“The souls of non-Jews come from impure sprits and are called pigs.”
JEWISH Jalkut Rubeni gadol 12b
IAN WILLIAMS
Palestinians take shelter at a school operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza City as Israeli airstrikes continue on Oct. 12, 2023. More than 175,500 internally displaced people are sheltering in 88 UNRWA schools across the Gaza Strip. (PHOTO BY ASHRAF AMRA/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES).
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2023, pp. 34-35
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
THESE ARE INDEED TIMES sent to try us—and the U.N. The organization makes repeated recommendations—and then those who consistently ignore its advice condemn it, before frequently trying to use it as the cherry picker to help them down from the tree that they climbed up. As the Israeli onslaught continued, the U.N. had gone beyond feeding and educating Palestinians to housing them in its schools and other depots, although history and the twelve dead staffers so far suggest that this is a highly qualified safety.
The U.N. has also followed most countries in seeing a close relationship, indeed an equivalence, between Israeli repression and Hamas’ attacks.
The eruption/mass-breakout/invasion from Gaza seriously supports Pontius Pilate’s confused query: “What is truth?” But the Roman was not around to ask the very pertinent question. It should be no surprise to see media and politicians looking at the whole thing through blue and white lenses, but after recent patterns of behavior from Israel and the settlers we could have expected a cosmetic attempt at objectivity.You do not have to be an apologist for Hamas—the brutal wannabe theocrats in Gaza—to suggest some cause and effect between Israel’s policies and this eruption.
I do not propose to burn incense on the altar of Israeli victimhood. Dropping bombs on apartment blocks in Gaza, allowing, indeed facilitating Ku Klux Klan-style pogroms in the West Bank, regularizing civilian executions of Palestinians, not to mention apartheid and ethnic cleansing, neither can nor should excuse the mayhem Hamas inflicted on civilians. Holding a music festival near the Gaza fence could be likened to opening a circus within earshot of the Warsaw Ghetto, but that is no reason for emulating a West Bank settler mob on a pogrom by massacring the audience.
But the reality of murders and hostage-takings is no excuse for febrile horror stories of the kind used to incite lynch mobs. The Israeli allegations of beheading babies and mass rape reminded me of the public relations-inspired campaign against Saddam Hussain claiming that his troops emptied babies out of incubators in Kuwait. His army had indeed massacred Kurds and Marsh Arabs, and Iraqi soldiers had indeed invaded Kuwait, but there is nothing like a juicy atrocity to prepare the way for bombing civilians.
These allegations of beheadings of Israeli babies and rapes of women ricocheted through the Internet and almost certainly provided cover for pro-Israeli politicians in the EU to threaten cutting off aid to Palestine. The source of those inflammatory news items appeared to be a report from a Netanyahu-linked TV station based on unsupported statements by an IDF reservist, who, it transpired, was a West Bank settler leader who had inspired the settler pogrom on Huwara in the West Bank (which did not rouse a fraction of the indignation of Kfar Aza kibbutz).
When a serious journalist from Turkey finally checked and asked, the IDF could not and would not substantiate the reports of beheadings even though, recognizing a good atrocity story when they saw one, they could not bring themselves to actually deny it. If Pontius Pilate were looking for truth, he would not go here!
To add flavor, the settler spokesman also referred to rapes, presumably because if you want to incite a lynch mob, rapes and murdering babies are the way to go. Within a day the cycle of unchecked indignation was complete, and even Biden claimed to have seen pictures of decapitated infants, but under more sustained questioning his office later walked that back and said he had seen news reports. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, presidents should not believe everything they read on the Internet.
He was not alone. The reality was bad enough, but the created facts had done their work and the tales had permeated the media miasma enough to occlude the sheer horror and illegality of Israel’s threats against the people of Gaza.
The EU Commissioner for neighborhood and enlargement, Olivér Várhelyi, reflecting the pro-Israel (and indeed pro-Russian) leanings of his Hungarian government, declared that the EU was immediately suspending “all payments” to the Palestinians. He was hastily overruled as the EU decided he had acted without legal authority or political backing.
Several other EU governments said they were suspending their contributions pending an investigation, but once the hysteria dies down the logic of punishing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for what un-elected Hamas does is unconvincing.
No matter that Hamas in Gaza gets no such aid and is a bitter enemy of the Palestinian Authority, which does. Reflexive mob action is not the time for analysis or calculation, it is the time for virtue signaling and baying with the pack.
To be fair, many of the politicians and less assiduous journalists are so steeped in pro-Israeli wishful thinking that they write what they hope for rather than from reality. The Guardian headline “Widespread condemnation across globe for Hamas attack on Israel,” is so inaccurate as to be a distortion. Outside Europe and the U.S. there is equally widespread condemnation of Israeli repression and agreement that Israel’s illegal occupation is the root of the problem.
It is indeed true that Hamas has few actual proponents but equally few support Israel to the hilt, not least since the blade is so firmly embedded in Palestine. For balance one can look to José Ramos-Horta, president of East Timor, which withstood Indonesian occupation for so many years, who said, “Indiscriminate killing of non combatants, civilians, of women and children—perpetrated by whoever, anywhere—is abhorrent and must be unequivocally condemned.” He added that Hamas’ actions, the “indiscriminate attack, kidnapping, execution of captured civilians gravely diminish the just cause of a viable Palestinian State.” But then he adds what is missing from the Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron pieties, “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policies of brazen expansion of Israeli colonial settlements in violation of international law and U.N. Security Council (SC) resolutions simmers frustration and anger among the Palestinian people leading to this dramatically worsened crisis.” As he told the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), “The blatant disregard of UNGA and SC resolutions by Israel, reneging the two-state solution [for Israel and Palestine, living side by side], poses a serious credibility challenge to the UNSC and perpetuates a profound injustice.”
In the battle of competing quotes Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur for Palestine, invited EU President Ursula von de Leyen to apply her resounding statement from last year to Israel, “Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming—these are acts of pure terror. And we have to call it as such.”
She added sardonically, “I look forward to the same declaration by the president on Israel’s cutting off electricity, water and food in Gaza. If not, people could think that European institutions do not value the protection of Palestinian children, women and men as much as that of Ukrainians.” One might put on the honor roll Volker Türk, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and even Secretary General António Guterres who have both spoken against an indiscriminate siege and assault on Gaza. “Crucial life-saving supplies, including fuel, food and water must be allowed into Gaza,” Guterres said, “We need rapid and any unimpeded humanitarian access now.” Türk pronounced, “The imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).
