The big men are all deaf; they don't want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street in cleated boots (Sylvia Plath, 11 September 1950)
“Postcards from Absurdistan is the third in a loose trilogy of books Derek Sayer has written about modern Czech cultural history … Put next to one another, the trilogy’s some 1,700 pages provide a tour de force of Czech cultural history … Sayer’s mise-en-scène and his analysis are always erudite, sometimes revisionist and frequently compelling … the book and the trilogy are tremendous achievements … this eminently readable book … is a well-balanced introduction to the Czech twentieth century for students and the wider public, and also offers many insights for expert scholars. Derek Sayer has written a deserving conclusion to his Czech trilogy.”—”The Last Postcard from Prague,” Felic Jeschke, CEU Review of Books
“Beginning with the intimate relationship between Franz Kafka and the Czech feminist, journalist, and writer Milena Jesenská, the book embarks on a colorful journey through the fates of hundreds of figures of Bohemian cultural life between 1918 and 1989. For Sayer, Prague is a loose starting point for the interweaving of the lives of the actors in his book, wherever these took place. He thus traces both the artistic activities and the private—and in many cases intimate—lives of countless Czech writers, architects, artists, and filmmakers, and of their partners, children, and extended families. He vividly shows the interconnectedness of their fates (and often their bedrooms), whether their lives’ vicissitudes took place in Prague, Paris, New York, or Tokyo, in their apartments, villas, or offices, in the torture chambers of the Nazi occupiers, in refugee camps, or in the interrogation rooms of the Communist secret police … Sayer displays a deeply impressive knowledge of modern Czech cultural history, which he manages to construct into an extremely appealing narrative … a literarily brilliant and empirically rich collage of stories from the history of Czech culture in the twentieth century.”—Rudolf Kučera, Journal of Modern History
“Sayer chronicles a world of the absurd but also contributes to it. Essentially he provides an episodic celebration of the Czech contribution to (post)modern civilization, with some brilliant aperçus … we learn much about the strategies of intellectuals and artists to frustrate successive orthodoxies of oppressive political regimes and especially about the genesis of the celebrated crop of Czech novelists and dramatists of the absurd headed by Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel … In the absence of any comparative dimension to this book, it might well seem that Sayer exaggerates his case for Czech primacy in absurdism, in the spirit of Jára Cimrman, the larger-than-life inventor and discoverer whose exploits included leaving three missed-call messages on Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone. Yet perhaps, on second thought, the cult of Cimrman, “the greatest Czech who never lived” (he was himself invented in 1960s Prague, initially as a radio character) is actually strong evidence that the claim, precisely in its flippancy, carries some weight.”—R.J.W. Evans, Common Knowledge
“Derek Sayer’s latest dive into Czech cultural history traces the winding paths of its protagonists through artistic movements, war, exile, and oppression … The absurdity implied in the title is shown repeatedly to be the result of the heavy hand of politics interfering with the life and work of the country’s cultural greats. Virtually no one escapes unscathed. Death, prison, and exile are as common among these Czech writers and artists as gallery openings and publication … The book’s main title is Postcards from Absurdistan, and the sense of absurdity is largely delivered. Yet the story branches out so internationally – from Prague to Paris to Moscow to Tokyo, India, and the Utah desert, among other places – and the absurdity presented seems so evenly shared, that it can make the world in general appear an Absurdistan. It very likely is, yet there is a particular style of absurdity found in 20th century Central and Eastern Europe, whether nationalist, communist, or a combination of the two, which the book effectively presents and defines.”—Michael Stein, “The Unsummoned Convention of Genius,” Transitions.
Aftermath of Israeli airstrike in Tehran, June 13, 2025. Photo courtesy Tasnim News Agency/Wikimedia Commons.
Gaslighting, noun: psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
I woke on Saturday, June 14, to Guardianheadlines explaining: “Strikes on Iran ease pressure on Israel to end starvation in Gaza. Critics of war will be more reluctant to press for its end while missiles from Tehran are killing people in Tel Aviv.”
I had two immediate reactions. Both were accompanied by a strong desire to vomit.
First reaction: speak for your f***ing self. I am not going to keep my mouth shut about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza just because Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen this moment to launch a “pre-emptive strike”—that is, an unprovoked act of war—against Iran, nor because Iran, not altogether surprisingly, is defending itself against this aggression.
