The flawed logic of David Cameron and Lisa Nandy

Posted on January 11, 2024January 11, 2024 by urbanramblings19687496

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”.

23,000/1,200 = 20 (rounded off)

80 days / 20 = one Oct 7th every 4 days.

The limits of dissent on Gaza in “The Observer”

Posted on December 31, 2023January 1, 2024 by urbanramblings19687496

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.

Thurrock Miscellany

Posted on December 25, 2023December 26, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

Xmas is a time of contrasts.

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.

A Tale of a Phoenix

Posted on December 12, 2023December 12, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

You have to kill the poets

When they laugh at your lies.

You know there were no babies,

burned in an oven on the seventh of October.

Not one.

A baby killed in an oven has a dreadful resonance

In a culture haunted by the nightmare

Of so many of them in the forties

Too much so not to use the idea

Made hallucinogenic by past fears

Constantly stoked

To put a genocide beyond moral question.

Unbearable to have that exposed to ridicule

To have self deception stripped bare

By caustic words that cut to the nerve ends

So much better to pretend

That the poet was mocking the baby

As if it was as real

As all the babies killed by the Nazis

Than allow any self reflection

On why you need to make up a lie

As terrible as that.

Better by far to kill the poet

Before he expose you again.

But the explosion from the bomb you used

To kill him,

his sister,

his brother in law,

and their four children,

has blown his words

around the world

like a million kites

written in two hundred languages,

has thrown his pen

in your soldiers faces,

and a phoenix alights

in a billion hearts.

Somos todos…

Nous sommes tous…

We are all…

12/12/23

In homage to Refaat Alareer; Poet, teacher, Palestinian. 23/9/79 – 6/12/23

A small protest with big implications

Posted on December 9, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

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

@PrimeshPatel +

@HarrowLabour to call for an urgent & permanent #CeasefireForGazaNOW. Thank you Lezzet for your solidarity & for keeping us warm with hot drinks! #Gaza_Genocide

@harrowonline

Even one of the police who turned up to make sure we didn’t obstruct the pavement wished us luck as he walked away.

Big political shift going on.

Reading the appeal by the UN Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator for an immediate Ceasefire.

Questions for Education Ministers. Will you stop your complicity in genocide?

Posted on December 1, 2023December 2, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

FAO: Gillian Keegan, Nick Gibb, Robert Halfon.

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?

BBC complicity in murder of its own journalists.

Posted on November 26, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

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.

This is the moral challenge of our time.

“Israel-Hamas conflict”: (misleading and partisan) advice for schools from Ministers

Posted on November 23, 2023March 30, 2024 by urbanramblings19687496

This is an examination and critique of a letter sent by Government Ministers at the Department for Education to school leaders, applying pressure on them to adopt a shamelessly one sided and partisan approach to the war in Israel/Palestine that discards its own impartiality guidance. Their letter is in plain text. My comments are in italics.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, the Minister for Schools and the Minister for Skills have written to schools and colleges (17 October 2023) to provide advice on how to respond to the Israel-Hamas conflict in the classroom.

There are many ways to describe this conflict, and Israeli politicians have not been shy in doing so. Nakba 2 sums up their approach. We have seen the results on our TV screens. We know what is happening in Gaza. Journalists have had to die in unprecedented numbers (53 so far) to get these images and stories to us.

We know that Palestinian families are having discussions about whether to sleep in different rooms, so that if they are bombed, some might survive, or all together, so if a bomb drops, they will either all live, or all die together.
We know that Palestinian children are having their names written onto their legs or arms, so that if they are killed, and their family with them, the people who collect their bodies will at least know their names.
We know that hospitals in Gaza have had to write WCNSF on children’s notes (wounded child, no surviving family).
We know, if we read the daily UN reports, that 1.7 million people have been displaced from their homes, that half of those homes have been bombed flat, that health care has collapsed with almost every hospital bombed or shelled, that UN places of refuge, including schools, have been shelled, that people who have tried to find safety in the South have been shelled, that ambulances have been shelled, that water supplies have been cut off, desalination and sewage plants shelled and, overall, one in two hundred people in the Gaza strip have been killed in just five weeks; while far right settlers have carried out 6 attacks a day and, with IDF support killed 201 Palestinians in the West Bank.
This is called a genocide on Al Jazeera. The Pope calls it “terrorism”.
Calling it “the Israel:Hamas conflict” elides the Palestinian people from the narrative in way that is peculiarly grotesque, given that they are suffering the highest casualties, as they have done in every instance of this conflict since 1948.
The UN Secretary General points out that more children have been killed in this Israeli assault on Gaza and more quickly than in any other conflict during his tenure. This is also true of UN workers themselves and journalists.
With an attack on such a scale, with so many child casualties, you might think that Ministers of Education would notice and seek an end to it, as a majority of the world has in very clear votes at the UN. Or at least recognise harms on all sides. Not a bit of it. Off they go…

Dear school and college leaders,

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.

