Blinded by impunity

When Joseph Farrugia was in Brussels on October 10, 2023, (‘The regressive new left’, March 14), “the IDF had not yet fired a single shot” in Gaza as protestors against the state of Israel took to the streets. No, only an occupation of the people of Gaza for the past 20 years, in which this land was illegally turned into an open-air concentration camp, crippling its economy after having destroyed 60,000 homes during Operation Cast Lead.

It is rare these days to skim over a genocide that has murdered 72,000, half of whom are women and children; injured 171,000; caused 21,000 children to be disabled; murdered journalists and humanitarian workers; carried out a deliberate starvation campaign and blocked humanitarian aid; apart from the pogroms in the Occupied West Bank... simply to prop up a hyperbolised ‘critique’ of the left for apparently not supporting an illegal war by Israel and the United States against Iran.

Like the former MEA director Farrugia, I am an amateur at geopolitics but I know fey moralism when I read it. Naturally, I have only an intense dislike for Iran’s theocratic and oppressive regime.

But in a world in which the West has abandoned the principles of international law and gives diplomatic cover to war criminals, we should employ a critical reading of empire and power, instead of plying soft narratives in favour of war by propping up ‘the left’ as an antagonist.

As far as ideological soups go, Farrugia’s is a familiar broth: Donald Trump, the working class, identity politics, radical Islam, immigration... so many anxieties grouped in this one prosecutorial brief against the ‘new left’, simply to make a just exhortation to support the democratic will of the people of Iran. Yet, the genocide in Gaza is his least important exhibit.

What about the democratic right in Europe? Where have EU governments’ support for legality, international law, humanitarianism and sovereignty been for the past two years? What have the European People’s Party luminaries – Roberta Metsola and Ursula Von der Leyen – done or said, beyond their intrepid photo-op in Israel, about the genocide perpetrated by a cabinet of ministers hailing from the far-right, ultra-nationalistic and anti-Arab parties?

And does Farrugia believe that destabilising the Middle East, through a war that burns billions in dollars to kill the proud civilians of Iran and their children in school, that sends the price of oil skyrocketing, that exacerbates the climate crisis and water stress in the GCC and that risks taking us beyond the threshold of World War III, is now a simple ‘fight for democracy?’

We are yet to see how the American working class that supported Trump will respond to the rising bill of the war and the effects of his tariffs. Groceries and other goods remain high, gasoline prices are soaring and, in January, employers slashed jobs by the thousands.

For Farrugia asks why the working class has abandoned the left and elected the likes of Trump. The political failure Farrugia should be writing about is not the spectre of a left too sympathetic to Palestinians but why both social and liberal democratic parties endorsed decades of deindustrialisation, why they keep failing to address unaffordability, rising house prices, wage stagnation and job security.

It is rare these days to skim over a genocide that murdered 72,000- Matthew Vella

That is why voters are pushed into the hands of right-wing populists, who weaponise their rage by blaming the wreckage of a stripped-down economy on minorities and immigrant workers.

Even Trump’s move to go to war in Iran at Benjamin Netanyahu’s behest has been foolish – the US president himself has been unclear about his motivations, failing to outline a clear trajectory of what victory should mean. Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself spelt out that any “regime” that is not antagonistic to the US will do in terms of resolution – another case of ‘Madurismo without Maduro’ of course, where regime decapitation does not bring democratic liberation... just oil profits (in Venezuela’s case).

I don’t need to bend backwards to condemn any oppressive theocracy or non-state militias. But does that mean that Western military violence enjoys institutional impunity because it clothes itself in some sort of democratic legitimacy? Because its arms manufacturers are listed on the stock exchange, all the while supplying the arms and bombs for the Gaza genocide? For the logic that sends a Houthi missile toward a cargo ship in the Red Sea is the same one that sends a Raytheon bomb toward a Yemeni wedding.

I understand that we have adopted a very particular vocabulary in our part of the civilised world – when we see war on our smartphones, we take comfort that organised violence in the service of the West is better than the one where the fighter wears a keffiyeh, or that it is blessed by the multi-millionaire chum of a paedophile, rather than a cleric.

To go by Farrugia’s mentality, we should be keeping ideological scoreboards on the dead in Gaza and those in Iranian streets… but are they not the same catastrophe, produced by the same logic of power that decrees which lives are not deemed worthy?

Impunity is the same enemy, whether it’s at the hands of the IRGC or a democracy with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. I’d like to think this is not a left-wing position. It is simply a human one.

Matthew Vella is a former editor of MaltaToday.

www.matthewvella.info