I have collected statements from Israeli politicians and soldiers, as well as from human rights organisations, UN officials and other credible mainstream sources, which prove that Israel has deliberately targeted civilians in Lebanon and Gaza. This is intended as an educational resource.

Lebanon War (2006)

Death toll: 1,000 Lebanese civilians killed

• Just prior to the Israeli invasion, IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz threatened to “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” (i.e. to when it was in the midst of a destructive, brutal civil war) if Hezbollah did not free the soldiers that it had captured.
• During the war, a senior officer in the Israeli Air Force told army radio that Halutz had ordered them to “destroy 10 multi-storey buildings in the Dahaya district (of Beirut) in response to every rocket fired on Haifa”.
• Within the final 72 hours of the war – after the UN Security Council had already passed a ceasefire resolution – Israel dropped more than 4 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon. Entire villages were made uninhabitable. In their report ‘Flooding South Lebanon’, Human Rights Watch stated the following: “Based on their personal observations, experts from Human Rights Watch and the UN have judged the level and density of post-conflict contamination in south Lebanon to be far worse than that found in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kosovo following the use of cluster munitions in those countries”. HRW further stated: “It is inconceivable that Israel, which has used cluster weapons on many previous occasions, did not know that that its strikes would have a lasting humanitarian impact”.
• A commander in the IDF told Haaretz: “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs”.

Blockade Of Gaza (2007-Present)

Death toll: 1,000 Palestinian civilians killed

• Dov Weisglass, advisor to then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, stated in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”.
• Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated in 2008 after visiting Gaza: “Their whole civilisation has been destroyed, I’m not exaggerating”.
• Also in 2008, Human Rights Watch called on the Israeli government “to immediately lift restrictions on the flow into Gaza of food, medicines, and other supplies essential for the well-being of the civilian population and to cease all measures that amount to collective punishment of the civilian population, including disruptions to the electricity supply and fuel cuts”.
• Amnesty International stated in 2010: “As a form of collective punishment, Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza is a flagrant violation of international law”.
• Also in 2010, the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha published a partial list of items that Israel had prohibited from entering Gaza; these included cumin, coriander, jam, chocolate, biscuits and sweets, potato chips, dried fruit, fresh meat, fabric (for clothing), musical instruments, size A4 paper, toys, cattle and chicks.
• The International Committee of the Red Cross stated in 2012: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law”.
• Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and specialist on Gaza’s economy, stated in 2016: “Innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink and likely by the soil in which they plant” [a reference to the fact that 97% of the water in Gaza is contaminated].
• Robert Piper, UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Development Activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, stated in 2017: “We talk about the unlivability of Gaza. When you’re down to two hours of power a day and you have 60 percent youth unemployment rates… that unlivability threshold has been passed quite a long time ago”.
• Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated in 2018 that the people of Gaza “are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death”.

Operation Cast Lead (2008-9)

Death toll: 1,200 Palestinian civilians killed

• During the operation, then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated: “Hamas now understands that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing”.
• The day after the operation ended, Livni stated: “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded”.
• Many testimonies from Israeli soldiers collected by the NGO Breaking The Silence reveal that they deliberately targeted civilians. One soldier stated: “You felt like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants”.
• Another soldier stated: “If you’re not sure, kill. Fire power was insane… You see a house, a window, shoot at the window. You don’t see a terrorist there? Fire at the window. It was real urban warfare. This is the difference between urban warfare and a limited confrontation. In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents”.
• Another soldier stated: “The amount of destruction there was incredible. You drive around those neighborhoods, and can’t identify a thing. Not one stone left standing over another. You see plenty of fields, hothouses, orchards, everything devastated. Totally ruined. It’s terrible. It’s surreal”.
• Another soldier stated: “Let’s say that the general approach was ‘we’re going off to war’ and I can swear I heard our brigade commander at least once, when sitting with us during maneuvers for a combatants’ talk around the campfire at Tze’elim at night – he happened to join us and we asked him what was going on in Gaza and what was to be expected, stuff like that, and he went so far as to say this was war and in war as in war, no consideration of civilians was to be taken. You shoot anyone you see. I’m paraphrasing here, not literally quoting, but the gist of the matter was very clear”.
• Another soldier stated: “In short, what shocked me was a talk we had with the commander of ***, he’s a colonel, and he gave our whole battalion a talk. The tone of it was really, first of all he started out with something like “Unfortunately we’re a democracy, so we can’t demolish Gaza to the extent that we’d really like.” Perhaps he didn’t actually say “unfortunately,” but he repeated, twice, that “the fact that we’re a democracy works against us, for the army cannot act as aggressively as it would like.” Then he said once again that we’re going into this operation aggressively, without… Usually in such talks the army, the commanders mention the lives of civilians and showing consideration to civilians. Here he didn’t even mention this. Just the brutality, go in there brutally… He said, “In case of any doubt, take down houses. You don’t need confirmation for anything, if you want'”.

