Sally Rooney: Killing in Gaza has been supported by Ireland’s ‘good friend’ in the White House

Our Government is basking in the moral glow of condemning the bombers, while preserving a cosy relationship with those supplying the bombs

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Sally Rooney – Palestine

“The cries of the innocent will haunt us forever if we stay silent.” These are the words of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, speaking at an event in Boston this week about Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza. And who could disagree? What is taking place in Palestine now is one of the most profound and shocking moral catastrophes of our time.

Already for months on end, Israeli military forces have been pounding the besieged, starving and largely homeless population of Gaza with relentless aerial bombardment. Cut off from the outside world, Palestinian survivors have been forced to document the crisis in real time, sharing stories, images and footage of mass graves, destroyed buildings and abandoned bodies. And with no end in sight, the United States continues to pump money and weapons into Israel to prolong the onslaught.

But on Sunday, to cap off his US visit, Varadkar will visit the White House for a St Patrick’s Day photo opportunity with president Joe Biden. At their meeting on Friday, some concerned words were no doubt exchanged about the plight of Palestinian civilians, but Varadkar was clear in advance about the purpose of the conversation: “I’m not here to tell him off or tick him off … Let’s never forget that he’s been a very good friend to Ireland.”

This illustrates neatly the Irish Government’s approach to the war on Gaza. Strong straightforward criticism is reserved for the relatively small (and increasingly globally isolated) state of Israel. The US, on the other hand – which supplies about 80% of Israel’s weapons imports, as well as billions of dollars in aid – is treated as a kind of neutral third party, and of course as a “very good friend”. This way, our Government can bask in the moral glow of condemning the bombers, while preserving a cosy relationship with those supplying the bombs.

But

what is happening in Gaza is not only Israel’s war: it is a US war, and
it is most particularly Biden’s war. Israel simply could not afford to
carry out this prolonged and resource-intensive assault on the
Palestinian people without US money and weaponry. Polling shows that a majority of Americans want a permanent ceasefire; Biden’s support for Israel even appears to be damaging his chances in the upcoming presidential race. And yet he’s refusing to listen to his voters, and has repeatedly bypassed Congress, in order to keep supplying Israel with the resources on which it relies.

Conspiracy
theorists may like to imagine that Israel exercises some outsize
influence on the US, but the reality is quite the opposite. It is the US
that exerts enormous power over Israel – and previous American
presidents have been prepared to use that power. In the 1980s, in
response to illegal Israeli attacks on Iraq and Lebanon, Ronald Reagan
not only criticised the attacks in public, but also restricted US aid
and military assistance to Israel in response, helping to force the
withdrawal of troops. In the early 1990s, George H.W. Bush
likewise used US aid to Israel as a bargaining chip in international
negotiations. If Biden is refusing to leverage these same resources in
order to make Israel comply with US policy, the only reasonable
conclusion is that this war is already US policy.

Many experts in international law are describing the war on Gaza as a genocide. Many more may come to agree, when the true scale of death and devastation is revealed. After all, Israel has not permitted any external media organisations
to enter Gaza since last October, except under strict military escort.
Palestinian journalists inside the territory have meanwhile been killed
at a rate indicative of intentional targeting. In the whole of last
year, 99 journalists worldwide were killed in the course of their
reporting; 72 of those were Palestinian journalists killed by Israel. This prohibition on external media and consistent killing of reporters suggests a concerted effort to suppress the facts.

Since the start of the onslaught, more than 65,000 tonnes
of primarily US-made explosives have been dropped on the Gaza Strip.
Each new airstrike rains down more devastation, demolishing more
infrastructure, trapping more helpless people under the rubble,
inflicting more catastrophic injuries. Each additional death leaves
behind more irreparable grief and heartbreak. And now, as Israel
continues to block the flow of aid, a manmade famine is taking hold. Human beings are slowly and excruciatingly dying of starvation, not through crop failure or natural disaster, but as a result of intentional Israeli and US policy.

At the time of writing, the official death toll in Gaza stands at more than 30,000. As horrifying as this figure is, it is probably an underestimate.
The Gaza health ministry, relying on figures from catastrophically
overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, has likely failed to keep up with the
rapid pace of destruction. We simply do not know how many Palestinians
have been killed by the Israeli state since October of last year.

What
we do know is that each one of these killings has been financed and
supported by our “very good friend” in the White House. In the short
time I have spent preparing this piece, I have seen images of one of
Gaza’s few remaining UN aid facilities hit by an airstrike, just one day after the centre’s co-ordinates were shared with Israeli security forces; images of the protruding bones of an emaciated Palestinian child; of the rubble of the majestic 14th-century Barqouq castle irreparably demolished by bombs; and of Israeli soldiers posing cheerfully with the underwear of displaced or massacred Palestinian women.
To this collage of moral depravity, we may soon be able to add a
photograph of Biden and Varadkar smiling together over the customary
bowl of shamrock. If so, it is an image that – to use Varadkar’s own
words – ”will haunt us forever”.

Copyright ©2024 Sally Rooney Sally Rooney is a novelist