There are so many lies, deceptions and misdirections in Sir Keir Starmer’s statement on the ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas yesterday that they need to be picked apart line by line.
Starmer: After months of devastating bloodshed and countless lives lost, this is the long-overdue news that the Israeli and Palestinian people have desperately been waiting for. They have borne the brunt of this conflict – triggered by the brutal terrorists of Hamas, who committed the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust on October 7th, 2023.
Under no reasonable definition can the last 15 months be described as a “conflict”. The slaughter and maiming of hundreds of thousands of civilians, as well as Israel’s program to starve the rest of the population, should rightly be understood as a genocide, one the International Court of Justice began investigating a year ago, and one that has been attested to by every major international human rights group, as well as a growing number of Holocaust scholars.
Starmer does at least hint at the truth in conceding that the ceasefire is “long overdue”. The genocide in Gaza could have been brought to an end at any point by US pressure. Indeed, the outlines of the current ceasefire were advanced by the Biden administration back in May. It was Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blocked progress. Israel’s western patrons, including Starmer, rewarded him with weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover. If the ceasefire is “overdue”, Starmer is fully responsible for that delay.
Further, the “conflict” wasn’t “triggered” by Hamas’ attack of October 7, as Starmer claims. The “conflict” has been going on for more than three-quarters of a century, triggered by Israel’s continuous efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland, with western backing, in an explicitly colonial project. Israel wants us to believe the “conflict” clock started ticking on October 7. Only the ignorant, and contemptible politicians like Starmer, repeat that lie.
The killings on October 7 2023 weren’t “the deadliest massacre of Jewish people” since the Holocaust. That’s another cynical Israeli talking point repeated by Starmer whose sole purpose is to rationalise Israel’s genocide. The “deadliest massacre” for Jews since the Holocaust was, in fact, committed by the Argentinian junta, which disappeared and murdered thousands of Jews in the late 1970s. And unlike Hamas, whose victims were killed not because they were Jews but because they were Israelis and viewed as members of an oppressor nation, Argentina’s generals killed Jews specifically for being Jewish. Nonetheless, that massacre – inconvenient to the West – has been carefully memory-holed, including by Starmer.
Hellbound and Down 