Initial reports suggest that as well as the military commanders and nuclear scientists Israel individually targeted (whose families were “collateral damage”), the first strike killed at least 60 people in residential neighbourhoods in Tehran and other Iranian cities, including 29 children, and injured many more. This is par for the Israeli course.
By the end of Sunday, Israel’s continuing strikes had killed at least 224 people in Iran and wounded another 1,277. Netanyahu promises the world that this is just the beginning, warning: “We will hit every site and every target of the Ayatollahs’ regime and what they have felt so far is nothing compared with what they will be handed in the coming days.”
Meantime, the carnage in Gaza has not stopped but intensified. On Saturday June 14 alone, reports Al Jazeera, “Israeli fire and air strikes… killed at least 58 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, many of them near an aid distribution site operated by the United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).” This brought the number of those killed while attempting to obtain food for their families through the controversial GHF sites (which Israel reluctantly set up under international pressure after banishing UNRWA, the principal supplier of aid to Gaza) to at least 274 people, with more than 2,000 wounded.
Second reaction: what does it say about us that these headlines can be true? That these things can be said at all? Into what new moral abyss has “Western civilization” fallen?
Are we—Canada, the US, Germany, France, the UK—really so morally bankrupt that we will allow Netanyahu’s cynical maneuver, an act of naked aggression in flagrant breach of international law, to divert us from our responsibilities to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
Do we really want to say that the relative handful of deaths so far reported in Israel from Iran’s response (13, as of June 15) count for more than the hundreds of deaths Israel has already caused with its latest strikes on Iran—let alone the more than 55,000 people, the majority of them women and children, Israel has killed in the last twenty months in Gaza? That when the chips are down, Israeli lives are worth that much more than Iranian lives or Palestinian lives—irrespective of the fact that Israel initiated this latest round of fighting?
From the first responses of Western political leaders, it would appear that the answer to all of these questions is unfortunately an unhesitating and emphatic yes.
Was the West getting cold feet about Israel’s genocide?
Significantly, Israel’s attack on Iran came against a backdrop of the beginnings of a sea-change in Western media coverage of Israel’s conduct of its “war” in Gaza and the Israeli government’s encouragement of settler violence in the West Bank. Coincidence? Some might suspect that the attack was designed to nip this dangerous shift in the bud.
Recent weeks had seen a widespread acknowledgment that since its declaration of “war” on Hamas following the latter’s attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity—and likely genocide—not as aberrations but as de facto state policy. This tectonic shift in media coverage was echoed by a number of political leaders in Israel and the West (the US apart), who adopted a more critical stance toward Israel’s conduct of the “war” than they had at any point during the last two years.
Within Israel, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had long rejected charges that Israel was guilty of war crimes or genocide in Gaza, wrote an editorial for Haaretz on May 27 in which he recorded his recent change of mind. He didn’t mince his words:
What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy—knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.
A week earlier, Yair Golan, a retired general and the leader of the Israeli opposition Democrats, caused outrage among Netanyahu’s supporters when he told Reshed Bet radio: “A sane country doesn’t engage in fighting against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby and doesn’t set for itself the goals of expelling a population.”
Similar misgivings were expressed by some of Israel’s staunchest Western allies—though notably not by the Trump administration or the Democratic leadership in the US.
Having told the UK parliament on March 17 that Israel’s blockade on aid to Gaza, which began on March 2, was a “breach of international law”—only to be rebuked at the time by PM Keir Starmer and forced to backpedal—Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy gave a passionate speech in the Commons on May 20 in which he denounced Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s dreams of “‘cleansing’ Gaza, of ‘destroying what’s left’ and of resident Palestinians being ‘relocated to third countries.’” He too did not mince his words:
We must call this what it is: it is extremism, it is dangerous, it is repellent, it is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms… Israel’s plan is morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counterproductive…
An entente cordiale
The previous day Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had issued a joint statement which offered the most unequivocal condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza by any G7 leaders yet. It began:
We strongly oppose the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable. Yesterday’s announcement that Israel will allow a basic quantity of food into Gaza is wholly inadequate. We call on the Israeli Government to stop its military operations in Gaza and immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. This must include engaging with the UN to ensure a return to delivery of aid in line with humanitarian principles…
The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law. We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate. Permanent forced displacement is a breach of international humanitarian law.
