The dirtiest word to come out of the 1930s was ‘appeasement.’ The national socialist government in Germany, along with the fascists in Italy and Japan steadily turned the international order upside down. 

German military support helped the Spanish fascists overwhelm the elected republican government.  Germany annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, Italy invaded Ethiopia and Japan China but only when it was too late – the German invasion of Poland – did the liberal democracies stand up to these murderous bullies.  

The reasons for their failure have been gone over relentlessly by historians but they included trade and the anti-Bolshevik hope, in Britain especially, that the Nazis would turn east when they went to war and destroy the Soviet Union. However, Poland was as far east as they turned before directing their attack westwards.

The writer Claud Cockburn called the 1930s the “devil’s decade.” It was a turn of phrase which accurately described the collapse of international order, ending inevitably in the Second World War. 

The British/French solution to the crisis in Ethiopia – the Hoare-Laval pact of 1935 – was not to tell the Italians to get out ‘or else’ but to offer them half the country they had invaded as a compromise. Aggression was to be rewarded.  

At the same time Britain was bending over backwards to appease the Nazis. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, accepted every slap in the face but the last, Germany’s impending invasion of Poland.

The world is now in a similar situation – another ‘devil’s decade’ - but with a change of characters. It is no longer the fascist states invading other countries but the liberal democracies, led by men not in military uniforms but dark blue suits and pastel ties. Yet when Russia intervened in Ukraine they were quick to invoke the ‘international rules-based order’ they had themselves repeatedly smashed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,  Syria and other countries. 

Like the League of Nations before it, the United Nations has been turned into a spectator on the sidelines, unable to stop aggression by the liberal democracies because of the way it was structured in the first place: all real power to the five permanent representatives in the Security Council and only moral power to the peoples’ house, the General Assembly. 

Appeasement in the 1930s ended in World War Two.  As we watch the daily destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of its people, men, women and children, the perpetrator of these atrocities is also being appeased. 

By the third week of November the number of dead had reached 15,000, including 6000 children, with many more bodies buried under rubble which the Gazans can only try to move with their hands because they have no fuel for their earth-moving equipment. 

The scenes are straight out of Dante’s seventh circle of hell, the Hell of the Violent and Bestial. We have no option but to watch them unless we never turn on the news or look at social media.   The gross violence is there every day, every hour and minute, staring back at us from the bottom of the abyss, almost taunting us as human beings with a heart and a conscience but individually unable to stop this and frustrated by the refusal of governments we elect to intervene.   

The deliberate killing of thousands of children is an enormous crime.  It strikes at the foundations of what it is to be human. We raise and protect the young as the first priority in life but in Gaza they are being slaughtered with no one to protect them, not even the parents who often lie dead with them in the rubble.  

Not one of the (so-called) liberal democracies has raised a hand to tell the perpetrator: “Stop or else we will stop you.” Instead they plead for restraint when there is no restraint and ask the state extinguishing life in Gaza to stop killing children.  Bear this in mind: even when children are being mass-murdered they don’t threaten or demand that it stops right now, they ask.   

There is a time to talk and a time to put the hand up and stay ‘Stop or else.’ That point should have been reached when the colonial settler militias were ethnically cleansing Palestine in 1948 but over 75 years it has never been reached. Not once has the Zionist regime been punished for its atrocities and standing violations of international law. Midwifed by the west, it remains its favourite child, out of control, free to smash and bully as it wants.  

Far from being punished for its wilful behavior, it has always been rewarded with more money and more arms, so why would it want to stop now?  

After the ‘tripartite aggression’ of 1956 President Eisenhower finally had to threaten it with economic retribution and the withholding of political support at the UN to get it out of Sinai.  The threat worked: it got out but the lesson was not learnt.  Since that time,  none of the governments with the power to curb the settler regime have used any of it and why would they,  when they are its enablers and protectors.

Confident they can do whatever they want without anyone stopping them, the Zionists have brought nothing but death and destruction to Palestine and the countries around it:  occupation, murder, massacre, assassination, ethnic cleansing and now what is widely regarded as genocide in Gaza. Almost nothing has been missed but not even genocidal behavior has been enough for Western governments to rise up for once and say: “Stop or else.”

Instead, they negotiate with Netanyahu and other architects of mass murder - or is there another word to accurately describe the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, about 15,000 after five weeks, including 6000 children? Hospitals are being bombed, their patients and staff driven out, their medical supplies destroyed.  No fuel so the people have to try and dig the victims of missile attacks out of the rubble with their bare hands.  Refugees in schools or walking on the road south, with nothing in their hands but what they can carry, are being murdered.  We have never seen such despicable behavior by a government and its uniformed enforcers. 

This is not a war but the obliteration of a civiIian population by people who know exactly what they are doing, from the politicians and generals down to the pilots, tank commanders, and snipers firing into hospitals. What can possibly be in the minds of the mostly young men committing these crimes? Hamas fighters have hardly been touched even after almost seven weeks. 

These crimes have people around the world gasping with horror at what they are seeing. Yet, instead of intervening forcefully to stop the slaughter of the innocent, western governments issue hollow calls for restraint. The US, the UK, Canada and Australia did not even have the small amount of moral courage needed to utter the word ‘ceasefire,’ talking instead of a humanitarian ‘pause,’ in line with what the perpetrator of these crimes would accept.

Now there actually is a ceasefire but it had hardly been announced before the Zionists declared they would continue their ‘operation’ – their killing spree - as ruthlessly as before when it was over.  

Not one of their government allies in the ‘west’ put their hand up to say “This has to stop now or else.” ‘Or else’ includes suspending or breaking relations (as South Africa has done), suspending economic and military aid and standing aside while the UN Security Council passes a resolution censuring the regime in Tel Aviv but ‘western’ governments have not picked up one of these tools.  

Not only does the government responsible for these crimes need to be stopped: it must be punished, as unpunished crimes only lead to more crimes and worse crimes. That is the story of Palestine over 75 years and if Tel Aviv’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are not punished there will be even worse crimes to come. That is the lesson that should have been learnt from the past. 

The governments that installed the settler state in Palestine know where their failure to stand up to the Nazis and fascists in the 1930s led and they should be able to see where their endless appeasement of an equally aggressive apartheid regime in occupied Palestine has led in 2023 and will lead in years to come. 

The politicians and generals in Tel Aviv are on the point of precipitating a large-scale regional war. This may be what they want, dealing with all their enemies at once. Such a war may be avoided this time but there will always be another time and eventually a time when that war can no longer be deflected.  

The Zionist settler state cannot be allowed to get away with this. It cannot be allowed to set the narrative. There must be punishment of the architects of mass killing and destruction in Gaza and no more appeasement if an even more catastrophic outcome of the war on Gaza is to be avoided.