Israel is laying waste to the very idea of liberal society

Here, starvation is being utilised as a weapon of war. Evacuation orders are followed up with massacres, through the use of snipers and weaponised drones. People are being bombed in their tents, having had their homes obliterated.

There is nothing more urgent than this. The consequences are global in reach, setting new and hellish parameters for an era of war.

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A thought, therefore, occurs. What would have to happen for establishment liberals to speak out? Thus far, so many have fallen silent, after a year of atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

This article is for them. It is clear that the grotesque daily updates coming from Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, are not enough. So let’s try another way: Israel, with its American, British and European partners, is destroying the idea of liberal society.

This is ideologically, indeed psychologically, vexing for many Western liberals to metabolise. But not to register this reality, is simply to deny it, and the crimes associated with it.

Firstly, and most obviously, we can start with the “international rules-based order”. Any independently-minded observer can point to a litany of hypocrisies in relation to this, over many decades. It has always been the case that claims to global rules have been applied inconsistently, and are bound together who the US deems worthy and unworthy.

This century, the Iraq war marked the first overt departure from pretence, with the launching of an illegal invasion of a sovereign state without United Nations approval. But what is happening now is so repeatedly egregious, that it has smashed international law completely, and in front of the world.

Numerous International Court of Justice provisions have been shredded, as myriad war crimes are aided through Western arms exports, and sanitised politically and in the media. The International Criminal Court should have the arrest warrants it has applied for in place long ago. But the US has been applying pressure not to, and its leading figures have sought to undermine the process as a whole.

Israel has also conducted a major terrorist attack on Lebanese soil, through the use of exploding pagers. There is no need to labour the point. If you, a liberal, agree with the concept of international law, it is impossible to support the policy of the Israeli state as Joe Biden, leader of the “free world”, has so resolutely.

Israel is also conducting targeted attacks on the positions of UN peacekeepers. This force is composed of troops from 50 countries, including the Nato states. The attacks are designed to remove the platoons in southern Lebanon, and have led to hospitalisations, and condemnation from various European governments and even the Italian leader Giorga Meloni.

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Yet Benjamin Netanyahu, acting with the impunity afforded to him by the US, simply pushes further up the ladder of escalation, by calling for the UN soldiers to abandon their posts. This call has been rejected, including by the French and Irish leadership.

Meanwhile, the UN secretary-general has been banned from entering Israel, prompting this response from EU foreign affairs spokesperson: “The repeated accusations of antisemitism against him are slanderous.”

The Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez has called for an international arms embargo, as French president Emmanuel Macron calls for a ban on weapons used in Gaza. Yet still, there is a reluctance to reckon with these fractious events among some liberal circles and commentators.

What might the consequences of all this be?

Let’s just ignore it, and maybe it will all go away. Or worse still, let’s maintain the fiction that this endless destruction has some saintly objective that in the end could be worth it.

The idea that the West can properly represent a paradigmatic alternative to autocracy while failing to apply international law in relation to Israel, is also falling apart. Most of the world can see the duplicity and in the Global South, diplomatic and trade alliances are being re-ordered to reflect this.

In Germany, there are brutal crackdowns on protests and individuals who want to protest the slaughter in Gaza and oppose the attacks on Lebanon.

They have tried to ban Glasgow University rector Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis from entering the country to take part in events around Palestine. Greta Thunberg, once revered in liberal quarters, is now persona non grata and denounced because of her stance on Gaza. She too, has been on the receiving end of calls to have her banned from entering Germany.

This, risibly, at the same time as German ministers introduced a clause in their weapons contracts with Israel, that their arms should not be “used for genocide”.

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In the US, protesters were physically assaulted on university campuses; here in the UK, demonstrators have been continuously demonised, lied about and labelled as “hate marchers” with high-profile calls to ban the democratic right to assemble.

Yet many so-called proponents of free speech have been either silent on these developments – or supportive of them. This is why many come to the following conclusion: the lives of Arabs and brown-skinned people are cheap. Or, as Sayeeda Warsi puts it in her new book: “Muslims don’t matter.”

Yes, for all of the talk of progressive innovation and enlightenment, the colonial mindset remains unabashed.

Even among those who proclaim the values of liberal multiculturalism. Palestinians are not to be humanised but shall remain as statistics, at best.

Is it just easier to compartmentalise genocide, because those at the sharp end are not European, or American, or Canadian, or Australian?

Again, what does this do to the social fabric?

When politicians and media personalities gloss over the bombing of hospitals, the man-made famine, the torture and the mass death, they are saying very clearly who they regard as worthy of human rights, and who is to be left out.

And once that happens, don’t be surprised when the beneficiaries are the far-right.

If now is not a time to speak out, there never will be one.