When the Music Stops
For eighteen months, politicians, the press and commentators held the line defending and excusing Israel's actions in Gaza. Now, the dam is beginning to break. Why?
Something strange has been happening over the past fortnight. On May 6th, Conservative MP Mark Pritchard withdrew his support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying, ‘I got it wrong and I condemn Israel for what it is doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza and indeed in the West Bank.’
On the same day, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times published an article entitled “The west’s shameful silence on Gaza”, condemning European leaders for their failure to confront Israel’s actions in the Strip, stating that, ‘the longer it goes on, the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.’
On May 8th, The Economist, a publication with a colourful history when it comes to its positions on wars, conquests, and states with patchy records regarding human rights, published its own editorial entitled ‘The war in Gaza must end.’ In its opening, the editorial presents the familiar refrain of “Israeli officials say”, only now with a tone of ironic disbelief: ‘This time, Israeli officials insist, things will be different.’
Days later, on May 10th, The Independent published an editorial demanding to ‘end the deafening silence on Gaza now.’ Published the following Sunday morning as a full front-page headline, the article castigated British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his silence, stating that he ‘should be ashamed that he has said nothing.’
And in The Guardian, after months of engaging in the rote journalistic style when reporting on Israel and attendant discourses—careful stenography of Israeli military and government accounts; prefixing reference to any official Gaza authority with an obligatory ‘the Hamas-run’; dispassionate reporting that takes pains to merely recount government and ministerial positions without verging into questions of agency or complicity—the first weeks of May saw a marked and notable shift in the paper’s approach to and position on Israel’s assault on Gaza.
On May 11th, the same day as the above Independent front-page, The Guardian published an editorial describing Israel’s plan for ‘a Gaza without Palestinians,’ and asking, ‘what is this, if not genocidal?’ Compare and contrast with an editorial from September 2024 which describes Gaza’s situation, in more taciturn language, as simply ‘a nightmare that does not end.’
There appear to be shifts and rumbles occurring on the diplomatic front as well. On May 7th, the Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp called for an urgent review of the EU’s Association Agreement with Israel over concerns that Israel is in violation of Article 2 of the treaty, which states that such associations ‘shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles.’ Veldkamp’s initiative has since been backed by representatives of Belgium, Finland, France, Portugal and Sweden.
The initiative represents a significant and growing rift within the EU on the question of Israel, particularly with EU President Ursula von der Leyen, whose commitment to excusing and defending Israel’s violations of International Law has prompted calls for her to be charged with complicity in Israel’s war crimes.
After over a year and a half of institutional obfuscations and silence, it appears that a dam is beginning to break. The sudden shift from foot-dragging to forthrightness provokes new questions: Why? Why now? To what end?
For over eighteen months (and many years prior), the institutional stance on Gaza has been a combination of denial, Omertà, and complicity. Despite the candour with which Israel’s political and military leadership outlined their genocidal intent for the Strip from the very outset—and the de facto ultimate objective of Israel’s gradual encroachment upon Palestinian territory in the Occupied West Bank for many decades beforehand, with similar implications for Gaza’s ultimate fate—political leaders, international diplomats and political commentators have engaged in a decades-long dance of deflection and obfuscation regarding the State of Israel, its modus operandi, its intentions, its ultimate ends and the means by which it intends to secure them.
As anyone willing or able to bear witness to the Palestinian plight with eyes unclouded understands, the maintenance of Israel’s legitimacy and credibility on the international stage has long been dependent upon this practice of collective unseeing; DARVO on a global scale.
Far from being a new development, this practice goes all the way back to the State of Israel’s founding in 1948. In the West, that moment is understood as a moment of liberation for the Jewish People, and of redemption for the failures of Western Liberalism following its belated confrontation with Nazism.
For the Palestinians—the people upon whom this moment occurred, against whom these redemptive actions were taken—it is known as the Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’, an event of mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing which saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly ejected from their homes and many more slaughtered, buried in unmarked mass graves that Israel now touts to tourists as its idyllic beaches and national parks, or to real estate investors as empty land awaiting an apartment block.
For nearly eight decades, this chasm between the objective reality of Israel’s brutal creation and maintenance, and its cultivated perception as a liberal dream in the desert, has been the terrain of discursive conflict between the State’s opponents and advocates. The former work to bring the inherent, horrific violence that subtends Israel’s daily reproduction to light; the latter perpetually repackage these violences within emotive narratives of persecution and victimisation; of a fragile people trying to eke out a living in a region of enmity; of Western Liberalism’s own Brave Little Toaster.
