Retired teacher. Lives in North West London. Grew up in Thurrock in the 1950's and 60's and consequently spent the first 18 years of his life breathing air that was 60% cement. Active member of the National Education Union (formerly NUT) and Labour Party.
A boy of about seven carrying a large backpack walks along Orsett Road chatting with his Dad. Where might they be going? Church? Seems unlikely. Serious though they look, the dress code for the new wave of Black Evangelical Churches in Grays ranges from the Handmaiden’s Tale look (white robes and squashed chef’s hats) to the distinctly snazzy. The Dad was wearing camouflage cargo shorts, which probably wouldn’t make it past the divine bouncers on the doors. On the same stretch of street a couple of weeks ago I saw a sharp looking young Pastor who was offsetting his stark black shirt and gleaming white dog collar with a spotless, figure caressing, bright mustard camel coat. He had a confident, world conquering walk. Hot priest, indeed.
Just past the Magistrates Court onto London road, the Dad stops and checks his phone, letting his son walk ahead to his destination. The Grays Tuition Centre – “Your Child … Our Priority” (next door to Divine Styles and Cosmetics and Tahmina & Co Criminal Solicitors – not a place to hang out, you never know who you might meet) and offering courses to get you through the tests for Maths, English, 11 plus.
As the boy gets closer to the door and further from his Dad, his pace slows and his mood deadens. He slowly mounts the steps and quietly enters the building, seemingly in the hope that if no one sees him, he won’t really be there.
On Friday the International Court of Justice threw out Israel’s objection to proceeding with South Africa’s case that it is committing genocide in Gaza, on the grounds that it is plausible that it is, gave it specific instructions on what it had to do, and ordered it to report back to the court by February 26th on what it has done to comply.
Simply put, it has to cease attacking civilians and allow in aid. There was a brief moment of hope that this might provide some pressure towards a change of course. But, hope, above all else, must be crushed.
Over the weekend there was no let up in the Israeli assault. This is from the latest UN daily report:
“Intense Israeli bombardment from air, land, and sea continued across much of the Gaza Strip on 27 and 28 January, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction.”
Between the afternoonsof 26 and 28 January, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza, 339 Palestinians were reportedly killed (165 people on 28 January, 174 people on 27 January), and 600 Palestinians were injured (290 on 28 January and 310 on 27 January).
Incoming truckloads of aid, averaging 156 a day in the preceding week, are now being held up at Kerem Shalom by Israeli demonstrators.
On Saturday Israel’s leaders responded to the ICJ ruling by demanding that countries cease to fund UNWRA – the backbone of what aid structure there is in Gaza – on the grounds of “allegations” that 12 of its employess “participated” in some undefined way in the attacks on Oct 7th. These allegations have not been published. UNWRA has sacked the named individuals while an investigation takes place.
The UN Reports that UNRWA is the main humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over two million people now dependent on its services and some 3,000 out of its 13,000 staff in Gaza continuing to report to work, despite the ongoing hostilities.
So, far from seeking to comply with the Court, and recognise what a deep hole they are digging themselves into with their armoured bulldozers, Israeli leaders have sought to bluster, calling the South African case “outrageous”, carried on as though no ruling had been issued, and to hit back by undermining what limited aid has been getting in.
This is in a situation in which the UN reports that
2.2 million people are at imminent risk of famine.
378,000 of these are at “catastrophic” level (extreme lack of food, starvation, exhaustion of coping capacities)
939,000 are at emergency level.
The ICJ will take a long time to come up with a definitive judgement. Without a ceasefire, the scale of this famine could well have made the case de facto for them by the time they decide de jure.
The response of “the West” has been instructive. A rush further down the rabbit hole towards confrontation with the rest of the world.
Faced with “plausible” accusations of genocide from the ICJ – the World Court on these questions – they issued diplomatic versions of Itamar Ben Gvir’s dismissive tweet “The Hague schmague. The UK with characteristic patronising condecension snarked that the South African case was “not helpful”. Its “plausibility” in the eyes of the court was not acknowledged. Instead we had the worn out mantra that Israel is “entitled to defend itself”; while the Palestinians, presumably, must suffer what they must with no right to resist. The same mind set that led the Observer to write that Israeli violnece is “understandable” while Palestinian violence “defies comprehension” (Editorial Oct 15th).
Faced with unpublished allegations of a tiny number of UNWRA employees being involved in Oct 7th, the US and nine of its core subordinates have leapt to broadcast Israel’s case from their bully pulpits and to cut UNWRA’s funds.
