La Jornada editorial on October 25, 2023
The Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Antonio Guterres, denounced before the Security Council the “clear violations of humanitarian law” in Gaza and recalled that the brutality of the attacks perpetrated by Hamas on the 7th of this month does not justify the collective punishment against the Palestinian people.
The head of the multilateral body lamented that over the past 56 years, Palestinians “have seen their land relentlessly devoured by settlements and ravaged by violence, their economy suffocated, their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been fading.” While Guterres’ speech was a factual, albeit tempered, description of the ongoing violence experienced by millions of Palestinians under Israel’s yoke, Israel’s foreign minister and his representative to the United Nations reacted viscerally.
Ambassador Gilad Erdan demanded the resignation of the official and assured that he would not meet with him again, while Foreign Minister Eli Cohen asked the international official “in what world he lives”, described Hamas as the new Nazis who want to destroy the Western world and assured that this group must be annihilated.
One could reply to Minister Cohen that Guterres and the millions of people in solidarity with the Palestinian cause live in a world in which Israel has nuclear weapons, one of the most powerful armies in the world, a state-of-the-art air force and perhaps the most extensive and bloodthirsty spy agency, the Mossad; in this world, Tel Aviv uses these capabilities to subject the Palestinian people to a bloody occupation.
It is also worth reminding them that it is a State that murders 10 people for every one it loses, keeps its alleged victimizers locked up, deprives them of electricity, water, fuel, food and medical supplies whenever it feels like it, bombs them indiscriminately and expels them from their homes in open violation of international law and the most elementary observance of human rights. Such a state cannot justify these actions with “the right to self-defense”.
Tel Aviv could not sustain this denialist position of genocide against the Palestinian people, nor behave with the arrogance and insolence with which it does if it did not have the backing of the Western powers, starting with the United States and Germany, which encouraged it to continue with the destruction of Gaza, despite the fact that every 15 minutes a minor dies under Israeli fire.
Such is the unconditional support of the leaders of the West for the ultra-right government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, that they not only encourage the massacre against the Palestinians, but also annul the rights of their own citizens who dare to denounce the facts or even describe them with a minimum of objectivity: Germany, France and the United Kingdom have banned any demonstration in support of Palestine, and the United States has arbitrarily arrested hundreds of participants in acts of protest.
London has gone even further, criticizing the police for not cracking down hard enough on demonstrations repudiating Israel’s slaughter, as well as forcing the BBC to refer to Hamas members as terrorists, thereby trampling on the independence of a media that had made an editorial decision to call them militants in order to maintain neutrality.
It is clear that the West has become co-responsible for Tel Aviv’s war of extermination, so the rest of the international community must close ranks around the figure of Guterres and take up his words to draw up a peace plan to put an end to the barbarism, guaranteeing the harmonious coexistence of the two peoples who share this Levantine territory.
Source: La Jornada translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English