Britain

Winter Fuel Allowance: ecosocialism versus ageism, austerity and poverty

Saturday 21 September 2024, by Liz Lawrence

On 10 September 2024 348 MPs (overwhelmingly Labour MPs) voted through regulations to cut the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners except those in receipt of means-tested benefits such as pension credit. In this article Liz Lawrence explores what this suggests for the direction of the Labour government and what remains of the Labour Left. She also discusses pensioners’ poverty and resistance and how ecosocialists respond.

Austerity under Labour

Even before the general election, the Labour Party leadership positioned themselves as a party of fiscal responsibility, which was business-friendly. This theme has continued post-election with a focus on cutting public debt.

They are fond of rhetorically talking about the broadest shoulders bearing the heaviest load when it comes to taxation and austerity. This is not what has happened with the winter fuel allowance. The removal of the allowance hits those pensioners entitled to pension credit but don’t claim or those just above the threshold of entitlement for the benefit. Whoever has the broadest shoulders, it is not the single pensioner living on basic state pension of £169.50 per week.

Labour Party leaders, and their supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party, have doubled down on the message about the need for economic stability. They keep dropping hints about more unpopular measures to come. They talk about “hard choices” but it is the poorest for whom these choices are hard, for instance whether to heat the home, eat enough food or maintain a decent broadband connection to keep in touch with family and friends. This “hard choice” for the Labour Government follows on their previous “hard choice” to maintain the two-child cap on child benefit.

The decision by the Labour Government to push through this unpopular cut to the winter fuel allowance is a clear signal of which class they support and of their resolution to shut down any left opposition within Parliament or the Labour Party to their austerity policies. They have pushed ahead with this policy despite warnings it could lead to an increased death rate among pensioners on account of cold and cold-related illness. There is plenty of medical evidence that exposure to cold increases death rates, and risk of various diseases such as heart attacks and strokes and makes conditions such as arthritis worse. What will the response of the Labour Government be when the death rate among pensioners increases?

Resistance

The cut to the winter fuel allowance was announced at the end of July 2024. On 3-4 September the National Pensioners Convention (NPC) which works to represent older workers in retirement, met in Blackpool for its Annual Conference. Founded in 1979, one of its first leaders was been former General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union Jack Jones. Many at the NPC conference have been active in trade unions all their working lives and still have active links with unions. Some had also campaigned for a Labour victory in the last general election and were outraged by this cut, which was not in the Labour Party manifesto.

The NPC was clearly up for a fight over the cut. It is working actively with other lobby groups, such as Age UK and other groups representing older people. Age UK has launched a petition to save the winter fuel allowance. At the final session of the conference, General Secretary of the NPC, Jan Shortt, urged everyone to write to or see their MPs to ask them to vote against the winter fuel allowance regulations in Parliament.

Other voices in the labour movement, including some trade union leaders, have put the case for more taxes on the very rich or ensuring private corporations pay the taxes they should pay.

Resistance and criticism of the proposal to means-test the winter fuel allowance was expressed in the form of petitions, letters to MPs, and an Early Day Motion calling for reconsideration of the decision, which has been signed by 48 MPs. This EDM was tabled by Neil Duncan-Jordan, recently-elected Labour MP for Poole, who used to work in research and policy for the National Pensioners Convention.

The NPC, together with the Unite the union campaign to Defend the Winter Fuel Payment is calling a mass lobby of Parliament over the issue on October 7

Embarrassment

In terms of parliamentary manoeuvres the official opposition party, the Tories, tabled a motion calling for repeal of the cut to the winter fuel payment. In supporting speeches, many Conservative MPs accused the Labour Party of being controlled by the trade unions (an unlikely prospect) and of taking money from pensioners to meet trade union wage demands and settle industrial disputes. This was a crude attempt to divide workers in retirement from those still in employment.

Some Labour MPs may have some sense of embarrassment about this and may have stayed away from Parliament or abstained, but the majority did not. Some new Labour MPs gave nauseatingly “on message” speeches in which they supported the need for financial stability achieved by cutting the incomes of the poorest in society.

MPs are on a salary of £91,346 plus expenses. Those who do not live in London or a grace and favour property can claim expenses to cover utility bills, including heating, for the cost of running a second home. This MPs’ “heating” allowance was not considered as an area for cuts to help balance the government budget.