The ICJ ordered Israel “to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”. UNWRA is the body that organises that. In striking at UNWRA, Israel is signalling that, in doing the exact opposite of what it has been ordered to do, far from respecting international law, it is doubling down on defying it.
This was an opportunity for “the West” to de escalate, if that were their intention. Perfect legal cover. In backing Israel up, and actively imposing its own collective punishment on the people of Gaza, “the West” is tearing off its moral mask.
So, even after the ICJ ruling, the UK and US continue to supply Israel with weapons and argue that the condition for a viable ceasefire is for Israel to have achieved its military objectives before one happens. Given the way that Israel is doing that, that makes them overtly complicit in the ongoing slaughter.
They are, perhaps, hoping that by doubling down they can make what the ICJ says to Israel in a month’s time irrelevant, drowned in a brute display of unaccountable force.
This is what the West’s “rules based international order” looks like with the pretences stripped away. Not naked in the conference chamber, or courtroom, but strutting across the world with their big swinging dicks horribly on display.
Even if we avoid the wider war that is now looming, and which this stance has made more likely, this will neither be forgotten nor forgiven. Now we see you.
Both have argued this week that a ceasefire is not a route to a durable peace because Israel’s declared war aim of eliminating Hamas will not be achieved; therefore further October 7th attacks could take place.
The core moral flaw in this argument is that there is an October 7th attack on Gaza every four days. Another way of looking at it is that the price for stopping a further October 7th is twenty of them inflicted on the Palestinians so far, and an incalculable number of them henceforth.
The only logic of this is that Palestinian lives are worth less than a twentieth of Israeli lives.
There’s a word for that.
Doing the Maths
Total Israeli casualties on Oct 7th: 1,200
Total Palestinian casulaties in Gaza so far: 23,000. This is an underestimate, as it does not include any of the people buried under the rubble and not yet accounted for. Attempts by Israeli spokepeople to cast doubt on this figure by quibbling that this estimate is made by Hamas ignores the fact that previous Hamas estimate of casualties caused by IDF attacks on Gaza have been found to be accurate, that these figures are used as a working assumption by the UN. In any case, they present no figures of their own, other than the absurd claim that just about every male Palestinian they have killed is a “Hamas terrorist”. This follows the sort of practice carried out by some NATO units in Afghanistan, which counted all Afghan males killed as “Taliban”.
While claiming no entitlement to have letters published, I think its indicative of the ideological limits of the challenges The Observer is prepared to publish that neither of these, or anything like it, made it into print.The only response they put in to the Karen Pollock article, which was a way to package Suella Braverman’s accusation that demonstrations calling for a ceasefire are actually “hate marches” in a way that might be acceptable for readers who think of themselves as liberals, was a letter that followed her framing of the conflict as religious intolerance, nothing to do with occupation and oppression (and was pessimistic that anything could be done about it).Narrowing the range of challenge, and excluding challenge to ideological frameworks, is a sign of waning political self confidence. As the old order fades, it has no option but to shut people up.
Eyeless in Gaza
Karen Pollock uses some odd constructions in her article (Anti Semitism and Holocaust denial are rife, just look at Stephen Fry’s Twitter Feed Observer 24/12/23) stepping across the thin ice of distortion on the snow shoes of euphemism.
Conceding that you “can“ be “appalled by the scenes we are witnessing in Gaza and critical of the choices made by the Israeli government and not be an antisemite” is just as well. If you read the daily UN updates there is such utter horror there, expressed in the most dispassionate prose, that it becomes numbing to read it. That’s why a majority of people in this country want a ceasefire, almost every country in the world has voted for one at the UN, and why there have been such huge demonstrations, here and everywhere else.
Implying that is driven by “hatred” rooted in “antisemitism”, not by the reality of a genocide unfolding in front of our eyes, inverts reality; and would even if there weren’t such large and vibrant Jewish contingents and speakers on all of the marches.
Her use of the word “scenes”, for the utter carnage we are all seeing, possibly indicates a shying away in her own mind from the consequences of seeing it for what it is, as the logic of racism leads to genocide, and no people are immune from following it.
In that spirit, I hope that the Holocaust Education Trust would agree that Israeli politicians have learned the wrong lessons from the Holocaust when they
build their state on racially discriminatory laws,
say “the Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there—death”,
or back settlers who terrorise villagers in the West Bank and chant “Death to Arabs” and “May your villages burn”?
