Master and servant

by WOLFGANG STREEK

US-Israel weapons production IMAGE/Al Jazeera

The Israeli massacre in Gaza is a catastrophe, and not just for the city’s tortured inmates, languishing for decades under a merciless occupation. The United States in particular, but also Germany, will forever be closely associated with this unrelenting slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children, a slaughter that both countries continue to underwrite materially and diplomatically. Two-and-a-half months into the mass killing, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have restored some hope of survival to those Gazans still remaining after the hell of continual bombing and shelling. By that time, following the Hamas breakout and the murderous attack on kibbutzim close to the Gaza wall, more than 20,000 Gazans had been killed, 8,700 of them children and 4,400 women, and 50,000 wounded, compared to 121 dead Israeli soldiers, one fifth of them victims of friendly fire or traffic accidents. Since the beginning of the war, the Israeli air force claims to have bombed 22,000 ‘terrorist’ targets: more than 300 a day, every day, in an area the size of Munich.

As the year draws to an end, 90% of the roughly 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip have been made homeless, chased by the Israeli military from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip and back, told to shelter in allegedly safe zones which are subsequently bombed. There is hunger verging on starvation, scant medical care, no fuel, no regular electricity supply, and no indication that the slaughter will end any time soon. The reason given by the US for vetoing the Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire was that this would be ‘unrealistic’. Meanwhile the German government, led by its feminist foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, demands ‘humanitarian pauses’ as an alternative to peace, after which the killings are to continue until ‘Hamas’, prepared for death by a free UNRWA meal, will finally be ‘rooted out’.

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