Israel’s cruelty affects the whole region

The United Nations must push to bring Tel Aviv to account for its crimes in Gaza

Nasmia Atatreh with her grandchildren as she works spiking tobacco leaves in the courtyard of their home in the Palestinian village of Zabouba near the city of Jenin. All generations in the family wShow more

What is happening in Gaza is almost unimaginable. Almost, because there are daily reports of the brutality of Israel’s occupation – reports which, of course, spike during particularly nasty moments in this long conflict.

Yet what is much harder to imagine is what daily life is like. The dehumanising of Palestinian life, particularly in Gaza, is complete. The Israeli occupation has entrenched itself in every single aspect of life in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is often described as an open-air prison – the latest report from the United Nations shows that even that is something of an understatement.

The report, as carried in our pages yesterday, highlights how ravaged daily life has become: 95 per cent of Gaza’s water is unsafe, nearly three-quarters of Gazans fear not getting enough to eat. The report is shocking but hardly surprising.

Will anything happen this time? The UN, as well as Israel’s chief supporter and financier the United States, is sensitive to world opinion, which has shifted against Israel in recent years. It is possible that, in the brief window afforded to Barack Obama over the next year, he may attempt to make a statement against the occupation.

That statement, were it to come, would mostly be in the form of a UN resolution that the US would decline to veto. That may seem astonishingly tame given the brutality of Gaza, but it is a significant step for a US president, with so many pro-Israel lobbying groups ranged against him in his own country. Such a move would not be easy, but it would be in the interests of his own country.

The Palestinian issue remains the defining issue of the Middle East. Over the seven decades since Israel’s violent birth, it has never gone away. Such is the injustice of Israel’s occupation, that militant groups find it easy to “prove” the West’s bias against the Arab world. Israel’s own capricious violence has helped: Christians and Muslims have been targeted, as well as Arab and African Jews. The violence that is inflicted on the Palestinians is just the more obvious expression of Israel’s exclusionist ideology.

The UN report goes a long way towards establishing the facts that underpin the occupation. But the real task for the UN is not to create an accounting of Israel’s crimes, but to bring Israel to account for its crimes.