There are some remarkable characters in the gang surrounding Donald Trump. Most recently, I’ve found it fascinating to catch up on Mike Huckabee.
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| Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel Innovator in his approach to diplomacy |
The Huckabees are at least progressive, in that they’ve allowed the father's inheritance to pass to a daughter rather than insisting that it go to a son.
In any case, Huckabee continues to occupy a key position on the political stage, nearly twenty years after ending his time as state governor. Today he’s the US Ambassador to Israel. Now rather a lot of people – a growing number – around the world are becoming increasingly upset at the behaviour of Israel in Gaza.
Why, some have gone so far as to talk about genocide.
Huckabee, though, has the answer to all that. He seems to have been annoyed, in particular, by the decision of the UK government to recognise Palestine as a state. On social media, Huckabee told the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer where to get off. In no uncertain terms:
So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved. Did UK surrender to Nazis and drop food to them? Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer? That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!
Is it just me or is there a bit of what-aboutery there? You know, as in, ‘hey, you want to criticise what Israel’s doing in Gaza? You want to have a go at Israeli forces killing civilians? What about what you did to Dresden?’
Still, he clearly thinks that the fire-bombing of Dresden was a good thing, not a bad one, presumably including the fact that it caused a firestorm so intense that it sucked the oxygen out of the air and many people died of suffocation. And what he’s doing is drawing a parallel between that atrocity and what’s happening in Gaza. Which, presumably, he regards as equally justified.
I wouldn’t disagree. It seems to me that it’s precisely as justified to do what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza as it was to set fire to Dresden. I suppose it’s helpful of him to highlight the equivalence. Mind you, I don’t think that he’d agree with my view that the Dresden raids constituted a major, unacknowledged and unprosecuted war crime, and Israel’s violence in Gaza and starvation of its population is another. The parallel he draws has merit, but not the way he meant. He’s got it right, but only by accident.
But are the two atrocities really equivalent? The four raids on Dresden may have been ghastly but at least they only lasted from 13 to 15 February 1945. The Gaza incursion has lasted 22 months and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Unsurprisingly, it has caused more deaths: the best estimate for Gaza is some 60,000 and rising, while most commentators agree that the Dresden raids killed around 25,000. But, worse than that, the Gaza action is threatening an entire population, believed to be about 2.1 million today.
Israel is targeting an entire people, and that whole people is in danger of death. Mostly by starvation, though Israeli Defence Forces are helping the process along by bombing or firing on people, in particular when they come looking for food. War on a people is pretty much a textbook definition of genocide.
It's never been really clear to me where to draw the line between a war crime and a crime against humanity. However, I can’t help feeling that it’s somewhere between Dresden and Gaza. That, though, isn’t anything Huckabee’s ever going to admit.
And if he’s right, without meaning to be, to categorise Gaza and Dresden as similar events, he’s wrong to draw a veil over the difference in scale and in genocidal intent between them. What he got right, as I suggested before, he got right by accident. What he’s getting wrong, I suspect, he’s getting wrong on purpose.
The hallmark of the Trump regime.
