“Right now, Lebanon is being bombed, and genocide in Gaza has been ongoing for nearly a year. Yet the world looks away. We are morally responsible for what is happening, and whether you like it or not, we are complicit. Let’s not act as if silence will free us from our responsibilities.”
Those were the words of France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as at least 560 people were slaughtered in Lebanon in just 24 hours. Meanwhile, United Nations secretary general denounced governments that invade other countries, laying waste to whole societies, trampling international law, violating the UN charter, safe in the knowledge that nothing will happen to them.
They are right. Keir Starmer is looking away. He claims to be working with the UK’s allies to stop the escalation of war in the Middle East, when it’s the UK and its allies that are doing the escalating.
Calling for restraint and de-escalation is not action. Starmer refuses to enforce a full arms embargo, refuses to demand the country complies with international law, continues to say the state has the right to defend itself, laughs at a party conference delegate protesting about the slaughter of children and even banned the word genocide from being used there.
He tells British citizens to get out of Lebanon, but doesn’t tell Israel to get out too. The reality is that Benjamin Netanyahu is dragging the world into a deeper, wider Middle East war with the full backing of the US and the UK.
We see headlines framing Israel’s extension of its deadly bombing campaign into Lebanon as a counter-attack against Hezbollah, as if it were a victim, acting in self-defence against an equally-armed enemy, when the reality is it has been goading the organisation in order to justify its latest acts of state terrorism.
The BBC claimed that Hezbollah had fired a ballistic missile into “the biggest population centre in Israel”, mentioning only in passing that the rocket was actually targeted at a Mossad HQ on the edge of Tel Aviv, which has sent thousands of IEDs into Lebanon.
How can the BBC’s audience be expected to understand the background to this conflict when it presents Hezbollah as firing indiscriminately at Israel and therefore implies that the IDF’s murder of hundreds of civilians, including children, is somehow ok?
It’s deliberate disinformation.
And where in the media is the analysis of Netanyahu’s pledge to return tens of thousands of residents evacuated from northern border areas to their homes, as if thousands of Lebanese families are not being pushed out of their cities in the south of their country?
All Israel has to do to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets and get the Houthis to let ships through the Red Sea again is to stop slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Who knows, that might actually get the hostages back too.
So we must take to the streets again to demand Israel takes its hands off Lebanon and for an end to the genocide in Gaza. Join us at Downing Street tomorrow (Thursday 26 September) for an emergency protest and again on the national demonstration on 5 October to demand the UK government stops arming Israel and for an immediate and full ceasefire across the Middle East.