This one was written in the middle of October and calls out the fundamental imbalance in their editorial response to October 7th. The figure quoted in this letter understates the asymmetry in casualties since 2000, which is almost 7 Palestinians for every Israeli killed.And this has got far worse since then, with the casualty rate since October 7th being “at least” (in the UN’s words) 18 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.
In the last decade the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been five Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, just on that level and leaving aside everything else, it is therefore strange that your editorial finds calls for violence from Israel “understandable”, while considering that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”.
Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.
In the market, a bloke is selling gift bags with four top of the range brand perfumes for a tenner. Ask no questions…
Outside the Eastern European Deli by Clarence Road a crowd of people gather round a man playing an accordion and sing the Rumanian version of Felice Navidad. Rumanian being a Latin language, the first word is the same. As is the tune. They seem to be having a good time. People passing by smile, even though they don’t understand the words. They can pick up on the good feeling.
Hurtling on a mobility scooter down George Street towards Morrisons at about 4 mph, a wild haired man with a rubbery twisted face mutters and gurns at passers by like Mick Jagger with Turettes.
Inside a tiny Rumanian owned finance shop on the riverward side of the level crossing by the station, a full scale service is going on. A priest in a cylindrical black hat, wearing an utterly gorgeous scarlet cloak covered with ornate gold embroidery with an icon like picture of the Virgin Mary on the reverse collar at the back of his neck, waves a heavy gold cross in one hand, while crossing himself with the other. Sometimes facing his small congregation of men with nylon suits and short haircuts, sometimes facing the wall behind him. This has an plaque celebrating the company’s Platinum award for HR successes, so it sometimes looks as though they are worshipping that. To his left, and facing the gawpers in the street through the plate glass windows, an attendant in an equally heavily gold embossed crimson robe stands guard with a serious look on his face. The overall effect is positively Byzantine in its mystical magnificence; humanised by the small table of snacks and orange squash along the wall.
At the bottom of Cromwell Road a tiny boy wearing one of those animal head hats that make him look like Max from “Where the Wild Things are”, is being pushed along by his Mum on a little purple plastic three wheel scooter which flashes lights as it trundles onwards. He is standing rigidly erect like a little Emperor, hands firmly on the handlebars, one of them grasping a sharpened pencil that he holds pointedly upwards like a staff of office.
Coming out of the Church of Christ Celestial, a young woman dressed all in white like a cross between a pastry chef and a woman from the Handmaiden’s tale, bustles off down the road on Godly business. The Church is installed above the St Luke’s Hospice shop in what used to be the Burton’s Snooker Hall. Burton’s was a popular off the peg suit emporium that ran a snooker hall above the shop in the middle of the last century. My Dad told me that this was considered something of a den of iniquity among respectable folk – as in The Music Man song:
Oh yes we’ve got trouble
Right here in River City
With a capital T
And that rhymes with P
And that stands for Pool.
The logo for the snooker club – a triangle of racked balls – can still be seen faded but legible on the most southerly window. Hopefully the Church won’t disapprove as much as my grandparents did, and will leave it in place.
Although my Dad was forbidden to go in there, he’d sometimes surreptitiously nip up the stairs, not because he wanted to be Thurrock’s answer to Fast Eddie Felton, but accompanying a mate who’s Mum ran the tea bar as an alternative to the London Road Cafe on a Saturday night; for a heavily stewed tea and slice of “yellow cake” (a late 40s austerity version of Madeira, and nothing to do with Uranium…so they said).
Down Hathaway Road marches a small, slow, stately procession of elderly black matrons, all in their best church hats and sombre business like handbags, led by one of their number carrying a museum piece of a tall vertical banner in dark red with something Biblical in black written on it that could be straight out of the Shankill Road circa 1887. The strong influence of Black Evangelicals on the local Conservative Party indicating that the Saints might not be marching in, but they are definitely marching on; resolutely in the wrong direction.
Outdoor household Xmas decs look a bit sad in daylight, even before the day itself. Lights at night are one thing, but shopworn bows and slightly deflated snowmen and Santas blowing a bit desperately in the wind, are something else. Especially as seen from the top of the 100 bus to Basildon hospital, trundling through Stanford le Hope and Corringham, on a local road for local people, running alongside the huge six lane A roads that slice through and coil around the old towns like Boa Constrictors, with most traffic passing them by, trucking mountains of containers from the docks at Tilbury and Thames Gateway on up to the M25 and across the country. The relatively small and discrete railway line from Southend to London probably carries as much, or could, and makes a far lower impact on the landscape. Blink and you might miss it. You can’t miss the roads, making Stanford and Corringham feel by passed by their by passes. Both have a slightly tired and accidental higgeldy piggeldy feel to them, with no real centre, or heart, just successive layers of improvised development, clustered beyond Stanford’s handsome old church, with matching pub across what might have been a village green once.
