FOLLOWING Israel’s murderous exploding-pager stunt in Lebanon, Labour’s Emily Thornberry is asking questions every Cabinet minister should answer.
It is all very well for the Foreign Office to call for “calm heads and de-escalation” every time Israel bombs or assassinates people in neighbouring countries.
Since Israel faces no consequences for repeated escalation, it will continue to escalate: and, as Iran warned after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, this means a failure to respond to Israel’s provocations is itself escalatory, likely to lead to wider war.
Iran called on the UN security council to rein Israel in: since Israeli allies Britain, France and the US have a majority on that council, and since all are also involved in supplying arms to Israel and providing logistical support for its war on Palestine, the particular responsibility to act rests with Tel Aviv’s Western backers.
Thornberry, newly elected chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Commons, asks: “Why is this happening now? And what will the result be?
“…Is this the first step, and what will Israel do next? Is it part of a larger plan? It is very worrying and I would certainly be expecting Israel’s friends to be speaking very seriously to them, and saying: ‘What on Earth are you doing’?”
Thornberry could go a lot further. She could call out the pager operation for what it was: a callous act of terrorism committed in a country with which Israel is not at war.
As the exiled whistleblowing US spy Edward Snowden points out, remotely detonating hundreds of communication devices carried by different people scattered about a whole country is exceptionally reckless: some blew up while their carriers were behind the wheel, leading to cars spinning out of control; others while people queued in shops, endangering the lives of random passers-by. We already know an eight-year-old girl is among the dead. The number of injured runs into the thousands.
It is clear from the genocidal assault on Gaza — if it were not evident enough from countless crimes committed during the illegal occupation of Palestine over decades — that Israel’s military and political leaders are indifferent at best, actively gleeful at worst, over the deaths of non-Israeli civilians.
Western governments have shown they do not care, and given the US’s own predilection for murdering arbitrarily identified enemies, often with considerable “collateral damage” in the form of bystanders, from Somalia to Yemen to Pakistan, perhaps we should not expect Thornberry to ask by what right countries in the US bloc kill people when and where they please, without a judicial process or a declaration of war.
But the questions she does ask are important enough. Is Benjamin Netanyahu simply trying to widen the war into Lebanon, to provoke the current contained, if deadly, exchange of fire with Hezbollah over the border into a full-blown war?
Few other explanations spring to mind. If so, why? Presumably to make ending the conflict more difficult, to avoid huge street pressure for his own resignation and new elections which could deprive him of the premiership and possibly his liberty.
Such an escalation could easily drag in Iran, and might be designed to force Washington to directly involve the US and British militaries in a major Middle Eastern war. Is that what the US and British governments want? If so they should admit it; if not, they should explain what they are doing to stop it.
The TUC Congress this month passed an emergency motion from UCU and RMT condemning Israel’s attempts to widen the war, which included a call for a nationwide workplace day of action on October 10 for an immediate ceasefire.
It is indeed an emergency, and unions should use Labour conference to make it clear a failure to stop this war will have consequences for the government.
