No balance in climate change - or genocide

April 14, 2026

I usually enjoy John Warhurst's writing but this is a lame piece of fence sitting. “Let’s not upset anyone.”

Calling what is happening in Palestine a “war” doesn’t reflect what I see on my phone or what both the ICJ and Chris Sidoti, former member of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, describe as genocide. As one swallow does not a summer make, one attack (7 Oct. 2023) does not make a war. That attack, actually an outbreak from the prison known as Gaza, triggered an intensifying of the slow motion genocide that has been ongoing since the first European Jewish colonisers turned on the Palestinians who welcomed them a century ago. War requires two combatants. By what stretch of imagination does Warhurst see the inhabitants of rubble fighting back in any way that could remotely be called war?

Failure to acknowledge the justice owed to Palestinians and context of 2023 only pushes us further from peace. Removal of all Palestinians from their homeland was intrinsic to the establishment of Israel from its beginnings in the 19th century. Just what is the polite way to show contempt for those condoning genocide, Jews and non-Jews alike?