There are times when the veil of delusion, the web of weasel words that weaves our brains into complacent compliance, tears of its own accord and we can see them for what they are.
When the peaceful encampment at UCLA calling for the University to divest its investments in Israel was attacked overnight by masked far right Israeli supporters spraying mace, throwing fireworks and wielding iron bars, aerial footage showed a large concentration of police vans just a few blocks away. It was apparent from the film that the violence and aggression was coming from the pro Israeli side. Resistance from the occupation came in the form of holding up the barricades that the attackers were trying to tear down. The Police did not intervene. Analogies with the West Bank, where far right settlers attack Palestinian villages while the IDF stands by, and sometimes joined in, were hard to avoid.
The attack failed.
So, the following day, the Police themselves in full riot gear, steamed in to smash the occupation and arrest the students taking part. The state having far greater resources than a bunch of vigilantes. Film of students – who had been protesting peacefully – being brutally dragged off, their wrists fastened behind their backs with plastic ties were all over the news.
The similarity in the style of attack juxtaposed together coming so soon after each other was obvious. You could see it.
But the news framed this violent Police action as an attempt to stop violence on campus. You couldn’t make it up. But, in a way, they did just that. And in so doing they reveal what they are. The longer this goes on, the more the masks will slip.
Personal Note: The demand for disinvestment is a crucial one. When I was a student in the 1970s, our Anti-Apartheid society had a campaign for the University I was at to disinvest from investments in South Africa. As the Secretary of the group I had to take in a petition to the University Bursar and try to negotiate with him. Brushing aside my arguments about the sheer immorality and inhumanity of Apartheid and the University’s complicity in it, he commented “Essentially, you want us to opt out of the capitalist system”, before phoning his PA to ask for roast beef, “left a little pink in the middle”, for lunch. I drew the conclusion that if breaking with Apartheid required breaking with capitalism, thats what we’d have to do.
This cartoon is based on a design by the Atelieres Populaires for workers at the Renault Flins factory, who were occupying their plant as part of the General Strike in May – June 1968 and were coming under attack from the CRS riot police as a result.
A recent article on Labour Hub tries to link the struggle in Gaza and the war in Ukraine as parallel “struggles for self-determination”; not noticing that one struggle (Gaza) is in resistance to the US centred global imperial system, the other (Ukraine) is a struggle to join it as an auxiliary ally.
People in the Palestine Solidarity movement have strongly felt and taken note of the difference in the response from Western governments to these “struggles for self determination”.
The flags of Ukraine and Israel have both been flown on public buildings, head teachers and college principals have been told by the DFE to “stand with Israel”.
Palestinian flags – and Keffiyas – have been denounced as “threatening”, or “symbols of terrorism” or “hate” and children drawing flags on their hands or wearing badges in schools have been referred to Prevent. This has become increasingly shrill as the movement has grown and public sympathy for the Palestinians has grown with it.
Like many similar articles, this one has two glaring pieces of disavowell at the heart of it – a selective approach who who is entitled to self determination and a failure to take account of the very active role of the United States and NATO – and a logic that leads those sections of the labour movement who support their line to end up campaigning for the rearmament and militarisation drive that our ruling class is determined to push, even as our societies crumble for want of invetsment and fail to rise to the challenge of climate bteakdown.
All peoples are entitled to self determination, but some are more entited than others.
If a struggle for “self determination” is based on denying that right to another people, it has no leg to stand on. The Palestinian struggle, including the way it is defined in the revised Hamas Charter (2017) is against Israel as a racist state, not against the Jewish population, in the same way that the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was a struggle against the state, not white people as such.
The dominant, far right, form of Ukrainian nationalism, however, denies the national rights of Russian citizens and heroises historic figures like Stepan Bandera, a recruiting seargent for Nazi concentration camp guards. The US and NATO are quite comfortable with this, but no one on the Left should be.