Operation Protective Edge (2014)

Death toll: 1,500 Palestinian civilians killed

• Many testimonies from Israeli soldiers collected by the NGO Breaking The Silence reveal that they deliberately targeted civilians. One soldier stated: “The instructions are to shoot right away. Whoever you spot – be they armed or unarmed, no matter what. The instructions are very clear. Any person you run into, that you see with your eyes – shoot to kill. It’s an explicit instruction”.
• Another soldier stated: “Me personally, deep inside I mean, I was a bit bothered, but after three weeks in Gaza, during which you’re shooting at anything that moves – and also at what isn’t moving, crazy amounts – you aren’t anymore really… The good and the bad get a bit mixed up, and your morals get a bit lost and you sort of lose it, and it also becomes a bit like a computer game, totally cool and real”.
• Another soldier stated: “I remember that the level of destruction looked insane to me. It looked like a movie set, it didn’t look real. Houses with crumbled balconies, animals everywhere, lots of dead chickens and lots of other dead animals. Every house had a hole in the wall or a balcony spilling off of it, no trace left of any streets at all. I knew there used to be a street there once, but there was no trace of it left to see”.
• Another soldier stated: “We fired ridiculous amounts of fire, lots of it, and relatively speaking our fire was nothing. We had spike missiles (guided antitank missiles) and artillery, and there were three tanks with us at all times – and another two D9s (armored bulldozers). I don’t know how they pulled it off, the D9 operators didn’t rest for a second. Nonstop, as if they were playing in a sandbox. Driving back and forth, back and forth, razing another house, another street. And at some point there was no trace left of that street. It was hard to imagine there even used to be a street there at all. It was like a sandbox, everything turned upside down. And they didn’t stop moving. Day and night, 24/7, they went back and forth, gathering up mounds, making embankments, flattening house after house”.
• Another soldier stated: “There weren’t really any rules of engagement, it was more protocols. The idea was, if you spot something – shoot. They told us: “There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.” Whether it posed a threat or not wasn’t a question, and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal”.
• Another soldier stated: “When we first entered [the Gaza Strip] there was this ethos about Hamas – we were certain that the moment we went in our tanks would all be up in flames. But after 48 hours during which no one shoots at you and they’re like ghosts, unseen, their presence unfelt – except once in a while the sound of one shot fired over the course of an entire day – you come to realize the situation is under control. And that’s when my difficulty there started, because the formal rules of engagement – I don’t know if for all soldiers – were, “Anything still there is as good as dead. Anything you see moving in the neighborhoods you’re in is not supposed to be there. The [Palestinian] civilians know they are not supposed to be there. Therefore whoever you see there, you kill… Anything you see in the neighborhoods you’re in, anything within a reasonable distance, say between zero and 200 meters – is dead on the spot. No authorization needed'”.
• Another soldier stated: “There were no rules of engagement. If you see anyone in that area, that person is a terrorist”.

