The violence convulsing the Middle East has produced heart-rending images and statistics.
As I write this at least 76 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians, including at least 18 children (again, the vast majority being Palestinian) have been killed through the Israeli military bombs.
It is bombing in densely populated Gaza, as armed Palestinian groups hurl rockets at Israeli cities.
Meanwhile, communal violence has broken out across Israel, with Arab and Jewish mobs attacking people and property.
In response, Western governments, led by US President Joe Biden, have been quick to unequivocally condemn Palestinian groups for the rocket barrages but been much more circumspect about condemning Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians.
Lukewarm expressions of "dismay" and "grave concern" at Palestinian death have been interspersed with declarations of “unwavering support for Israel’s security and for Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself” and appeals for “moral clarity”.
This simply implies the actions of Palestinian groups, though causing a tenth of the civilian deaths that Israeli bombardment has wreaked, were much more objectionable.
While some progressive politicians such as US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have pointed out the hypocrisy of a blanket assertion of the Israeli right to self-defence, even they have hesitated to unequivocally deplore the Israeli actions, perhaps fearing backlash from their constituents.
Colonial occupiers have long claimed a "right" to defend themselves from the resistance of native communities including by committing mass murder.
The history of African colonisation is littered with the corpses and mass graves of those who dared to resist the militarily superior Europeans.
In her book, the British Gulag, Caroline Elkins describes a “murderous campaign” by the British in colonial Kenya following the 1950s Mau Mau peasant uprising, including the establishment of concentration camps for the 1.5 million Kikuyu people and a brutal system of torture camps that may have claimed the lives of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands.
The idea that colonial land grabbers have the right to terrorise, brutalise, torture and murder those whose land they steal under the rubric of "self defense" flies in the face of UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 of 1982 which reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.
That resolution specifically reaffirmed this in the case of Palestinians.
Thus today in Gaza, rather than seeking "moral clarity", the West in using moral obfuscation to justify attacks on a refugee population by a colonial power that has evicted them from their land, blockades them in what is, in essence, an open-air prison, and then claims the right to do so in peace and quiet.
When western media speaks of a "cycle of escalation", it deliberately ignores that Palestinians are responding to a decades-long illegal and immoral occupation, as well as to a regime of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
It is notable that most media reports on the violence in Gaza pointedly ignore the recently released report from Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israeli actions against Palestinians, both in Israel itself and in the occupied Palestinian territories, fit the definition of international crime of apartheid.
In many interviews, Israeli spokespeople repeatedly stress the difficulty that Israel’s self-declared “most moral army in the world” has in finding and killing what is in essence Palestinian resistance leaders, who they say are hiding behind civilians.
And the western press is happy to accept this as the dominant frame, that the leaders of Hamas and other groups are legitimate targets while glossing over the fact that Israel is bombing a population resisting occupation, oppression and systematic dispossession.
As Cortez pointed out, regurgitating the line that "Israel has a right to defend itself" without including the context of oppression simply excuses and legitimates even more oppression.
If Western media, politicians and diplomats truly seek moral clarity, it behoves them to reject as gaslighting and both sidesism, the outrageous claim that colonial states such as Israel have a right to defend themselves from those they oppress.