In this Labour Hub article, like so many others, the Russian population in Eastern Ukraine is ignored. Its as if they don’t exist, didn’t rebel in 2014 against the overthrow of a government they’d voted for, and weren’t bombed and shelled indiscrimately by the Ukrainian armed forces from then onwards. At most they are posed as “Russian proxies” with “no interests of their own”; just as Ansar Allah in Yemen is belittled as “Iranian proxies”. This writes them out of history just as surely as the Israelis would like to do to the Palestinians, who are still described in some quarters there as “not a people”.
As this statement from No Cold War – The War in Ukraine must end – points out; A 2001 census found that nearly 30% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’. There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.
All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues – which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.
A “self determination” that denies the national rights of a large minority and denies it equality before the law within the area controlled by an ethnically defined state sounds a lot like Israel – a living expression of Marx’s dictum that “a nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free”. Not something any Socialist should be defending.
The limits of geopolitical Flat Earthism
Its important also to grasp the broader geo political context of these wars in a way that makes sense of both of them. This is because articles like this one reflect a widespread view on the left in the Global North that the world is geopolitically flat. That every country is capitalist. That there is no structure to global imperialism.
This is profoundly disorienting and can lead to the same people challenging the dominant narrative coming from our own ruling class on Gaza, while actively repeating it over Ukraine.
This is inherently distorting for any accurate understanding of whats going on; especially if you fall for, or worse, promote the sort of manichean propaganda that the Russians (or Hamas) are all evil, murdering rapists, while butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of the Azov battalion or the IDF.
The bottom line on this is…
Who is threatening whom?
In the case of the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, from 2008 to 2023 there were 319 Israeli deaths and 6,779 Palestinian deaths; thats a ratio of 21 Palestinians to 1 Israeli before Oct 7th and the ensuing IDF offensive.
That looks like this.
With 1,200 Israelis killed on that day and 235 since, and over 29,500 Palestinians killed in the Gaza strip and another 399 in the West Bank thats a ratio of more than 24 to 1.
That looks like this.
The balance of threat and the balance of death in this conflict is obvious and evident; and needs smoke screens of indignation to try to obscure it.
As there are millions of people in this country who feel a connection with the Palestinians, and have sources of information outside the establishment media, it has been impossible to control this narrative, to allow Israel to get on with what its doing with no scrutiny, and this is rebounding on the government and opposition, both now forced to oppose an IDF attack on Rafah and in some disarray. As there is no such community here with any links in the Donbass, even the existence of Russian speakers in eastern Ukriane is barely known about, let alone understood, and the narrative has been much more tightly controlled.
And, as the war in Ukraine is now being visibly lost by NATO, we are back to the sort of over heated rhetoric that was common two years ago – that NATO is an essentially defensive alliance needed to stop the Russians steamrollering over Europe.
This argument is politically absurd. Taking control of a continent would require a political project that could hold the allegiance of enough of the people who live there for it to be viable. It is not simply a technical military exercise. Russia does not have such a project. It has the military capacity and the political pull to absorb Russian speaking parts of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, and thats it. Even taking over the Western parts of Ukraine has been described as like “swallowing a porcupine”; let alone anywhere else.
Even if it could be reduced to the level of technical military capacity, the threat is actually in the opposite direction.
This uses NATOs own figures for its spending. Monthly Review has assessed that US spending is actually about double the amount claimed.
That imbalance looks like the graph above and shows the absurdity of NATOs claim to be both defensive and worried about the potential of being attacked by a power with less than a tenth of its strength. The Russians however, clearly have every reason to be worried about what NATO wants all that expenditure for; especially as it conducts annual “war games” in Eastern Europe practicing for a war with them.
It was fear of that threat, and the failure of NATO to even negotiate about it, which led to the current phase of the war in Ukraine.
Two phases of the wars for the New American Century.
The global context for this is that, for the first time since 1871, we are living in a world in which the United States is no longer the largest economy. China already is in Purchase Power Parity terms; and at current growth rates is likely to overhaul the US in Current Exchange Rate terms before 2030.
The “unipolar moment” and “end of history” is long gone. This analysis of the structure of global imperialism by the Tricontinental Institute goes into this in immense detail and is essential reading. Its core point is that the US has integrated the Global North into a subordinate imperial economic bloc and set of military alliances, but its decline is leading to increasing challenges from a far more diverse set of regimes in the Global South, with China as the core; and China’s highly succesful Socialist economic model at the heart of it. Those who disagree with this definition of China nevertheless have to acknowledge its success, and perhaps concede that that’s how the Chinese themselves define their society. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
In its resistance to its slipping domination, the USA threatens the end of humanity because, with its primacy in capital formation, production and trade gone, financial control and technological lead slipping, the US is trying to push the challenges it faces increasingly onto the military field; which it still believes that it can dominate. That is what makes our current decade the most dangerous in the whole of human history.
The first stage of the wars for the New American Century, the War on Terror after 9/11 2001, was directed at weak powers that the US could overwhelm, killing 4.5 million people according to Browns University, but nevertheless ending in defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; and chaos in Libya. This was when they thought they could incorporate China into their world order.
The second phase, now they know that they can’t, threatens to be worse, and could kill all of us, with a nuclear first strike an active part of US war planning.
This is where the tension in the world is coming from. This is who is driving it.
There is an argument within the US ruling class between those who think that it has to take Russia on first before it can get on to the confrontation it wants with China – the position of the Biden administration and more traditional Republicans – and those, like Trump, who think they might be able to get Russia onside against China. Putin’s response of ridiculing questions on these lines from Tucker Carlson in his recent interview, shows that this is wishful thinking on Trump’s part.
The second phase
The US and its allies have now crossed the security red lines of a nuclear armed power (Russia) in Ukraine, and have fuelled the attempted genocide in Gaza; because they have to be seen to be able to impose their will.
The US has repeatedly vetoed ceasefire motions for Gaza in the UN Security Council.
Russia and China have voted for a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the world majority, in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
In General Assembly votes, Ukraine has been among the tiny minority who have voted with the US against a ceasefire.
Israel and Ukraine are both using weapons supplied by the US. Neither could pursue their war without them.
The US signed up to provide $38 billion in military aid to Israel between 2016 and 2026, and additional aid has gone in since October 7th.
It has gave Ukraine £113 billion between 2022 and September 2023, with more on the way.
The US is intervening in and arming both in its own interests. The Israelis are already an established US attack dog and the Ukrainian regime aspires to be; and has been playing that role since 2014.
A “Big Israel”in Eastern Europe
The forces the US is supporting – or using – in each war are the same sort of ethno nationalists with far right backing.
Netanyahu has Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalal Smotrich. Zelensky has the Right Sector and the Azov battalion.
Just to dispell any doubt, speaking in April 2022, President Zelensky was very clear that he wanted Ukraine to be “a big Israel” in Eastern Europe. A country where there were “soldiers in cinemas and supermarkets” and “people with weapons”, not a “liberal European” state at all.
This vision was eagerly and approvingly embraced by US commentators (its possible that they wrote it) because being like Israel is being a military frontier state for the US.
Israel has been the lynch pin of US domination of the Middle East. President Zelensky has volunteered his country to do the same in Eastern Europe.
The Left in NATO countries, marinading as we are in the ideological stomach juices of the belly of the beast, should never forget who our ruling class is.
NATO and other direct US allies – the world’s wealthiest countries – account for 75% of global military spending, are the core of global imperialism, organised as a coordinated bloc, with the US dominating its subordinate rivals.
Russia is not part of this bloc. It is a target for it.
Not recognising that NATO expansion in Eastern Europe has predatory intent takes self delusion a little far. See the map displayed by Kyrillo Budanov, Head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence for the partition of Russia that this aims at if you have any doubts.