Great March of Return (2018-Present)

Death toll: 214 Palestinian civilians killed

• The UN Human Rights Council released a report in February 2019 which concluded that Israeli snipers intentionally shot children, health workers, journalists and disabled people.
• In that same report, the UN Human Rights Council described numerous cases wherein civilians were intentionally shot by Israeli snipers. For example: “Ibrahim Abu Shaar (17): On 30 March, Israeli forces shot Ibrahim, a candy seller from Rafah, in the back of the head as he walked away, approximately 100 m from the separation fence, after he and his companion threw stones at Israeli soldiers. He died almost instantly”.
• Another example: “Wisal Sheikh-Khalil (14): On 14 May, Israeli forces shot Wisal from the Maghazi refugee camp in the head when she was approximately 100 m from the separation fence, after she had approached it several times to hang a Palestinian flag there. She died instantly”.
• Another example: “Yasser Abu Naja (11): On 29 June, Israeli forces killed Yasser from Khan Younis with a shot to the head as he was hiding with two friends behind a bin, approximately 200 m from the separation fence. The children had been chanting national slogans at Israeli forces”.
• Another example: “Razan Najar (20): On 1 June, an Israeli sniper bullet hit Razan, of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society and who at the time was wearing a white paramedic vest and standing with other volunteer paramedics approximately 110 m from the separation fence, in the chest at the Khuzaa site, east of Khan Younis. She died in hospital”.
• After dozens of civilians were killed by Israeli snipers, the IDF’s official Twitter account posted this statement: “Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed”.
• In April 2018, then Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated: “You have to understand, there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip”.

A few years ago, when ISIS was all over the headlines and Islamophobia was surging in the UK, the following headline appeared in The Daily Mail: ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis’. The article was later investigated by the press regulator, Ipso, and was found to be significantly misleading. At the time, I remember feeling like it was a personal attack on me, because it was implying that I might be in some way sympathetic to ISIS even though I abhorred everything that they were doing. It was implying that I didn’t really belong in the UK, because my religion made me a potential terrorist; a hostile entity, a virus. I felt like the society I had lived in all my life hated me; when I got home from school, I lay down in bed and just cried into my pillow.

Fast-forward to last year. I was walking to a friend’s house in Nottingham, and these two guys cycled past me while staring me down. As they passed, one of them hissed at me, “ISIS”. At first I didn’t realise what he had said, but then a few seconds later it hit me. Once again, I was painfully aware that I was being judged purely on the basis of my skin colour and my religion to be a terrorist, even though if I was living in ISIS-controlled territory I would probably be one of the first ones that they would kill, given that I support gay rights, women’s rights, religious freedom, freedom of speech and democracy. None of that mattered to these guys, though; I’m a brown Muslim, so therefore I’m no different than ISIS.

A few days ago, I went to see a panel discussion at Nottingham Trent uni, featuring the right-wing American activists Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, as well as the founders of Turning Point UK, a newly established right-wing student movement. I got into an argument with them about US foreign policy in the Middle East, during which they defended bombing and sanctioning Muslim countries. Most of the audience was white and non-Muslim, and, judging by their raucous applause, overwhelmingly agreed with the panelists.

I found out recently that Candace Owens has previously tweeted: “according to the birth rate, Europe will fall and become a Muslim majority continent by 2050. There has never been a muslim majority country where sharia law was not implemented”, and “if France wants to defend itself against anything, it ought to be against the declining birth rate of its people. All signs indicate that it will be a Muslim majority country in just 40 years! Defend your culture first, @EmmanuelMacron! We are your allies”. The terrorist who shot dead 49 Muslims in Christchurch cited Candace Owens as his main inspiration.

When I see people who I went to school with sharing posts on Facebook about how Islam is destroying the West, praising Tommy Robinson and referring to British Muslims as “invaders”; when these same people accuse me of supporting Sharia law even though I have never advocated for Sharia law in my life, and never will; when I see people like Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray getting slots on the BBC and being treated like respectable commentators, even though the former believes that Islamophobia isn’t real and that all 1.6 billion Muslims are terrorists, while the latter believes that Muslims should have fewer civil liberties than non-Muslims and that Europe is being destroyed by Muslim immigration; when I see headlines in The Daily Mail like ‘Muslim Plot To Kill Pope’, ‘Muslims Tell British: Go To Hell’, and ‘Ramadan A Ding-Dong’; and when I see articles in ‘respectable’ journals like The Spectator saying that there is “not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party”, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed sometimes.

