The World has failed the Palestinians

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is already wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, is set to mount what may be the largest and most calamitous war crime of this century and possibly the last one too. The Israeli military will follow his orders and drive a million walking skeletons out of Gaza City and then occupy the ruins. His plan to seize all of Gaza and corral the remaining 2 million or so Gazans in a giant concentration camp on the border with Egypt, appears to have been dampened down by the military as ‘unachievable’.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer asked Netanyahu to ‘re-consider’ his plans. He made no mention of what might happen if he did not. But then Netanyahu has always known that the United Kingdom would do nothing and that the United States would give carte blanche to whatever he wished to do and that the European Union and most of the Arab World would either collude or sit by, wringing their collective hands in controlled impotence.

The World has failed the Palestinians.

Not the thousands of Palestinian doctors, nurses and medical staff, many of whom have been targeted, arrested or killed (over 1,500 at the last count). Not the brave journalists inside Gaza who have live streamed a genocide and who have witnessed over 200 of their colleagues being killed, often methodically and deliberately.

The World has failed the Palestinians.

Not the Non-Governmental Organizations; the brave staff of the United Nations agencies and other charities who have fought against desperate odds to get food and medicine to a starving population and not the volunteer doctors and nurses who for so long have told the World what they are having to do and of the horrors of what they are witnessing. And not by the millions across the World who have marched and demonstrated and shown up their morally vacuous leaders.

The World has failed the Palestinians. It has failed the 60,000 plus civilians mainly women and children killed, 70% of whom had been living in residential buildings; the incalculable number of Palestinians lying dead under the rubble and the almost 2000 half-starved people shot dead while running the gauntlet of the IDF in order to try and reach the wholly inadequate amount of aid being policed by mercenaries working for the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Fund’. It has failed the hundreds of thousands wounded, often lying and dying in agony for want of the most basic medicines. It has failed the numerous children brought into collapsing hospitals with bullets in their heads; or the groups of children brought whose testicles were targeted by drones.

The Palestinians have been failed by the leaders of the so called ‘free World’, the United States in particular, whose taxpayers have paid for Gaza to be turned into an uninhabitable moonscape. These countries used to talk of an ‘international rules-based order’, they made great play for the need for human rights to be observed, but as we were to discover these rules and norms were to apply to occupied Ukrainians, and not to occupied Palestinians. The Palestinians have been failed by the Europeans and in particular the former colonial power, Britain, which bears such heavy historic responsibility for the mess it helped leave behind, but also by Germany whose leaders give every impression of having failed to learn from their own history of igniting genocide and holocaust. The Palestinians have been failed by their leadership; by the zealots of Hamas who gave Netanyahu the greenlight he had hankered after for 30 years and by the enfeebled gerontocracy of the Palestinian Authority. They have been failed by the Arab World; by the Saudis, UAE and Egypt, all of whom could have put real pressure on President Trump, but who have stood by and watched. And the Palestinians have been failed by an ineffectual UN Secretary-General, given to mouthing platitudes. (It is a little-known fact that the UN Secretary-General and President Trump have not even spoken directly since the latter was re-elected, which gives a clear indication of how much clout the United Nations now has). The Palestinians have been betrayed by big-tech and the arms companies who have made great profits and been able to experiment almost at will on over 2 million people living in the most densely populated 30 square miles on the planet. All of this will have enormous ramifications for every one of us in the future.

Future generations will ask incredulously how this was all allowed to happen in plain view and why it was never stopped.  All of us need to think very carefully before answering because we need to be able to explain to them what we actually did.

*Mark Seddon is a former Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Ban ki moon & former Adviser to the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly