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As the G7 issues a statement declaring that Israel has a “right to defend itself”, you have a right to ask if you are losing your mind. Israel launched an unprovoked onslaught on Iran. Its excuse – that Tehran may acquire a nuclear weapon – renders its attack illegal under the UN charter, which forbids wars justified by the claim of a future threat.
“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” declares the G7 statement. Even though Donald Trump’s intelligence chief testified three months ago that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. Even though it’s Israel that actually possesses nuclear weapons, while refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and refusing International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Even though, as progress was being made in nuclear talks between Iran and the US, Israel targeted Iran’s chief negotiator and proceeded to exterminate scientists, including their families, alongside countless other civilians, including children, an athlete, a teacher, a pilates instructor. Even though Israel’s leader is subject to an arrest warrant, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And even though Israel has erased Gaza in a genocidal frenzy, and subjected the illegally occupied and colonised West Bank to an escalating pogrom, attacked southern Lebanon and Beirut, and invaded and occupied Syria. No country in the Middle East is as great a source of regional instability and terror as Israel: it’s not even close.
Yet even as polling shows that Britons overwhelmingly want no part in this literal crime, we hear the same tunes sung to demonise opponents of the latest carnage. Scottish politicians demanding peace “are siding with a mediaeval theocratic dictatorship”, declares former flagship BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. Recall how opponents of the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya calamities were monstered as lackeys of Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and Muammar Gaddafi. Yet who, Mr Neil, was vindicated – catastrophically so?
Here is a tragedy paid with the blood of an estimated more than 4.5 million human souls – the combined number of direct and indirect deaths in the post-9/11 war zones, according to a Brown University study. There have been no reputational consequences for those who cheered on each calamity, allowing them to walk away whistling from each crime scene demanding yet more violence without shame. About six months before the Iraq invasion, and believing the war in Afghanistan to already be a great success, Neil wrote a column warning “the suburbs of Baghdad are now dotted with secret installations, often posing as hospitals or schools” which were developing chemical and biological weapons and, “most sinister of all, a renewed attempt to develop nuclear weapons”.
One sentence he deployed against advocates of peace should surely become the epitaph of the warmongers: “It is unclear how many more times they have to be wrong before we are released from the obligation to take them too seriously.” Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, shared his hubris, promising US Congress in 2002: “If you take out Saddam – Saddam’s regime – I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
No amount of objective failure can change their minds. This fanaticism can only be sustained by mocking reality itself. Unlike Israel, the Iranian regime “targets civilians”, says a prime minister accused of war crimes. At the same time, an Israeli military spokesperson brands Tehran a “terror regime” because of these killings. The concept of terrorism, in practice, has come to mean violence perpetrated by regimes and militants hostile to the west, used to portray such acts as illegitimate and immoral, unlike the vastly more lethal missiles and bullets of Tel Aviv and Washington.
Israel’s gall is something to behold. It has butchered tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza – mostly women and children – yet 24 Israelis killed by Iranian attacks apparently exposes the unique evil of Tehran’s regime. More than twice as many hungry Palestinians looking for food in Gaza were slaughtered in a single massacre by Israeli troops overnight: note how this mass killing receives the tiniest fraction of media attention. There is no attempt to disguise this hierarchy of death. A comprehensive new report on the BBC’s reporting of the Gaza genocide finds that each Israeli fatality received 33 times more coverage than each Palestinian. The west’s facilitation of Israel’s atrocities relies on treating Arab and Iranian lives as worthless.
Iran, too, of course, has a legal responsibility to avoid killing Israeli civilians. As Kenneth Roth, former Human Rights Watch director, observes: “Israel’s close intermingling of military and civilian sites makes it difficult to know what Iran is aiming its missiles at.” In Gaza, this was defined as using civilians as “human shields”, but no such standards are applied to Israel. This narrative was used to wipe Gaza from the face of the Earth, even as Israel used actual Palestinian human shields on an industrial scale.
You may indeed feel like you are losing your mind. After all, Israel’s military has reportedly committed every war crime under the sun. It attacked Iran without evidence or provocation. The same cheerleaders for past bloodbaths strut around advocating yet more slaughter as though recent history never happened, while opponents of dropping bombs on terrified civilians are once more smeared as dangerous extremists. Yet western states issue a statement portraying the genocidal, expansionist, nuclear-armed Israeli state as the victim, and our government refuses to rule out military support for Tel Aviv.
The truth is you are not losing your mind. The actual mad men are those in power. And unless they finally face a reckoning, the abyss awaits.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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