Climate Breakdown helps drive US brinkmanship
The accelerating breakdown of the climactic conditions for human civilisation adds urgency to the increasing US brinkmanship that we have seen in Ukraine and Gaza. To try to survive it with the current imbalance of global wealth and power intact requires catastrophic defeats to be imposed on the Global South, and any power not included in the US dominant bloc; in short order.
This can’t be kicked down the road anymore; hence the emergence of apocalyptic maniacs as mainstream political options for the ruling class – from Trump to Bolsonaro to Millais – and the increasingly unhinged quality of mainstream political debate.
Into the vortex of barbarism
We are spiralling into a vortex of barbarism in which light minded fools like Grant Shapps can float the possibility of nuclear war with “Russia, China, Iran, North Korea” and argue that we should arm even more to prepare for it; and this is repeated in a blase way by media talking heads as though this wasn’t suicidal insanity. A mainstream consensus urging us on to Armageddon stretches from the military itself – with former Generals calling for the UK to be put on “a war footing” and floating the idea of conscription – to Boris Johnson arguing in the Dail Mail that a Trump Presidency might be “just what the world needs” because of his “willingness to use force and sheer unpredictability” – to Timothy Garton Ash, arguing in the Guardian that Trump’s America First volatility gives Europe the opportunity to become a more serious military imperialism in its own right – to the Labour front bench, with Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules mysteriously not applying to the large increases in military spending pencilled in by the Tories (in a country which already has one of the highest military spending burdens in the world).
Supporters of Ukraine Solidarity Campaign like Paul Mason are following the logic of their support for NATOs war aims by arguing, in his case, that the investment needed to combat climate change cannot be afforded because “the cost of borrowing has increased”, but at the same time saying that the UK should follow the US and EU in using debt to finance arms spending. Suicidal logic.
The whole labour movement should be pushing in the opposite direction.
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
Remembering the dead of former wars should motivate us to march to save the victims of the war in Gaza. That is particularly the case if you reflect that the intensity of the casualties there in the last four weeks have been five times as great on a per population basis as the total losses through aerial bombing in the UK throughout the Second World War, in a less than a seventieth of the time*.
This is the UN summary of casualties just for the last 24 hours in Gaza.
Between 8 November (14:00) and 9 November (14:00), 243 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza. According to initial information, on 8 November at about 15:30, an airstrike hit a residential building in Gaza city, killing 19 people and injuring 45; another strike at 18:00 hit a house in Jabalia Refugee Camp, reportedly killing 15 Palestinians; on 9 November after midnight, a building in eastern of Khan Yunis was hit, reportedly killing six and injuring several others.
The fatality toll reported by MoH in Gaza since the start of the hostilities stands at 10,818, of whom 68 per cent are said to be children and women. About 2,650 others, including some 1,400 children, have been reported missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble, awaiting rescue or recovery.
The reported fatalities since 7 October include at least 192 medical staff, according to the MoH Gaza. Of them, at least 16 were on duty when killed, according to WHO. The fatalities further include 99 UNRWA staff, and 18 Palestinian Civil Defense personnel.
And on displacement
On 9 November, for the sixth consecutive day, the Israeli military – which has called upon residents of the north to leave southwards – opened a “corridor” along the main traffic artery, Salah Ad Deen Road between 9:00 and 16:00. It is estimated that, over the course of these seven hours, more than 50,000 people fled.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) reached the main junction next to Wadi Gaza on foot or donkey carts, as vehicles were reportedly stopped by the Israel military at about 4-5 kilometres away from that point. Most were able to carry only few personal belongings. UN monitors and NGOs distributed water and biscuits next to the junction. IDPs interviewed by OCHA monitors indicated that they did not know where they would stay overnight.
Over 1.5 million people in Gaza are estimated to be internally displaced. To cope with the increased flow of IDPs, UNRWA opened two additional shelters in the Middle area, bringing the agency’s total number of shelters in the south to 92, sheltering 582,000 IDPs.
