the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There’s always a ‘but’. 

The ‘Israeli but’ they should call it. Any article, statement other expression of deep sorrow about the Oct 7 genocide by Hamas of Jews for simply being Jews in Israel is qualified by a but. It has become so ubiquitous it seems almost mandatory. That one has to hastily acknowledge such a thing happened in the briefest and least condemnatory of terms before damning Israel for all the sufferings in the war which then followed.

But here’s my but.

Since the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Olympics and the subsequent hunting down and killing of those gunmen by Israel, no-one can have been in any doubt that the killing by terrorists of any Israeli citizen is considered by Israel to be an attack upon Israel itself and therefore treated as such. And Hamas can’t have been unaware of this. As this report from the BBC – under 3 minutes long and using Hamas’s own drone footage – points out, the attacks by Hamas on the 7th October were well coordinated, using as they did land, sea and air and as such required months, if not years of planning.

After all, people who can operate motorised hang-gliders need some training. More importantly, they need the motorised hang-gliders. A decoy missile attack of over 2,000 missiles requires over 2,000 missiles. They weren’t gathering dust in some nearby lock-up; they needed to be ordered, then stored somewhere before finally being taken the sites where they were launched. They also needed drones to fly over the Israeli border and to be capable of shooting up Israeli surveillance tower in order to blind the Israeli military as to what was happening. 

So the sheer scale of the logistical planning involved was simply staggering. Dwarfed only the fact that at no stage when all of this planning was going on did no-one say ‘But hold on, do we really think there’ll be no response from Israel from this. That they won’t see this as act of such barbarity that can only be met with overwhelming military action. And because our forces, munitions dumps and command bases are deeply embedded within the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, such action will necessarily cause the death of those civilians. Oh, we know this ahead of time and are going to do it anyway? Silly me. I forgot that we value Palestinian lives almost as less as we value Jewish lives.? Forgive me. Carry on then, carry on.’

The Mare of London, Sadia Khant seems oblivious to all this. It isn’t conjecture, speculation or hearsay.  Hamas themselves made sure their fighters filmed and live-streamed the genocide. But Khant chooses to ignore this. So today, three years after the genocide, he issued a statement which quickly got to the ‘Israeli but.

 “Today is also a moment to reflect on the unfathomable suffering and killing of Palestinians over the last three years, both in Gaza and in the West Bank,” Khan wrote. “ The suffering and deaths for which Hamas both instigated and perpetuated.”, he didn’t add.

What he did add, though, was this. “The UK government is right to call out the reprehensible actions of the Israeli government and apply more pressure to keep the prospect of a two-state solution alive.” In what universe were the actions of the Israeli government ‘reprehensible’?  How morally deficient must one be to even think that.  Perhaps it is the twisted logic of electoral opportunism, calculating that the has more to gain than to lose by saying these things. Because now we live in a country where a mainstream political party openly endorses the destruction of Israel.

How the fuck did we get here?