The three leaders went on to express opposition to “any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank,” insisting that “Israel must halt settlements which are illegal and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state.” If Israel continued in its “egregious actions,” they threatened, “we will take further concrete actions in response… including targeted sanctions.”
“By asking Israel to end a defensive war for our survival before Hamas terrorists on our border are destroyed and by demanding a Palestinian state, the leaders in London, Ottowa [sic] and Paris are offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities,” Benjamin Netanyahu responded in a post on X.
Netanyahu added: “Israel accepts President Trump’s vision and urges all European leaders to do the same.” That “vision” is to turn an ethnically cleansed Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” under American auspices. As Trump says, he’s a real estate guy at heart. So is Israel, which has been gobbling up Palestinian land and “displacing” its owners since 1948.
On May 29, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced approval of 22 new settlements, some of which already existed as illegal “outposts”—the biggest such expansion in decades. Katz was clear that the point was to “prevent… the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”
Destruction in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons.
The Western dilemma
Though disappointingly little in the way of “concrete actions” has followed the British, French, and Canadian leaders’ entente cordiale, the UK did suspend talks on a trade deal with Israel and impose individual sanctions on a few extremist settlers in the West Bank.
Of greater import—though still more of a symbolic gesture than anything else—on June 12, the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK jointly announced “sanctions targeting [Israeli ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.” They noted that:
Today’s measures focus on the West Bank, but of course this cannot be seen in isolation from the catastrophe in Gaza. We continue to be appalled by the immense suffering of civilians, including the denial of essential aid. There must be no unlawful transfer of Palestinians from Gaza or within the West Bank, nor any reduction in the territory of the Gaza Strip.
The problem with this position is that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are not rogue extremists, but key ministers in Netanyahu’s government. They respectively hold the ministerial portfolios of national security and finance. The policies and words for which they are being individually censured are collectively those of Israel’s government as a whole.
The statement concludes: “We will continue to work with the Israeli Government and a range of partners,” but the main obstacle to its attaining its objectives, “an immediate ceasefire, the release now of the remaining hostages and for the unhindered flow of humanitarian aid including food,” and “a reconstructed Gaza no longer run by Hamas and a political pathway to a two-state solution,” is precisely the Israeli government itself. As, of course, Messrs. Carney, Starmer, and Macron very well know.
Their position, like much else in the West’s response to Israel’s actions since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, is incoherent. But the incoherence is revealing. The West is being tossed on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma—as it has been, in one form or another, since the foundation of the State of Israel and the Nakba of 1947-1948. This dilemma has assumed acute form since October 7.
If the West continues to support Israel’s “right to defend itself” as Israel interprets that “right,” then—as has become crystal clear over the last twenty months, and has once again been proven by Israel’s latest “pre-emptive strike” on Iran—it can do so only at the cost of trashing the norms of international humanitarian law and the cherished “Western” values of human rights and the universal rule of law upon which they supposedly rest. The supreme irony here is that Israel has repeatedly claimed to be waging this “war” in defense of the humanist values of Western civilization and against Islamist barbarism.
If, on the other hand, Western democracies are seriously to uphold those values and enforce the rule of law, they are morally and legally bound not simply to condemn Israel’s crimes but to take whatever concrete actions lie within their power to prevent them—including, at a minimum, stopping all arms supplies and applying economic and other sanctions (as has been done in the case of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine).
Stronger action might include international military intervention under United Nations auspices, like that which followed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
As just one example of this, in its landmark judgment on the legal status of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—within which it counted blockaded Gaza—of July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and Israel must “end its unlawful presence… as rapidly as possible,” “cease immediately all new settlement activities, and… evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The court unambiguously spelled out the resulting obligations of all UN member states, including Canada:
all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
In the same way, all 125 countries that signed the 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC)—the US is not among them, but Britain, France, Canada, the rest of the G7, Australia, New Zealand, and most members of the EU and NATO are—are legally bound to execute the court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, whether they approve of them or not.
The West cannot have its cake and eat it. Either it supports Israel, or it supports the rule of law. Israel’s “right to self-defense” does not permit war crimes or genocide, period.
More theatre for public consumption?