Overcrowding remains a major concern. On average, 160 people sheltering in UNRWA schools facilities share a single toilet and there is one shower unit for every 700 people. The worsening sanitary conditions, along with the lack of privacy and space, generate health and safety hazards.
They have other sections dealing with Humanitarian access, Electricity, Hospitals and Health Care (including attacks), Water and sanitation, in which the statistics are similarly numbing. Right wing attack dogs like Jacob Grease Smug and Julia Fartly Brewer, who have tried to dismiss the human scale of these deaths this week by claiming that the numbers are “Hamas propaganda” should note that these are UN endorsed figures.
What they say about the West Bank, which is not run by Hamas, shows that this is a war between the Israeli state in all Palestinians.
Israeli forces shot and killed 18 Palestinians, including one child, between the afternoon of 8 November and noontime on 9 November. The deadliest incident, which lasted for over 12 hours, took place in Jenin Refugee Camp and resulted in 13 Palestinians, including one child, killed. The operation involved armed clashes with Palestinians, and airstrikes, resulting in extensive infrastructure damage. Another five fatalities were recorded during confrontations in the course of search-and-arrest operations in Anin (Jenin), Bethlehem city, Balata Refugee Camp (Nablus), Al Am’ari Refugee Camp (Ramallah), and At Tabaqa (Hebron)
Since 7 October, 167 Palestinians, including 45 children, have been killed by Israeli forces; and an additional eight, including one child, have been killed by Israeli settlers. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians.
The number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 7 October accounts for 42 per cent of all Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank in 2023 (415). About 59 per cent of the fatalities since 7 October occurred during confrontations that followed Israeli search-and-arrest operations, primarily in Jenin and Tulkarm governorates. Some 27 per cent were in the context of demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza; seven per cent were killed in settler attacks against Palestinians, and the remaining seven per cent were killed while attacking or allegedly attacking Israeli forces or settlers.
Since 7 October, Israeli forces have injured 2,492 Palestinians, including at least 253 children, over half of them in the context of demonstrations. Sixty-six Palestinians have been injured by settlers. Some 32 per cent of those injuries have been caused by live ammunition.
In the past 24 hours, six settler attacks resulting in damage or injuries were reported. These included raids in the villages of At Taybe (Hebron), Qusra (Nablus), Bruqin (Salfit), Khirbet Tana (Nablus), Al Mughayyir and Sinjil (the latter two in Ramallah) where settlers vandalized agricultural structures and crops. In two of these attacks, Israeli settlers physically assaulted and injured two Palestinians who were harvesting olives.
Since 7 October, OCHA has recorded 230 settler attacks against Palestinians, resulting in Palestinian casualties (28 incidents), damage to Palestinian-owned property (167 incidents), or both casualties and damage to property (35 incidents). This reflects a daily average of seven incidents, compared with three since the beginning of the year. Over one-third of these incidents included threats with firearms, including shootings. In nearly half of all incidents, Israeli forces were either accompanying or actively supporting the attackers.
Since 7 October, at least 111 Palestinian households comprising 905 people, including 356 children, have been displaced amid settler violence and access restrictions. The displaced households are from 15 herding/Bedouin communities.
An additional 135 Palestinians, including 66 children, have been displaced since 7 October following demolitions in Area C and East Jerusalem, due to lack of permits, and another 27, including 15 children, following punitive demolitions.
The note that since Oct 7th there have been 7 daily attacks by settlers, but that before Oct 7th there were 3 a day, should bring home the reality of daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. What its like when this is out of sight and out of mind of the news bulletins. Just as bad. But a bit slower.
Remembering the dead of past wars is used in this country as a way to ceremonially bind the present population to the institutions and power structures that fought those wars in the first place. People will remember in different ways.
