A ghostly landscape of Palestinian graves

They are all stationed in important western capitals. And they are all looking away from the terror that has descended on Palestinians in Gaza. They are all lining up behind Netanyahu, to let him know that in his war against the innocent in Gaza they are with him.
They are not, have never been with the Palestinians in these past so many years. These people without a state, inhabiting the ghetto Gaza has been turned into, have borne the brunt of Jewish settler violence and Israeli military might. These powerful men and women in the West have had no time for these Palestinians.
These men and women of enormous power have spoken of the need for Israel to exist free of danger. They have looked away from the danger into which Netanyahu and his far-right government have pushed these hapless Palestinians. They do not see, they do not wish to acknowledge the war crimes the Palestinian people are being subjected to, month after month, year after year.
They condemn Hamas terrorism. They do not speak of the terror their friends in Tel Aviv rain down on people who have no means of defending themselves – no army, no air force, no navy, no formal structure of what constitutes a state. They are not worried when Israel's cabinet orders a blockade of Gaza, prevents food, water, electricity and aid from going in.
They stand solidly behind the men whose savagery is pounding Gaza into rubble, life into unmoving flesh, families into memories of those bloodied to death. They see buildings and homes and offices slipping into ash. But they look away.
They have no inclination to see conditions for what those conditions are. They see the terror machine of a state mowing down lives. And yet they do not perceive circumstances for what they are. For these men and women, the swift murder of those Gazans is no war crime. It is Israel's act of self-defence, even if Netanyahu has promised revenge on an entire population for the action of a militant group craving freedom for its people.
Look away from Gaza for a while, to take in the hypocrisy these men and women of unlimited, unchallenged power have exhibited elsewhere around the world. They have always condemned the Chinese over the alleged repression exercised on the Uyghurs. They have condemned President Vladimir Putin over his assault on Ukraine, have gone looking for evidence of Russian war crimes, have had sanctions imposed on the Russian leader.
These powerful men and women, operating in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels, draw a veil over the crimes, crimes against humanity, being committed by a government whose country has stood on territory that was once an entirety of Palestine.
These individuals of power miss no opportunity to take Iran's ayatollahs to task over the human rights being violated in Tehran and elsewhere in the country. But Iran's rulers have not bombed people in regions beyond Iran. And yet for these powerful individuals Iran is a potent threat. Israel is not.
Time was when such powerful western leaders sat in comfortable couches even as some among their own went into destroying Iraq in 2003. No provocation was there for George W. Bush and Tony Blair, except the WMD lie they invented and repeated ad nauseam, to march into Baghdad, topple Iraq's government and unleash the fury that would put the country to the torch.
The world, the western hemisphere, looked away at the time. The western hemisphere is looking away from Gaza now. To all intents and purposes, Palestinians either do not exist or they have turned subhuman, undeserving of the attention of the putatively civilised world. Palestine was buried under the weight of Israel in May 1948. Its soul refuses to die.
And Palestinians have trekked from country to country in search of bare existence. In the world's power capitals, they are not seen on the radar. They carry begging bowls, they live on the aid doled out by global bodies and charity organisations. In a world of power and prosperity, these Palestinians always stand outside the door for scraps of sympathy.
Hearts in the West have grown hard and cold. Sympathy is not to be found there for these people whose grandparents and parents were driven out of their homes and villages in 1948. Hearts melt --- and they should – when innocent men and women die in Hamas missile raids on Ashkelon. But hearts do not melt when Palestinians have their lives snuffed out in Netanyahu's revenge mission.
The United Nations informs the world that 187,000 of Gaza's 2.3 million people have left their homes in search of shelter since Netanyahu's offensive went underway. Back in 2014, Israel's aggressive air and ground offensive forced 400,000 Gazans out of their homes. These men and women, in their hubristic hold on authority, said nothing nine years ago. They will say nothing in 2023.
And that is the pity. These western human symbols of power, fond of lecturing governments in less powerful or weak nations on democracy and human rights and rule of law, will not lecture Israel. Those Hamas missiles were a violation of the sanctity of life. These Israeli bombs falling on Palestinian homes, on old and young and babies, are for these powerful men and women no violation of life's noble principles.
For these powerful rulers of the world, life is of little consequence in Afghanistan, where people perish in hunger, where girls cannot go to school, where government is based on the primitive and on an endless use of the lash on women. They lorded it over Afghanistan as purveyors of neo-colonialism, before abandoning it to the wolves.
Their ancestors abandoned the Palestinians decades ago, for what mattered was the Balfour Declaration. It did not matter that Palestinian homes, their villages, their olive gardens, their heritage, their songs were pushed into exile. And so it does not matter today that the descendants of those exiles are paying for the sins of western colonialism, that they carry their dead and bloodied babies to cemeteries in the narrow confines of Gaza.
The numbers go up. Illegal Jewish settlements spread out across occupied territory. Palestinian graves extend as far as the eye can see.
But those men and women, immaculate in their demonstration of authority in the world's elegant and well-ordered capitals, do not have time to see such manifestations of reality. The blood on the streets of Gaza does not move them.
No hint of statesmanship lights up their politics. Absence of moral leadership turns them into hollow men.

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