Two other recent initiatives that signalled apparent shifts in Western attitudes toward Israel’s ongoing Gaza “war” are worth mentioning here. Both have now been rudely sidelined by events.
The first was a conference, co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia under UN auspices and scheduled to take place on June 17-20 in New York, at which it was hoped to make progress toward a two-state solution to “the Palestinian problem.” This “solution” is one to which Israel and its Western supporters have been nominally committed since the Oslo Accords of 1993-5, even though Netanyahu has repeatedly stated his opposition to any “attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel” on grounds that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River… That collides with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty. What can we do?”
It was widely rumoured that France and Britain might recognize a Palestinian state at the conference in order to maintain pressure on Israel to stop the war in Gaza and return to the negotiating table. This led Donald Trump to call upon the world’s governments on June 10 to boycott the conference and threaten “diplomatic consequences” if they took “any steps that would unilaterally recognise a conjectural Palestinian state.”
Faced with this US threat, Macron was already backtracking on recognizing Palestine when Israel launched its “pre-emptive strike” on Iran. The new situation gave him the perfect off-ramp. On the same day as Israel attacked Iran, he announced that the two-state conference was indefinitely postponed “for logistical and security reasons.”
The second initiative—a poignant one, in retrospect—occurred at the UN. Meeting in an emergency session on June 12 , “the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and lasting ceasefire in Gaza,” which:
strongly condemn[ed] the use of starvation as a weapon of war, demand[ed] a full lifting of the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid, and insist[ed] on the protection of civilians under international law.
A week earlier a similar resolution had failed to pass at the Security Council due to a lone veto by the US. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that the US government could not support any resolution that “draws a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas, or disregards Israel’s right to defend itself.” The rest of the UNSC voted in favour.
The General Assembly resolution passed with 149 votes in favour, 12 against, and 19 abstentions. Joining Israel, the US, and a sprinkling of US Pacific dependencies in the No lobby were Argentina, Hungary, and Paraguay—hardly paragons of liberal democracy. The rest of the G7, and most members of the EU and NATO,1 supported the motion.
The day after this near-universal condemnation of Israel by the international community, Israel attacked Iran. And everything changed overnight.
Come back Bibi, all is forgiven
“Game on. Pray for Israel,” posted the reliably odious US Senator Lindsey Graham on X upon hearing the news of Israel‘s strikes on Iran. His recent contributions to peace in the Middle East included the post “Hope Greta [Thunberg] and her friends can swim!”—an invitation for the IDF to attack the Madleen, on which activists were sailing to Gaza to draw attention to Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.
Before long, the mantra “pray for Israel” was broadcast far and wide, and sob stories of poor Israeli families having to spend the night in air-raid shelters began to appear in the Western press.
One could be forgiven for believing that Iran had launched a pre-emptive strike on Israel that killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in Tel Aviv and Haifa rather than the other way around.
Worse was to follow. Speaking with Israeli President Isaac Herzog “concerning the escalating situation in the Middle East” on June 13, President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen“reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself and protect its people.” She made no mention of the fact that Israel struck first.
On the same day Emmanuel Macron called “on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate” in an English-language statement on X that began: “France has repeatedly condemned Iran’s ongoing nuclear program” and continued “France reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself and ensure its security.” He made no mention of Iran’s right to self-defense against Israeli strikes.
The situation in the Middle East has escalated dramatically overnight. Israel has carried out targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran is responding with hundreds of drone attacks on Israel. This development is more than alarming.
We strongly condemn the indiscriminate Iranian attack on Israeli territory. Iran’s nuclear program violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty and poses a threat to the entire region—especially to Israel.
Israel has the right to defend its existence and the security of its citizens. At the same time, we call on all parties to avoid further escalation. Germany remains committed to diplomacy—together with our partners in Europe and the United States.
This conveniently overlooks the facts that unlike Iran, Israel declines to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, possesses a nuclear arsenal, and has refused to let the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspect its facilities; that in 2015 Iran agreed a deal with China, France, Russia, the UK, the US, and Germany to limit its nuclear program in exchange for relief on sanctions, which Donald Trump unilaterally scuppered in 2018; that negotiations between Iran and the US to renew such a deal were well advanced when Israel launched its attack (one of those assassinated in the first wave of targeted missiles was the leader of the Iranian negotiating team, Ali Shamkhani); and that as the IAEA has emphasized in a statement of June 13, “any military action that jeopardizes the safety and security of nuclear facilities risks grave consequences for the people of Iran, the region, and beyond.” But who cares when Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel famously defined German support for Israel, is at issue?
