Partners in genocide: Israel, the US, and the "spinelessness" of European and UK leaders

The relentless, bloody, murderous, assault on innocent people that is happening by the hour in Gaza as I write is so far beyond the pale as to defy the power of language. There is no description adequate to the ongoing vicious, immoral, and innately supremacist campaign of unfettered barbarism that is being perpetrated by Israel. But we cannot turn away from it. We cannot allow ourselves to be silent.

Yesterday, Israel deliberately targeted and murdered seven people gathered in a media tent, including Anas al-Sharif – a popular Al Jazeera correspondent who had over 500,000 followers on X – and three of his colleagues. In total, Al Jazeera estimates that almost 270 journalists and media workers have been murdered by Israel. At least 180 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

It is a campaign, ruthlessly carried out by the Israeli war machine, to erase the witnesses, to make it impossible to record all the atrocities being carried out under the flag of Israel.

It is Tuesday, 12 August, 2025. Today’s headline on the Guardian website reads: Israel intensifies bombing of Gaza, killing 89 Palestinians in 24 hours. Fifteen of that number were shot while they queued for food at the deliberately lethal distribution centres set up by the Israeli authorities and the government of the United States, under the sickeningly deceitful banner of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Meanwhile, in the same 24 hours, five people were reported to have died as a result of the starvation imposed on Palestinian people by the Israelis and their partners in genocide, the United States of America.

ISRAELI EXTREMISM

We need to be clear about this. They are partners.

Since the beginning of this latest phase of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, when Israel began its totally disproportionate response to the brutal atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023, the United States of America has colluded in the campaign of genocide launched by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Again and again, former-President Joe Biden had the opportunity to put the brakes on. He could gave stopped the genocide in its tracks, by withdrawing the availability of the vast and monumentally destructive weaponry essential to the Israeli extermination blitz.

He could have insisted that no innocent civilian lives would be lost under his watch. He could have made it clear that the savage destruction of homes, of hospitals, of schools, of businesses, of vital infrastructure and of agricultural land was unnecessary and wrong and that the United States would supply no more weapons and cut off diplomatic ties with Israel if it persisted.

As far back as 27 October 2023 – here in Hot Press – we could call it for what it was. I wrote about it in The Message at the time, under the headline – Israel and Gaza: Religious Extremism Is Always Wrong...

The reckless bombardment launched by the Israeli government after October 7 has clearly gone far beyond the remit of defence. An attack of massive savagery was unleashed on Gaza, with the city being pounded mercilessly, and indiscriminately, by Israeli bombs.

What have they been trying to achieve?

“The emphasis,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defence Force, admitted, “is on damage and not on accuracy.”

In other words, we don’t care who we kill.

“Right now, one goal: Nakba!”, the Likud MP Ariel Kallner tweeted. “A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” For the uninitiated, ‘Nakba’ means catastrophe and it refers to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians and the occupation of their lands, in a pivotal moment in the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. The promise, therefore, from this MP, is for a million or more people to be displaced – permanently.

“Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents,” a security official told an Israeli reporter. “There will be no buildings.”

Already much of the city has been levelled, including tens of thousands of homes. The message here, then, is: we’ll keep going till all the buildings are reduced to rubble.”

Was I right?

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip, made no secret of his contempt for all Palestinians. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he said.

Or, to extrapolate, human rights or justice don’t come into it with animals – so why should they with Palestinians?

Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry, Nir Barkat, meanwhile, told ABC News that hostages and civilian casualties will be (a) secondary (consideration) to destroying Hamas, “even if it takes a year.”

I was able to draw attention, in that same article, to Israeli leaflets being dropped into Gaza, the content of which Owen Jones, also writing in The Guardian, had described as “a public confession of future war crimes”; to the fact that the Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen had spoken openly about Gaza’s territory shrinking thanks to Israeli annexation; to the declaration by the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, of her support for expanding Israel’s territory to include the biblical regions of Judea and Samaria – denoting the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza; and to the evidence that the UN had issued a warning of mass ethnic cleansing, of Israeli crimes against humanity and of the risk of genocide.

I quoted Moustafa Bayoumi, a Muslim writer, journalist and Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City of New York.

“What are you doing to stop the imminent ethnic cleansing of Gaza?” he asked. “This is a serious question. If ever there was a time to stand up for the rights of an oppressed people, this is it. And yet, in many places in the western world, you can’t. It’s literally been outlawed. How is this even possible?”

Mousafa Bayoumi. Photo: Neville Elder

This was almost two years ago now.

“No one,” I said at the time, “can say that they weren’t warned.”

PALESTINE ACTION

And yet the censorship of any criticism of the insanely blood-thirsty policies being enacted by the Israeli government has become more widespread, more Kafka-esque, and the punishments more outrageous.

