Owen Jones: History must be harsh on those who stayed silent

Apologies if you were in an upbeat mood before reading this, but we cannot rule out a coming age of fascism, war, climate-driven mass destruction and all the attendant turmoil. If that is true, then Israel’s genocidal onslaught might not be remembered for the crime it is, and unfortunately humanity will have even graver horrors to be concerned about.

But if our species does actually have any hope, then the extermination of Gaza will be remembered as one of the worst crimes of our ages.

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As the US serviceman Aaron Bushnell put it before he tragically self-immolated in protest at this abomination nine months ago: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Which brings us to culpability. Until Black October last year became Black November, then Black December, and so on, President Joe Biden had a fighting chance of being remembered as one of the least destructive US presidents.

Arming and facilitating a genocide ensures his place in history as a monster, his occasional handwringing about the resulting horror for the sake of domestic audiences merely underlining his cynicism.

As for Keir Starmer: history will damn the man who backed Israel’s right to besiege a civilian population – as a human rights lawyer, he knows this is a grave war crime – before he tried gaslighting the electorate by claiming he’d never believed it. F-35 jets continue to rain death and mayhem on Gaza, made possible by British components Starmer continues to sign off.

And what of other states: like Germany, which apparently cannot shake off a genocidal addiction. By declaring that it is not likely to comply with the warrants of a court it is a signatory to, Germany has told the world it is a rogue state, defying international law to protect its ally from accountability for war crimes.

These states facilitated Israel’s genocidal slaughter to different degrees with weapons, with aid, with political cover and with diplomatic support. But they were not alone in their complicity. The Western media has disgraced itself, and should never be allowed to get away with a crime scene covered in its fingerprints.

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There was no question that Hamas and other armed groups committed war crimes on October 7. As an al-Jazeera documentary later found, the Western media decided to focus on the atrocities that did not happen, rather than those that did. Most notoriously, that included peddling the lie that babies were beheaded. This was a fiction: One baby was killed that day, shot through the door of a safe room, a crime in its own right.

But Western media outlets such as The Times spread this claim, which helped promote the idea that such unspeakable barbarism required the monstrous onslaught against Gaza that followed.

They then whitewashed the far deadlier war crimes committed by Israel every single day since then – and there have been 412 days. They showed infinitely more disgust at the babies which were not beheaded than the hundreds of Palestinian babies who were then burned alive, crushed to death, riddled with bullets or blown apart, along with thousands of other children.

Detailed investigations which exposed depraved atrocities – like how six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family, and the paramedics sent to save her, could only have been intentionally killed based on the facts – did nothing to shift a narrative that this was Israel’s self-defence.

They buried or ignored relentless public statements by Israeli leaders, officials and soldiers amounting to genocidal incitement and intent, refusing to frame coverage around what were confessions about the state’s motives.

Even though Yoav Gallant and his allies made clear that the civilian population would suffer a deliberate siege from the start, and even though the evidence for this criminal act is so overwhelming it forms the core of the ICC arrest warrants, the Western media never explained to its readership that a Western ally was deliberately starving its population.

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Unlike Russian official sources – rightly treated with contempt and derision – the Western media treated deceit, deflection and gaslighting by Israel’s authorities as though they were credible, despite objective overwhelming evidence about their never-ending lies. Meanwhile, those few voices who stood against this outrage were demonised, defamed, ostracised and silenced.

There are gruesomely few exceptions in the Western media of outlets which told the truth, which made clear to their audiences what this crime really was – a crime not only proven by overwhelming evidence, but by the relentless confessions of its perpetrators.

One exception is The National, an outlet which often faces patronising derision from journalists who consider themselves “the grown-ups in the room”, but which showed moral clarity and courage throughout, not being afraid to tell its readers the truth about a horror which will scream through the ages.

Those journalists should ask themselves searching questions. If you look down at The National, as you work for outlets which whitewashed one of the worst crimes of our age, which failed to tell the truth when it really mattered, which demonised the few determined to speak out, where does that leave you?

Well, I’ll tell you. If you are remembered at all, you will be damned along with the rest of an industry which helped facilitate this obscenity, by protecting Western governments from pressure to stop facilitating Israel’s genocidal mayhem.