Opinion: The real crimes are taking place in Gaza, not at Glastonbury or Brize Norton

What Israel, Washington, the UK and others have been forced to do to sustain the genocide is to create theatre - in a series of deflection dramas - to distract from the central crime.

Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, the film director who specialised in what he termed “MacGuffins” - narrative dead-ends to throw viewers off the scent - might have appreciated the skill with which this has been done. 

The aim has been to get the western media to focus on, and therefore western audiences to think about, not the main drama - either the genocide itself, or the inherently violent, apartheid nature of the Israeli state carrying it out - but to invest instead in separate plot twists and turns. Ones, of course, that don’t make western capitals look so obviously complicit and depraved...

The frenzied production of MacGuffins is necessary to stop western publics from thinking about the only issue that really matters: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians because it is a settler-colonial state that wants to rid itself of the “wrong” ethnic group. 

What European settler-colonial states have done throughout modern history - from the US, to Australia and South Africa - is replace the native population through strategies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and extermination. Israel is simply following in that tradition....

As Israel’s actions in Gaza become ever more indefensible - not least, the starvation of the population by blocking aid - the deflection dramas have needed to grow more lavish.

The recent attacks by Israel and the US on Iran, and before them, Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, are the most egregious of these set-pieces. 

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