President of Qatar Press Center Saad bin Mohammed Al Rumaihi (right) and Director General of Qatar Press Center Sadiq Mohammed Al Amari (left) present a memento to Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Eye David Hearst after the event.
Doha, Qatar: Renowned journalist and co-founder of Middle East Eye, David Hearst, has called the glaring double standard by the West on Israel’s aggression in Palestine as hypocrisy and has labelled the scale of Palestinian deaths as obscene.
Hearst, speaking at a seminar yesterday on ‘The Double Standard in the International Community During War on Gaza’ hosted by the Qatar Press Center, disclosed that most Western politicians have to toe the line on Israel to remain in power and described the current situation in Palestine as industrial-scale killing that wasn’t always part of the crisis.
David Hearst and moderator of the discussion Osman Ayfarah. Pics: Ahmed Barakat
“The rate of killing that has changed, and it is the scale of the killing and the obscenity of it that has changed -- but the ingredients of it have always been there. The blood’s on people’s hands, and I’m not actually surprised by what the Israelis are doing. What astonishes me is how they are allowed to do it,” Hearst said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry stated yesterday that the death toll among Palestinians in the Hamas-Israel conflict has crossed 8,000 – most of them women and minors. Israel imposed a total siege – no food, water or electricity on the Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people in the wake of the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. It has allowed limited supplies of basic necessities and medicines to reach Gaza.
Hearst, who is also the editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye, noted that the West is complicit in its staunch support of Israel. He said Israel is a Western colony and is there for a reason — to protect Western economic and security interests. Hearst said the Western and American monopoly had suffered a series of shocks leading to a fundamental crisis of purpose and lack of trust in its leadership.
“I think we’re arriving at a point after a series of shocks where people are rethinking what exactly the West is about, and what you’re getting are some deep, nasty beliefs. For instance, in Europe, the EU was supposed to be a Europe of liberalism. However, today they’re becoming less liberal. This process is happening all over the continent, so we are going through a fundamental change, a fundamental belief, and these anti-liberal theories keep on emerging like fascist civilizations,” Hearst said.
Hearst said Israel has never been subject to international law from its inception – a fact he notes it isn’t attempting to be. For Hearst, the Oslo Accords has failed in the region, and support for the accord is a “camouflage for reality, which is de facto annexation.”
“What you’re seeing now in Israel is what you’re getting right. There’s no pretence of a liberal solution. There’s no potential for negotiations. What we need is a peace initiative. It has to be done with proper representation of all Palestinian factions. The PLO has to be rebuilt, there has to be a unity government, and it has to be based on equal citizenship. We have to sit down and say, Jews and Arabs have to talk to each other as equals, and Israel is a long way away from that at the moment,” he added.
Speaking on the role of Arab leadership, Hearst said the support of Arab leaders for a peace process that doesn’t exist is now clearer than ever before. He emphasized that talk of a two-state solution is a camouflage for failing to address the expansion of Israel and the expansion of settlements, and that has become obvious.
Hearst added that the stance of Arab states is weak and in desperate need of reform. According to him, the model of some Arab states where the military oppresses citizens, no freedom of speech, free press and proper elections or competition within those elections makes the coalition weak.
“Having said all that, even leaders who lack legitimacy are aware of public opinion. If you look at the sort of demonstrations that have been happening all over the Arab world in Amman, Cairo and Baghdad, they’re sending a real message to their leaders. Palestine is absolutely the centre of this conflict, and you cannot avoid it. You cannot go back to a formula which seeks to talk about anything other than the Palestinians, and in that sense, there’s progress. But what has to happen now is a fundamental reevaluation of Western support for Israel.”
Meanwhile, speaking to the media on the sidelines of the seminar, President of Qatar Press Center Saad bin Mohammed Al Rumaihi said the situation in the Middle East and the Arab world is ‘horrible.’ He called for more support for Palestine, adding that more focus is needed on the war to shed more light on the sufferings of Palestinians.
“I hope we have more lectures in the future because we need to focus on the Arabs and the Palestinians struggling for their rights. The world should support them because many people have died, including children and women. They were killed for nothing -- just because they were asking for their rights,” he said.
