Regarding Israel, Greta Thunberg Knows Exactly What She Is Doing

Greta Thunberg and her Freedom Flotilla friends clearly don’t know much about international law. Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly allows a state to withhold humanitarian aid from an enemy combatant under certain conditions. To wit:

The obligation of a High Contracting Party to allow the free passage of the consignments [humanitarian aid] indicated in the preceding paragraph is subject to the condition that this Party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing:

(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,

(b) that the control may not be effective, or

(c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods.

Hamas does “divert aid from its [intended] destination.” Much of that aid is “diverted” from the people of Gaza to Hamas. Until now “control” of the distribution has been nearly nonexistent. Hamas does have a “definite advantage to accrue to it” when its fighters know they can take vast quantities of the aid for themselves and their families, which helps Hamas sustain its men, and even gain new recruits. And Hamas sells much of the aid it steals to the Gazans who were supposed to have received the aid for free.

In other words, all three of the permissible reasons for withholding humanitarian aid, as set out in the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 23, have been met. Would someone make sure Greta Thunberg is sent a link to Article 23? She might even read it.

Brendan O’Neill takes her to task for her latest cause, and the malignancy of her attack on the tiny, embattled Jewish state that is now fighting a seven-front war for its survival, here: “Greta Thunberg’s moral siege of Israel,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, May 7, 2025:

People talk about the siege of Gaza but few are prepared to reckon with the siege of Israel. For years, the Jewish State has been subjected to a double siege. There’s the physical siege by the armies of antisemites that surround it and which dream of its obliteration. And there’s the moral siege by the intellectuals of the West. By our credentialed classes, our activist set, our literary elites, all of whom increasingly derive their fantasy of virtue from their hostility to the Jewish nation. And some of whom also dream of its destruction. ‘From the river to sea’, they cry, to let the world know that their utopia is a Middle East with no Jewish homeland.

Yes, seemingly all of a sudden, since the atrocities of October 7, 2023, when six thousand members of Hamas, accompanied by a few hundred civilians who wanted to join in the fun, smashed into Israel from Gaza and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap 251 others, antisemites have been having a field day. Israel has become the object of nonstop vilification, and many people, from campus brownshirts to UN officials, have no problem demanding that “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which can mean only one thing: Israel must be destroyed, in order to be replaced by a 23rd Arab state. As for the Israelis themselves, those who are not killed in the fighting that will undoubtedly ensue must be expelled.

Brendan O’Neill, not for the first time, has given Greta Thunberg the drubbing she deserves. But don’t worry. She’ll be in the news again very soon. She has been formally diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, and from here on out, her obsession will be the mighty empire of Israel that has been, in her view, the source of so much woe. She hasn’t a syllable to spare for the mass famine in Sudan, or Pakistan’s aggression against India, or the murders of Alawites and Druze in Syria, or Russia’s war against Ukraine. For Greta Thunberg, it’s all the way with “globalize the Intifada” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho/The IDF has got to go.”

Don’t forgive her, Lord. She knows exactly what she is doing.

AUTHOR

Hugh Fitzgerald

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