I’m not trying to play the victim. I live a very comfortable life compared with millions of people throughout the world. But it’s hard not to be emotionally affected by all of this, and this rampant Islamophobia leads to atrocities like the one carried out in Christchurch. Please remember: Muslims don’t want special treatment. We just want to be treated like human beings.

The UN Human Rights Council recently published a report on Israel’s killings of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza. Its key findings are summarised below:

◙ Key Finding #1: The Great March of Return was not organised by Hamas, but by a wide array of civil society groups and activists of many different political persuasions.

It was great to attend the Tory Party Conference last Sunday in Manchester and join the scores of protesters who were standing up to the brutal regime currently residing in Westminster. There were many different leftist groups there – The People’s Assembly, Stop the War Coalition, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Party, Unite, Unison, CND, and various others supporting refugees, disabled people and other victims of Tory savagery – along with regular people from all across the country, all uniting to voice their anger at the endless array of injustices being meted out by the government. It was incredible to witness so many people in one place who all want the same thing; a country where compassion, rather than cruelty, is the hallmark of political life.

There was a real sense of internationalism there; people were flying flags in support of Kurdistan, Catalonia and Palestine, and it was a stark reminder that we’re all in this boat together, fighting back against the same tyrants and oppressors, although the repression we face in the UK is obviously not comparable to what others face elsewhere in the world. It was impossible not to feel heartened by the turnout – around 30,000 people – and the renewed confidence with which everyone carried themselves thanks to Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning performance in this year’s snap election. There is a tremendous feeling of hope in the country that we can change things for the better; that neoliberalism is not graven in stone. If we can keep the momentum going until the next election, I think we have a decent chance of ousting the Tories and ending the suffering of millions of people both at home and abroad.

• The strike violated domestic American law, as there was no congressional authorisation, and it violated international law, specifically Article 2 of the UN Charter, which bars the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”. It was an act of aggression, which is, according to the Nuremberg principles, the “supreme international crime”.

• The timing of the strike indicates that it was not motivated by humanitarian concerns, as it is unclear who was responsible for the chemical weapons attack, and a logical step would have been to help coordinate an independent investigation to ascertain the facts and then proceed to bring whoever was responsible to justice using legitimate mechanisms (i.e. via the UN). There is no way that in the short space of time between the chemical attack and the US strike that the Trump administration could have gathered irrefutable evidence as to who the culprit was; certainly nothing that would have justified an illegal military attack. The tragedy in Idlib was clearly a pretext for military intervention, rather than the actual reason.

• The US has once again reaffirmed that it has the right to do whatever it wants in the world, without needing to defer to a higher body or seek approval from anyone, which is perfectly consistent with how rogue states operate.

• If the principle that it is justified to attack military bases in a sovereign state in order to deter repetition of atrocities was universally applied then military bases in America, Britain, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and a host of others would all be legitimate targets. Suppose Iran attacked military bases in the UK under the pretext of deterring future aggression of the kind we carried out against Iraq (which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed the region); how might we react?

• If it turns out that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack in Idlib, he certainly wouldn’t be the only one to have used chemical weapons against defenceless civilians; America and Britain used white phosphorous in Iraq, and America notoriously used it in its attack on Fallujah during which 5000 civilians were killed. Israel used white phosphorous shells to bomb hospitals during its 2008/2009 attack on Gaza. During the 1990s, Turkey dropped US-made napalm on Kurdish villages as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing that was strongly supported by America and Britain. These are just a few examples.

• The consequences of the attack are likely to be extremely negative; risking military confrontation with Russia is reckless in the extreme. The threat of nuclear war is increasing, and one provocation on either side could easily set off an irreversible chain of events. The attack has done nothing to curb the Assad regime’s military capabilities, but has allegedly succeeded in killing nine civilians. It could even strengthen the regime, which now has added rhetorical justification for carrying out its crimes by being able to repeat the line that it is under attack from the West and is acting defensively. 

• More commentators and political officials from both parties in the US will now be calling on Trump to escalate and carry out further strikes once it becomes obvious that the limited attack he has already authorised has had no observable consequences on the ground, and he will probably oblige so as not to appear weak. This could end in full-scale invasion, which would be catastrophic (see: Iraq, Libya).

• If it turns out that the regime was responsible for the chemical attack, one step would be for the UN to oversee the destruction of all of the illegal substances and to move in independent monitors to help stem the atrocities. Whatever influence Trump has with Putin he should use to pressure Russia and Syria to get round the negotiating table (maybe in return for relief from sanctions or promise of investment), and America should stop supplying weapons to the rebel forces, whose own actions are often awful, and end up eliciting a more brutal response from the regime. Aid-drops and an increased intake of refugees would be positive steps in the short-term.

As the Saudi-led coalition continues to demolish Yemen, the UK’s role in fuelling the ongoing assault is becoming increasingly difficult to defend, both morally and politically. First, General Ahmed al-Asiri, spokesman for the coalition, was pelted with eggs and subjected to an attempted citizen’s arrest on a recent visit to London. Then, just recently, it was revealed that the Metropolitan police are examining allegations of Saudi war crimes in Yemen, committed with the active participation and unconditional support of the UK. As the brutality of the bombing campaign becomes harder to conceal, despite the best efforts of warmongering MPs and their lapdogs in the corporate media to do just that, the government will be forced to churn out even more propaganda than usual in order to justify its role in this unending savagery. The Bahraini government, another renowned defender of human rights and one of the UK’s chief allies in the region, condemned the attempted citizen’s arrest of al-Asiri as a “barbaric assault” committed by a “group of terrorists”, thus inadvertently but aptly summing up the Saudi-led coalition’s military campaign in Yemen.

Responding to reports of atrocities, an FCO spokesman has stated: “We regularly raise the importance of compliance with international humanitarian law with the Saudi government and other members of the military coalition and we do not shy away from raising legitimate human rights concerns with our friends”. It’s touching to see British political officials proudly and unashamedly referring to Saudi despots as their “friends”, once again illustrating how admirable our alliances are and how sincere we are in our professed commitments to ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. It’s a mystery how anyone could possibly accuse us of hypocrisy when we lecture other countries on the importance of protecting human rights and upholding ‘Western values’. Moreover, rather than pressuring their “friends” in Riyadh, it would be much easier for members of the Foreign Office to raise “legitimate human rights concerns” with themselves and ponder for a moment why they continue to materially and diplomatically support a campaign which has killed 10,000 civilians, displaced millions more and left an entire country on the brink of famine.

As Britain plummets away from the EU into a dark abyss of political and economic insecurity, the government is forging deeper links with yet more repressive and barbaric regimes. International Trade Minister Liam Fox has announced that the UK is already having informal conversations with twelve countries about post-Brexit trade deals; among them are Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Egypt, Turkey and Israel. When members of the government announce their vision for a ‘truly global Britain’, this is what they mean; deepening our relations with tyrannical and oppressive regimes, and fuelling yet more violence and suffering around the world. During an interview with Channel 4 News prior to the EU referendum, Noam Chomsky warned that if we were to leave the EU, we could find ourselves “even more subordinated to US power”. He turned out to be correct; Defence Secretary Michael Fallon recently stated: “Our defence relationship with the US is unprecedented in its depth and scope. As we leave the EU, our bilateral relationships matter more than ever, so we’ll be enhancing our cooperation and investing more in our joint F-35 fast jet programme”.

The programme to which Fallon refers is one of the costliest military projects in history, and it’s good to see that, with the NHS in dire straits and a record number of people relying on food banks as of 2016, the government has its priorities sorted with regards to investment. This strengthening of our role as America’s leading ‘junior partner’ is an extremely dangerous development; the government recently deployed 200 out of 800 NATO troops to Estonia, and huge NATO training exercises are underway in Scotland with the obvious purpose of intimidating Russia and exhibiting NATO’s military prowess. Similarly provocative acts can be expected in future (from both sides). Growing Russia-NATO tensions could easily escalate into a potentially terminal situation. As we leave the EU and enter into a new era of uncertainty, the importance of activism and direct action on the part of the citizenry in order to protect human rights and prevent destructive policies from being enacted is especially great. Unless we band together and organise, political elites will be free to do as they please.

