I’VE always believed that in all things, the truth will inevitably come out to one degree or another.
It has a funny way of worming itself to the surface eventually, much to the chagrin of world leaders and disgraced political parties.
Maybe naively, it’s something I still hold to be the case in the UK’s complicity in the genocide being carried out in Palestine.
That is little comfort to those dying beneath the rubble in the Gaza Strip today; to know that at some future point vindication awaits. It’s even less of a comfort to suspect, as I do, that when it does, Britain’s political class will shield itself in obfuscations of ignorance: oh, we didn’t know then, what we know now. Hindsight is 20/20. Blah blah. Who are we kidding?
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The playbook is the same every time, whether it’s reducing a Gazan hospital to dust or systematically hunting and executing foreign aid workers: deny; deflect; admit; and finally, normalise.
There is no mistake that Israel has conceded to that fact, as the news cycle moves on to the next act of heinous cruelty. More decimated hospitals. More targeted aid convoys. It never stops at one, even as Israel wrings its hands and promises a full internal investigation.
And always, just enough performative contrition to give Western leaders cover for their continued support for a regime carrying out the mass slaughter of innocent Palestinians, of journalists, and of aid workers.
Western leaders have treated condemnation of the horrors emerging from the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank as something that must be limited, first, to finding the right legal opinion or the right intervention from the right intergovernmental organisation.
Or in the case of the United Kingdom and its cowardly political class, the publication of legal advice that Britain’s reckless Conservative government already has in its possession – but refuses to publish.
When occupation forces leave mass graves across a besieged nation – at Al-Shifa hospital, at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, in Beit Lahiya – there is no justification for covering your eyes and ears and flippantly remarking that we must wait and see. It is there to see already.
Britain’s political class wants to hide its complicity behind the structure of the state, as if putting on a suit and tie and arming a genocidal regime from the comfort of Westminster’s benches gives politicians distance from their decisions.
It is not an abstract state that continues to sell arms to Israel; it is people from our communities, many of whom behave as if their actions as a politician are, in some way, separate from their actions as a human being. They will condemn more to death, before popping off to their local like it means nothing at all. Compartmentalised. Separate. Safe. And yet, we are what we do.
Westminster’s benches are stuffed with former lawyers and legal experts; yet on the subject of Israel’s violent occupation and subjugation of Palestine, their legal knowledge seems to disappear in a moment.
And in turn, they debase themselves in defence of a regime committing grave violations of international humanitarian law that they suddenly cannot see.
No, the decision to continue selling arms – supported by both Labour and the Conservatives – is carried out with both impunity and the full and total knowledge that these weapons will be turned on civilians, not from self defence, but as a means for Israel to expand its borders and further an extremist ethnonationalist ideology in the Middle East.
The evidence is so well documented that the truth will out.
I remain confident in that.
What I feel less confident about, however, is that when the full scale of Britain’s role in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians does solidify itself to the public, that it will mean anything at all. It seems there is no indignity that Westminster can inflict on the British public that won’t be reduced to the clicking of tongues and a weary, resigned voice opining that “that’s just what politicians are like”.
But this is not a difference of opinion in the same way that we can disagree over economic policy or tax brackets.
It is the very worst of humanity – an endorsement for actions so far beyond any red line that even hand-wringing liberals should be questioning whether or not they should be smugly applying the principle of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
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UK arms sales to Israel since 2015 are to the value of at least £489 million – not a figure as high as some other countries, but that’s irrelevant.
It means nothing where Britain lands on the leaderboard. We can bounce the level of complicity back and forth all day, but the complicity itself never changes.
I don’t know how we can exist as a supposed family of nations knowing that our elected representatives are so willing to dip their hands into the blood of others before returning to their communities as if it doesn’t matter, believing they can wash the blood off before walking out the doors of Westminster. But it matters.
The truth will out, and it should not be forgotten who closed their eyes and pretended they could not see it.
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