by Salum Mansur, The Unz Review:
The collective West’s complicity reflects moral bankruptcy, as in that of Canada
“We are angry, we are broken. This would have been the time of joy, instead we are mourning. We are fearful. More than 20,000 children – thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways day after day, 1.9 million displaced, hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed… Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is genocide. The world is watching. Churches are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on.”
—Rev. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem, West Bank (Occupied Palestine), on Christmas Eve 2023.[1]
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“Bethlehem is besieged. Jerusalem is wounded. And Gaza is being annihilated. This year we say, Christ is still under the rubble in Gaza… He [Jesus] was born among those under occupation, to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and the repressed. In his childhood, he became a refugee, to stand in solidarity with the displaced and the exiled. He was a victim of the occupier and the extremist. He came to save us from our selfishness, greed, desires, and our pursuit of power and arrogance. He is Jesus, born in Bethlehem, to him we give love and worship.”
—Rev. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem, West Bank (Occupied Palestine), on Christmas Eve 2024.[2]
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Bethlehem has been delivered a mortal wound that now runs through the ancient city where, as both the Gospels of the New Testament Bible and the Qur’an narrate, Virgin Mary brought forth into the world the child Jesus (Yehoshua in Hebrew, and Isa in Arabic). It is the wound that now divides the world in the first quarter of the twentyfirst century, and the beginning of the third millennium, into two unequal parts, the Global North and the Global South. This division is not natural brought about by some feature of geography; it is a division designed and imposed by men of war, plunder and pillage, from the Global North as were once the Crusaders a millennium ago, mortally wounding the township of Jesus’s nativity whose birth symbolized heavenly peace for all people and who later announced, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”
Israeli genocide into its second year and continuing has exposed the “collective West” represented by the G7 countries, six of the seven belonging to the Global North – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the United States – except for Japan, complicit in the genocide, especially the United States and Britain with their ample material and diplomatic support for Israel and its genocidal war-mongering government led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Without the primary support of the Biden administration in Washington, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza very likely would have ended as soon as it began. But apart from the “collective West,” countries of the Global North, except for a few such as Ireland and Spain, by not speaking out forcefully against the Israeli genocide and taking adequate measures to compel its ending and hold the Israeli leaders accountable, are no less complicit. As Professor John Mearsheimer, co-author with Stephen Walt of The Israel Lobby, recently wrote,
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.[3]
At the United Nations the repeated veto by the United States of Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefire in Gaza, a prerequisite for stopping the genocide and enforcing UN resolutions on Palestine, has left the UN bereft of its power in performing its primary responsibility of maintaining peace and security among member-states and justice for people under occupation. When the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was engaged in examining the request of the Prosecutor made on May 20, 2024 to issue arrest warrants for the Israeli leaders, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant,[4] American lawmakers in the Congress issued threats against the Prosecutor and the Court, though the United States had rescinded its signature in May 2002 from the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC. The Prosecutor also requested arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri; they were killed by Israeli military actions in the weeks after the requests made, though the death of Mohammed Diab remains unconfirmed and, therefore, the ICC’s arrest warrant issued for him has not yet been withdrawn.