Newspaper headlines have been blaring news of Jamal al-Harith, a former British Guantanamo detainee, blowing himself up in a suicide attack against Iraqi forces in Mosul after having joined Islamic State. What happened here is tragic and horrendous, and the conclusion we should draw from it is obvious: if you don’t want people to hate you and to become sympathetic to extremism, don’t kidnap them, hold them incommunicado without charges in a dungeon, torture them and then finally dump them back in their home country without explanation or apology. According to al-Harith’s family, before 2001 he was a “peaceful and gentle person”, but after his captivity in Guantanamo he was “utterly changed… While sleeping he would cry out, ‘Don’t hurt me'”. According to his wife, he became increasingly radicalised after seeing atrocities committed by the Assad regime in Syria; his vulnerability to such radicalisation was undoubtedly compounded by his experiences of abuse in Guantanamo. The conclusion that papers such as The Daily Mail are drawing – that he should never have been released in the first place – is completely missing the point. Rather than abducting him, illegally detaining him, torturing him and then, despite realising that there was no evidence against him, refusing to release him, upon his release he should have immediately been given psychiatric help and other medical care by the British government, as well as a formal apology and compensation for the role they undoubtedly played in his ordeal; instead, al-Harith had to wait until David Cameron was in power before he received any compensation, despite being released in 2004.

It’s true that The Daily Mail has exhibited some hypocrisy here by condemning Blair for requesting al-Harith’s release despite having campaigned for it at the time; however, Blair’s response to that hypocrisy just sheds further light on what a sick, depraved individual he is. Blair’s statement reads: “The fact is that this was always a very difficult situation where any government would have to balance proper concern for civil liberties with desire to protect our security, and we were likely to be attacked whatever course we took. The reason it did take a long time for their release was precisely the anxiety over their true affiliations”. The fact that any journalist could print these words without collapsing into ridicule is mind-bending; the idea that Tony Blair was at all concerned about the “security” of the British public, and that this was the reason for his reluctance to request the release of Brits detained in Guantanamo, is a pathetic joke. This was the man who invaded Iraq despite his own domestic intelligence agency, MI5, predicting that such an act would greatly increase the risk of a domestic terror attack. Why would Blair be so unconcerned about the security of the British public that he was willing to attack and destroy Iraq, knowing that it would generate terrorism, but then suddenly develop a concern for public safety when it came to releasing Guantanamo detainees? The reason for his government’s complacency over, and complicity in, America’s torture program is that he was trying to please his masters in Washington so their praise could carry on feeding his ego, being the craven, power-hungry freak he is.

Moreover, Blair’s statement actually reveals his active complicity in the horrors unfolding at Guantanamo: “The reason it did take a long time for their release was precisely the anxiety over their true affiliations”. So despite knowing that these men were being illegally held in a torture camp, Blair deliberately delayed requesting their release because of “anxiety over their true affiliations”. Obviously, there was no “anxiety over their true affiliations”; Blair couldn’t care less if they were linked to al-Qaeda, being more than happy to turn Iraq into a sectarian wasteland filled with head-chopping extremists and to greatly increase the domestic terror threat. But even if he was, his statement is a frank admission that his government wasn’t at all willing to have these men released, revealing just how little he cared about human rights and freedom (despite pretending that he was on a divine mission to bring both of those things to Iraqis).

Blair remains a parasite in British political life, apparently not having yet completed his self-appointed task of sucking all the joy and happiness from the world. His intervention in the Brexit debate was equally facile and unwarranted, and his remarks were spectacularly hypocritical; daring to claim that voters in the EU referendum were misinformed about what they were voting for when his own government carried out one of the most intense misinformation campaigns in British political history, and suddenly pretending to care about the “will of the people” when he certainly didn’t care about it in 2003. His intervention was just another ill-disguised attempt to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever be dragged before the Hague in chains, but the sooner he disappears from public life, the better.