As the years have gone by in early November, as the leaves fall from the trees and blood red paper poppies appear on the lapels of politicians and newsreaders, I have thought more and more about my grandfather, as a boy soldier at the Somme at 17, then a quarter of a century later as a veteran in the Home Guard, fire watching from the roof of the factory he worked in, my other grandfather, as a sergeant in the Royal Engineers “Dock lot” at Anzio in 1944; both of whom survived: and my Mum’s uncle, killed in Tunisia on the last day of the North Africa campaign in 1943 when he drove his lorry over a landmine at the age of 20, and my Dad’s cousin, not much older, killed when his co-pilot in the radar mosquito they were flying to track V1s in 1944 tried to take off in the wrong direction and ploughed into the side of a hangar… who didn’t. And my parents, both evacuated. And my grandmother, who worked for the Coop and was secretary of the local rationalisation committee, that divvied up delivery rounds for grocery companies so they didn’t duplicate and waste petrol.
Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak have tried to argue that demonstrating against this present war is some sort of dishonour to them. But, remembering what they and so many others went through should make us even more motivated to march to stop a military genocide happening now in front of our eyes.
The Home Secretary and Prime Minister are opposed to a ceasefire, so of course they want a pause in the pressure on them to call for one. They have given a nod and a wink to the sort of far right rabble – political descendants of the Nazis – who were standing by the Cenotaph last week “defending” it from people who have no intention of damaging it, one of them commenting that England was wonderful in the 1950s and we could get back there if we just “get rid of the riff raff”– to come out in greater numbers and cause disturbances that would allow them to ban future marches. And desperately mischaracterise them within their own communalist framework, in which conflicts cannot be conceived as anything other than one ethnic or religious community against another. The vibrant Jewish contingents deliberately erased from their account, and those in the right wing newspapers.
There is no doubt that the sheer scale of these marches, their cross community character and intense moral and human purpose, is shifting the terrain of politics across the board, not just here but internationally. Every bomb that Israel drops is blowing away the hegemony of the US “rules based order” for more and more people as the scales drop from their eyes. It is a terrible price to be paid for political clarity. A pause this week would make that price even higher.
See you on the march.
*UK population during WW2 around 50 million.
Gaza population: 2.3 million. So Gaza population is less than a twenty fifth of that number.
Total UK deaths from aerial bombing in WW2, after 292 weeks: 52,000.
Total Gaza deaths after 4 weeks: 10,000 (this is a conservative estimate that does not include people missing under rubble, assumed to be an additional 2,500).
So, as a proportion of the population the deaths in Gaza have been more than five times as heavy as those in the UK through the whole of WW2 after just a seventy eighth of the time.
At the chemists, where I am a regular, the news from Gaza broadcasts silently from the screen above the counter; out of sight of the pharmacists who work away oblivious of the horror above their heads, chatting amiably to the customers who are not looking up either.
On the screen, the woman from UNWRA is talking about how they will run out of fuel today and will have to shut down, even though their facilities are hosting 700,000 people, triple their capacity. The trickle of aid getting in is barely a fig leaf to cover the ongoing attack. She is very smartly turned out, but her face betrays a fortnight of sleeplessness and she seems hollowed out, just about holding it together.
Reading an article by Ahdaf Soueif in the FT in the library, after glancing at the usual headlines screaming vengeance in the Mail and such, and her observation that “dehumanising the Palestinians absolves one from trying to understand them” could have been written with them in mind.
This comes after listening to Jeremy Bowen’s interview with some Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who were saying that the weapons they carried, a big machete and gun, were currently to defend themselves; but they hoped to go onto the offensive against their Palestinian neighbours soon and drive them out, as one of them said, “from the river to the sea.” If you’re looking for a genocidal movement…
The young woman in a hijab working in Boots wishes me a “good day”; and I bite back a comment on how difficult that is knowing what’s happening in Gaza, and realise how close to tears I am.
A bright red spatter of paan spit on the pavement looks like blood.
Urban ramblings 