UK Finance Minister Rachel Reeves joined the chorus of condemnation of Iran, tellingSky News on June 15 that British military assets—including fighter jets—were being moved to the conflict zone “to protect ourselves and also potentially to support our allies.” While “this does not mean we are at war,” she said, these assets could “potentially” be used to help defend Israel and the government is “not ruling anything out.”
Canada’s about-turn is perhaps the most despicable of all. At least Germany had the honesty to acknowledge that Iran’s “indiscriminate attacks” came in response to Israel’s “targeted strikes.” Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s June 13 post fails to admit even this. For all we are told, “Iran’s attack upon Israel” came out of nowhere.
The sheer chutzpah boggles the mind. Anand remained silent on Israel’s attack on Iran. But as soon as Tehran retaliated, she was quick to announce that:
Canada condemns Iran’s attack on Israel, and urges restraint on both sides. Further actions can cause devastating consequences for the broader region. The US-Iran negotiations represent the best path to achieving a lasting and peaceful resolution to Iran’s nuclear program. Diplomatic engagement remains essential to ensuring long-term regional stability and international security. Iran cannot obtain nuclear weapons. Iran’s continued efforts to pursue nuclear weapons, support for terrorists, and direct attacks on civilian centres embody Iran’s persistent threat to regional stability and to Israel, which has the right to defend itself.
Once again, Israel’s absolute right to possess nuclear weapons, support terrorists, and direct attacks on civilian centers in Iran and elsewhere (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen …) in the name of “self-defense” goes unquestioned. If these are not “persistent threats to regional stability” I don’t know what that phrase means.
The next day Anand thanked Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar “for the conversation this evening,” adding: “Thank you to the brave firefighters who helped a Canadian embassy staff member in a building that was struck by a missile in Tel Aviv. She was eventually rescued, along with other occupants of the building, and is safe and sound.” How sweet.
They say a week is a long time in politics. As Nesrine Malik wrote in the Guardian on June 16, two days after I was nauseated by any such suggestion:
Stories of people dying of starvation in Gaza or of the hungry being killed while queueing for food, have fallen away from the headlines. The relentless assault on the West Bank and the expansion of illegal settlements has receded from view. The pressure that was beginning to build on Israel to let in more aid and honour a ceasefire has been replaced with the same mealy-mouthed defences that we saw in the early days of the war in Gaza, plus the same pabulum of urging “restraint.” The clock is reset.
Hats off to you, Bibi. With one small act of war, you’ve gaslit the whole Western world into dancing to your genocidal tune yet again.
Fire engulfs a classroom at the Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City following an Israeli strike, May 26, 2025.
One of the most remarkable—not to say shameful—features of the last 20 months of carnage in Gaza has been the near-unanimity of support for Israel’s assault from Western governments and political parties of otherwise sharply opposed persuasions, regardless of how criminally Israel has conducted its “war.”
Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poiliévre, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Viktor Orban, Antony Albanese, Donald Tusk, Geert Wilders, Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas are unlikely bedfellows, but all have come together on Israel’s “right to defend itself” against Hamas “terrorism.”
In the name of this principle—whose legality is dubious, given that Gaza is not a foreign power but (according to the world’s highest court) a territory that Israel has de facto occupied since 1967, whose civilian population it therefore has a legal duty to protect—even the mildest Western expressions of “concern” over this or that IDF “excess” have invariably been prefaced (“balanced”) by obligatory ritualistic condemnations of Hamas.
With the partial exception of the Guardian, which has allowed its columnists like Arwa Mahdawi and Nesrine Malik to pen op-eds that were critical of Israel, the mainstream Western media from the BBC to the New York Times, CNN to the Washington Post, have all generally been content to toe this official line. While Israel’s justifications—and lies—have been amplified, its atrocities have been sidelined, minimized, or not reported at all.
Under the sign of October 7
Such partiality was perhaps comprehensible in the immediate aftermath of October 7, when images of the horror were fresh in people’s minds. But little changed either with revelations that what happened on October 7 was less clearcut than Israeli propaganda had presented it or with the mounting deaths, destruction, and undeniable evidence over the ensuing weeks and months that Israel was routinely committing war crimes in Gaza.