The UK Defence Journal reported on January 2, 2017, that the RAF had conducted airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq through New Years Eve, ushering in a new era of death and destruction. The article quotes from a government press release referencing strikes in Mosul: “A Brimstone weapon was used in a precision attack to destroy a[n] Islamic State artillery weapon which was mounted on a truck. Tornado aircraft conducted thorough checks before each strike to ensure that no civilians were put at risk”. Despite the UK’s use of “precision strikes” and its meticulous care to avoid civilian casualties, the civilian death toll in Mosul continues to mount as a result of coalition airstrikes. The article goes on to state the following: “In December 2016, it was reported that the Royal Air Force is operating at its most intense for 25 years in a single theatre of operation which far outstripped the UK involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan – RAF jets have dropped 11 times more bombs (1,276 strikes) on Syria and Iraq in the preceding 12 months than they had in the busiest year of action in Afghanistan a decade previously”.

The RAF’s savage, unrelenting bombardment of Iraq and Syria, which “far outstrip[s] the UK involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan”, is certainly being felt by the civilians on the ground; over 2,000 Iraqi and Syrian civilians have been killed by coalition airstrikes since the bombing began, and Mosul is beginning to resemble Aleppo as civilians there suffer endless aerial bombardment. The cost of these military campaigns, which are contributing to the destruction of the region and are inflaming extremism at home, is extortionate; “between August 2014 and the 31st of March 2016” the MOD “set the costs… at £265 million (£45 million in the 2014-15 financial year, and £220 million in the 2015-16 financial year)”. No doubt this money is being put to good use; the NHS and other public services that are under severe threat can receive funding from elsewhere. The same day, the UK Defence Journal ran an article proclaiming 2017 to be the “‘Year of the Royal Navy’”. The article opens with Michael Fallon, the euphemistically-titled ‘Defence Secretary’, declaring: “We are investing billions in growing the Royal Navy for the first time in a generation with new aircraft carriers, submarines, frigates, patrol vessels and aircraft all on their way. 2017 is the start of a new era of maritime power, projecting Britain’s influence globally and delivering security at home”.

The UK government will project its power and influence around the world in a variety of ways; for example, “The fourth Astute Class submarine will enter the water for its commissioning phase in spring; The keel for the seventh and final Astute-class submarine – as yet unnamed – will be laid in 2017 as work continues apace on the fifth and sixth, HMS Anson and HMS Agamemnon in Barrow; The opening of the first permanent Royal Navy base East of Suez in nearly half a century”. Aside from providing UK-based arms manufacturers with a fortune, these plans will consolidate and strengthen British military power in the Middle East; that is, the power to intimidate the people of the region into submission and protect the existing hegemonic order. Since the end of the Cold War, British military submarines have been deployed largely for symbolic purposes; they have not been involved in any actual warfare, and their positioning alongside US submarines around the world is merely to remind other countries of who is in charge. The article’s reference to the “opening of the first permanent Royal Navy base East of Suez in nearly half a century” is an allusion to the construction of a permanent Royal Navy base in Bahrain. The rulers of Bahrain have always been reliable clients; alongside creating a favourable environment in the country for corporate exploitation, they have dutifully carried out the task of suppressing the population and ensuring that democracy is not allowed to prevail, often with our direct assistance.

A revolution in Bahrain would be bad enough for the West in and of itself as it would topple a dependable dictatorship, but its real danger would be that it could trigger a similar revolution in Saudi Arabia, which would be an unmitigated catastrophe; we would no longer profit from Saudi oil, and a regime that obediently carries out Western orders would be gone. That is why the US and the UK supported the Saudi-led suppression of the Bahraini uprising in 2011; democracy is too dangerous for us to tolerate. The establishment of a permanent Royal Navy base in the country is a way for us to prop up the regime from within and allow it to more efficiently suppress the population by coordinating with it militarily and logistically. Unless democracy is also asserted here in the UK and we summon the will to impose constraints on our leaders, they will be free to do as they please over the next year.

British foreign policy has not changed that much since Tony Blair was in office. The only real difference seems to be that we are now outsourcing the terror and violence to other countries, so as to create the appearance that our hands are clean. For example, Saudi Arabia, the most fundamentalist Islamic country in the world and our favourite ally in the Middle East, is currently rampaging through Yemen, obliterating schools, hospitals, markets, homes and other civilian infrastructure, and has also imposed a crushing blockade on the country that prevents the most basic supplies from getting in; over ten thousand people have been killed, millions of people have fled their homes and are now on the brink of famine, hundreds of thousands of children are starving to death and much of the country has been entirely devastated. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both found evidence that Saudi Arabia is deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, and is thus committing war crimes.