It appears around 50 Labour MPs didn’t vote on the motion to reverse the cut to the winter fuel allowance. It seems impossible to know which of these ‘had permission’ from the whips to stay away for what were considered legitimate reasons and which did this in a half measure of defiance. It’s a shame they did not find the courage to follow John Trickett – the only Labour MP who currently holds the whip who voted against.

Older people’s liberation

Speakers at the NPC conference emphasised the importance of seeing older people as contributors to society, not just an expense. The Labour Government when it is not busy being friendly to businesses, claims to be focusing on “working people”. That it is defining work in a pro-capitalist sense as meaning only paid work, and that this thinking was behind the decision to axe the winter fuel allowance for the majority of pensioners.

Retired people do much unpaid work: providing free childcare to working parents; providing free social care to other old and disabled people; voluntary work, including running and staffing many civil society organisations and charities. This non-recognition of the social contribution of unwaged work often incorporates prejudices which are ageist, sexist and disabilist. Many groups in society perform work which contributes to society but which is not paid. This does not mean these groups are inactive. Older people can be active citizens and active members of labour and socialist movements.

Many participants at the NPC Conference are people who have been and are active in the powerful social movements of the twentieth Century including the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement and the Disability Peoples Movement. They know how social movements and trade unions can transform people’s lives. The Labour Government is underestimating retired people if they think we will all just sit at home quietly and accept cuts to living standards.

Poverty, ageing, gender, disability, race and housing

The winter fuel allowance was first introduced by a Labour Government in 1997. Like some other benefits paid to pensioners it reflects the fact that UK state pensions are relatively low as a percentage of average earnings compared to many OECD countries. The usual amount paid for the winter fuel allowance was £200 for pensioners under 80 and £300 for those who were 80 or older.

Poverty is experienced by pensioners who have only the state pension as a source of income and those pensioners who have only small occupational pensions, which place them above the level of eligibility for means-tested benefits such as pension credit. The winter fuel allowance was a benefit paid to everyone in receipt of the state pension, without any means-testing.

Around 1.4 million pensioners in the UK are in receipt of pension credit. There are around 880, 000 pensioners who are eligible but do not claim. This indicates the problems with means-tested benefits. Some who are eligible do not claim because they are unaware of their entitlement to the benefit, because they find the application process too difficult or because they feel there is a stigma attached to claiming.

In the parliamentary debate, Neil Duncan-Jordan MP suggested the take up rate for means-tested benefits is usually around 67% and emphasised the case for universal benefits. Universal benefits have a much higher take-up rate and do not stigmatise the poor or put people through difficult application processes. Means-testing also means that the poor lose financial privacy in a way the recipients of universal benefits do not.

So, the cut to the winter fuel allowance will hit hard those pensioners who are eligible for pension credit but do not claim. Government agencies and charities will make efforts to improve the take up rate for pension credit, which will then entitle people to the winter fuel allowance. It is unlikely that all pensioners who are eligible but have not claimed will be reached and helped to claim pension credit before cold winter weather starts.

There are also many pensioners who have income just above the level for entitlement to pension credit. These pensioners will lose the winter fuel allowance. Some of these have been appearing on television or posting on social media explaining how they are just a few £ above the entitlement level and how they will be impacted

Poverty in old age particularly hits women, for reasons including interrupted working lives, lower pay leading to lower occupational pensions, and employment in areas where there is no occupational pension provision. The gendered nature of poverty is often ignored. 20% of male pensioners and 33% of female pensioners have only the state pension, but no additional occupational pension.

Disabled people are also more likely to experience poverty in old age. Some may have additional heating and energy needs, for instance to operate specialist equipment, such as dialysis machines. Some may need special diets and greater warmth to manage impairments or health conditions. Moreover, employment discrimination against disabled people and earlier retirement (sometimes not voluntary) may have reduced opportunities to earn a decent occupational pension.

Given that both the state pension and occupational pension payments are usually tied to years of contribution in the scheme, those pensioners who have worked outside the UK for several years or have migrated to the UK during their working lives, are likely to have smaller pensions and be at more risk of poverty in old age. This disproportionately affects Black communities. Racial discrimination in employment also can reduce lifetime earnings and hence occupational pension income in old age.

