Mass-killing in Gaza: no, we are not on “Israel’s side! ” & Rwanda: Cleverly’s abject charade

“Tonight you will be bombed”.  The leaflets informing Gaza’s 1. 8m evacuees from the North and the 1m Palestinians living in the South, of impending Israeli army shelling, have a QR code printed on them, to be read by a cell phone.

    The network connection needed, however, is switched on and off at will by Israeli controllers.  And anyway, since Gaza’s electricity grid was destroyed several weeks ago, oil-operated generators are needed for charging phones and power banks, and oil is very scarce. . .

    If however, you’re able read the QR code, you get access to a map with lots of numbers, indicating “safe and unsafe zones”.  It’s complicated and most people can’t figure out what it means.  But the experience of the last 2 months is that wherever you go, you’re at risk; nowhere is “safe”.

    And even if the small barren plots of land (with no buildings “worth” bombing on them) indicated by the Israeli Defence Force’s “map” won’t be shelled or overrun by tanks, the thousands of Palestinian evacuees who might seek refuge there will have no drinkable water, nor food, nor shelter, let alone the luxury of a toilet.

    The Israeli military, (whose latest chosen spokesperson is an ex-Glaswegian, called Richard Hecht) claims that their killing spree is in order to destroy “Hamas and its tunnels”.  But it’s obvious that it is driving the whole population further and further south towards the Rafah Crossing. . .

    One could be forgiven for seeing this as an effective ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.  Does the IDF expect Rafah to be opened by Egyptian authorities, or for the population, in desperation, to break through its gates? The other side - into Egypt’s Sinai Desert - is also unlikely to be a “safe place”, since the Gazans may then have to face the bullets - or at least the counter-force of the Egyptian army. . .

    When asked by BBC’s Radio 4 what he had to say about all of this, Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick answered: “well, we support Israel”.

    Yes Jenrick and Sunak etc. , and, indeed, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (minus about 50 Labour MPs who couldn’t stomach it) give unconditional “support” to the Israeli government’s terrorism and mass murder of the Palestinians.  And now there’s a 2nd and 3rd front to their one-sided “war”, on the West Bank - where Palestinians are being murdered and interned daily while their homes are bulldozed.

    Is this not enough, already, for the rest of us, who watch this horror from afar, not only to withdraw our support from all of these politicians and unite to overturn their rotten, barbaric system? Our collective class force wasn’t used last year; but once organised, it would have the power to get rid of such barbarism, once and for all.

Unfortunately the occupant in the plane which successfully took off for Rwanda this week didn’t stay in order to get a taste of the “hospitality” of Paul Kagame’s de facto military dictatorship.

    Home Secretary Cleverly visited in Kigali on Tuesday to salvage his government’s “Rwanda Plan”.  A new Treaty is meant to somehow bypass the Supreme Court ruling that Rwanda can’t be regarded as a “safe place”.

    Others at the press conference intervened to speak about Rwanda’s “good” refugee record.  True, lots of refugees already end up in Rwanda - and have to be looked after, not by the Rwandan state, but the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR.

    It’s also true that many are refugees from a war sponsored in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo by. . .  the Rwandan regime - and conducted by its proxy militia, the notoriously brutal M23.

    This, from Human Rights Watch:“[the M23] have committed unlawful killings, rape, and other apparent war crimes. . .  Attacks with explosive weapons in populated areas of North Kivu province have killed and injured civilians, damaged infrastructure, and exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis”.

    It should come as no surprise that a British government which backs Israel’s bloody slaughter in Gaza should be happy to shake hands with Kigali’s murderous regime.  Nor should we be surprised that Cleverly is amending rules so as to cut legal migration into Britain ahead of the election, when the only way that social care and NHS staffing levels can be rendered “safe” is by employing migrant workers.

    If there were British workers to do these jobs then there wouldn’t have been a shortage of over 200,000 workers last year.  And despite the relaxation of immigration rules to allow families of foreign workers in, there are still over 150,000 vacancies!  What’s more, turning what currently are offered as unskilled domestic jobs into real healthcare jobs on proper wages is not on the Tory agenda - and not on Labour’s either, of course.

    It would need a reversal of the privatisation of social care and the placing of both social care and the part-privatised NHS into public - that is workers’ - control.  And for that to happen, nothing short of a social revolution will be necessary!