President Joe Biden has lost all claims to being Irish. It is not a statement made lightly. In general, as readers will know, I don’t like personalising things. It has been a matter of long-standing policy in Hot Press that you avoid targeting, insulting, abusing,  harassing  or trolling individuals. That caveat still holds. But occasionally – very occasionally – there is no other way of expressing the extent of our revulsion.

There are many – far too many – brutal, corrupt and ultimately self-aggrandising thugs on the world stage right now, deserving of our passionate condemnation. Narendra Modi in India, who is busy building an apartheid State. Xi Jinping in China, who has unceremoniously jailed a million Turkic muslims, mainly Uyghurs. Kim Jong Un in North Korea.  President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt. President Joko Widodo in Indonesia. Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei in Iran. The so called Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The self-styled supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada in Afghanistan – there’s a Boeing 747 load of them.

And, worst of all we might have thought a year ago, is the butcher of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin of Russia, a man who has been guilty of vicious war crimes, carried out under his ultimate command by the Russian army and mercenaries in Ukraine, Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Syria and elsewhere.

A year is a long time in geopolitics. In October 2023, came the massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the capture of approximately 250 hostages, by Hamas, under the leadership of Yahya Sinwar, adding a new name to the list of infamy. Of course, mass murder on that scale is always absolutely wrong. But it is still possible to establish a kind of hierarchy of evil.

In this respect, Sinwar was quickly outflanked by the President of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

NO ELECTRICITY, NO FUEL, NO FOOD

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led assault, Netanyahu decided that he would respond in kind, only worse – much worse. Very quickly, it became obvious that the Israeli Prime Minister had crossed the line into downright barbarism.

Israel declared war on Hamas. But in truth, Netanyahu had decided to use the opportunity, presented to him and his henchmen by Hamas, to wage brutal and vindictive war on the Palestinian people.

The atrocities mounted. So too did the number of women and children killed. And still, the Israeli leader was given unconditional support by the United States of America, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, among others. Having been handed a licence to kill, the Israeli government and army showed a completely reckless disregard for any form of international law, for human rights or the Geneva convention.

Gaza is a very small place. At 141 square miles, it is far less than half the size of the metropolitan Cork area. And yet, before the catastrophic onslaught by Israel, it was home to 2.3 million people compared to an estimated 300,000 in Cork. Its population density is 16 times that of the Republic’s second city.

It was self-evident from the outset that to bomb the place would involve an industrial-level butchery of innocent people, but they did it anyway. Some of the rhetoric of Israeli politicians and government Ministers confirmed that this was not just the accidental by-product of an attempt to crush Hamas, as Netanyahu repeatedly claimed.

It was a deliberate policy of collective punishment.

Benjamin Netanyahu. Credit: Jolanda Flubacher

But then it went further. Even under the callous doctrine of “disproportionate response” pursued by Israel, this was so far beyond the pale it was scarifying. No number of deaths seemed to be enough to satiate the blood-lust of the Israeli government. Piled high, the dead bodies were seen as mere land-fill, rubbish to be dumped and left to rot.

Every day a new horror was revealed. In truth, however, the ideology behind these atrocities was not really new at all.

As far back as 9 October – two days after the war crimes committed by Hamas – the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant made the position of the Israeli government clear.

He referred to the Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals.”

“We are acting accordingly,” he said, boasting that he had ordered a complete siege on Gaza. “There will be no electricity,” he said, “no fuel, no food.” A day later, he told the truth about the instructions that had been given to the Israeli war machine (the term Israeli Defence Forces is a lie). Addressing the Israeli army, he instructed them that he had released “all restraints.” And he added: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.”

The intent behind that phrase – “we will eliminate everything” – could not be clearer and so it took no special genius to see what was coming. A former Israeli army general and adviser to Yoav Gallant, named Giora Eiland, wrote that, “In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.”

And this is what they have done.

BREAKING INTERNATIONAL LAW

As early as 24 October, as the Israeli army prepared for a ground invasion, I warned in Hot Press of the sheer horror of what was being planned. By then 5,789 people had been killed in Israeli air strikes, 2,055 of them children. And yet it was obvious that the Israelis were hell-bent on making things immeasurably worse.

The previous day, the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Gutteres, had called for a humanitarian ceasefire, to deliver desperately needed food, water, medicine and fuel into Gaza.

Even then, aid workers were pleading that the situation on the ground was catastrophic, with hospitals under attack and people at increasing risk of dying from dehydration, medical failure or hunger.

