by Jonathan Cook, The Unz Review:
Western governments will never isolate and sanction Israel. The war machine will roll on until either we stop it or its lethal games blow up in all our faces
There are many reasons Gaza has been mostly off the radar of the western establishment media for months now, even as the enclave turns into an ever-bigger killing zone.
One is that, nearly a year into what the World Court has termed a “plausible genocide”, where Israel has kept out western journalists and killed off most Palestinian journalists, as well as driving out international aid organisations and the United Nations, there is almost no one left to tell us what is happening.
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We have only snapshots of individual suffering, but not the big picture. How many Palestinians are dead? We know there are at least 40,000 killed by Israel – the deaths recorded by Palestinian officials before the health system collapsed. But how many more? Double that figure? Quadruple it? Times it by 10? The truth is, no one knows.
What about the famine in Gaza that has been raging for many, many months as Israel has systematically blocked aid into the enclave, in line with its promise last October to deny the Palestinians there food, water and power?
The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, because the pair’s starvation of Gaza is a crime against humanity.
But the prolonged famine is presented as a near-victimless crime. Where are the dead from this famine? They are certainly not on our TV screens or on our front pages.
The true death toll will probably never be reported, just as it wasn’t after the West’s Middle East bloodbaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Western politicians have no interest in knowing the truth, and the western establishment media has no interest in discovering it.
Democracy gutted
The news from Gaza is being actively buried for another reason. Israel’s genocide continues to be tangible, shocking proof that western capitals are not the bastions of democracy and bulwarks against barbarianism they claim to be.
Western politicians have been utterly complicit in the genocide – a fact impossible to hide from their publics. The killing could have been stopped at any point, had the Biden administration so willed it.
Ordinary people have made clear they want the slaughter to end, which is why Biden has to pretend to be “working tirelessly” to negotiate a ceasefire – a ceasefire he could impose whenever he chooses to.
Israel is entirely dependent on US military, diplomatic and financial largesse, as is only too clear from the 50,000 tonnes of weapons the Biden administration has so far shipped to Israel since last October.
