The West’s shift in positioning on Israel’s genocide in Gaza isn’t groundbreaking. It’s barely even the minimum of what we should expect when a Western ally is committing war crimes and starving thousands of babies to death. And Israel has apparently been boasting that it ‘moderated’ its allies’ smokescreen response this week.
Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Cook has called on us to “ignore Starmer’s theatrics” on Israel, because it’s as “equally deceitful” as the narrative he has been feeding the public since the start of the genocide. Both the government and the establishment media, he insists:
are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.
He also argues that:
Because colonial Israel is deeply integrated into the West’s war machine and therefore needs protecting, those same western leaders coordinated their seeming “ambush” of Israel with Israeli officials and the US. There was nothing spontaneous or genuine about Starmer and co’s “ambush”.
Israel “managed to moderate the outcome” of the West’s smokescreen actions
Britain seems to have no plans to stop regular flights to Israel from RAF Akrotiri, expel its genocide-supporting Israeli ambassador, or cancel all arms sales. So any new performative stances Starmer’s government takes essentially mean next to nothing for the people in Gaza whom Israel is starving to death right now. And as a senior Israeli official has revealed, that’s hardly surprising. Because as they told Haaretz, the seemingly strong announcements:
were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.
The current “handwringing”, Cook stresses, “is just another bit of stagecraft” aiming “to buy Israel time to “finish the job” – that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza”. He continues:
It is all meant as noise, to distract us from the only pertinent issue: that Israel is committing genocide by slaughtering and starving Gaza’s population, while the West has aided and abetted that genocide.
And he asserts that:
The truth is that western leaders and establishment media are playing us for fools once again, just as they have been for the past 19 months.
For him:
Whatever they say or do, the trail of blood leads straight back to their door.
A senior Israeli official tells the Haaretz paper why European leaders shifted yesterday, after 19 months of silence about the Gaza genocide, to instant outrage. It was all coordinated with Israel in advance:
"The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about.…
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) May 21, 2025
Featured image via the Canary
