After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different \u2013 but equally deceitful \u2013 narrative.<\/p>\n
With the finishing line in sight for Israel\u2019s program of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West\u2019s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.<\/p>\n
As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada \u2013 key US allies \u2013 erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.<\/p>\n
They called<\/a> Israel\u2019s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing \u201cdisproportionate\u201d, while Israel\u2019s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was \u201cintolerable\u201d.<\/p>\n The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language<\/a> against Israel from the western press corps.<\/p>\n The establishment media\u2019s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza\u2019s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney \u2013 after more than a year and a half of indifference \u2013 did not appear too abrupt, or too strange.<\/p>\n They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel\u2019s genocide. But genocides don\u2019t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.<\/p>\n The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.<\/p>\n But the deeper reality is that western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their \u201ccriticisms\u201d of Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza \u2013 just as they earlier coordinated their support for it.<\/p>\n As much was conceded by a senior Israeli official to Israel’s Haaretz<\/em> newspaper. Referring to the sudden change of tone, he said<\/a>: “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n The hand-wringing is just another bit of stagecraft, little different from the earlier mix of silence and talk about Israel\u2019s \u201cright to defend itself\u201d. And it is to the same purpose: to buy Israel time to \u201cfinish the job\u201d \u2013 that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.<\/p>\n