Universities in the US have been forced to bend the knee. Some have betrayed their scholarly mission, cravenly accepting a definition of anti-semitism which makes support for the Palestinian cause, or even the recitation of the irrefutable historical facts of the land theft that took place in 1948, impossible without incurring vengeful penalties, potentially including arrest, brutal treatment and detention without charge for lengths of time that are arbitrarily decided by the captors.

It is a clear expression of the shift into totalitarianism in the US, under the Trump administration, where no dissenting voices are allowed, protestors can be locked up, and enormous financial penalties are extracted from universities, colleges, museums, media outlets and  TV and film production companies or other institutions that are deemed to have transgressed.

Meanwhile, at the gore-soaked front of Israel’s campaign of terror, there is one thing they can – and do – rely on, and that is the unwavering support of the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

We, and many others in Europe, and some – though far too few – in the United States, including thousands of Jewish citizens, highlighted the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated by Israel. We described what was happening, and would continue to happen. If anything, we underestimated just how far Israel would be allowed to go.

Did we know then that they would deliberately set out to starve the civilian population? I knew that they would like to. They would want to. They would try to. But there was still a belief, deeply ingrained, that the rest of the world would be too ashamed, too appalled, too emotionally disturbed by the prospect of the sight of starving children to allow it to happen.

That, of course, reckoned without two things.

The first is Donal Trump’s compete lack of any moral fibre, principle or purpose. He does not give a damn about people being butchered. He does not care how many children die. It matters not a whit to him that the Israelis have knowingly, deliberately, engineered a famine. Or that the system they have created – that he has co-created – for the distribution of food is designed to impose impossible conditions on a tired, malnourished, broken people. That it deliberately engenders chaos. That it provides an opportunity to gun people down at will. That the Israeli army have been given free rein to shoot who they like, when they like, where they like and how they like.

All of that is ok with Donald Trump because he wants the land. He wants the property deal. He has an appallingly twisted vision of rich people cavorting on the beaches of Gaza and no monstrousness is too evil if it helps to get him there, to that greedy, selfish, narcissistic, venal, nauseating end-game.

So Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, is not just complicit in the genocide. He is supplying the guns, the bombs and the planes. He is controlling – or helping to control – the narrative. He is crushing protest. He is imposing sanctions on those who engage in principled opposition to Israel, including in the International Criminal Court. He is attacking the UN and its representatives. He is using tariffs to threaten countries that refuse to accept his desire for global dominance – including enabling an Israeli takeover of Gaza. And he and his representatives, walked in lockstep away from the attempt negotiate a ceasefire despite the very obviously cynical demands of the Netanyahu government.

The second thing we failed to anticipate was the spinelessness of so many European leaders, and more than almost anyone else, of the British Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. Did anyone ever foresee that the one-time self-styled Human Rights lawyer would preside over the proscription of Palestine Action as a “terrorist organisation.” Did anyone imagine that we’d witness hundreds of silent protestors – half of them pensioners – holding placards saying “We Oppose Genocide. We Support Palestine Action” being handcuffed and hauled into custody by the British police?

Or that all of this would be happening in a pathetic effort not to get on the wrong side of Donald Trump; and that, in effect, Trump would be allowed to dictate British foreign policy?

And so we are treated to the ridiculously lily-livered, empty spectacle of Starmer telling Benjamin Netanyahu that Britain will recognise Palestine as an independent State if Israel don’t agree to a ceasefire. Clearly quaking in his boots – not – Netanyahu has continued to escalate the genocide and Starmer looks like more of a fool than ever.

WAR CRIMES

The truth is that Europe and the UK – not to mention Japan, Canada, Australia and more – could very quickly end the slaughter if they cut all trade and diplomatic ties with the rogue state of Israel. Sure, it’d make Trump’s blood boil. But if everyone jumped together what could he do? It’s what should happen. In fact it should have happened months ago. Because there is only one way this is heading otherwise: the total destruction of Gaza, widespread starvation, and the death of tens of thousands more.

Which brings me to one final point. The currently accepted number of people killed by Israel in Gaza is more than 60,000. I suspect that this will turn out to be a gross under-estimation and that the real number may be closer to 100,000.

It is generally accepted also that the number injured in the Israeli invasion is more than double the official number killed, which on the current calculations would amount to approximately 130,000. Of these, taking earlier proportional estimates from the World Health Organisation as a guide, 26,500 have received life-altering injuries. In January this year, UNRWA estimated that every day 10 children lose one or both legs.

Thinking about that sickening, unconscionable reality, I have to repeat my opening sentence here. The relentless, bloody, murderous, assault on innocent people that is happening by the hour in Gaza as I write is so far beyond the pale as to defy the power of language. But what isn’t beyond the power of language is to write out a list of those who should be charged with war crimes and with collusion in genocide.

It is increasingly clear that everyone who fails to take the action necessary to end the carnage, and to hold those responsible to account, should themselves be added to the list.

And that at the top of it, alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, should be the President of the United States of America.