My Take | Gaza has West’s citizens against their governments’ moral failure
- Israel has every right to strike back but not with the kind of impunity Western governments and mainstream media are willing to tolerate
Against many of their own citizens, major Western governments, beginning with the United States, have declared they are standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel while barely expressing concerns about the human catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.
Not only have calls for a ceasefire been ignored, but they are being actively undermined – no less than at the United Nations Security Council – as more weapons and aid are flowing to Israel as if it couldn’t take out tiny Gaza with its own arsenal.
It has been left to many of their own citizens to do the right and brave thing and refuse to accept what their governments are doing in their name.
No decent human being can excuse the Hamas massacres or look on them without utter horror; but neither can any decent government justify what Israel has unleashed on Gaza, and has been doing to its 2.3 million population for years.
Many people are fed up by the lies and propaganda fed to them by their governments and mainstream news media. Contrary to reports such as those by the BBC, those mass protests in Western cities were not for Hamas; they were for the Palestinian right to exist, to stay alive. Some may also raised Palestinian flags, which has long been an expression of support for statehood or independence, not terrorism.
I have witnessed two mass protests for Palestine at Nathan Phillips Square, the City Hall of Toronto in the city’s downtown in the past two weeks. No one supported Hamas, though some refused to condemn its terrorism. What they were demanding was an end to Israel’s military operations in Gaza and the almost unconditional support of Western governments for Israel.