other members of the Atlantic alliance who asked the UNSC to convene. Of the council’s 15 members only the U.S. — Does this go without saying? — refused to call upon the Zionist state urgently to lift its siege and allow aid flows to resume. Bringing the point yet closer to home, the speaker who carried the session was Tom Fletcher, a long-serving British diplomat now serving as the U.N.’s Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian affairs.
Fletcher’s impassioned speech is worth reading in full, and a transcript is here, provided by ReliefWeb, an online resource run by the U.N.’s coordinator for humanitarian affairs. I single out a few of his choicer remarks, those most suggestive of the broader shift in the winds that I describe:
Let me start with what we see and are mandated by this Council to report.
Israel is deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. [Fletcher addresses the West Bank crisis later in his remarks.]
For more than 10 weeks, nothing has entered Gaza—no food, medicine, water or tents. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have, again, been forcibly displaced and confined into ever-shrinking spaces, as 70% of Gaza’s territory is either within Israeli-militarized zones or under displacement orders….
This degradation of international law is corrosive and infectious. It is undermining decades of progress on rules to protect civilians from inhumanity and the violent and lawless among us who act with impunity.
Humanity, the law and reason must prevail. This Council must prevail. Demand this ends. Stop arming it. Insist on accountability.
To the Israeli authorities: Stop killing and injuring civilians. Lift this brutal blockade. Let humanitarians save lives.
For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: What more evidence do you need now? Will you act — decisively — to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law? Or will you say instead, “We did all we could?”
Fletcher, who received unanimous support from UNSC members — again, we must leave out the Americans — reserved some of his sharpest criticisms for the U.S.–Israeli plan to bypass all international humanitarian organizations and resume aid by way of private groups Washington and Tel Aviv are picturesquely calling the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.” Distribution sites would be reduced from 400 to a very few. This would require Gazans to walk long distances to receive aid; Israeli military units would surround these sites and the routes leading to them.
The U.S. representative at the session, Dorothy Shea, defended this plan — “We urge the U.N. to continue discussions” — as she declined to join the other 14 council members to call for Israel to end its illegal siege and let perfectly capable international aid organizations resume their work. Parenthetically, if you want to keep up with the depravities of the State Department under Marco Rubio, a transcript of Shea’s remarks will fix you right up. It is here.
And here is Fletcher on the U.S.–Israeli plan:
For anyone still pretending to be in any doubt, the Israeli-designed distribution modality is not the answer.
It practically excludes many, including people with disabilities, women, children, the elderly, the wounded. It forces further displacement. It exposes thousands of people to harm. It sets an unacceptable precedent for aid delivery not just in the OPT [the Occupied Palestinian Territories], but around the world.
It restricts aid to only one part of Gaza, while leaving other dire needs unmet. It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip.
It is a cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction. A fig leaf for further violence and displacement.
If any of that still matters, have no part in it.
There is one theme in Fletcher’s inspired comments that seems to me to reflect the emerging zeitgeist, if this is the right word, among the Western powers — with the exception, once again, of the United States. It makes me think again of Omar El Akkad’s point. It suggests that the price of not speaking out against the Zionist regime’s terrorism — the “personal downside,” as El Akkad puts it — now comes to outweigh the price of speaking out, as people of mediocre character would calculate these things.
I will let Tom Fletcher conclude this commentary:
I ask you to reflect — for a moment — on what action we will tell future generations we each took to stop the 21st century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza. It is a question we will hear, sometimes incredulous, sometimes furious — but always there — for the rest of our lives.
We will surely all claim to have been against it? Maybe we will say we issued a statement? Or that we trusted that private pressure might work, despite so much evidence to the contrary?
Or pretend that we thought a more brutal military offensive had more chance of bringing the hostages home than the negotiations which brought so many hostages home?
Maybe some will recall that in a transactional world we had other priorities.
Or maybe we will use those empty words: “We did all we could.”