Palestinians have been in a continuous hour of need since 1948. Continuous, ongoing, racist oppression, with 50 discriminatory laws, constituting a system of apartheid every bit as repressive as that in South Africa or the Jim Crow US South, ongoing dispossession, settler and army violence and casual murder, house demolitions, olive grove uprootings, children arrested and detained without charge or tried in military courts, having their arms hit with rocks by adult soldiers until they break. No unequivocal condemnation of that, or solidarity with the victims of it from our Education Ministers.

Even when the IDF has invaded Gaza in the recent past and killed more people than Hamas killed in Israel on Oct 7th, 1,400 in 2008, 2,100 in 2014, this does not spark the same level of outrage. I think we are entitled to ask why not?

The response from people on the Right – which is where these Ministers sit politically – to the Black Lives Matter Movement was to deploy the phrase “ALL lives matter” as a self satisfied mantra to cover up the reality that, in the world they run, white lives matter more. Its therefore no contradiction that, as far as they are concerned, Palestinian lives don’t matter in the slightest; certainly not enough to generate solidarity with them or any, let alone unequivocal condemnation of the army and state that is killing them.

The Prime Minister has announced that £3 million of extra funding will be provided to the Community Security Trust to protect schools, colleges, nurseries and synagogues and other Jewish community buildings.

The presumption here is that the response here is a straight conflict between communities, but also that, in such a conflict, the protection of one of them has to be prioritised. On the first point, there have been large Jewish contingents calling for a ceasefire and just solution on the Palestine demonstrations. This poses a question about how free to express a contrary opinion Jewish students are in faith schools, which the Ministers don’t consider any more than they notice those contingents, or the independent actions led by Jewish organisations like Naamod. The Ministers seem to have the same surreal mindset as the US Anti Defamation league, that classes sit ins at Railway Stations called by Jewish organisations calling for peace, and attended wholly by Jewish demonstrators, as “antisemitic incidents”. On the second point, since Oct 7th Islamophobic hate crimes have increased by 600% across the country with a tenfold increase in schools and Universities according to ITV. Where is the funding to deal with that?

Schools and colleges offer children, young people and staff a safe environment in which to learn and work.

That applies to ALL students, many of whom will be being traumatised by what they are seeing on the news, and the affect that it is having on their parents and friends. The suppression of strong feelings and anxieties does active damage to mental health and is therefore a safeguarding failure. It is also exclusionary. Schools have to be a safe place for all students to get an accurate picture of what is going on and explore ideas and feelings about it without feeling under threat of being penalised or put on a watch list for doing so.

Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, and it is illegal to encourage support for them. This would also be contrary to the British values that schools and colleges should promote and embody.

Perhaps the Ministers would like to explain how denying food, medicine, fuel and water to a civilian population is consistent with “the British values that schools and colleges should promote and embody” or, for that matter, international law? While they are at it, they might like to have a go at explaining how blowing over 5,000 children to bits with shells, bombs and missiles is something other than terrorism? At most, on Oct 7th, Hamas killed 1,200 people. Since then, the IDF has killed more than ten times as many. The RAF has been flying arms supply flights into Israel from Cyprus to help them do it. Is this “British values” in action, as the Ministers see them?

To support senior leaders and teachers manage these discussions, there are several reputable organisations that offer resources to teach about this sensitive topic in a balanced way and challenge extreme and hateful narratives. The Department’s Educate Against Hate website provides a range of resources to support with challenging discrimination and intolerance. It also provides advice on how to respond where you have concerns.

This is the profoundly flawed Prevent approach, which is based on a false notion that people who commit violent acts of terror do so as a result of developing “extreme” ideas. The scope of what is “extreme” has been redefined under this current government to play down the growing threat from the far right – because their ideas are uncomfortably close to those of sections of the ruling Party, but, lets not dwell on that…

We know that recent events will result in teachers being put in difficult positions at school, as children understandably ask questions and share their opinions. In some cases, children may have been exposed to false or inappropriate information outside of school, making the role of the teacher in responding to children even harder. As with other sensitive topics, teachers and staff will of course be using their judgement and expertise to navigate these discussions, in a way that maintains high standards of ethics and behaviour.