Since October 7th, this dynamic has only amplified and accelerated, as apologists for Israel’s violence in politics and the media tripping over themselves to keep up with and justify the State’s latest act of wanton mass slaughter. Blockades of food and water, destruction of hospitals, purging entire cities, bombing refugees living in tents in the so-called “safe zones” to which they subsequently fled, the deliberate shooting of pregnant women and children, the mass killing of journalists, the destruction of UNESCO World Heritage sites and ancient religious monuments, the killing and arrests of doctors, the mass detention and torture of civilians in military prisons with documented abuses that equal and surpass the worst American actions at Abu Ghraib (that we know of). All of these actions, it should be noted, are war crimes, violations of International Humanitarian Law. Each violation is manifold in number, and there are many more that could be listed.
Nothing of what Israel is doing and has been doing in Gaza is new. The atrocities that the Israeli military now commits against the Palestinian people on a daily basis are merely an acceleration of the logics and techniques that have grounded Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and its orientation towards what we might call the Palestinian Question since the country’s founding in 1948. One need only look back to the notorious massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 to understand that Israel’s murderous and, in the final analysis, genocidal designs upon the Palestinian people have been clear and unambiguous for decades, however repressed or expressed in particular junctures.
For a long time now, but particularly since October 7th, 2023, the attitude of western governments, institutions and media outlets toward Israel and its actions against Gaza has been one big game of Hot Potato. Having vociferously declared their steadfast support for and unwavering commitment to Israel, its security, its regional objectives, and its embeddedness within the liberal international order for so many decades, these groups have opted (for varying, operationally particular reasons) to redouble their commitments to the status quo rather than attempt the difficult and troublesome task of disrupting the uneasy balance that was forged over decades prior.
It is hard to believe that any of these groups or individuals were really unclear about what Israel’s ultimate aims were after October 7th. Again, the desire among Israel’s political and military leadership to cleanse Gaza and eliminate the Palestinian people in toto has been made repeatedly, forcefully clear since October 8th, 2023. It is more likely that they naively expected Netanyahu and the IDF to repeat a course of action it has generally followed in recent decades, and respond to Hamas’ attack with overwhelming, disproportionate force, as they did in 2008, 2014 or 2021, before eventually reverting to a justifiably elevated baseline of securitisation, policing and suppression of the Gaza strip.
Had such a sequence of events played out, then it would surely have been strategically unwise for them to speak out or intervene rather than simply let the Israelis enact their perfunctory act of vengeance and save the lamentations for when the dust had finally settled. The news producers and paper editors would be able to report and publish with minimal angry phone calls from this or that interest group, the politicians would get to keep accepting plush diplomatic trips to Tel-Aviv or to see the Wailing Wall, this or that nation and its various arms manufacturers would be free to keep selling arms, munitions, drones and bombs to ensure Israel’s security, and international bodies and NGOs would be able to continue their admirable work of dubious efficacy without having to speak out and expose the gaping chasm between the proclamations of International Law and Human Rights and the ability to actually enforce it – as is now happening with increasing frequency.
It is hard to believe that these groups of highly educated people were unable to deduce the full scale of Israel’s designs for Gaza from the State’s words and actions. Everybody surely knew where this was all ultimately going. But one suspects they shared in a naive and self-preservatory hope that the final cataclysm would come still further down the line; that they could ride it out during their term and tenure, cash the rhetorical cheques of excuse and explication, let Israel do what Israel does, and then when the final, conclusive act of elimination happens further down the line (‘Please, please, just a little further down the line.’), look back with sorrow and explain how they honestly tried everything they could during their brief tenure.
Whether or not this is the reality of how these politicians, organisations and individuals have approached the question of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians, it is how it has looked. And in this most recent conjuncture, they all participated in a collective act of mass delusion that, despite its repeated accelerations and radicalisations, the Israeli war machine would eventually wind down; that however close to The Line—yes, That Line—the IDF would come to tread, it would surely never actually cross it.
‘Certainly, they do not intend to cross it. Please tell me they won’t cross it. Please understand that we neither expected nor intended for them to cross it. Surely you must understand that we gave them license to do anything on the implicit understanding that “anything” did not, would not, could not include crossing it. You must understand that we wrote the blank cheque on the understanding that there are certain figures one simply does not write.’
And what has happened now, after eighteen months of equivocation and excuses, of deflection from reality and denial of what is plain and obvious for all to see, many of the people who did the institutional heavy-lifting of legitimising Israel’s actions in national and global discourse are realising that this accelerating war machine has no intention of slowing down; that Netanyahu intends to press on and finish the job; that, left to its decisively chosen course of action, Gaza will be ethnically cleansed of the Palestinian people; that an act of genocide, both de facto and de jure, will be carried out on a global stage, having been handwaived, excused and justified at every single step before where it could have been prevented; and that these politicians, editors and commentators have 𝑥 number of years left in their term, their tenure, their career, and that the Israelis intend to finish the job sooner than that; that they will not be gone long before the final cataclysm; that this will happen, that this is happening, on their watch.
And that makes them very nervous.
Because the music might be about to stop. And the hot potato is still in their hands.
And they can feel their skin beginning to blister.