In honour of a brave Gazan fisherwoman Madleen Kulab, the international aid boat of the same name was turned back to an Israeli port.

Naval ships from at least one Western government could have escorted that boat to the shores of Gaza, but they only watched, twiddling their thumbs in port, perhaps muttering something about respect for Israel’s national sovereignty.

There is a different way of thinking and behaving. In the immediate future, the ships from several navies could be escorting flotillas bringing aid to Gaza. It should not be difficult to justify that intervention, to prevent genocide, to save lives, to relieve massive human suffering. The world’s peoples cry out for such intervention. Why doesn’t it happen?

Explaining the watch and wait passivity

For more than 70 years, under US influence, Western governments have treated Israel as exceptional, above the law, never to be held accountable, allowed to act with impunity. In the same breath, such governments mouth support for international law and for human rights, each claim bolstered by the so-called principle of respect for national sovereignty. That “respect” means intervention in another country’s affairs could only happen as a last resort, even if today that might mean there would be no one left in Sudan or Gaza to be starved to death or bombed into oblivion.

Respect for international law is mouthed even as the US vetoes another UN Security Council attempt to enforce a ceasefire in Gaza, even as governments say that Israeli-imposed famine and slaughter is unacceptable. Such wringing of hands, a sort of feigned morality, is expressed in Orwellian terms: genocide is awful, but to stop it is intervention, hence governments are able to simultaneously appear principled and unprincipled.

This wait-and-watch passivity towards the mounting death tolls in Gaza has been fed by politicians’ cowardice when crafting policies. Not wishing to offend Zionist lobbies, let alone the US Government’s and corporations’ fondness for arms supplies to Israel, Western government leaders would need to find courage to offend bullies who are also murderers.

For the past 18 months, reliance on international law as the means of halting the slaughter of a people has produced nothing. The International Criminal Court indicted Prime Minister Netanyahu for war crimes but the US Government reminded the world that they did not recognise the Rome Statute which underpinned the ICC.

Although the International Court of Justice ruled that Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands was illegal and should end immediately, states which were signatories to the ICJ have shown no inclination to fulfil their legal, let lone humanitarian, obligations.

Given that the wheels of international humanitarian law have ground to a halt, there has to be an alternative policy, another way of thinking. It should not be difficult to shift perspectives on how to intervene in Gaza, but that will require a touch of vision for humanity and more than a touch of courage.

Justifying Intervention, at least with a naval escort

The claim that respect for national sovereignty makes intervention to save lives illegal is pitted against support for human rights. How will journalists report that dilemma, how will students be taught, which way will governments choose?

Reference to a ground-breaking book written in 1974 provides one way to answer that question. In her effort to protect women from domestic violence, in a book Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, feminist, human rights activist Erin Pizzey wrote that a man’s home was not his castle, that he could not do what he liked within his walls, that police should intervene to stop domestic violence.

Since that publication, in the UK at least, police could arrive to protect victims and even arrest the perpetrators of violence.

Translate the thesis of that book to international relations and it reveals the UN 2005 principle the Responsibility to Protect and its reminder that states have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. If states do not protect their populations from atrocities — are 62,000 slaughtered Palestinians a sufficient atrocity? — the international community has a responsibility to intervene. The R2P principle also insists that military intervention would be a last resort unless the threat to peoples’ lives was considered clear and extreme.

To overcome a fear to intervene, certain concepts — “international community”, “world order”, “humanitarian aid”, “genocide” — will have to be redefined, given a new connotation, a new life.

Reflection on the connotation of words addresses previous failure to prevent or halt the suffering when politicians and their advisers are paralysed by constant use of words that provide excuses but mean nothing.

Luckily, former secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has justified when intervention to prevent genocide or gross violations of human rights’ should occur. In a 6 June 1998 address, he reminded his audience that the UN’s responsibility was to intervene, that when faced with extreme atrocities — how much more extreme can it get in Gaza? — the usual principle concerning national sovereignty can be set aside.

As if respecting events of the last 18 months when millions of people have marched in the world’s cities to protest Israeli slaughter and to “Free Palestine”, Annan stressed that the UN Charter was issued in the name of “the peoples” not “the governments”.

To reaffirm faith in a common humanity, reference should be made to the Charter not being a licence for governments, but a moral line in the sand to protect the sovereignty of peoples.

Proposals to have a naval force escort any future humanitarian aid boats to the shores of Gaza will have to be bolstered by the sort of courage which motivated the crew and passengers of the Madleen, and will no doubt have to face the wrath of Israel and the US. But the violent, racist, colonialist — let’s not mince words — ways of thinking of those governments have to be challenged, better still replaced, by a way of thinking which meets the goals of the UN Charter, a humanitarian challenge, not a legal one.

Of all the options open to peoples, a naval escort for boats carrying humanitarian aid to a beleaguered starving people would represent not an act of war, but a long overdue, life-saving intervention.

Can you hear the world’s’ peoples — not the governments — cheering such an initiative, applauding a way of thinking about policy to save lives?

Such intervention should have far more effect than placing sanctions on two religious zealots, those two political thugs in the Israeli Government.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.