The condemnations and pledges of support from Western governments were rapid, the media coverage comprehensive. The mass murder of many hundreds of Israeli civilians by terrorists, the barbaric kidnapping of who knows how many Israeli men, women and children to become hostages and human shields, the indiscriminate raining of thousands of rockets on Israeli cities, rightly drew instant outrage and horror from the West.
But compare the almost complete absence of condemnation for the murder of 185 Palestinian civilians this year by the Israeli Defence Force, or Israeli settlers — the number according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Or the 172 Palestinians murdered in 2022. Or the 80 in 2021. There have been 3,081 Palestinian civilians killed in the past decade, and 132,000 Palestinians injured, including 16,300 shot with live ammunition. In the same period, 129 Israeli civilians have been killed, and 3686 wounded.
The steady killing of Palestinians draws virtually no comment from Western governments, and any coverage in the Western mainstream media is minimal. It takes an egregious act of violence by the IDF, like the murder of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, to force Western governments into any critical statements of Israel.
Other systematic Israeli violations of human rights — the demolition of Palestinian homes; the holding of many hundreds of Palestinians without trial or charge; the state support for ongoing, illegal colonisation of Palestinian land by settlers, numbering thousands of houses a year; the long-term treatment of the 2 million citizens of Gaza as a giant prison population — draw no comment, despite being forensically detailed by independent human rights bodies such as Human Rights Watch.
For the West, Palestinians just don’t count. Twitter doesn’t light up with footage of grieving Palestinian families; there are no headlines and front-page news of their deaths, the prime minister doesn’t rush to offer his support for them after an atrocity takes the lives of civilians. Israelis — despite the horrific resurgence of anti-Semitism on the right in the West — are like us; Palestinians are Other, their deaths and their grief always of less importance, if any.
That is exactly how Israel likes it. Despite countries like Australia clinging to comfortable motherhood about a two-state solution, Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly rejected the idea, saying Israel must have “overriding security control of all the territories”. And that’s at the rhetorical level: on the ground, Israel continues to colonise occupied Palestinian land — a war crime under international law — in a slow, steady imposition of an apartheid state, in which Israeli communities on Palestinian land surrounding Palestinian communities are linked by Israeli-only infrastructure while a fragmented Palestinian population is left to “govern” itself in non-contiguous, heavily policed territories.
This delivers Israel the benefits of colonisation, without the negatives, such as having to allow Palestinians citizenship of, or voting rights in, a greater Israel including an annexed Palestine.
A key element of this annexation-by-stealth strategy is to keep the ongoing conflict suppressed, to present a business-as-usual face to the world unmarked by major outbreaks of violence or limited to a steady drip of Palestinian casualties, “mowing the grass” in the infamous phrase, while colonisation proceeds on the ground, extending Israeli control of Palestinian land and resources further and further without adverse international comment, with the hope that the status quo of a one-state colonial solution becomes accepted by the West.
Hamas’ mass murders, monstrous as they are, have, for the time being, disrupted what has been a successful Israeli strategy, once again focusing the world on a conflict that Israel has worked assiduously to suppress and laying bare the double standards of the West. For now, there’s no going back to a world in which hundreds of Palestinian civilians can be killed without Western politicians and journalists stirring.