Another factor making for inequality and poverty in old age is your housing situation. Those pensioners living in the privately rented sector may be less able to insulate or control housing costs. The need to find money for rent out of a small pension exacerbates poverty in old age.

Thus, the decision of the Labour Government to cut the winter fuel allowance for the majority of pensioners, besides being a threat to life and health for the poorest pensioners, will increase the impact of many forms of social inequality among the elderly.

The ecosocialist response

What attitude should ecosocialists take to ageism, the ageing process and retirement? There is the need to oppose ageism, just like any other unfairly discriminatory process. It is also important to recognise how ageism interacts with other forms of oppression.

In terms of energy policy, ecosocialists should support the provision of domestic heating and energy as a universal basic service. This includes bringing energy companies back into public ownership and running them in ways which do not harm the environment and meet human needs, including the needs of elderly and disabled people. The restoration of public utilities would enable governments to control energy prices.

Housing needs to be built or retrofitted to be carbon-neutral and to meet the needs of inhabitants, including older people who may have reduced mobility and may have higher heating needs if they spend more time at home than those who go out to work.

In respect of income maintenance, the first essential demand should be that the state pension is high enough to live on comfortably, without the need to rely on means-tested benefits or an occupational pension. If all pensioners had an adequate income in the first place there would be much less need for additional sources of income, such as a winter fuel allowance. Meanwhile, however, such allowances must be defended because they reduce poverty in old age.

Attached documents

• winter-fuel-allowance-ecosocialism-versus-ageism-austerity_a8680.pdf (PDF - 920.7 KiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article8680]

• Liz Lawrence

  Liz Lawrence is a member of ACR in Britain, a past President of the University and College Union and active in UCU Left.

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

 

How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism

Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It’s time to ask why

by Jonathan Cook / September 18th, 2024

Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.

The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.

The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.

This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.

We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.

https://x.com/BBCWorld/status/1832047105801683068?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1832047105801683068%7Ctwgr%5Eb7c9fe5da4bf390397c10bbf078320352b533c1c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jonathan-cook.net%2F2024-09-13%2Fwar-gaza-israel-western-fascism%2F

After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.

And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.

No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.

The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.

Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.

In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.

Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”

According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.

A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.

Pulling punches

The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.

Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.

Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.

Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.

Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.

But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.

What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.

Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.

Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.

What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.

Campaign of intimidation

The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.

The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.

Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.

What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.

The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.

Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.

This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists, including the western media, run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.

No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.

The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.

Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.

Allowable thought

The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.

The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.

The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.

Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.

That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.

Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.

Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.

The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.

Pressing the button

What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.

It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.

The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court.

Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.

Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.

Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.

One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.

In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.

They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”

Relentless depravity

It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.

The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.

It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.

After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.

In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.

One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.

Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.

None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.

After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.

The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.

Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”

‘Heroic soldiers’

This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.

What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.

In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.

Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.

He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.

Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.

Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.

In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.

There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.

Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.

Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguingthat those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.

He clearly meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.

Inner fascist

Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.

His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.

Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.

Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.

Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.

His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.

The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.

The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.

Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.

Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.

The genocide party

That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.

On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.

7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.

Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.

The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.

The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.

Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.

All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.

All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.

7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.

• First published in Middle East Eye
Twitter

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

The more definitive the proof of Israeli atrocities, the less they get reported

Videos show Israeli soldiers push three Palestinian men off a roof in a West Bank town under illegal Israeli occupation. The western media can barely stifle their yawns.

by Jonathan Cook / September 20th, 2024

The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it’s unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from two different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.

AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.

Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately: even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)

Remember, that same media never fails to highlight – or simply make up – any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent “beheaded babies”.

AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a “pattern of excessive force” by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.

That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP’s preferred characterisation of the group’s reference to a pattern not of “excessive force” but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

AP makes sure to give Israel’s pretext for why it is committing war crimes: “Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy.”

But it forgets yet again to mention why that “militancy” exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it – once again illegally – has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.

AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel’s occupying soldiers, including “militantly”.

Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as “terrorism”, but that’s not how it is seen in the international law codes that western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.

It’s also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by “Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem”.

As is true with many other western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.

Western news outlets doubtless privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is “sensitive” to Israel’s perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.

Which is precisely the problem. The bias in western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel – in the midst of a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court – which means it’s entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.

It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel’s war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.

UPDATE:

Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn’t been “independently verified” – whatever that means. There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.

The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.

And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is “another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting”. No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.