“The cries of the innocent will haunt us forever if we stay silent.” These are the words of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, speaking at an event in Boston this week about Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza. And who could disagree? What is taking place in Palestine now is one of the most profound and shocking moral catastrophes of our time.
Already for months on end, Israeli military forces have been pounding the besieged, starving and largely homeless population of Gaza with relentless aerial bombardment. Cut off from the outside world, Palestinian survivors have been forced to document the crisis in real time, sharing stories, images and footage of mass graves, destroyed buildings and abandoned bodies. And with no end in sight, the United States continues to pump money and weapons into Israel to prolong the onslaught.
But on Sunday, to cap off his US visit, Varadkar will visit the White House for a St Patrick’s Day photo opportunity with president Joe Biden. At their meeting on Friday, some concerned words were no doubt exchanged about the plight of Palestinian civilians, but Varadkar was clear in advance about the purpose of the conversation: “I’m not here to tell him off or tick him off … Let’s never forget that he’s been a very good friend to Ireland.”
This illustrates neatly the Irish Government’s approach to the war on Gaza. Strong straightforward criticism is reserved for the relatively small (and increasingly globally isolated) state of Israel. The US, on the other hand – which supplies about 80% of Israel’s weapons imports, as well as billions of dollars in aid – is treated as a kind of neutral third party, and of course as a “very good friend”. This way, our Government can bask in the moral glow of condemning the bombers, while preserving a cosy relationship with those supplying the bombs.
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But what is happening in Gaza is not only Israel’s war: it is a US war, and it is most particularly Biden’s war. Israel simply could not afford to carry out this prolonged and resource-intensive assault on the Palestinian people without US money and weaponry. Polling shows that a majority of Americans want a permanent ceasefire; Biden’s support for Israel even appears to be damaging his chances in the upcoming presidential race. And yet he’s refusing to listen to his voters, and has repeatedly bypassed Congress, in order to keep supplying Israel with the resources on which it relies.
Conspiracy theorists may like to imagine that Israel exercises some outsize influence on the US, but the reality is quite the opposite. It is the US that exerts enormous power over Israel – and previous American presidents have been prepared to use that power. In the 1980s, in response to illegal Israeli attacks on Iraq and Lebanon, Ronald Reagan not only criticised the attacks in public, but also restricted US aid and military assistance to Israel in response, helping to force the withdrawal of troops. In the early 1990s, George H.W. Bush likewise used US aid to Israel as a bargaining chip in international negotiations. If Biden is refusing to leverage these same resources in order to make Israel comply with US policy, the only reasonable conclusion is that this war is already US policy.
Many experts in international law are describing the war on Gaza as a genocide. Many more may come to agree, when the true scale of death and devastation is revealed. After all, Israel has not permitted any external media organisations to enter Gaza since last October, except under strict military escort. Palestinian journalists inside the territory have meanwhile been killed at a rate indicative of intentional targeting. In the whole of last year, 99 journalists worldwide were killed in the course of their reporting; 72 of those were Palestinian journalists killed by Israel. This prohibition on external media and consistent killing of reporters suggests a concerted effort to suppress the facts.
Since the start of the onslaught, more than 65,000 tonnes of primarily US-made explosives have been dropped on the Gaza Strip. Each new airstrike rains down more devastation, demolishing more infrastructure, trapping more helpless people under the rubble, inflicting more catastrophic injuries. Each additional death leaves behind more irreparable grief and heartbreak. And now, as Israel continues to block the flow of aid, a manmade famine is taking hold. Human beings are slowly and excruciatingly dying of starvation, not through crop failure or natural disaster, but as a result of intentional Israeli and US policy.
At the time of writing, the official death toll in Gaza stands at more than 30,000. As horrifying as this figure is, it is probably an underestimate. The Gaza health ministry, relying on figures from catastrophically overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, has likely failed to keep up with the rapid pace of destruction. We simply do not know how many Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli state since October of last year.
What we do know is that each one of these killings has been financed and supported by our “very good friend” in the White House. In the short time I have spent preparing this piece, I have seen images of one of Gaza’s few remaining UN aid facilities hit by an airstrike, just one day after the centre’s co-ordinates were shared with Israeli security forces; images of the protruding bones of an emaciated Palestinian child; of the rubble of the majestic 14th-century Barqouq castle irreparably demolished by bombs; and of Israeli soldiers posing cheerfully with the underwear of displaced or massacred Palestinian women. To this collage of moral depravity, we may soon be able to add a photograph of Biden and Varadkar smiling together over the customary bowl of shamrock. If so, it is an image that – to use Varadkar’s own words – ”will haunt us forever”.
Copyright ©2024 Sally Rooney Sally Rooney is a novelist
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