A very good guide to dealing with this objectively and in a genuinely non partisan way, not taking the diplomatic imperatives of the UK government’s complicity with Israel’s breaches of international law as a distorting framework, is provided by the National Education Union’s guidance. The NEU guidance is aimed at developing historical understanding, challenging misinformation and media bias, built around a concern for the inclusion and safeguarding of all students and communities; and provides a far more balanced and workable framework than the Ministers seem capable of.

We know that young people may have a strong personal interest in these issues, which could lead to political activity. Schools and colleges should ensure that any political expression is conducted sensitively, meaning that it is not disruptive and does not create an atmosphere of intimidation or fear for their peers and staff. This includes not only where behaviour appears to celebrate or glorify violence, but also any expression of views that feels targeted against specific groups or stigmatises others. The Department has published guidance to help schools navigate teaching about political issues.

It may be that a school decides to ban all symbols associated with the conflict, but this should not be applied in a partisan manner. The Government itself flying Israeli flags on public buildings set a very bad example if they genuinely wanted to reduce tensions. There was a demonstration in the United States last week in which people waving Israeli flags were chanting “no ceasefire”. We will see if the UK demonstration “supporting Israel” this Sunday does the same. That could be interpreted as “glorifying violence”. It certainly wants it to continue. As does the government. The formula “any expression of views that feels targeted against specific groups or stigmatises others” can be, and in some cases is, interpreted very broadly; with the result that students expressing a pro Palestinian view have been put through disciplinary procedures; which is creating “an atmosphere of intimidation or fear” for these students. Put bluntly, they are nervous of expressing their view, and so are many of their parents. How this is compatible with the “Fundamental British Values” of democracy, respect and mutual tolerance is another question that the Ministers might have to wrestle with. The next paragraph shows the mental and organisational mechanics of this atmosphere of fear.

In the past, we have seen how events in the Middle East are used as an excuse to stir up hatred against communities, including in schools and colleges. It is of the utmost importance that schools and colleges tackle this head on and ensure that where behaviour extends into antisemitism or other discriminatory bullying, it is responded to with all due seriousness. There is also support through the Prevent programme if teachers consider that abusive or discriminatory views indicate a wider vulnerability to radicalisation. There is guidance available on GOV.UK on how to assess risk of radicalisation and make a referral.

Such a creative use of language to obscure realities. Perhaps this letter could be used in an English lesson to examine how the manipulation of language can be used to create a desired impression that subverts the truth, with a special emphasis on the strategic deployment of the passive voice. “Events in the Middle East”. What a passive phrase for such active violence; “provides an excuse to stir up hatred against communities”. Which communities? Only antisemitism is mentioned. Islamophobia isn’t mentioned. Why not? All bullying should be dealt with seriously, especially that coming from the top. The way that the former Home Secretary described people marching for peace and a ceasefire – a demand supported by 76% of the population, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd and 120 countries at the UN – as “hate marchers” indicates how out of step with most of the world this government is, but also how they want schools to become complicit in policing their own political view – that the IDF should be allowed to carry on this war until they have “rooted out Hamas”, which it is evident that they can’t do without a wholesale slaughter of the population in Gaza; as even a mass expulsion into Egypt or beyond would not prevent Hamas, or a formation like it, reemerging from the ashes with even more fuel for vengeance than they have had hitherto. This is a kind of insanity. You might even describe its stance as extreme and radicalised. It certainly isn’t mainstream.

There are trusted external bodies, which can provide support:

To assist, the Community Security Trust have published several educational resources, including those that support understanding and identifying antisemitism. For concerns regarding antisemitism, the Community Security Trust provide a national emergency number which should be used to report antisemitic attacks, alongside calling 999: 0800 032 3263.
For anti-Muslim hatred, Tell Mama provides a confidential support service, with their website providing a number of different ways to report anti-Muslim incidents.
The DfE has a Counter-Extremism online referral form, which allows for extremism concerns to be reported directly to the Department. Report Extremism in Education – Start.
For anyone in the UK who feels impacted by the ongoing conflict, Victim Support is available online on 0808 168 9111 (free and available 24/7).

