Successive United Nations investigations have documented Israel's genocide, yet western regimes still refuse to name it or deliver the accountability their own institutions demand
by Hossam Shaker
Part 2 - Double standards
It is entirely understandable that the allies of a regime of occupation and genocide, or those who consider themselves Israel's partners and friends, would avoid issuing a clear condemnation of conduct they themselves helped support and encourage, directly or indirectly, even if only through silence and denial of its atrocities.
Throughout this prolonged season of horrors, the Israeli side has enjoyed military and political backing, as well as propagandistic cover, through carefully crafted formulas uttered by senior European and western officials.
These amounted to evasive justifications for whatever war crimes and grave violations an occupying authority and its military forces might commit against a population left utterly exposed to continuous bombardment.
This may be inferred from the phrase that has become a staple of western speeches: "Israel has every right to defend itself" - words that Israeli leaders understand simply as advance legitimation for a policy of mass killing and comprehensive destruction on the ground.
Naturally, no mention is made in this context of any right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves, for example, or of their right under international humanitarian law to resist the military occupation entrenched on their land.
States, governments and political leaderships - joined by elites in the fields of thought, culture and media - insist on ignoring the reality of genocide against the Palestinian people, or conceal it through a tendency toward genocide denial, as though all the serious international efforts of documentation and investigation had no value for them.
Denying a genocide that has unfolded before everyone's ears and eyes simply means minimising its confirmed atrocities. It also entails direct or indirect encouragement of this pattern of horrific violations, so long as they are met with such shocking laxity.
Moreover, clinging to outright denial encourages the perpetrators to resume committing appalling war crimes, so long as these crimes are not named as such. Which western leaders - apart from a handful, such as Spain - have described what the Israeli leadership and its army have committed as "genocide" or "war crimes"?
It must be recalled that the centres of western decision-making, including the European Union and its leading bodies crowned with slogans of noble values and human rights, became implicated in a sweeping display of bias when they chose very mild or evasive terms to describe Israeli war crimes that the entire world followed in images, sound and live broadcasts.
Leaders and spokespersons resorted to cold expressions such as the ploy of "expressing concern" and voicing "sorrow" over the victims, often without naming the perpetrator, because the perpetrator was the Israeli leadership and its army, whose brutal policies and measures were visible to all.
Observers around the world have noted how the charge of "double standards" clings to European and western political discourse.
This is precisely what the former vice-president of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, warned his EU colleagues against - in full view of a world that notices the grave moral gap between European positions on Ukraine and Palestine. He issued that warning days into the war, at a Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 23 October 2023.
One would not be exaggerating to conclude from these contradictory positions that they place some human beings above others in status, degree of concern and human dignity, so that the lives, safety and security of Palestinians are placed lower in rank than those of others.
Thus comes the tolerance of the crushing of children, mothers, the sick and the elderly in the Gaza Strip, without serious positions being taken to restrain the machinery of genocide.
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