The world must intervene and stop Israel's violence

 

UNRWA
The world must intervene and stop Israel's violence
Carl Bildt talks about genocide and Jonas Gahr Støre about barbarism

Eric Rosen

This is a cultural article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

Published 14.30

A soldier waves from an Israeli tank near the Gaza border. Photo: Tsafrir Abayov / AP

Early this year I debated rade in P1 with Lars Adaktusson, chairman of the Sweden-Israel Friendship Association. I talked about the fact that around 25,000 Palestinians had already been killed and that we cannot just live as usual while as many more are killed by the Israeli military in the time to come.

Adaktusson thought it distasteful and wrong to speculate that the killing would continue at the same pace. Then he stated that what is happening, and what had happened then, is someone else's fault other than whoever pulls the trigger: "The responsibility is not Israel's," he said.

I came to think of that because his position was in no way an extreme statement beyond the middle of the debate. On the contrary, it is representative of how Sweden and large parts of the Western world have reacted to the carnage, the bombs and the ethnic cleansing.

Israel is not considered responsible for what they themselves do.
And everything that happens seems to be more the corpse's fault than the killers'.

Therefore, it was positively surprising when Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard (M) described the consequences of Israel's recently introduced ban on the UN agency UNRWA to work in the country.

Stenergard said that this is "a human disaster" and pointed out that Israel is responsible for this, that they are defying the International Court of Justice's demands to support and protect the civilian population. She also mentioned that Israel is ignoring demands to release humanitarian aid to the Palestinian population. Not much to say really. But much more than one dared to hope for from the Swedish government in the past.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre is even clearer. He calls what Israel engages in "barbarism".

Sweden's former prime minister and foreign minister, the moderate Carl Bildt, also speaks increasingly plainly. On X, he wrote on Tuesday that what is happening in Gaza, when Israel stops emergency aid to a couple of million starving people in need, "will be regarded as genocide by large parts of the world".

Both Gahr Støre, Bildt and Malmer Stenergard are right in their criticism of Israel's actions.

Israel's indifference to Palestinian suffering, and the brutal warfare against the Palestinian civilian population, is certainly nothing new. But when they also ban UNRWA, one of the few actors with the ability to help civilians, it becomes increasingly difficult for someone to claim, like Adaktusson and others, that responsibility is not Israel's.

The other day, Doctors Without Borders also expressed its anger and despair at how Israel "repeatedly kills our employees". Other aid organizations, such as UN soldiers and journalists, are also murdered when they try to help or do their jobs. In word and deed, Netanyahu and his regime show that anyone who wants to help Palestinians or tell the truth about Gaza will be stopped.

The question that must therefore be asked, when no one can any longer deny Israel's responsibility for what is happening in Gaza, and when more and more people begin to describe the killing in genocidal terms, is what responsibility the outside world has to intervene.

It is not enough to stop supplying the perpetrator with weapons, although that should be a given.

We are also in a position where we will soon need UN battalions on the ground in the war, with a mandate to stop the violence, establish safety zones and create peace by whatever means necessary. It has been done before.

The occasions we remember are above all when the UN intervened far too late, as in Rwanda in 1994, or failed to prevent war crimes despite its presence, as in Srebrenica the following year.

But the alternative to UN efforts, UNRWA, peacekeeping forces - and a rules-based world order - is to accept the barbarism that is going on.