Given that calling for peace has been interpreted by the former Home Secretary, and current prime Minister, as “hate”, it goes without saying here that the students that might be referred to Prevent are those that feel and express a solidarity with the Palestinians – constructively reinterpreted as “support for Hamas” as it so often is in our less scrupulous newspapers – but not students who express a desire for the IDF to “finish the job” in Gaza” or possibly sing songs like this. I double checked to see if this clip is real and, heart sinkingly enough, it is.

We ask that you do whatever you can to actively provide Jewish and all young people with the reassurance they need and respond swiftly to any incidents. We know that you will work to ensure that your schools and colleges remain calm, safe and supportive environments, where everyone can thrive in safety and respect.

If schools are proactive and allow a safe space for all students to express their views and feelings, in a “calm, safe and supporting environment” knowing that their school cares for them, and those that disagree with them, there will be fewer incidents where unexpressed and underexplored ideas come out under pressure of feeling suppressed and outlawed, not least through the partisan and deeply immoral promotion of state violence by our current Education Ministers who list themselves below.

The Rt Hon Gillian Keegan MP, Secretary of State for Education

The Rt Hon Nick Gibb MP, Minister for Schools

The Rt Hon Robert Halfon MP, Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education

Twelve Questions for Keir Starmer

Posted on November 17, 2023November 17, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

Outside Parliament calling for a ceasefire. November 14 2023

Nearly three weeks ago you said that you were opposed to a ceasefire in Gaza because it would “freeze the conflict” at that point, leaving Hamas’s military infrastructure intact. That was on October 31st. At that point deaths in Gaza were just under 9,000 according to the UN. Because of the collapse of services and communications in the hospitals in Gaza no totals have been reported in the ten days since Nov 7th, by which time it had reached 11,078. It could now be approaching 20,000, as the Palestinian Red Crescent has reported that it is now no longer able even to pull people out from the rubble of their bombed out homes when they call for help. If you think these extra deaths are a necessary price to make people in Israel safer, why do they matter less?
Given that most of the people killed have been civilians not fighters, how many civilians, how many more children do you think will have to die before the IDF thinks it has, in Ron DeSantis’s phrase, “finished the job”?
If you don’t agree with the comment of Republican member of the Florida State Legislature Michelle Saltzman, who, when asked how many people in Gaza have to die for Israel’s security, replied “all of them” how many do you think should?
Do you disagree with the families of the hostages held by Hamas that the IDFs current military campaign will put the lives of their loved ones at risk ?
If so, why?
Do you accept that the 1200 Palestinians currently detained without charge by Israel are also hostages?
You often say that Israel has the right to defend itself, but do you also accept that, under Additional Article 1 of the Geneva Convention, an occupied people like the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, including by force of arms?
As your argument is that no country could accept the scale of attack on Oct 7th this year without retaliation, and that the 1400 deaths suffered that day justifies whatever measures are necessary to remove the military threat posed by Hamas; do you think that the Palestinians have the right to retaliate for the Israeli invasions of Gaza in 2008, that killed 1400, or that of 2014, that killed 2100 and keep retaliating until the threat to their lives represented by the IDF is removed?
If not, why not?
Do you recognise that since 2000, eight Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli life lost, and the figures for children are thirty seven Palestinian children killed for every Israeli child?
If you do, what explains your stance that retaliatory attacks from Hamas are terrorism, while retaliatory attacks from the IDF are justified?
Given that you so firmly believe that the UK cannot take an independent line from its closest allies, now that EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, is arguing that “there is no military solution”, will you embrace this recognition; or are you waiting for Washington to say the same thing before you can feel safe to do so?

Questions for people who think “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is a racist slogan.

Posted on November 13, 2023November 14, 2023 by urbanramblings19687496

News coverage of Saturday’s colossal ceasefire now march in London in the right wing press has used the phrase “anti-semitic slogans were heard” in an attempt to bracket a massive outpouring of diverse humanity, all ages, faiths, communities, nearly a million strong, united in a call to stop a massacre – with the 1,000 almost entirely white male thugs who attacked the police in Whitehall, presumably in an attempt to “defend our statues”.

I’ve been on all of these demos and have not heard any “antisemitic slogans”. And the papers don’t specify what they are, which is always suspicious.

But, the Right has attempted to define the slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic, so perhaps that’s what they mean.

