Tag: israel

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Medic carrying a wounded Palestinian child in Gaza. Photo courtesy Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.

As I explained in a previous post, I don’t usually write on current political events outside of Facebook and Twitter posts, but there are limits. I will not keep my head down and my mouth shut in the face of what 15 out of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice have ruled is plausibly a GENOCIDE being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, until very recently with the unqualified support of the governments and major opposition parties of the two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, of which I am a citizen. 

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension.

The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

My most recent Substack/Canadian Dimension articles are:

A moral crossroads for the West: Is Benjamin Netanyahu about to cross his Rubicon? Substack, 14 March and Canadian Dimension, 14 March

The threshold of intent: Closing in on a Final Solution in Gaza? Substack, 25 March and Canadian Dimension, 25 March

Details and links to the earlier articles can be found in my earlier post Silence is complicity.

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an unpublished letter to the Guardian newspaper

I sent this letter to the Guardian on January 26 in response to their call for comments on an article on the ICJ ruling on South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel. I think it is safe to assume they are not intending to publish it. The only thing I would add is that to describe the ruling as “a win for the rule of law” is overly hopeful. The actions of Israel, the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and most other so-called western democracies since, including the disgusting defunding of UNRWA on the basis of completely unsubstantiated allegations by Israel, demonstrate the exact contrary. 

I have written more on this extremely clarifying moment in Canadian Dimension.

Dear Guardian,

Kenneth Roth is right to stress that the ICJ ruling on Israel’s actions toward Palestinians in Gaza is a “win for the rule of law” (“The ICJ ruling is a repudiation of Israel and its western backers,” Jan. 26).

It is also a vindication of the millions whose protests have been denounced as “hate marches, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map” (Suella Braverman); of US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by her House of Representatives colleagues for “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel”; of Liz Magill and Claudine Gay, who were hounded out of office as presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard respectively for their alleged failure to deal with campus antisemitism; of Mehdi Hasan, whose popular news show was pulled by MSNBC; of Ai Weiwei and Candace Breitz, who had long-planned exhibitions cancelled at prestigious art galleries; of Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, whose Frankfurt Book Fair award ceremony for the 2023 LiBeraturpreis for her novel Minor Detail was cancelled; of editors Michael Essen at eLife and David Velasco at Artforum, who were fired for supporting pro-Palestinian speech; of journalist Masha Gessen, who forfeited the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s sponsorship for her Hannah Arendt Prize because she dared compare Gaza with a Nazi ghetto; of actress Melissa Barrera, who lost her lead role in the next “Scream” film for describing Israel as “colonial”; of footballers Yousef Atal and Anwar El Ghazi, who were dropped at Nice and Mainz FC for pro-Palestinian posts on social media; and for a legion of others in the US, UK, Germany, Canada and elsewhere who have been vilified as “antisemites” and persecuted for daring to criticize Israel and/or support the Palestinian cause.

Derek Sayer