It mattered not that the final figure for deaths in Israel on October 7 was 1,139, not the 1,400 at first reported; nor that one-third of these were soldiers, police, or security guards—in other words, combatants—rather than “mostly civilians”; nor that most of the atrocity stories that did so much to mobilize Western opinion behind Israel in the ensuing weeks were either totally discredited, like the fairy tales of 40 beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens, and babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs, or, like the “mass rape” allegations, lacked any convincing supporting evidence. Politicians like Biden, Blinken, and Trudeau continued to repeat these myths long after they had been debunked in the Israeli press.
It mattered not that many of the Israelis who perished on October 7 were later shown to have died from IDF “friendly fire,” resulting either from the fog of war or implementation of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which authorizes killing one’s own rather than letting them be taken prisoner. Many of the young people killed at the Nova music festival were likely casualties of fire from IDF helicopter gunships; the burned-out hulks of their cars, which could not have been produced by Hamas’s light weaponry, strongly suggest as much.
Nor did it matter that 18 months ago, on January 24, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was “a real and imminent risk” of genocide occurring in Gaza and mandated six provisional measures aimed at “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.” The court imposed further measures on March 28 and May 24. All were simply ignored by Israel, with the open or tacit support of the United States and Israel’s other Western allies, including Canada.
It is difficult to think of a more blatant snub to the international rule of law—unless it be the howls of Western outrage that greeted the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) last November 21 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” The US has now instituted sanctions against the judges who authorized the arrest warrants.
One of the first signs that this unholy consensus among the major Western powers might at long last be cracking was a striking shift in tone in some leading British newspapers.
What appears to have tipped the scales this time were warnings of imminent famine in Gaza resulting from the total blockade on supplies of food, water, power, and medicine Israel had imposed on the Strip since March 2, two weeks before it unilaterally broke the truce it had agreed with Hamas in January and resumed its full-scale military offensive.
On May 4, the Guardian ran a lead editorial titled “Israel’s aid blockade of Gaza: hunger as a weapon of war,” which concluded:
What is shameful is that almost half the children in Gaza questioned in a study said that they wished to die. What is shameful is that so many civilians have been killed, and so many more pushed to the brink of starvation. What is shameful is that this has, indeed, been allowed to happen.
The next day the Daily Mirror, historically the most left-wing of Britain’s tabloids, devoted its front page as well as two inside pages to a story by Defense Editor Chris Hughes titled “Horror in Gaza.” The headline read “OUR CHILDREN ARE STARVING.”
On May 6 the Financial Times—the most establishment of UK establishment papers—openly challenged Israel’s “self-defence” protestations in a powerful editorial headed “The west’s shameful silence on Gaza”:
Each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land. For two months, Israel has blocked delivery of all aid into the strip. Child malnutrition rates are rising, the few functioning hospitals are running out of medicine, and warnings of starvation and disease are growing louder. Yet the US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.
Martin Sandbu’s June 2 op-ed, which argued that “it is in Europe’s interest to impose sanctions on Israel,” is something the FT would never have countenanced previously.
“End the deafening silence on Gaza—it is time to speak up,” proclaimed a lead editorial in The Independent on May 10, explaining that times had changed:
The world was stunned by the horrific Hamas atrocity of October 7, 2023, in southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 hostages seized—the youngest just nine months old. Despite its fierce retaliation raising immediate alarm, Israel found international backing for the right to defend itself …
But now any initial moral justification for continuing to prosecute the war 18 months on has been lost—and the disgust we once reserved for Hamas militants transferred to the brutal and relentless assaults by the Israel Defense Forces and the humanitarian disaster caused by its blockade.
Ramming its message home with a picture of hungry Palestinian children, the next day’s Independent devoted its entire front page to Gaza, calling upon “Britain and its allies to force Israel to end a cruel war that… has long since lost any moral justification.”
“The unfolding famine in Gaza is an obscenity the world must no longer tolerate,” the Independentagain thundered on May 29. “It is an outrage that Israel, the occupying power ignoring its obligations to treat civilians properly, should behave in this manner; it is an even greater act of shame that the world should continue to tolerate it.”
