Middle East Eye :
Nearly a decade ago, a leading Israeli human rights activist divulged to me a private conversation he’d had a short time earlier with one of Europe’s ambassadors to Israel. He had clearly been shaken by the exchange.
The ambassador’s country was then widely seen as one of the most sympathetic in the West to the Palestinian people.
The Israeli activist had expressed concerns about Europe’s inaction in the face of relentless Israeli attacks on Palestinian rights and systematic violations of international law.
At the time, Israel was enforcing a lengthy siege on Gaza that had deprived more than two million people there of the essentials of life, and it had repeatedly bombed urban areas, killing hundreds of civilians.
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel had intensified its expansion of illegal Jewish settlements, leading to a surge in violence from settler militias and the Israeli army. Palestinians were being killed and driven off their land.
The activist asked the ambassador a simple question: What would Israel need to do for his government to act against it? Where was the red line?
The ambassador paused as he thought hard. And then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he responded: there was nothing Israel could do. There was no red line.
A decade ago, that comment might have been interpreted as evasive. A year into Israel’s erasure of Gaza, it sounds utterly prophetic.
There is no red line. And more importantly, there never has been. That conversation took place many years before 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis.
That date is not quite the turning point, the rupture, that it is universally presented as.
Hamas’s brief jail-break from Gaza certainly triggered an explosive desire for revenge among Israelis, who had grown used to being able to subjugate and dispossess the Palestinian people cost-free.
But more importantly, it offered a pretext for Israel’s leaders to erase Gaza – to carry out a plan they had long harboured. And similarly, it offered western states the pretext they needed to stand with Israel and excuse its savagery as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
Horror show
Call the events unfolding over the past 12 months in Gaza what you will: self-defence, mass slaughter, or a “plausible genocide”, as the world’s highest court has termed it. What can’t be debated is that it has been a horror show.
In the first two months alone, Israel destroyed more of Gaza proportionally than the Allies managed in Germany during the entire Second World War.
It carried out more air strikes on Gaza than the US and UK did against the Islamic State group over a period of three years in Iraq.
The official figures are that Israel has so far killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza – more than half of them women and children – through relentless and indiscriminate bombing of the tiny, overcrowded enclave.
According to human rights groups, more children were killed by Israel in the first four months of its bombing campaign in Gaza than were killed in four years of all other global conflicts combined.
Oxfam reported last week that in the past two decades, no conflict anywhere else in the world has come close to killing so many children over a 12-month period.
But the true death toll is far higher. Gaza, bombed into 42 million tonnes of rubble, lost the ability to count its dead and wounded many months ago.
Last week, a group of nearly 100 American doctors and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza’s healthcare system as Israel has systematically eviscerated it wrote an open letter to US President Joe Biden. They estimated that the death toll was nearly three times higher than the official figure.
They added: “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
Medieval-style blockade Back in July, a letter published in the Lancet medical journal put the figure still higher. Using standard modelling techniques, drawing on data from previous wars in which densely populated urban areas were destroyed, a team of experts concluded that Gaza’s death toll would reach much closer to 200,000, based on conservative parameters.
That would amount to nearly 10 percent of Gaza’s population killed outright by Israeli bombs, disappeared under rubble, dead from medical conditions that could not be treated, or dying from mass malnutrition after a year of an Israeli medieval-style blockade of food, water and fuel.
Israel appears certain that there are no red lines, and as a result, things have only gotten worse since the Lancet letter.
In September, deliveries of food and aid into Gaza sank to their lowest level in seven months, according to figures from the United Nations and Israel.
In other words, Israel’s stranglehold on aid to Gaza’s starving population has actually intensified since May, when Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.
One of the main charges was that the pair were using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israeli leaders are so confident that the US and Europe are watching their backs that, according to a Reuters report last week, Israel’s military authorities have in recent days been blocking UN-chartered aid convoys from entering Gaza.
Netanyahu clearly isn’t worried about being dragged to the dock of a war crimes tribunal at The Hague any time soon.
One-sided anniversary If western politicians have no red lines when it comes to Israel, much the same can be said of the West’s establishment media.
They barely report on conditions in Gaza anymore, apart from the occasional headline figure of deaths from Israel’s latest bombardment of a school shelter, refugee camp or mosque.
Media outlets marked the anniversary of 7 October this week but, predictably, most did so from an exclusively Israeli perspective – as the day when 1,150 Israelis and foreigners were killed during Hamas’s attack, and a mix of some 250 captured soldiers and civilian hostages were taken into the enclave.
The BBC, for example, has been heavily promoting its documentary We Will Dance Again, recounting the experiences of Israelis who attended the Nova rave close to Gaza, which turned into a killing field.
Similarly, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary titled One Day in October, billed as “an intimate and shocking account of the Kibbutz Be’eri atrocity”. Some 100 kibbutz inhabitants were killed that day and 30 hostages seized.