The blockade of humanitarian aid imposed, since March 2, in the Palestinian enclave testifies to a moral collapse of the Jewish state and the international community, at a time when all the things available to end the excesses of Benjamin Netanyahu must be implemented.
Nothing can justify two months of blockade of essential humanitarian aid to a population in distress. Ever. The weapon of hunger and basic medical necessities discredits those who use it. That it is necessary to recall today this evidence concerning the Palestinians of Gaza testifies to a staggering moral collapse. The cries of alarm coming from experts in crisis situations are not lacking, even if Israel maintains another blockade in Gaza, that of information, unworthy of a democracy.
This subsidence mainly concerns the Hebrew State. In the name of a balance of power with the Hamas militiamen who are still holding Israeli hostages captured during the massacres of October 7, 2023, the Israeli authorities are making this blockade, obviously prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, a tool like any other. That this choice meets at best the indifference of Israeli society is the sign of an alarming confinement. Especially since it adds to deadly and destructive bombings since the unilateral resumption of fighting by Israel, always justified by cynically presented ratios as “tolerable” between civilian victims and military targets.
Israel can count on the blind support of the American administration as well as on the misguidance of those who seem unable to envisage that attachment to Israel can be accompanied by the slightest criticism when the unacceptable is reached. Yet here we are. The sanitized form of barbarism that constitutes the deliberate choice to deprive a population of more than 2 million people of the bare necessities is a terrible revelation of the drift of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, converted to the extremism of parties whose program is Greater Israel, “from the river to the sea”, of which the war in Gaza is a link.
Deafening silence
While France has been far-sighted before the International Court of Justice, before which some forty countries and international organizations have been pleading since Monday, 28 April, recalling Israel to its duties as an “occupying power” and calling for an immediate end to this blockade, its voice remains unfortunately well isolated, particularly in Europe, where one ends up wondering if the Union still has a foreign affair official. Silence is equally deafening in Arab countries, starting with the United Arab Emirates, which has normalized its relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.
It is certainly more convenient to resign oneself to impunity. Resisting it requires the courage to say loud and clear that Israel is going astray in a war in which it is losing its soul, that it must be called to order, and that the means available to arrest it must be implemented, especially if it continues to remain deaf to the injunctions of international justice.
The sequence opened by the Hamas terrorist attack paradoxically highlighted the military overpower of the Jewish state, but, as shown by what is happening in Gaza, the latter seems unable to make use of it that contributes to the stability of a region abandoned for too long to violence.
Leave a Reply