WHAT’S wrong with the Welsh government, what’s wrong with almost the entire Senedd, that it has not long ago risen up with one seethingly outraged voice to condemn the daily vicious killing of hungry people, including so many children, queueing for meagre food handouts in the shattered remnants of Gaza?

Why is this government not driven to fury by the multi-corroborated reports of Israeli soldiers firing at the starving, killing and maiming? Why are they so restrained in their oblique comments linked to these daily crimes against humanity?

Why is this government not naming these crimes for what they are - genocide?

How else would it wish to identify mass starvation, targeted bombings of civilian areas, and the forced displacement of over 1.5 million people but as evidence of what the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service condemns as a “systematic, targeted destruction of a people”?

Why is the presumed humanity of Senedd members so balked by timidity or indifference, or both, that most of them can day after day sit like stuffed dummies shuffling papers and prodding laptops and not raise the roof about the vicious repeated assaults on the dispossessed and the desperate of Palestine?

Why are the current figureheads of a Welsh Labour rooted in humanitarianism and compassion so comprehensively betraying their traditions?

How can a Plaid Cymru traditionally so solidly allied with the humanitarian principles of internationalism lack the will and the gumption to speak out decisively and repeatedly and pointedly against the crimes being inflicted on Gazans?

Is it possible that Senedd members are not fully aware of the shocking testimony at the United Nations and, before television cameras, of doctors who have literally been picking up the pieces of the victims of the assaults on the starving? No, of course it isn’t.

Have they not regarded with wonderment the wan admonition now being handed down by Jane Hutt, cabinet secretary for social justice, who not so long ago appeared to wish to justify the government’s near-silence on Gaza by invoking the get-out clause that international matters are “not a devolved matter”.

They swallowed without demur that slice of Newspeak.

The minister now declares: “As we have said repeatedly, humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and Israel is bound under international law to allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid.” A statement so cutting it could hardly fail to find itself at the top of the Israeli cabinet’s agenda.

First minister Eluned Morgan meanwhile refers briefly to the Gaza “atrocity” and says: “I encourage leaders across the world to put real pressure on the Israeli government to stop the suffering of innocent Palestinians. This isn’t about politics – it’s about basic humanity.”

“Leaders across the world”? And what of Wales? For Morgan and her cabinet, it seems, Wales’s voice will properly be restricted to a strangled whisper of discontent, when what is needed is profound and detailed condemnation of the Israeli government, combined with demands for an immediate end to its attacks on defenceless Palestinians.

The Morgan government has called for the unhindered flow of aid into Gaza and for progress toward a permanent ceasefire.

The sheer inadequacy of this position is well put by Sarah Rees, head of Oxfam Cymru, who rightly says that statement “falls devastatingly short of what is needed. It offers polite appeals where moral outrage is called for… It chooses cautious diplomacy over urgent humanity.”

Have our elected representatives considered that history may judge them very harshly? Who knows, and would they mind if that was the verdict?

STUDENTS are at the forefront of efforts to pressure universities into pulling out of their reprehensible involvement in the arms trade.

Of particular concern is Britain’s role as the second largest supplier of spare parts for Israel’s fleet of F-35 fighter-jets, which numerous reports say have caused hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of horrendous injuries in waves of attacks on Gaza.

The components, including targeting lasers and weapon-release cables, are supplied mainly by BAE Systems, in which universities hold multi-million investments.

Campaigners have had some notable success. Following student protests, King’s College, Cambridge, has said it will give up all arms companies investments by the end of the year.

If only Aberystwyth University was equally decisive. Its total investment assets of about £26m are important earners, generating a target distributable income of at least £800,000 a year. Last July, following a campus pro-Palestine demonstration, and demands for severance of links with companies said to be complicit in genocide in Gaza, it said it would remove from its investments portfolio firms dealing in “controversial weapons and weapons systems”.

So in how many, and in which, military and defence companies does the university currently invest, and which, if any, have been removed from the university’s portfolio since last July? What’s the score over BAE Systems?

Straightforward questions, but the university makes a meal of them. “We do not invest directly in any of those companies”, I’m told. “The university invests in pooled funds.

“Further fund analysis including details of the manager is available from a variety of sources online…”

So here we go with the run-around. Don’t ask us, we’re doing our investing at arm’s length. We choose not to be involved in the potentially awkward business of actually naming companies immersed on our behalf in this opaque pool of joint interests. After all, what institution would choose openness and transparency when evasion is available as an option?

But let’s take it from where the university plonks us. Pooled funds are investment vehicles that collect capital from individual investors to create a single portfolio. But they have managers, who would presumably be only too pleased to let Aberystwyth University know if BAE Systems was currently in the pool, or perhaps had been or was sometimes. But the university is not going to ask that question, and it knows quite well that such an inquiry by the press would be rebuffed.

The university’s investments committee said last July that it had “adopted a series of beliefs and policies which are aimed at removing sectors that have a negative impact on society or the environment, such as controversial weapons and weapons systems…”

What the committee considers to be “controversial weapons and weapons systems” is not spelt out, let alone whether the “aim” referred to a year ago has been comprehensively achieved.

The university tells me: “The definition is well-established in the investment community, and includes not investing in cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines, chemical and biological weapons.

“We are now implementing the new investment policy adopted last year, and the portfolio of indirect investment funds has changed as a result. This has reduced even further the very small possibility that our pooled investments might be invested indirectly with companies that do not meet our…criteria.”

So frowned-upon companies may still be bringing in the cash. And F-35 spare parts are not on Aberystwyth’s weaponry blacklist, meaning BAE Systems may also be a nice little earner.