AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
As the Israelis’ killing fields switch their deadly focus from Gaza to Lebanon and the tinder box of the Middle East region teeters on the brink of conflagration you wonder where is this going to end. As the death toll and injury of innocent civilians mounts by the thousands you may ask, as I do, what can be done to stop the Israelis’ massacre of civilians?
The descriptions of chaotic scenes as up to a million Lebanese flee the south of their country ahead of Israeli bombing are reminiscent of the mayhem on the roads of France in the summer of 1940 as desperate crowds crawled southwards attempting to escape the Nazi advance and were attacked repeatedly by German planes.
The actions of the Israeli Government and their defence forces (IDF) have shown that they can do whatever they like and get away with it without consequence. This has been happening not only throughout the year-long war and the Israelis’ disproportionate response to Hamas’ October 7 atrocities but for decades before that in the inhuman treatment of Palestinians and continuing encroachment of their lands.
They will continue to get away with it until the US, the EU and governments around world act to make to bring the killing rampage to an end by halting arms supply and trade with Israel– by putting an economic gun to Benjamin Netanyahu’s head.
The Israelis always have a justification when targets like schools and hospitals are hit by air strikes, missiles and bombs causing dozens of deaths and injuries to children, women, the elderly and infirm and reducing Gaza to rubble. These places they say, are hideouts, weapon stores or whatever for Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Condemning their actions, like the fiendish exploding of weaponised pagers in Lebanon recently, as war crimes, has absolutely no effect.
How can it, when the US is pleading for cease fires on the one hand and arming Israel on the other, sometimes covertly where the spending in dozens of smaller amounts doesn’t require to be passed by the US House of Representatives. While Israel has a burgeoning arms industry of its own , it cannot supply the full range of weapons that it needs like the aircraft, bombs and missiles supplied by the US.
A curious point is that we read of the Iran-backed Hezbollah but never read of the accurate linking of US-backed Israel. It could be said that that America is waging a proxy war on the people of Gaza and Lebanon.
The US provides the largest share of weapons, nearly 70% according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), that go to Israel, followed by Germany and with smaller amounts from Italy and the UK. Britain recently cancelled licences for 30 arms suppliers on the grounds that Israel was preventing humanitarian aid reaching the starving, wounded homeless people of Gaza.
Israeli trade was worth $58bn last year, its main exports are diamonds, integrated circuits and measuring equipment, with 27% going to the US. The rest of their trade is in much smaller amounts, Ireland bought $3.85bn worth in 2022. We should stop trading with Israel, so should everyone, to cut off the economic flow which enables Israel’s war-mongering.
Nothing else will stop Netanyahu and his Government deployment of the IDF: not the realisation that they will be forever condemning their own people to the threat of reprisals and revenge by militant organisations for the Palestinians and Lebanese they have slaughtered and oppressed.
The condemnation by other nations for their actions won’t stop them, nor fear that they their attack on Lebanon will tip the region into full scale war. They cannot see, as brutal colonisers hundreds of years ago could not see, that the only way to peace is by sharing the land they are occupying in Palestine.
Other nations, the US in particular, are not prepared to stop the arms flow and impose economic sanctions. Vested interests in terms of arms dealing, trade and most shamefully votes in America’s November elections come before the lives of others, unseen, whose piled-up bodies – over 50,000 in Gaza and already in just a week over 600 in Palestine – could bury the White House.
Nor can the world see that cutting off arms and trade with Israel is an investment in peace.
