WHY is Israel so intent on killing Palestinians? You might respond to that question with a number of suggestions.

Because on October 7 of last year, Hamas fighters broke through Israeli defences and killed some 1,400 Israelis and took a couple of hundred captive?

Because Israel wants to form ‘normal’ relations with its surrounding neighbbours like Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians are an obstacle to that?

Or maybe just because they can (the UK in the past decade has sold almost £500 million worth of arms, including fighter jets, combat vehicles, guns and parts for air-to-surface missiles to Israel).  

But the UK’s assistance shrinks to near-nothing beside that of the US. In 2020 alone, long before the recent Hamas attack, the US gave £2.7 billion to Israel as part of a commitment made during Barak Obama’s presidency. Virtually all of this was for military hardware. This huge sum is part of an even huger sum of £26.8 billion, an overall package of military aid that Obama signed up to for the period 2017 to 2028. And while not wanting to engage in repetition, it’s well to remember that this money and these arms were supplied long before the Hamas assault of October 7, 2023.

But that’s the what. It was the why that we started out looking at. For the UK, arms to Israel is part of their brisk world trade in weapons which they sell to the world every year. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked the UK as the sixth-biggest arms exporter in the world between 2015 and 2019. They’ve sold Typhoons to Saudi Arabia and missiles to Qatar. When people oppose weaponry being built and supplied by the UK, the UK government replies that the arms industry generates thousands of highly-skilled jobs and keeps the UK itself safe.  In other words, this may be a death-dealing business we’re in, but think of the money the workers are getting for building the weaponry. No doubt the US would give similar reasons for its arms trade.

There are, of course, other reasons why the Israelis are slaughtering Palestinians by the thousand – over 23,000 by the last count, many of them women and children. Israel is intent on teaching the Palestinians a lesson they won’t forget: don’t ever dare to attack us again. But how can Israel get away with this wildly disproportionate response – 1,400 Israeli deaths alongside 23,000 Palestinian deaths?

Maybe because places like the US and the UK have set a precedent which Israel is enthusiastically following. When we were kids we played Cowboys and Indians, and of course we all wanted to be Cowboys because everyone knew that the only good Injun was a dead one. We were taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, which conveniently ignored the fact that the indigenous people – the ‘Indians’ – had been living there for thousands of years. The Europeans landed and pushed West, killing the native people, seizing their land, breaking their culture. In a word, treating them as less than human. That’s what’s made America great.

The same applies, of course, to England. It subdued its nearest neighbours and later countries throughout the world. It taught the native people to see themselves as laughable – the kilt-wearing miser the Scot, the devious and daft Welsh, the ape-like and shambling Irish, the dark and savage Africans. That’s what conquering powers do – they destroy the natives and explain to them how their culture and way of life are laughably primitive. 

Maybe that’s the reason Israel gets away with its brutal slaughter of Palestinians. Some of the Israeli leaders have even said as much: these people are human animals, so it makes sense to treat them in a subhuman way. As with rape, the shame doesn’t lie with the victim, it lies with the monsters who inflict their obscene will on the defenceless.