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STRIP away the weasel words of “concern about mounting civilian casualties in Gaza” and the need for Israel to take “proportionate” action and grim reality hits us in the face.
This reality is that Britain’s political elite is united behind Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
None of the major party leaders speaks out against this country’s military industrial complex selling hundreds of millions of pounds worth of weaponry to Tel Aviv.
Not one backs Palestinian civil society’s plea to put peaceful pressure on Israel through economic sanctions.
All support the special relationship agreed by Israel and the European Union, even as the Israeli military occupation prevents Palestine from developing international commercial links freely.
David Cameron is said to have “expressed condolences for the deaths of Israeli troops and concern about mounting civilian casualties in Gaza.”
But he echoes Benjamin Netanyahu’s line that the only way out of “the spiral of violence” is “for both sides to observe a lasting ceasefire in line with the initiative that was put forward by Egypt.”
That would leave Gaza as an open prison, subject to a blockade of its land, sea and air borders by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), with Egyptian collusion.
None of the hundreds of Palestinian hostages seized by Israel on the occupied West Bank in recent weeks would be released.
The inhuman conditions imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza, including a dearth of potable water, would persist.
The IDF would still assassinate Palestinians of whom it disapproves because, for Israel and its Western imperialist backers, killing people it describes routinely as terrorists doesn’t constitute a ceasefire breach whereas any response, no matter how ineffective, does.
Yet the IDF carries a mock-up on its website of missiles being fired at the Houses of Parliament, carrying the usual loaded propaganda message from the zionist state.
This message is that Israel only responds to rocket fire, that it is under existential threat from an organisation dedicated to its destruction and that Britain would react in exactly the same way if website mock-up became reality.
Hamas, whatever its rhetoric, was observing a ceasefire until the IDF rampage through the West Bank that resulted in six Palestinians killed and hundreds banged up in Israeli prisons.
The idea that Hamas, with its puny arsenal, could threaten a modern militarised state backed by all imperialist powers is too fanciful for words.
When London was indeed a target for bombs and other military action by the IRA, the Establishment chose at first to rely on repression — massacres of Irish civilians, internment without trial, assassinations by army-backed death squads, dodgy no-jury trials and fitting up innocent people for bombing atrocities in Britain.
It was only when a Labour government agreed to negotiate a resolution of the conflict in Ireland with representatives of those who had taken up arms that the bombing campaign ended.
No two situations are entirely analogous, but the idea that Israel can guarantee its own security by periodic frenzies of bloodletting against Palestinians is patently ridiculous.
The people of Palestine want their own independent state and one day they will get it.
That day will arrive sooner and with less heartache if the rest of the world recognises that Israel is obstinately preventing that development and that action is needed to isolate the apartheid state and assist the Palestinians in their reasonable quest for justice.
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