Wednesday 10 April 2024

Arming Israel Makes Us Complicit In Genocide

If a country is committing genocide, as defined by International Organisations such as the United Nations and the highest court in the World as well as countless human rights groups, then if you knowingly continue to supply that country with the weapons to continue it then you are complicit in committing that genocide so when the British Foreign Minister states that Britain will not stop selling arms to Israel, then we become implicated in what they do with the weapons we give them.
After over 33,000 deaths in Gaza including over 200 aid workers and 100 journalists, pressure is mounting on Israel’s allies to halt arms supplies with Joe Biden's America by far the major supplier, providing an estimated 68% of Israel’s foreign weapons with Germany, providing around 30% while Britain and Italy send an estimated 1.5%.
As well as weapons, America has provided $158 bn of financial support since the second world war and immediately after the Hamas attacks in October,
passed a bill that would provide $14.1bn in Israel-related supplemental spending, $3.5bn in foreign military financing, and $801.4m for ammunition procurement although it is currently tied up in the Senate.
Human Rights Lawyers in America are pointing to Section 502 (B) of the US Foreign Assistance Act which prohibits aid to governments engaged in gross human rights abuses and the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 which forbids the state department or the Pentagon from providing funding to foreign units that have committed, according to 'credible information', human rights violations which is just , one of the many accusations Israel are accused of performing in Palestine. In February 2023, the Biden administration issued a Conventional Arms Transfer (Cat) policy stating that the US would not transfer weapons where they were deemed likely to be used to commit 'grave 'breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such' but unlike Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain and Belgium who have all announced they would stop shipping weapons to Israel, the arms flow continues.
One reason put forward is that punishing Israel risks alienating pro-Israel Jewish voters in an election year although that is coming at the expense of pro-Palestinian voters who are threatening to desert Biden over his stance on the war.
It is abhorrent that there are some nations who are decrying what Israel are doing in Gaza while providing them with the weapons to continue doing it and shamefully my own country is amongst them
and the murderous slaughtering of innocent Gazan's will continue long after any ceasefire, as has been happening for the past 60 years because this never started on October 7th, Israel has been killing and bombing Gaza for 60 years with weapons provided by it's allies and unless the Palestinian state is recognised and given security at the UN, it will continue long after any ceasefire.