The Israelis already knew. Danial Hagan, spokesperson for the Israeli army, revealed of their bombing campaign that “the emphasis is not on accuracy, but on damage.” They were using ‘dumb bombs’ to flatten housing blocks and kill everyone in them.

The Likud MP Ariel Kallner had clearly taken Yoav Gallant’s words to heart. “Right now, one goal: Nakba,” Kallner said on Twitter. “A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.”

A security official spoke to an Israeli reporter. “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents,” the official said. “There will be no buildings.”

Other confessions of crimes to come were recorded by Owen Jones of The Guardian. He pointed out that the supposedly ‘moderate’ foreign minister, Eli Cohen, had declared that Gaza’s territory would ‘shrink’ thanks to Israeli annexation. “He is simply stating a long-standing open Israeli commitment,” Jones observed and he was right.

Invited to speak at the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu had the unmitigated gall to show a map of a ‘Greater Israel’. The Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, meanwhile, openly said that Israel should comprise the biblical territory of Judea and Samaria – signalling the hoped-for annexation by Israel of both the West Bank and Gaza.

The Israeli army killed, and killed and they went on killing anything that moved. They butchered three members of their own army – hostages who had escaped and were holding a white flag. All restraints had been removed. Hold a white flag of surrender and you die.

They killed and killed and killed over 220 aid workers. They killed and killed and killed over 100 journalists.

The Irish government were among the few who actively spoke out against the unfettered barbarism. President Michael D. Higgins also sounded the alarm.

“Any response,” the President said about Israel’s pursuit of Hamas, “and indeed the resolution to what is an ongoing conflict… must be in accordance with international law, humanitarian needs and respect for the decisions of the United Nations.

“To announce in advance,” the President added, “that you will break international law and to do so on an innocent population, it reduces all the code that was there from the Second World War on protection of civilians to tatters.”

Meanwhile, ‘settler’ groups – among them Ministers – would talk to the BBC about plotting the occupation and sale of the land in Gaza. And the Israeli army protected settlers stealing land in the West Bank.

It was deliberate. It is deliberate. All of it.

APPALLING EFFECTS OF FAMINE

Predictably, Netanyahu and his blood-thirsty mafia bleated, every time they were asked, that they were doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties. They made a mockery of language itself, as the death toll mounted catastrophically.

America knew they were lying. Germany knew. The rest of Europe knew. The UK knew.

Israel had decided, in cold blood, to engage in a genocidal campaign. They would wreck the schools. They would bomb the hospitals. They would level the houses. They would destroy the fields. They would close the borders and stop the aid flowing in. They would deliberately and in a calculated affront to any form of human decency or respect, create the conditions in which famine was inevitable. And they would kill, kill, kill.

Genocide.

The aftermath of an Israeli strike in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Credit: Mohammed Abed

Gaza has already been described by the EU’s foreign policy chief, Joseph Borrell, as the greatest open-air graveyard in the world. And yet this week, Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he is pressing ahead with plans for a ground assault in Rafah, in Southern Gaza, where as many as 1.4 million people may now be based. We are told that the Israelis have bought 40,000 tents to throw at people who have to move to avoid being massacred. It would be laughable if it were not so utterly depraved.

As the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz bears a heavy responsibility. But there is one person who could indisputably have prevented all of this, and that is President Joe Biden. The United States supplies 69% of the arms that Israel is using in its campaign of genocide. Those arms sales could have been paused or stopped. Instead, ruses were used by the Biden administration to avoid having to get permission from Congress. The Israeli murder machine was supported by stealth, despite the fact that across the world – including in America – the vast majority want a ceasefire now.

In supplying the arms, the US has made itself complicit in the war crimes that are – without any doubt – being committed by Israel. Even now, Biden could prevent the assault on Rafah. Equally, the US could force Israel to stop murdering aid workers and get the food and water into Gaza that is so desperately needed to avoid the death of tens of thousands more as a result of starvation.

Irish people know the appalling effects of famine. They know what it does to the heart and soul of a nation and a people. If Joe Biden’s claims to be Irish have any meaning, he too should recognise this.

And yet, he refuses to acknowledge that what is happening now in Gaza is a deliberate, man-made famine, engineered by the Israelis – and that it is the logical extension of the genocidal campaign being pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war machine.

He knows. And yet he lets the slaughter, the genocide continue. This is why I say that Joe Biden has lost all claims to being Irish. We should let him know.