Along the river run a row of giant cranes and gantries and the containers pile up 6 storeys high looking like the Martian machines from War of the Worlds. The sort of job done by my grandfather and great uncle consigned by them to rapid oblivion in the early 70s. An old family friend drops in and tells me that her job as a copywriter has gone the same way. At the beginning of last year, she had a waiting list and steady work with regular clients. ChatGPT comes along this year and wipes her out. She hasn’t had work for two months.
My Mum had quite a few cousins. Two of them had rhyming nicknames. Donk and Bronc. “Donk” because he would donk people on the nose if they were getting on his nerves too much. Bronc because, as a child, he was always playing cowboys.
An aspect of US hegemony is the extent to which the films and TV series we have watched all our lives make people think of them as the good guys. This is despite everything we have lived though, from Vietnam to Chile to Central America and the 4.5 million people killed in the war on terror, with Abu Ghraib and the Fallujah Free Fire zone providing a model for the IDF now in Gaza and the West Bank, while the US supplies them with the bombs and bullets to do what they are doing. All played down and deflected in our media of course.
The cavalry charge bugle call that heralded the goodies (white soldiers) arriving at the gallop at the end of so many Westerns to deal with the “savages” (native Americans) to the cheers of the Saturday matinee crowds of children in the 50s and 60s was played in a way intended to be darkly ironic at the end of that decade in the Helicopter gunship scene in Apocalypse Now, where the music shifts to the Apache helicopters playing Ride of the Valkyries through loudspeakers as they swoop in to strafe the Vietnamese village, and their commander comments, “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning”. Only the ironic intent and impact is inappropriate, because, think it back and project it forward, in the “war of civilisation against barbarism” (B. Netanyahu) its a call for the same armed forces to do the same damn thing over and over and over again.
In just over fifty years of political activity, I have given out a lot of leaflets, in all weathers, in a lot of places, in all sorts of situations and times of day. Hitherto, I have never had anyone take a leaflet, stop, and shake my hand for having given it to them. On Wednesday evening, that happened twice.
Not what a “hate mob” looks like.
This was our local Palestine Solidarity campaign lobby of PPC for Harrow East Primesh Patel’s Xmas fund raising dinner at Lezzet in Kingsbury High Street. At any given point there were 30 people there, but it was one of those fluid events where people come and go, new people come across it, stay for a while and sign up, buy a badge, join a chant.
There was very little overt hostility, one woman who stormed past yelling something inaudible, and one bloke at the bus stop who refused a leaflet with the words “they started it” – showing his limited grasp of history. Some people blanked a leaflet, but as many gave a smile and a nod and two stopped for a hand shake and chat.
A lot of passing cars sounded their horns, as did some buses.
The waiters at the restaurant brought us out trays of tea.
As the local PSC tweeted,
This evening, we gathered outside Lezzet Kitchen in #Kingsbury to urge
On October 17th you sent a letter to school leaders advising them on how to deal with the war in Israel/Palestine.
The following statement was the basis of your position: “following the barbaric terrorist attacks in Israel, we are writing to provide advice for schools and colleges. The UK unequivocally condemns these terrorist attacks and stands in solidarity with Israel in its hour of need.”
The scale of the attack by Hamas on October 7th, is taken to be reason enough to give Israel a blank cheque in its response. But, if you look at the history, this is revealed to be blatantly one sided on your part.
You must be aware that the IDF invaded and bombed Gaza seven times between 2006 and 2022, and in two of these operations the Palestinian casualties were greater than the 1200 suffered in Israel on Oct 7th.
Operation Cast Lead (in 2008) killed 1400.
Operation Protective Edge (in 2014) killed 2,100.
The current attack has killed over 14,000. Why do none of these amount to an “hour of need” for the Palestinians, in your view?
If you want a lesson in barbarism, consider the punitive Israeli air strike on Gaza in 2008, which took place at 11:20 in the morning, just as the morning and afternoon shifts in schools changed over, ensuring the maximum number of children in the streets when the bombs were dropping.
