The magic spell of nationality
What it takes for some world leaders to characterize an Israeli atrocity in Gaza as “completely unacceptable,” “beyond any reasonable circumstances,” and demand “full accountability.”
World leaders have expressed outrage after seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen charity were killed in an Israeli attack on their clearly marked vehicles in central Gaza.
WCK said its team members came from Australia, Palestine, Poland and the United Kingdom. Al Jazeera reports that one of them had dual citizenship in the United States and Canada.
We now know what it takes for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to call a press conference and unequivocally characterize an event related to Israel's atrocities in Gaza as “completely unacceptable”, “beyond any reasonable circumstances,” and even demand “full responsibility” for the deaths.
It is not the 33,301 Palestinians murdered in Gaza (more than 13,000 children), nor the famine, nor the International Court of Justice ruling on plausible genocide in Gaza. It takes one Australian citizen. Echoing James Brown: “It’s not a human’s word”.
Similar reactions followed from other world leaders, notably US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who stated today that Washington had urged Israel to conduct a “swift, thorough and impartial investigation” into the Israeli airstrike that killed the seven WCK workers.
Also, what about another tragic event such as yesterday’s attack that destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria and killed seven people? Doesn’t that deserve a swift, thorough and impartial investigation? It does not seem so.
Final observation: yesterday, Monday, March 2, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared: “Al Jazeera harmed Israel's security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre and incited against Israeli soldiers.”
As usual without proof.
This follows the Knesset's passage of a law giving senior ministers the power to temporarily shut down foreign news networks they deem a security risk.
All well and good and in tune with Israel's democratic standards, but it leaves Netanyahu's reaction to the WCK murders a little lukewarm:
“These things happen in times of war,” Netanyahu said, adding that an investigation was underway. Officials are “checking this thoroughly” and “will do everything possible to ensure this does not happen again.”
It seems like calling dead foreign workers from the WCK as Hamas accomplices a bridge too far, no mention of human shields either.
That is the magic spell of nationality: how different the value of a human body seems to be to these politicians depending on the country in which that body was conceived. Such as with racism, discriminating by nation causes people to adopt that terrible “us or them” distinction: that some humans are more worthy than others, or even worse: that some humans, like Palestinians, might not be worthy at all.