Viewpoint: Seeping Complicity

On the surface, life in Britain goes on much as it ever did, with periodic political or media eruptions which disappear as quickly as they erupt. Organisations at micro (families) and macro (institutions, companies) pursue their enduring priorities with their ups and down, pleasures and frustrations.

But beneath the surface, unnoticed by many, a deadly stain is spreading, a stain that is inexorably corroding our society. It is the stain of complicity.

The nearly 11 months since October 7th 2023 have seen the most horrific punishment meted out on a people of any in living memory. The sheer scale and brutality of the destruction of the people and institutions of Gaza has no recent precedent. Even Hiroshima did not exact the same toll of explosive power.

Many of us understood within days that the explicit (and on record) intention of Netanyahu's cabal was extermination of the Palestinian people and the rendering unviable a Palestinian nation on Palestinian land. This was incontrovertibly evident (in facts on the ground) by late October, when more than 7,000 Palestinins in Gaza had already been killed by Israeli bombs (an average of 350 per day), and the razing to the ground and rendering uninhabitable of entire districts.

Our nation had its first chance to pull back from its complicity in the Gaza massacre on 15th November 2023, In the first Parliamentary vote on a ceasefire. The motion was overwhelmingly defeated. As Oxfam put it at the time:

"History will remember that UK Parliament lacked the moral courage to send a clear message that the suffering of civilians must stop. MPs' failure to back a ceasefire is a stain on British politics."

Since then, more and more parts of the British system (institutions, media, corporations) have bent themselves out of shape defending the indefensible. Employing institutions have gagged or even dismissed people demanding an end to the carnage. A huge list of companies actively support and finance the Israeli onslaught which continues to this day ( See: https://bdsmovement.net/Act-Now-Against-These-Companies...).

And day by day we are drip-fed insidious and one-sided accounts by the mainstream media, where pro-Palestinian voices and perspectives are marginalised or dismissed, and Israeli propaganda is dressed up as news. This complicity in Israel's crimes is funded by our taxes and our licence fees, as well as by our purchases.

In July 2024, the British people had their best chance of changing the narrative through how they cast their vote at the General Election. Every constituency had had least one credible candidate standing on an explicit mandate of ending Britain's political and financial support for the Israeli onslaught. But the electorate predominantly chose the two main war parties, Tory and Labour (who from October 7th have taken a unified stance on this).

We have 46 million registered voters. There was a 60% turnout, meaning that 28 million people actually went to the ballot box. 57% of those (16 million) voted either Conservative or Labour. So, in total, 34% of the electorate voted for the two major parties which are supporting Israel's actions in Gaza. If, as some people argue, not voting is in essence a vote for the status-quo, then we can add another 18 million voters, bringing the tally of complicity to 34 million (74% of the electorate).

In an elective democracy, voters bear the consequences of their votes. So it is no longer just parliament that is complicit, it is every member of the electorate who ensured that the two-party dominance of parliament continued unperturbed. The secret ballot protects individual identities, but the arithmetic could not be clearer. The election result mandated a continuation of the UK nation's support of war crimes.

Those of us who opposed the Israeli onslaught from the start (and voted accordingly) cannot escape complicity either. How many of us went far beyond our comfort zone? Did we all cease all engagement with corporations supporting Israel (which include Facebook and Twitter)? Self evidently, not! Did we engage in personal dialogue with family and friends to seek their support? Not enough! Did we engage in personally costly actions, liable to lead to loss of employment, income, or arrest? Hardly at all. We were not effective, and much of what we did could be written off as virtue signalling.

The conclusion of this train of argument is that, apart from children and the mentally infirm, there is hardly a British citizen who is by now not deeply complicit in the carnage still unfolding.

And it still goes on.

How will this effect our lives and our nation as we go forward? Of course the specifics are unpredictable. A significant likelihood is that the failure to restrain Israel will lead to a Third World War, with incalculable consequence for humanity itself. But even short of global nuclear devastation, the outcomes of further spreading war will radically degrade our society and our lives. Ever more securitisation and surveillance, erosion of the civility and trust that still exists between people, inexorable tightening of economic screws as money is diverted from activities that nurture and enrich towards activities that kill. And sitting beneath it all the deep psychological and spiritial damage done by the realisation of (or the suppression of) guilt and complicity.

The way out of individual guilt is contrition and reparation. But when an entire nation stands guilty it is hard to see what would count as either of these things, other than the total dismanteling of the apparatus of state (as happened to Germany at the end of WW2, which involved the handing over of control to international actors, and the staging of comprehensive war crimes tribunals). What the 21st Century version of this for Britain might be, I cannot imagine, but I do know that, one way and another, Britain will face monumental consequences for its complicity, and we will all be the worse for it.

What to do? Many wise people have enjoined that we should live each day as if it were our last. The Palestinian people know this only too well. 40,000 of them have each woken up on a particular morning, and by the end of the day they were dust, with all their hopes, dreams, and cherished relationships swept away. And by tomorrow another few dozens will be added to the heap of corpses.

John Sloboda is a Catholic academic, musician, and peace activist. He is a co-founder of Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.org ), and participates in the Holy Land Roundtable convened by the Westminster Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission. This commentary was originally published on John's Facebook page on August 28th 2024.