I Refuse

Ben Wildsmith

The situation in Gaza has become so dire as to override any necessity for nuance or both-sideism.

Over the course of this tragedy, the decent world has been at pains to balance mounting discomfort at the IDF’s actions with the gravity of events on October 7^th.

‘Of course I condemn Hamas,’ presaged the mildest questioning or critique of Israel’s response to the attack. Most people, I suspect, wanted to believe in Israel’s rectitude, its fundamental adherence to the values we claim, despite lavish historical contradiction, as defining western civilisation.

Beyond respect for Israel’s immediate tragedy stood the fathomless trauma of the holocaust.

Formulating responses to events in Gaza was rather like bringing up a difficult subject with somebody one knows to be grieving. The matter may be urgent, but basic humanity dictates that allowances be made and words chosen carefully.

Staring today, though, at the skeletal frames of children whose eyes seem to comprehend everything and nothing all at once, I can find no more reserves of politesse. Israel has insisted on assuming responsibility for feeding Gazans.

Pro-Hamas

Aid organisations have been slandered, driven out, and killed by a regime that insists they, like seemingly every international institution, are antisemitic and pro-Hamas.

Listening to British doctors describing the gunshot wounds they are treating is truly horrifying. One day those shot queuing for food have all been shot in the groin, the next in the shoulder, the next in the leg in a seemingly coordinated game played by the IDF, ‘the most moral army on earth’.

Today, plans were submitted to the Knesset outlining settlement plans for Gaza once the Palestinians have been expelled. There is to be a university, coastal tourism, and a focus on state-of-the-art agriculture. Settler families have already signed up to move into their new Utopia by the sea.

Israel’s justifications for its actions in Gaza are rendered nonsensical by the actions of its citizens in the West Bank. There, without input from Hamas, Palestinians are being driven from their homes at the dead of night by settlers who apparently enjoy the protection of the IDF. Peaceful Palestinians in an area governed by the pliable Palestinian Authority would, you would think, be recognised by Israel as potential partners in whatever emerges from this conflict. Instead, their collective punishment escalates as well.

Political abstract

Pro-Israeli voices in the media and online increasingly talk as if Palestinian people are a political abstract. There is no such thing as ‘Palestinians’ they tell us. These people are simply nomadic Arabs who arrived seeking work during the British Mandate. Despite DNA testing that ties Gazans to the area into prehistory, Israel seeks to paint them as interlopers and erase their ethnic identity. There are many modes of genocide, some of them linguistic.

This business in Gaza is the moral fulcrum of our age. I have absolutely no doubt that the protestors who have been arrested for belonging or showing support to newly proscribed pro-Palestinian groups will emerge from this with their reputations enhanced.

By contrast, the weasling politicians and journalists who have whistled Israel’s tune even as the evidence of moral bankruptcy became undeniable will never wash the stain from their names.

There are British people who have travelled to join the IDF as a matter of choice. They are free to do so with impunity and welcome to return here without sanction. Meanwhile, Shamima Begum, brainwashed and trafficked into Isis at the age of fifteen has been stripped of her citizenship and abandoned in a Syrian refugee camp by successive UK governments as if she were an existential threat to the UK.

Of course, her crimes weren’t committed under a thin veil of western respectability, complete with Eurovision entries and cheerleading from Sharon Osbourne.

Balance

I look at earlier pieces of mine that tried, painfully, to balance off this atrocity as a morally neutral tragedy and I’m ashamed of them.

What Israel is doing is a barbarous offence against humanity and anybody who claims not to see that now is either a fool or a liar.

Whatever fear I had of condemnation for speaking obvious truths about this has evaporated into the endless, sobbing disgrace that Israel has inflicted upon our times.

I refuse to be complicit. I refuse.