by JONATHAN COOK
As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.
Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.
Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.
The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.
In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic cleansing.
Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.
So parlous is the state of western reporting, from a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize on any small signs of progress.
Next, the Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements there”.
At the weekend, the Independent decided the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”
Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.
Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.
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