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IS THERE ANY RED LINE THAT ISRAEL WILL BE HELD TO? BIDEN HAS JUST
CONFIRMED THE ANSWER IS NO  
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Owen Jones
November 13, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Following butchering and starvation, Israel has ignored US demands
over aid for Gaza. There have been no consequences _

A Palestinian child at the site of an Israeli strike on tents of
displaced people, Deir Al-Balah, Gaza, 13 November 2024. , Photograph:
Ramadan Abed/Reuters

 

This is a story about an apparently invincible fortress: the west’s
official narrative about Israel’s war on Gaza. No matter how
depraved the atrocity, or overwhelming the evidence, or confessed-to
the crime, the fortress will not crumble. In fact, even when Israel
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main sponsor, the US, as it did this week, nothing changes.

The case in point here starts with a letter that the US sent to Israel
last month, which set out in detail how life-saving aid was being
systematically blocked from entering Gaza and threatened undefined
action if specific demands to reverse the siege were not taken within
30 days. As the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen suggested, the
letter was a political ruse
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voters in the run-up to the election (given most Democratic voters
correctly believe that Israel
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genocide).

And what happened? Despite a coalition of aid agencies concluding
Israel “failed to meet
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of the specific criteria set out in the US letter”, and indeed
“took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the
ground”, offering a score card
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detailed Israel’s overwhelming non-compliance with supposed US
demands, the deadline passed on 12 November and the US did nothing.
“US says no policy consequences for Israel despite lack of Gaza
aid”, as a headline in the Washington Post
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put it.

An official narrative isn’t a conspiracy put together in
smoke-filled rooms. It is a form of groupthink, forged in elite
political, policymaking and media circles, cementing clear parameters
on what is deemed respectable, mainstream and credible, and what is
not. The narrative that prevails today in countries such as the US,
Germany and Britain is that Israel is a western-style democracy that
has a “right to defend itself” from terror, with a permissible
side discussion about whether the response is “proportionate”.
Politicians will indulge in some platitudinous handwringing about
civilian suffering, and make abstract references to the need to abide
by international law, without ever identifying any of the rampant,
egregious violations.

This narrative bears no relation to the facts, which have pointed to
one of the great crimes of our age ever since Israeli leaders and
officials variously promised to deprive “human animals
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of the necessities of life, impose collective punishment
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remove “all the restraints
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on soldiers and cause “maximum damage
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to Gaza. Two months ago, it was revealed that both the US Agency for
International Development and the state department’s refugee bureau
had concluded by April that Israel was deliberately blocking aid
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Gaza. According to US law, this necessitated an arms embargo on
Israel, but the Biden administration simply ignored their assessment.

Israel appears to be able to do anything without the fortress falling.
It could safely ignore the tears of British doctor Nizam Mamode
yesterday as he told MPs that Palestinian children were deliberately
being shot in the head “day after day
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by Israeli snipers and drones, a testimony effectively corroborated by
dozens of US-based medical professionals
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served in Gaza. Mamode had worked in Rwanda during the genocide, but
declared he had never witnessed any horror on the scale of Gaza.

The narrative withstands the UN’s most senior humanitarian official,
Joyce Msuya, declaring, “The entire population of northern Gaza is
at risk of dying
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without a scratch when an IDF spokesman declares that violently
displaced survivors will not be allowed to return there. The Israeli
newspaper Haaretz, in an editorial, even stated that the “Israeli
military is conducting an ethnic cleansing operation
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the northern Gaza Strip”, but the de-facto cartel of western media
outlets and politicians keeps the hideous truth at bay.

Nothing leaves a dent. Not UN analysis finding that 70% of verified
violent deaths
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Gaza are women and children, with the age most represented between
five and nine. Not 710 babies killed
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Israel’s military in Gaza by this September. Not Israel wiping out a
minimum of 902 entire families
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last month, with whole lifelines, from days’ old infants to
great-grandmothers, permanently erased from the civil registry.

Starvation, butchering children, ethnic cleansing, violently erasing
a healthcare system
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all done deliberately by a state whose leaders have not even pretended
not to believe in the collective guilt of a civilian population. If
the official narrative lined up with reality, it would go like this.
Israel is a state perpetrating a genocidal bloodbath involving not
just bombs and bullets but alleged torture
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violence
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Those who defended or belittled this abomination would be publicly
disgraced, those who facilitated it would face arrest. There would
have been a deafening chorus from our politicians, media and public
figures many months ago, demanding something, anything, to make this
end.

But no matter what the people of Gaza
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prevails.

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_Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist_

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Genocide
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* President Joe Biden
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* US Military Aid
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