Image by Taylor Brandon.
The World is Sickened by Israel’s Genocide in Gaza (Including Many Israelis and IDF Soldiers)
Cambridge, UK — Israel’s leaders, and by extension their zionist supporters, are increasingly being condemned as genocidal criminals in much or the world — even in places like the UK, France and Canada, where they had been given a pass for most of the latest war on Gaza and for decades before that.
What this means for the future remains of course to be seen, but from here it looks like Israel and its lobbying/propaganda operation in western nations, including even the US, are having a harder time convincing the public and some political leaders to keep backing its genocidal war on the two million trapped civilians in its open-air prison in largely leveled Gaza.
Today, the London Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, long a stolid backer of Israel’s revanchist zionist policy of apartheid, reported that Britain’s Labour government is working up a program of sanctions to place on top Israeli government officials. These include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , Finance Minister Bezalei Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, “Defense” Minister Israel Katz snd others, and it is doing this along with “other countries,” to make the sanctions more painful and harder to avoid.
The language being used by British leaders has also changed dramatically. Long unwilling to condemn Israel for its epic slaughter in Gaza, which in less than three years has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them women and children, and injured over 100,000 more, Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy now publicly condemns as “monstrous” calls from Israeli cabinet ministers for Gaza to be “cleansed.” (That terminology was of coursed employed by the Nazis against Jews in Europe). Lammy also characterized the Israeli government’s refusal to allow food, water and medical aid into the battered enclave as “an affront to the values of the British people.’
Even US President Donald Trump, who has continued the prior Biden administration policy of massive arms support for Israel’s all-out assault by air and on the ground on Gaza, is said to be “growing frustrated by what he sees as Israel’s refusal to end the war.”
The change in tone by western governments appears to be driven by a marked shift in public opinion in these countries. For example, in the US, according to an April 11 poll published by the Pew Research Center, found 53 percent of Americans held a negative view of Israel, compared to only 43% in 2022. The same poll found that 27% of Jewish Americans said said they viewed Israel negatively and that they opposed “President Trump’s plan to take over Gaza” and to relocate Palestinians outside their homeland.
A similar drop in support for Israel is showing up in Germany, one of the strongest backers of the country in Europe. There, a May 9 survey by the. Bertelsmann Foundation found that only 36% of Germans interviewed had a positive attitude towards Israel, compared to 46% in 2021. The same poll found 38% of Germans holding a positive attitude towards of Israel this year.
Even in Israel itself, criticism of the government’s continued war on Gaza has been growing, with former Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert declaring continued attacks on remaining functioning hospitals and a total blockade on food and medical aid in Gaza “very close to a war crime.”
I suspect what is driving this shift is two things:
First of all, the news from Gaza, despite Israel’s best efforts to keep journalists out of the enclave or to kill those, mostly Palestinians, still filing reports from there, is showing Israeli jets and tanks bouncing the rubble of Gaza with their US-supplied bombs and shells. As this violence continues, public sentiment even in countries that have long unquestionably backed Israel is drying up.
Second, President Trump and his national security team are, for their own reasons, shifting their focus in the Middle East and are viewing Israel, once a lynch-pin of US dominance in that oil-rich region, as an impediment and a burden. They are instead turning to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates as allies. (For Trump it’s a no-brainer — that’s where the money is.)
All this suggests that the Trump administration effort to conflate anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian protest on US campuses with anti-semitism. which the New York Times just exposed as a conspiracy hatched by the Israeli government and the Heritage Foundation, is doomed to failure. Of course it was from the beginning a ludicrous proposition given the number of Jewish-Americans joining in and even helping to organize those protests. And of course there’s the semitic background of Palestinians themselves.
That’s a reality that cowering college and university administrators should consider before they sell out and cede control of their hiring and their curriculums in history, literature, political science, foreign policy, sociology and other key departments to the White House.
Those who have bemoaned the untoward influence that Israel and its zionist propagandists have had over US foreign policy over the decades can thank Netanyahu, who has destroyed and continues to pummel Israel’s public image on his own.
As the Jerusalem Times reports, Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s left opposition, The Democrats Party, has said, “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state like South Africa was, if we won’t return to being a sane country.” As the former reserve major general in the Israeli Defense Force put it, “A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a holiday, does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.”
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