From Gaza to Iran: Israel's regional conflict expands with little accountability |
“APPROXIMATELY 175 ACTIVISTS from more than 20 boats… are now making their way peacefully to Israel.”
So announced the Israeli authorities this morning, determined as ever to position itself as a standard functioning democracy interested only in defending the rule of law.
The statement was accompanied by a video of the activists aboard an Israeli navy ship, their fate likely to be no different to that of those arrested on the previous effort last October.
Whether Israel’s odious security minister, Itmar Ben-Gvir, will pay this group a visit to mock them remains to be seen.
What we know is that no matter how grim the conditions they might face, they will be as nothing to that of the more than 9,000 Palestinians still being held by Israel, more than 3,000 of whom are detained without charge.
Israel’s interception of the latest flotilla this morning is just another day of what is, for many, its emergence as a pariah state. Benjamin Netanyahu and his Zionist cronies have, since the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023, presided over sustained genocide and crimes against humanity in Palestine.
They’re consistently accused of operating in breach of international law and have faced minimal sanctions from what can only be described as a weak and fragmented global political landscape.
Concern is growing, too, as Israel seeks to extend its reach across the region, from military action in Lebanon to tensions with Iran, in pursuit of broader hegemony, amid continued support from a chaotic US Administration and a lack of effective international accountability.
Israel, Lebanon and Iran
We are weeks into a war initiated by this extremist Israeli government and a United States that’s more compromised by the Zionist ambition than any other. Given how tied the US has been to Israel since its foundation, that, of itself, is quite something.
Most of the West is compromised; only the extent of our abandonment of concern for human rights and the protection of the most vulnerable is surprising. We are continuing our slow, soulless sleepwalk of solidarity with evil, even as the evidence of the incalculable damage being done to civilisations, no more flawed than our own, is increasingly obvious.
Buoyed by US support, Netanyahu has been operating unchecked in the region. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
In my book on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Catastrophe Nakba II, published a year ago, I wrote that Israel would continue its onslaught in Gaza, take more and more of the West Bank and push further north into Lebanon in part by playing the West with what I termed ‘the Iran card’.
It wasn’t a new idea:........