For the last 77 years the West has watched Israel devour Palestine, plunder its resources and mercilessly kill and maim its citizens. They finally say ‘we recognise Palestine’ when it’s far too late to be of real use. I have no words to express my contempt for the United Nations.

Where are the hard-biting sanctions?

Where is the total worldwide boycott?

Where is the UN’s armed protection force to push Israel’s genocidal maniacs back to the Green Line?

Where are the naval escorts to ensure aid is safely landed on Gaza’s beaches?

When will Israel’s embassies around the world be shut down and their staff ejected?

Why hasn’t Israel been sacked, or at least suspended, for its disregard of UN values and Charter obligations?

Why hasn’t the General Assembly used the tools available to bypass the US’s repeated abuse of its privileged position? Every day they hesitate hundreds more women and children are exterminated.

It’s simple. Palestinians have an inalienable right to freedom and self-determination regardless of what anyone else says, and the international community has a sworn duty to recognise Palestinian statehood. It’s not a matter for ‘negotiation’. So it is nonsense for Palestine’s enemies to claim that recognition is “a reward” for the resistance some describe as terrorism. Besides, it can be argued that the UK’s refusal until now to recognise Palestinian statehood has encouraged and rewarded Israel’s 77-year reign of terror, brutal occupation, massacre and dispossession in the Palestinian territories, and now the 2-year genocide.

Let’s just look at Britain’s disgraceful performance. We should have granted provisional independence in the 1920s in accordance with our Mandate agreement, but didn’t. We should have ensured Palestinian statehood in 1948 but didn’t, accepting instead an Israeli ‘state’ with no borders so they could pursue their outrageous land-grab. We’ve used every silly excuse since then to block Palestinian freedom and buy time for Israel to establish irreversible facts on the ground. It’s been a long story of betrayal.

Now, instead of punishing Israel’s vile butchery we make Hamas the villain. “They can have no future, no role in government,” says Starmer without explaining how he can legally interfere and dictate who may (and may not) rule the Palestinian state. That’s a matter entirely for the Palestinians, surely. He still speaks about a 2-state solution where there’s “a safe and secure Israel… alongside a viable Palestinian State”, as if Palestinians are children of a lesser God, don’t deserve security and only qualify for second-class statehood. And despite endless blather neither he nor anyone else has described what a 2-state setup would look like.

Starmer once again shows he is only concerned about the Israeli hostages and not the 7,200 Palestinian captives, including 88 women and 250 children, held by Israel on that fateful day in October 2023. Have they all been released? He forgets — if he ever bothered to find out — that in the 23 years up till then Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1 (actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women; Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women – source: Israel’s B’Tselem). And Gaza had been under cruel blockade for 16 years, turning the enclave into an open-air prison with Israel periodically ‘mowing the grass’. Were the Palestinians supposed to put up with that indefinitely?

Just saying “We recognise you” while the genocide continues unabated is unbelievably pathetic. Britain and the international community must accompany those words with speedy, concrete action to put an end to Israel’s genocide and illegal occupation immediately. To make sure, the British Government and others must persuade the UN to intervene militarily with a protection force, sending Israel back to the internationally recognised ‘Green Line’. We should also pull the plug on all trade, military and security links with the Israeli regime until its conduct improves sufficiently to re-join the civilised community of nations.

But there’s a problem. The British Government remains a Zionist stronghold. Starmer has said, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. Yvette Cooper is a signed-up Friend of Israel. Can they ever be trusted to do the right thing? Peace can never be achieved without justice, but that is a word you seldom, if ever, hear from their lips.

“Nowhere near enough aid is getting through,” Starmer tells us, “let the aid surge in.” But he hasn’t bothered to send an escort from Gibraltar to protect the aid flotilla sailing to Gaza from drone attacks and the armed Israeli boarding parties that are expected to repeat their acts of piracy on previous mercy flotillas. The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip amounts to collective punishment on the Palestinians living there and is therefore considered illegal under international law. The flotilla is entirely peaceful, does not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel, so is entitled to free, safe and unmolested passage to its destination.

Meanwhile we see Israel, with massive US help and tacit UK approval, rushing to complete ‘Plan Dalet’, the Zionist terror blueprint for taking over the Palestinian homeland drawn up in early 1948 by the Jewish militia Haganah at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister. It anticipated the British Mandate Government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood, and correctly assumed the British authorities would no longer be there to block Plan D’s hideous purpose. The document shows how “expulsion and transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) was key to the Zionists’ ambition. The Israelis, backed throughout by the US and UK, are still busily fulfilling it.

Netanyahu’s response to the flurry of recognitions is to carry on regardless, insisting yet again there’ll be no Palestinian state and increasing Israeli settlements in the West Bank (which is classed as a war crime). Starmer’s reacts by announcing more sanctions against Hamas while still giving the real terrorists a free pass as they step up the genocidal slaughter. None of them gives a damn about international and humanitarian law, human decency, or justice.

A UN commission of inquiry now reports that Israel seeks to establish permanent control over Gaza and a Jewish majority in the occupied West Bank, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s paying attention.

I expect maximum foot-dragging, as before, to prolong the misery and ensure the Zionists’ ultimate triumph.

The post Was that the Best the “Civilised” World Could Do? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.