Israel's Burning Of A Hospital Patient Also Torched What Remained Of The West's Respect For International Law

NOTE: Throughout 2024, I have voiced audio versions of all articles by former Guardian Middle East correspondent Jonathan Cook.

Although these articles are all Jonathan’s exceptional work, he has kindly allowed me to share extracts and the full audio at any time.

I am just the voice actor here, though I chose to perform Jonatahn’s work because it so closely reflects my own views on the conflict.

As such, I’ll sometimes post the audio and key parts of Jonathan’s text on my Substack.

Thanks,

Matthew

…The year-long genocide in Gaza is entirely a western co-production. The US and Europe send the weapons, provide the diplomatic cover, orchestrate support from their pliant state- and billionaire-owned media, and stifle all domestic dissent. 

The modern era of international humanitarian law that the West proclaimed, as well as the institutions the West championed to uphold it, are going up in flames. 

…

Israel is not “remaking the Middle East”. It is destroying the world as we have known it for generations. 

…In Lebanon, Israel faces a bigger problem. The UN – a body whose humanitarian remit is to bring pressure on state parties to abide by international law – has not just eyes on the ground. It has experienced soldiers in fortified positions to observe proceedings on the battlefield Israel has made of southern Lebanon. 

Its peacekeeping force is drawn from 50 countries, making all of them direct witnesses to Israel’s crimes against humanity. Unifil reports are sent to the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, and a network of UN human rights bodies. 

That’s why the force needs the very watchtowers Israel is intent on destroying.

…

That is why Israel has declared Guterres “persona non grata” and banned him from entering the country. Israel’s foreign minister has accused Guterres of backing “terrorists, rapists, and murderers”, and called him “a stain on the history of the UN”. 

It is why Netanyahu has described the UN General Assembly as a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”. 

It is why the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN responded to the General Assembly’s vote to back Palestine as a member by publicly shredding the UN Charter. 

It is why Israeli officials have repeatedly smeared the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court staffed by expert judges in international law, as antisemitic, supposedly seeking “the persecution of the Jewish people”. The ICJ’s crime is to have ruled that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. 

…

Barely mentioned in the western establishment media has been Israel’s so-called “Generals’ Plan”: turning an area Israel has declared as “northern Gaza” into an official, industrial-scale extermination camp. 

The plan, published last month by a group of influential military reservists, involves giving some 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza a week to flee southwards. Anyone left will be starved to death or executed as a “Hamas terrorist”. Frustrated by Israel’s failure to defeat Hamas, these senior officers want to erase any last traces of protections for civilians. 

…

The detonation of weaponry across the region equivalent to many atomic bombs is possible because of the Biden administration’s deep pockets and limitless indulgence. 

We are entering a period not only of industrialised slaughter carried out in the name of a supposed western civilisation, but also of an earth-shaking geopolitical crisis.  

In 1929, in the dark, chaotic period between the First and Second World Wars, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously wrote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

The old world is dying once again. It thinks it is in charge of the birth of the new; the remaking of the Middle East. But it is wrong. It is not fighting monsters. It is the monster.