On May 8 the Economist published an article suggesting that the Gaza Health Ministry death toll was a significant undercount and that “between 77,000 and 109,000 Gazans have been killed, 4-5% of the territory’s pre-war population,” and the lead editorial demanded that “The war in Gaza must end.” Even Rupert Murdoch’s reliably pro-Israel Times carried an editorial titled “Israel’s friends cannot be blind to suffering in Palestine.”
On May 11, the Guardian broke the taboo on the dreaded G-word, whose application to Gaza by correspondents or interviewees the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN have all done their utmost to ban, asking:
Now [Israel] plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?
The lawyers and the literati weigh in
On May 26, more than 800 UK legal professionals published a letter to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer asserting that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possible genocide. They went on to demand that the UK government honour the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, impose sanctions, and trigger the suspension of Israel’s UN membership by invoking Article 6 of the UN Charter.
These were not Donald Trump’s “radical left lunatic” judges and lawyers. Signatories included former Supreme Court justices Lady Hale, Lord Sumption, and Lord Wilson; former Court of Appeal judges Sir Stephen Sedley, Sir Anthony Hooper, and Sir Alan Moses; and more than 70 King’s Counsel, including former chairs of the Bar Council of England and Wales, the Criminal Bar Association, and the Bar of Northern Ireland.
Two days later, 380 writers from England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland issued a statement begging “the peoples of the world to join us in ending our collective silence and inaction in the face of horror.” Among the self-styled “Writers for Gaza” were Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureshi, Geoff Dyer, Jeannette Winterton, Pico Iyer, Russell T. Davis, and Zadie Smith, all eminent figures in British cultural life.
The term “genocide” is not a slogan. It carries legal, political, and moral responsibilities. Just as it is true to call the atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians on October 7, 2023 crimes of war and crimes against humanity, so today it is true to name the attack on the people of Gaza an atrocity of genocide, with crimes of war and crimes against humanity, committed daily by the Israel Defence Forces, at the command of the government of the State of Israel.
The writers went on to demand an immediate ceasefire and unrestricted distribution of aid to Gaza through the UN, with the imposition of sanctions if Israel refused to comply.
While musician Brian Eno and historian William Dalrymple have repeatedly called out Israeli crimes over the last 20 months, the same cannot be said for all of the letter’s signatories. Many had remained silent up to now, and some have shifted their positions.
Zadie Smith, for example, copped a lot of social media flak for having described the language of student protestors in a May 2024 New Yorker article as “weapons of mass destruction” while refusing to take sides on Gaza.
To be fair, she had hardly represented Hamas’s and Israel’s crimes as comparable in scale:
The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides …
Are these instances of better late than never? Or are they, as some have argued, efforts to launder reputations while there is still time, to escape charges of complicity in what is increasingly being recognized as a genocide? As Omar El Akkad grimly predicted in his book of the same title, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.
Bringing up in the rear, the politicians
Other public figures have also been having second thoughts on Gaza. UK broadcaster Piers Morgan recently told Mehdi Hasan: “Listen, you and I have talked about this war in Gaza ever since it started, this phase of the 75-year conflict. I have resisted going as far as you have done in your criticism of the Israeli government. I resist no more.”
Former US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who made himself notorious for his smirking defences of Israeli actions under the Biden administration, admitted in a Sky Newsinterview that “I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think, I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes.”
Asked why he lied about this at the time, Miller responded:
When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion.
You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government had not concluded that they committed war crimes, still have not concluded [that].
In other words, he was only following orders. This defence didn’t wash at the Nuremberg Trials, and is unlikely to wash today should Miller—or anybody else who has helped Israel carry out or cover up its crimes in Gaza—find themselves in the ICC dock in the Hague.
No doubt this consideration is beginning to weigh with the West’s political leaders, some of whom now appear to be in an unseemly rush to cover their asses.
In October 2024, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy—who like Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a long-standing member of Labour Friends of Israel—told Parliament that to speak of genocide in Gaza “undermines the seriousness of that term,” which he wanted to reserve for “when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War and the Holocaust.”
This is a definition that not only (willfully?) misinterprets international law but conflicts with the British government’s own stance on genocides in Srbenica and Myanmar.
