The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten

The Guardian

Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever.

What is the value of a Palestinian life? For those retaining delusions not already buried in the rubble of Gaza alongside entire families – like the Zorobs, the Kashtans, the Attalahs – Joe Biden offered a definitive answer last week. In a statement marking 100 days since the current horror began, he rightly showed empathy for the plight of hostages – whose abduction by Hamas represents a grave war crime – and their traumatised families. Yet there was not a single mention of Palestinians. (...)

(Text continues underneath the photo.)

‘Life is cheap, they say: it is apparently meaningless if you are Palestinian.’ Palestinians search the rubble after airstrikes on Khan Younis, October 2023. Photograph: Mohammed Dahman/AP.

If the world’s powerful nations had not so brazenly shrugged off three-quarters of a million Palestinians being driven from their homes 76 years ago, accompanied by an estimated 15,000 suffering violent deaths, the seeds of today’s bitter harvest would not have been planted. (...)

If even some worth had been attached to Palestinian life then decades of occupation, siege, illegal colonisation, apartheid, violent repression and mass slaughter might never have happened. Oppressing others becomes difficult to sustain when their humanity is accepted. (...)

Surely 10,000 children suffering violent deaths, or the 10 kids having one or both legs amputated each day, often without anaesthetic, would stir powerful emotions. Surely 5,500 pregnant women giving birth each month – many having caesareans without anaesthetic – or newborns dying of hypothermia and diarrhoea would trigger unstoppable revulsion. (...)

This has not happened, and this is why the consequences will be severe.

The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. (...)

All this will have a profound impact. For a start, forget about any future western claims about human rights and international law. (...) After the west armed and backed Israel as it imposed mass death on Gaza through bombs, bullets, hunger, thirst and the destruction of medical facilities, nobody other than the terminally gullible will listen to such claims ever again.

But it’s not just other countries that western political and media elites should be panicking about. They face moral collapse at home, too. Younger generations in countries such as the US and Britain have grown up taking racism far more seriously than those before them, and polling shows they are far more sympathetic to Palestinians than older citizens are. (...)

What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? (...)

So yes, we have seen how the refusal to treat Palestinians as human beings made today’s nightmare inevitable. We can see how the moral claims used to justify western global dominance are permanently shredded. But little thought has been given to how political and media elites in western nations have torched their moral authority, leaving it to fester alongside thousands of unidentified Palestinian corpses buried under the rubble. A turning point, to be sure, with consequences that will only be understood when it is much too late.

Complete article

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #media #news #journalism #journalist #media_coverage #international_law #war