Diplomats protest UK complicity in War Crimes
But the Foreign Office dismisses their concerns
It’s reported that three hundred Foreign Office officials and diplomats (my former colleagues) have written to the Foreign Secretary to raise concerns about UK policy on Gaza. You can see the BBC report here.
Bravo and kudos to them.
The Foreign Office's dismissive and patronising response was lamentable, if predictable. They basically said do what you’re told and if you don’t like it, quit.
Nothing has been learned from the illegality and lies over the Iraq War, over which I resigned in 2004 (I had long worked on Iraq as a diplomat). It is entirely right to question the legality of British policy when Israel is openly and unashamedly committing war crimes. Officials have to defend this policy; some have to implement it. Would you like to be complicit in war crimes or defend sharing intelligence with the IDF as it starves and slaughters Palestinians, as the UK has done?
It is insulting and dismissive to tell those concerned to resign if they don't like it: 'put up or shut up'. Resignation is a heavy price, as I know - you lose career, income and pension. Officials have mortgages to pay and families to feed. Why should they pay that price while those who stay silent - and complicit - carry on with their comfortable salaries and careers?
Questions about the legality of mass killing should be welcomed, not shot down. Many are the lawyers and others qualified who are in no doubt that Israel is committing war crimes through its indiscriminate slaughter and deliberate (deliberate!) and openly-declared starvation of the inhabitants of Gaza. To claim that the government 'rigorously' complies with international law in this circumstance beggars belief.
I have some ideas about what the protestors should do next. Do not resign. Stay together. Become public. Perhaps strike. Give interviews and leak documents. Let them fire you and then sue them for wrongful dismissal (as Josie Stewart has successfully done over the government's lies about the Kabul evacuation). Get legal advice.
To all government officials and diplomats, a simple message: do not be complicit in blatant and horrific war crimes.
If those concerned want to talk to me, please get in touch. For encrypted, let me know and we can connect on Signal.
And please share this post with those who might want to see it. On LinkedIn it’s here:
https://lnkd.in/ewpmUYY7
The correct word to use is COLLABORATOR followed by NUREMBERG TRIALS 2.
They’re made entirely of paper tigers.
All lives and needless suffering should matter to us all; however, that’s much easier for a conscience to dismiss when one considers another an innately much lower lifeform. And, although Israel's use of systematic starvation as a means of war and ethnic cleansing against innocent non-combatants, especially children, may occasionally be internationally 'condemned' as ‘intolerable’, the atrocities will ultimately be tolerated by those nations with any ability to hinder the Israeli state's crimes against humanity.
Ergo, such condemnations — which are relatively few when considering the seriousness and scope of the atrocities committed — are but paper tigers.
To quote Wikipedia (Casualties of the Gaza War): "Scholars have estimated 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians. A study by OHCHR, which verified fatalities from three independent sources, found that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children."
On a mindbogglingly massive scale, human beings are being seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic, relatively civilized and supposedly Christian nations. And it’s even easier for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.
A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken regions. In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.
With each news report of the daily civilian death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in the late 1980s.