Tag: Gaza

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.

The shameless manipulation of Remembrance

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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.

Gaza in the Chemists and other Street Scenes.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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.

Manufacturing consent for a massacre…

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is an expanded version of my complaint to Radio 4. You can’t say everything you need to in 2000 characters.

The way that I feel about your coverage this evening is summarised in a letter I wrote to the Observer last week,

In the last two decades the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, 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. 

They didn’t publish it.

Like them, your bias comes out in two main ways.

The tone in which you say things and the presumption you have about who can be trusted. As if Rishi Sunak, the US administration and MI6 don’t have gigantic axes to grind and have never knowingly misled anyone for political purposes.

What you cover.

  • This evening you relegated Palestinian suffering to its customary background level of attention and concern – something to be taken for granted, like wallpaper, like all Global South deaths.
  • You broadcast an item that argued for the Police to suppress people on a small Hizb ut Tahrir demo on Saturday shouting “jihad” on the basis that this could be interpreted as threatening, while managing to falsely imply that this was the character of the main, massive and diverse PSC ceasefire demonstration on the same day – which actually included Jewish people and organisations – and without reflecting for a moment that taking the flag of a country that is imposing collective punishment on 2.3 million people, and has killed over 5,000 of them in the past week, and flying it on public buildings might also be offensive and threatening to many people in this country, and is opposed by most of us.
  • you followed up with a report on the IDF press conference on Hamas atrocities on October 7th,
  • then followed that up with an individual story of what happened to one family on Oct 7th.
  • Then you repeated the Prime Minster’s endorsement of the Israeli claim that the attack on the hospital last week was from a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad (rockets that have never managed to kill even a handful of people when they have got through to Israel but in this case managed to kill over 400 somehow) without reflecting either the serious debunking the Israeli claims have had, nor noting the other 5 hospitals the IDF have hit, nor the Church that runs the hospital stating that the IDF have warned them twice, nor the Israeli- US rejection of calls for an independent investigation (which is always a bit of a give away).
  • mentioned that 20 lorries have been allowed into Gaza with humanitarian aid, without noting that this is 480 short of the normal daily total after two weeks of a total siege
  • then repeated the rocket claim from our ever trustworthy intelligence agencies (who have never been known to be economical with the truth) just in case anyone missed it the first time.

All of this is designed to build up empathy for one side over the other in a way that reflects the agenda of the IDF, which is to generate compliance for its current and future operations in Gaza.

These have already killed three times as many as died on Oct 7th and will kill many many more if there isn’t a ceasefire; something the overwhelming majority of people in this country support (76% according to a YouGov poll last week).

When you cover an individual story it generates an emotional bond with the people being covered. If you primarily cover one side in this way, it indicates that this is deliberate.

Here’s a suggestion. To be properly balanced and properly to match the current ratio of death and suffering, for every individual story you cover from the Israeli side, you should cover three from the Palestinian side, and keep adding to the ratio as the death toll goes up. As it will. A process that coverage like yours is now enabling.