However, the only reason that Saudi Arabia is allowed to continue massacring civilians in Yemen is that we allow it to do so; since the start of the bombing campaign, Britain has sold over £3.7bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, and an investigation by Sky News found that British military personnel are in the Saudi command centres when targets are being chosen and strikes are being launched. Amnesty International has found evidence that British-made weapons have been used by Saudi Arabia in attacks that have killed civilians, including several children, while Human Rights Watch has documented how British-made weapons have been repeatedly used by Saudi Arabia to target civilian infrastructure. As Angus Robertson, MP for Moray, pointed out in Parliament in 2015: “Thousands of civilians have been killed in Yemen, including a large number by the Saudi air force, and they’ve done that using British-built planes with pilots who are trained by British instructors who are dropping British-made bombs and are co-ordinated by the Saudis in the presence of British military advisers. Isn’t it time for the Prime Minister to admit that Britain is effectively taking part in a war in Yemen that is costing thousands of civilian lives and he has not sought Parliamentary approval to do this?”. We are direct participants in this ongoing assault on the people of Yemen, and not only does our role in this violate domestic British law, but it also violates international law; according to the Arms Trade Treaty, to which Britain is a signatory, no state is permitted to sell arms to a country that is likely to use those arms to violate human rights. However, the extent of our criminality goes much further than this; the fact that British military personnel are active participants in the coordination and commission of airstrikes means that we are co-belligerents alongside Saudi Arabia; David Cameron and Theresa May should both be charged with war crimes.

A key feature of Blair’s foreign policy was international terrorism; Britain was an active participant in the US-run extraordinary rendition program, whereby CIA agents went around the world abducting people and flying them to secret prisons where they would be tortured, many of them in countries run by brutal regimes, such as Libya under Gaddafi, Syria under Assad and Egypt under Mubarak. While the UK government has suppressed virtually all evidence related to the matter, it is extremely likely that the British-Indian island of Diego Garcia was home to one such secret prison, or ‘black site’, where prisoners were held without charge or trial and tortured. Furthermore, UK airports were routinely used by US rendition planes for refuelling, some of them even carrying prisoners at the time. In one of the most notorious and depraved cases, MI6 agents facilitated the kidnap and rendition of two Libyan dissidents and their families, including a child and a pregnant woman, in order to help Tony Blair ingratiate himself with Gaddafi. This was an extreme international terrorism campaign; imagine knowing that on any given day someone could break into your home, place a hood over your head, bundle you into the back of a van and transport you to a secret torture chamber, and that the same thing could happen to someone you love; you would be living in constant terror. The creation of an international campaign of kidnap and torture, one that even targeted women and children, was a way for the US to reassert its dominance after 9/11 and intimidate the world into submission and obedience, and Britain was a willing participant in this campaign, as was much of Europe.

While the extraordinary rendition program has been shut down (at least the most brazenly immoral aspects of it), it has been replaced by the drone campaign; a global assassination campaign that targets anyone who the US suspects of someday posing a threat to Western interests, along with anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity. This is also a global terror campaign; people in countries such as Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia fear the skies due to these flying harbingers of death; children are afraid to walk to school in the morning and people live not knowing whether their child or their grandmother will be incinerated in the next moment or whether their neighbour will be targeted for assassination. Britain has been an active and enthusiastic participant in this campaign; documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA base at Menwith Hill, UK, where activities are carried out with the “full knowledge and consent” of British authorities and where members of various UK intelligence agencies are stationed, is used to gather intelligence that enables these drone strikes to be launched. Therefore, not only should David Cameron and Theresa May be charged with war crimes, but they should also be tried for international terrorism. It is highly unlikely that this will ever happen; when you’re the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world the law does not apply to you. However, we can still hold them accountable in the court of public opinion, and act to ensure that these crimes, for which we are all responsible, end immediately.