Questioned as to whether Lammy spoke for the government, Keir Starmer responded with a characteristic deflection:
It would be wise to start a question like that by a reference to what happened in October of last year [2023]. I am well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I have never described this or referred to it as genocide.
He cannot do so, of course, without laying open both his government and his person to criminal charges of complicity in the most heinous of all crimes.
All the more significant then, that David Lammy told Parliament on March 17 that though Israel “quite rightly must defend its own security,” its latest blockade was a “breach of international law.” The next day Starmer publicly rebuked his foreign secretary for saying the quiet bit out loud (“The government is not an international court, and, therefore, it is up to courts to make judgments”), but nevertheless conceded that “Israel’s actions in Gaza are at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law.”
Several senior British Conservative MPs are also seemingly having a change of heart on Gaza. On May 6 Kit Malthouse organized a letter to Keir Starmer signed by seven MPs and six members of the House of Lords calling upon the government to stand “against indefinite occupation” and “reinforce international law,” and recognize the state of Palestine “as a necessary step to reinforce international law and diplomacy.” That same day, Conservative MP Mark Pritchard told the House of Commons, “I have supported Israel, pretty much at all costs. But today, I want to say that I got it wrong.”
Against this background, Keir Starmer for the UK, Emmanuel Macron for France, and Mark Carney for Canada issued an unusually strongly worded statement on May 19 threatening that “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.”
Though the three leaders did not—for perhaps obvious reasons—use the word genocide, they left no doubt as to their disgust at Israel’s “egregious actions”:
The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law. We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate. Permanent forced displacement is a breach of international humanitarian law.
The statement went on to condemn “any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank … which are illegal and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state and the security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” threatening that in this case, too, “We will not hesitate to take further action, including targeted sanctions.”
The following day David Lammy addressed the Commons again. “We are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict,” he told MPs:
Netanyahu’s Government plan to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need. Yesterday, Minister Smotrich even spoke of Israeli forces ‘cleansing’ Gaza, of ‘destroying what’s left’ and of resident Palestinians being ‘relocated to third countries’. We must call this what it is: it is extremism, it is dangerous, it is repellent, it is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms … Israel’s plan is morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counterproductive, and whatever Israeli Ministers claim, it is not the way to bring the hostages safely home.
Though Lammy’s speech was passionate, the accompanying actions were modest: the suspension of trade talks with Israel, which were stalled anyway, and a largely symbolic imposition of sanctions on a handful of settler extremists in the West Bank.
Are these indications that the rats are finally preparing to abandon Israel’s sinking ship? Or are they just cosmetic gestures, designed to cover up Western complicity in the Gaza genocide while doing nothing serious to stop it? Only time will tell. Unfortunately time is a luxury the starving people of Gaza do not have.
The official death toll in Gaza—Israel’s payback for the 1,139 deaths on October 7—now stands at nearly 55,000, the majority of them women and children. Where are those “concrete actions,” Mr. Starmer, Mr. Macron—Mr. Carney? As you convene for your G7 summit in Kananaskis, the world awaits.
Are you prepared to face down Donald Trump, who has thrown his full support behind Israel and is salivating at the prospect of America rebuilding an ethnically cleansed Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”?
Three weeks have now passed since your declaration of intent, and so far we have seen nothing but words.
It’s only words
In the contentious New Yorkerarticle mentioned earlier, Zadie Smith’s intent was to draw attention to “the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so.”
Under other circumstances, I would be the first to agree that in this case as in others, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”:
It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately.
But these are not other circumstances. And however belatedly, more people like Zadie Smith—and even a few politicians—may be waking up to that fact. This is not a time for nuance.
Ta-Nehisi Coates probably said it best when, commenting on the part played by Biden’s Gaza policy in Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat by Donald Trump, he argued:
We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend [Trump’s] assault on democracy … and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.
The “labyrinthine” complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict—whose century-long history includes plentiful atrocities on both sides—cannot be used to obscure the simple moral truth that lies at the foundation of all international humanitarian law.
It is necessary to condemn war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide wherever and whenever they occur—irrespective of the identity of their perpetrators or the justice of the causes in whose name they are committed.
If we forget this, the genocide in Gaza will point the way to a future without law for the whole of humanity, and Western democracies’ selfishness, cowardice, and indifference will have let it.
coasts of bohemia 