It is impossible to read the chilling reporting of the killing of Mariam Abu Dagga in a double-tap Israeli attack on the Nasser hospital in Gaza without giving in to righteous, visceral rage. But the systematic mass killings in Gaza, the systematic targeting of medical personnel and journalists and the gigantic civilian death toll require a cold intellectual response. And that is a demand for sanctions against Israel.
Imposing real and immediate economic costs on Israel for its appalling campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank - where armed ethnic gangs of land thieves are stealing farms and killing Palestinians with impunity under the protection of Israel’s armed forces - is both the right and sensible thing to do. The regime of Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi was attacked by European Nato forces, including the UK, in 2011 because he and his son Saif had threatened the city of Benghazi with bloody retribution verging on genocide. Syria’s dictator Bashar al Assad was subjected to international economic sanctions because of his attacks on the nation’s civilian population.
The Trump administration used the allegation that Iran’s theocracy had killed 30,000 civilians putting down demonstrations earlier this year, in part, as justification for the combined US-Israeli attacks on the country that continue today. So there is plenty of precedent for action. When it comes to Israel, it is only soft action that is required.
Israel’s military has killed an estimated tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza since around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023. Israel’s far-right government is deeply invested in a culture that celebrates the razing of Gaza and the land theft on the West Bank. The legislature has imposed a mandatory death penalty for “terrorist” murders, by Palestinians in occupied territory and inside Israel, that applies only to Palestinians.
Israeli security minister Itamar Ben Gvir recently showed off the gallows, complete with viewing area, which is being built only to swing ethnic Palestinians. Convictions without the right of appeal will be handed down for alleged killings on the West Bank by military tribunals who have a “successful” conviction rate of around 90 per cent. If this sounds almost as sick as the Iranian regime’s practice of dangling alleged killers and apostates from cranes by the neck, that is because it is.
For decades politicians and commentators, like this writer, have refused to be sucked into the morass of the debate over the “moral equivalence” between militant Palestinian groups. There could be no ethical comparison between groups or individuals who used terror, the application of violence against civilians to create widespread fear for political ends, with the State of Israel. The latter was bound by international law and its own democratic norms and processes.
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