The vibrant Jewish contingents that have been part of all these demos, and led the inspiring Railway Station occupations in the US have joined in with it of course, but these are never reported in the Daily Mail or Sun; as with most inconvenient truths.

So, what can be the objection to this slogan? If we change the tense, and make it a description of the current situation, its hard to argue that “From the river to the sea, Palestine ISN’T free!” is not accurate.

The area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is controlled by Israel. Palestinian Israeli citizens do not have the same rights as Israeli Jewish citizens and key state provisions, like education, are segregated. This is like Apartheid South Africa, or the Jim Crow South in the USA. Palestinians in the occupied territories are at the mercy of the Israeli army and settlers and have no recourse or standing when they are attacked by them. If someone wants to argue that between the river and the sea Palestinians are already free, they are welcome to try, but I’ve never heard that argument.

So, as this is an accurate description, the objection must be to the aspiration contained in “will be”.

Wanting to maintain the status quo means that “From the river to the sea, Palestine WON’T be free!” indefinitely. That the Palestinians should permanently accept inequality and injustice.

Perhaps people think that Palestinians not being free is OK.

We have heard a lot of “Israel’s right to defend itself”. But, under international law, an occupied people also has the right to resist occupation, with arms if need be; so stating the former without acknowledging the latter is an ideological reflection of a racist primacy. Only one side has the right to fight.

Put bluntly, the only basis on which this slogan can be interpreted as antisemitic is on a never stated but always present racist zero sum presumption that freedom for one people has to mean dispossession or genocide for the other.

This is rarely explicitly stated in the media here, but this is precisely what the Likud Party Constitution states. Likud is the core governing Party in Israel and is led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel).

a. The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace: therefore Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the sea and the river there will only be Israeli sovereignty. (My emphasis)

b. A plan which relinquishes parts of Western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a “Palestinian state” (my emphasis, their inverted commas) jeopardises the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the state of Israel, and frustrates any prospect of peace.

No ambiguity there. When Netanyahu showed his map of the “new Middle East” at the UN in September, showing Israel covering the whole territory with no Palestinian entity, he was expressing that view, in which Israeli security is predicated on the permanent subjection or erasure of the Palestinians, and there will never, ever be a Palestinian state.

The settler I heard interviewed by Jeremy Bowen last month, who was talking about driving out all the Palestinians “between the river and the sea”, was implementing that programme from below. These are the people who have just been given 10,000 assault rifles. The UN reports that since October 7th, attacks by settlers on Palestinian villages have been running at seven a day. But they were running at three a day before October 7th. Something to bear in mind when Tzipi Hotovely, or someone like her, says “we had a ceasefire before October 7th”.

Norman Finkelstein has compiled an enormous list of statements by Israeli politicians, spokespeople, IDF officers and journalists calling for Gaza to be bombed flat, everyone driven out, Israeli settlers moved in, often spiced up by defining the Gazan population as “human animals”. I think we’ve all seen or heard some of these, but the length of the list is as numbing as the UN casualty summaries. Its like stepping into a river of the most genocidal racism that just goes on and on and on.

Benjamin Netanyahu describes the war in Gaza as a war between civilisation and barbarism, and the Gazans as “savages”. And we all know how “civilisation” treated “savages” in North America, Africa, Australasia. Back to the Heart of Darkness. “Exterminate all the all brutes”.

The logic of basing a state on racial grounds is at least discriminatory, at worst genocidal. And that is what we are seeing playing out now.

The alternative is the same as almost every other country in the world in which different ethnicities, faiths, linguistic groups and cultures live side by side on the basis of legal equality. In that sense, freedom for Palestine, also means freedom for the Israeli population.

There was a terrible fear among white South Africans under Apartheid that freedom for the Black majority would mean dispossession and death for them – partly as an awareness of the violence and humiliation that they had dealt out to them. It didn’t happen. There are lots of problems in South Africa, but the collapse of Apartheid was experienced as a liberation by almost everyone remarkably quickly. Rainbow nation.

Contrary to Suella Braverman, multiculturalism hasn’t failed. Its how most of us live in most places. And its better than zero sum racial conflict.

A ceasefire is the first step to peaceful resolution. Letting the IDF offensive continue or, worse, cheering it on, with or without weaselly qualifications, is the road to genocide, with Netanyahu citing “Dresden” and “Hiroshima” as models.

Never again. For anyone.

Urban ramblings

Author: urbanramblings19687496