But, even if you want to start the clock on October 7th, does the impact on children of this current offensive not register with you?
Before the bombing started again on Dec 1st, over six thousand children had been killed according to the UN. This is probably an underestimate. According to the official Israeli death list, thirty three children were killed in the Hamas raid on Oct 7th. If you work it out, that’s one hundred and eighty one Palestinian children killed, so far, for every Israeli child.
Why does this not yet weight heavier with you? We should note that 63 further children have been killed by settlers and the IDF in the West Bank since October 7th, where attacks have been running at an average of five a day, and thousands of olive trees have been uprooted.
To make these statistics more graspable for you. 6,000 dead children is equivalent to
fifty two Aberfan disasters,
or three hundred and seventy five Dunblane massacres.
How can you not grasp the horrific scale of this?
Seven to eight hundred children, two schools full, have had to have limbs amputated. Some of them multiple limbs. Many of them without anaesthetic. Imagine your child going through that.
61% of the population of Gaza is now displaced, about half of them children, with 46,000 homes totally destroyed and more than 243,000 damaged. Imagine that in your neighbourhood. Some of us can’t help but do so.
No children are going to school. They are too busy trying to survive.
51% of education facilities have been bombed.
Children have been writing their names on their arms or legs in case they are killed.
Doctors have had to write WCNSF (Wounded Child, No Surviving Family) on children’s case notes; where they have been able to treat them at all, as 26 hospitals and 55 health care facilities are out of service from bombing and lack of resources.
Children are being denied water, sanitation, health care. Lice are endemic. There have been more than 30,000 cases of diarrhea in children under five, the historic child killer in the Global South. Cholera, measles, chicken pox, typhus are all looming; and the WHO was warning that more would die from malnutrition and disease in the coming weeks even than in the bombing so far, even if it stopped, without a qualitative increase in aid starting now.
Instead, the bombing has started again, making the aid impossible, guaranteeing a horrific escalation in deaths even from what we’ve seen so far.
This is the consequence of standing with Israel.
So, for you, is this still Israel’s “hour of need”, are these attacks barbaric enough for you to condemn them, will you withdraw your advice to school leaders and stand with humanity and the global majority that is calling for a permanent ceasefire now?
This is my complaint about the report at the end of the World at One on Saturday lunchtime.I suspect that the arrest of the person concerned was choreographed with the police in order to get this snippet.Because placards of the sort referred to can be misinterpreted in this way, it is counterproductive to carry them in my view.It should also be noted that the police announced that they would be carrying out a very intense surveillance of the march looking for people to arrest for this sort of thing. Ben Jamal, Director of PSC noted: “So 18 arrests of which only 13 related to main protest. Of these 13, 6 were for failing to disperse. So 7 arrested in relation to hate speech out of a crowd of 300k, 4 of which were people from a fringe group selling a booklet. This after a mammoth ” robust” police operation.“
At the end of the broadcast there was a report on the demonstration calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza which focused on the police arresting a demonstrator for carrying “a Nazi symbol”. This associates marchers calling for peace with fascists, which is a smear.
I presume that the symbol concerned was a montage of the star of David with a swastika. This montage was originally developed by Jewish anti Zionists horrified at the extent to which Israel’s consolidation as an Apartheid state with increasingly genocidal policies and attitudes (demonstrations of settlers and others chanting “death to the Arabs”, “May your villages burn” etc) was imitating other racist states, South Africa, the US South under Jim Crow and, most traumatic, Nazi Germany.
The idea of this was to shock people into a recognition of what they were becoming. As such, it takes a Nazi symbol as the ultimate horror and is the complete opposite of parading support for it. On the last demo there was a very elderly Jewish lady who had home made placards making a similar analogy. She was arrested by the police. An antisemitic action on their part.
This matters because this sort of report is designed to inhibit support for the marches, by associating them with a politics that their participants oppose vehemently. In the context of the IDF threatening to “intensify” their attack after the current pause, and invade the South of Gaza, we are likely to be seeing a genocidal slaughter on an even greater scale than we already have.
The only thing that will hold them back is opposition from their traditional supporters. That requires mass mobilisation pulling the ground out from under the mainstream consensus that values Palestinian lives as less than a tenth valuable than Israeli lives. Your news snippet, in seeking to demobilise these marches, is complicit in allowing the sort of attacks that have killed 67 of your journalistic colleagues to find even more victims.
Urban ramblings 