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How the West's Israelophobia Has Made Life Hell for Palestinians
(Spiked-UK) Brendan O'Neill - Gaza has been engulfed by war for nearly two years. Why are there still women and children in Gaza? Have we become blind to what a grotesque and preposterous situation this is? Women and children leave warzones. That's the one nod to civilization man makes even in the hell of war. Almost eight million souls have fled Ukraine since Russia's invasion, most of them women and children. Around seven million Syrians fled fighting over the past decade. The jarring truth is that they are there because the moral institutions of the West have all but forbidden their fleeing. This is the first war in my lifetime where women and children leaving the warzone has been actively discouraged by the West's opinion-setters. In most wars, humankind fervently does everything it can to facilitate the fleeing of the innocent. We recognize that flows of refugees are tragic but necessary, displacement being infinitely preferable to death. In this war, uniquely, the opposite calculation has been made: that the risk of death is less atrocious for Gazans than displacement. When Israeli officials propose the temporary displacement of civilians from Gaza as the war rages, they are instantly condemned for "genocidal" thinking, for lusting after "ethnic cleansing." Why is it "seeking refuge" when Ukrainians are forced to flee their homeland by Russia, but "ethnic cleansing" if Gazans were to flee as a consequence of this infernal war Hamas started? What motors this delirious, even murderous hostility to "outflows" of Gazans? It's simple: hatred for Israel. Palestinians are dying as a consequence of the anti-Israel bigotry of Western institutions. Palestinians are being deprived of the essential right to asylum that is enjoyed by all other people swept up in war. The international community hates the Jewish state more than it cherishes Palestinian life. The claim that Israel is intentionally starving Gazans is a grotesque inversion of reality. In truth, Israel has handed out millions of meals while Hamas has used menace and violence to try to thwart this mass feeding in the hope that the sight of emaciated Gazans will lead once more to Israel being damned by the West as "genocidal." And that's exactly what has happened.