Category: Gaza

If Gaza were the UK…

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The UK has a population 29 times larger than that of Gaza.

To get to get the equivalent impact on the UK of the IDF assault on Gaza, you therefore have to multiply the casualty figures* by 29.

On day 111 of the assault those would be.

756,407 people confirmed dead. This does not inlcude the estimated additional 239,000 unaccounted for.

1,870,123 injured.

49 million displaced.

2,030,000 homes destroyed.

8,410,000 homes damaged (60% 0f the total)

10,962 schools destroyed or damaged (90% of the total)

18,125,000 students with nonaccess to education. (100% of the total)

3,562 ambulances destroyed or damaged.

63,800,000 people at imminent risk of famine. 10,962,000 of them already at “catastrophic” level.

* From the UN OCHOA reports.

The flawed logic of David Cameron and Lisa Nandy

Posted on 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.

Twelve Questions for Keir Starmer

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Outside Parliament calling for a ceasefire. November 14 2023

  1. 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?
  2. 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”?
  3. 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?
  4. 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 ?
  5. If so, why?
  6. Do you accept that the 1200 Palestinians currently detained without charge by Israel are also hostages?
  7. 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?
  8. 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?
  9. If not, why not?
  10. 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?
  11. If you do, what explains your stance that retaliatory attacks from Hamas are terrorism, while retaliatory attacks from the IDF are justified?
  12. 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 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.