Are Ben, Joe and Rishi headed for the Hague?

A few questions this morning, to see if your moral compass has been bent into a horse-shoe shape.

1. Do you think Israel has been and is guilty of war crimes? That’s pretty easy – YES. Long before October 7, it kept the Palestinian people, or 2.3 million of them living on the Gaza strip.  The unemployment rate there  was 80%, Palestinians depended on Israel for water, electricity, power.  Since shortly after October 7, Israel has been reducing the Gaza strip to rubble, killing over 10,000 defenceless and innocent people, with a third of those reckoned to be children.  So YES, it would be safe to say that Israel is guilty of war crimes.
2. Is the US,the UK or the EU guilty of war crimes? Well, you might be tempted to say no, since no troops from those regions are engaged in the fighting. But all three supply moral support and weaponry to Israel. So if Israel is a bank robber and you’re supplying the weapons and get-away car, are you guilty of bank robbery? Most judges would say yes. The same applies to those three powers who urge Israel to have “a pause” in the fighting rather than a ceasefire, because a pause by definition means you’re good to go with more bloodshed when the pause ends.
3. What are the chances that those involved in the bombardment of helpless people in Gaza will be tried as war criminals when the dust in Gaza finally settles? Will Benjamin Netenyahu, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and other supporters of slaughter by Israel find themselves in the dock of the International Criminal Court? Most definitely NO. Neither George Bush nor Tony Blair were held to account for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraquis, so why should Netenyahu, Biden or Sumak stand trial? If you seriously believe they might, you don’t know a lot about the way power works in the twenty-first century.

  I’m no fan of Leo Varadkar, but he did warn in the days after October 7 that lawless action by Israel would risk the draining away of public sympathy for Israel, and so it’s proved. He also said more recently that Israel’s actions in Gaza look rather more like revenge than defence of Israel.

So take off those comforting rose-tinted glasses that help you see might is the same as right. Ask the pitiful people of Gaza, presently trooping to the south of Gaza, even though they know the Israelis will bomb them to smithereens too. They’ll tell you.