Israel über alles
ONCE the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague endorsed the substance of South Africa’s case against Israel (albeit not in its entirety) last week, the Zionist project’s international collaborators were as desperate for a distraction as Israel. The latter promptly provided it with the allegation that a dozen UNRWA employees participated in the Oct 7 atrocities in southern Israel.
Led by the US, Germany and UK, a number of Western nations and their allies suspended their crucial funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was set up in 1949, in the wake of the Nakba, to provide means of subsistence to Palestinian refugees. These include basic education, primary healthcare and other vital services. Its operations stretch from Gaza and East Jerusalem to the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
A secondary distraction was provided by a drone attack that killed three US personnel and injured dozens in Jordan. US media reports suggest the drone wasn’t intercepted based on the suspicion that it might be ‘friendly’ (Israeli), and that the US authorities had no idea where it came from, although they showed no hesitation in blaming ‘Iranian-allied’ militias and vowing vengeance. That’s the latter-day equivalent of the much-mocked command to ‘round up the usual suspects’, but perhaps the bigger question is why there should be a US military base where Jordan’s borders meet those of Syria and Iraq — or anywhere else in the country.
‘Guilty until proved innocent’ also applies to UNRWA, which has previously been accused by Israel of preaching hatred in its schools — which, mind you, help to place the Palestinians among the best-educated Arab populations. The accusation cannot be taken seriously in a milieu where reciting the true history of Israel as a colonial-settler society is deemed antisemitic, and there is no equivalent focus on the pernicious nonsense drummed into the innocent minds of Israeli schoolchildren.
The ICJ’s interim verdict won’t make much of a difference.
UNRWA has suspended nine of its accused employees pending an internal probe, and two others are among the dozens of staff killed in Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza. It is distressing that the accusations involving 0.01pc of its 13,000 employees, whether or not true, have been deemed sufficient by so many Western states to cut off funding to one of the only organisations that may be able to avert a famine. All too many of them, meanwhile, continue to arm and diplomatically abet the perpetrators of what the ICJ deems a potential genocide.
That impression was consolidated on Sunday when 11 members of the Netanyahu cabinet attended a congregation in Jerusalem tagged the ‘Victory of Israel Conference: Settlement Brings Security’, which called for the ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians away from the Gaza Strip. That not only defies the ICJ’s interim injunction against incitement to genocide, but also reflects the Nazi attitude towards European Jews before the Germans opted for gas chambers.
Notwithstanding the ‘never again’ slogan of 80 years ago, the Zionists brought with them to the ‘promised land’ the Nazi concepts of lebensraum and untermenschen — territorial expansion and lesser beings, the first applying to European Jews and the second to Palestinians. The devotion to their would-be exterminators stretched to hiring one of Hitler’s leading henchmen, Otto Skorzeny, as a Mossad hitman — after he had, equally deplorably, served as military adviser to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
It was the Nazi regime’s expansionism, rather than the related Judeocide, that propelled the British and eventually joint Anglo-American response — although the latter was also instigated by the Soviet advance into Eastern Europe after the Red Army had turned the tide against the Wehrmacht. It remains to be seen how far the Israel Defence Forces will go before any nation other than the dispersed Palestinians steps up to challenge the Israelis.
The resistance so far has been restricted to so-called non-state actors. Saudi Arabia remains keen on establishing formal ties with Israel. Arab and other Muslim states have vaguely backed South Africa’s case at the ICJ, but none of them has officially signed up as a party to the dispute, as Germany has disgustingly done on behalf of Israel, even as it staves off its own neo-Nazis.
Whatever the ICJ’s verdict, it is likely to come too late to halt the genocide. It may depend on how far Israel goes henceforth, but its establishment is accustomed to defying UN injunctions — as long as the pecuniary and moral assistance from the US and the rest of the West remains intact. It does not have much to worry about on that score. Its self-conception of uber alles remains intact among its acolytes, whose every action is directed towards enabling Israel to achieve its clearly genocidal and arguably Nazi-like aims.
Published in Dawn, January 31st, 2024