Gaza

 A couple of months ago, Arwa Mahdawi one of The Guardian's American correspondents wrote this passionate and heartbreaking article on the plight of Gaza. 

Strangely after a day or two, and no reader comments permitted on  it, it seemed to disappear, along with its author. Was Mahdawi serving some kind of suspension? Had she been fired? The answer, thankfully seems to be 'none of the above.' 

Still, her article deserves to be better known and shared, which is why I'm doing so today. It's excellent throughout, but I found this paragraph a credible and disturbing prediction:

Twenty years from now, when it is far too late for journalism to make any difference, someone will win a Pulitzer for telling the truth about this moment. They’ll be celebrated for unequivocally and unapologetically using the words that people are currently losing jobs or being targeted by hate campaigns for saying: occupation, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Only when every single Palestinian is dead or displaced will it be acceptable to treat us as human.

 

Murderous Hate in and around Gaza

On Saturday 7th October, with complete surprise, Hamas fighters broke out of the blockaded Palestinian territory of Gaza and attacked Israeli soldiers and settlements in the area. There was also a rave going on which turned into a bloodbath.

The attack was without mercy, and it showed the extreme cruelty that indoctrinated young men are capable of when well led and motivated. No Israeli citizens were spared; men and women, the very old and even babies - all killed. Think about your worst nightmare and the reality of what happened that day is worse. With over 1,300 people killed, the vast majority Israeli, it was the biggest single lost of life in a day in Israel's history. 

The Israeli Army and the armed Israeli police force reaction was slow and hesitant. Incredibly it was several days before all the Hamas fighters were killed or forced back into Gaza. The world response was faster, instant condemnation of Hamas and offers of help. President Joe Biden, hopefully the last of the Israel-can-do-no-wrong democratic presidents pledged full support to Israel, American military support and extra ammunition. Much of the media, especially in the USA devoted itself to parroting the pro-Israel line. 

Israel's response is depressingly predictable and familiar. An orgy of bombing and shelling the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas of the world. This has been the standard Israeli response to any act of Palestinian resistance since the state's bloody and morally dubious foundation in 1948. The result is also depressingly predictable and familiar. Thousands of innocent Palestinian men and women, the very old and even babies - killed and maimed. The survivors and relatives will of course hate the country, society and people that has done this to them, and not a few will look for opportunities for revenge in the future.

It's tempting to write on, but fortunately there has been some outstanding writing already done on the situation. Sarah Helm has written a brave article on the dangers of Netanyahu's extreme nationalist government ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip by expelling its population to Egypt. And the ever reliable Andrew Sullivan has written an outstanding article on this episode that is the best I've read so far.

Here at home, our doomed Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has shown unprecedented levels of support for Israel, including the offer of some ships and a unit of Royal marines. I assume these will contribute to the blockade of Gaza so that countries like Iran cannot ship weapons into the enclave. Perhaps as a British Indian he feels he has to do twice as much to avoid accusations of antisemitism. 

Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer has built his power base in the Labour Party by accusing people like me of antisemitism. So it's no surprise that he's given Israel unqualified support, to an extraordinary extent. As Marina Hyde writes: 

[It was] pretty unedifying to note Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry seemed unable to stand behind the idea of international law in interviews this week (particularly given the suspicion they might have said the diametric opposite four years ago). Well quite.

The media have also been irritating. For the first few days there was reporting that seemed to assume that this attack had been completely unprovoked and come out of a clear blue sky. Antisemitism was the official Israeli explanation for the whole thing. Belatedly, perhaps as a result of fury from people like me, there is now a lot more context given to the attack and more explanation of the general situation and history of the conflict. But there is a horrible, pervasive assumption behind much of the coverage that Israeli Jewish life far more valuable than any Palestinian Arab one . 

My own feelings are ones of deep sympathy to anyone who's lost anyone in this conflict. But coupled with that are feelings of anger and sorrow that my and many other good people's efforts to get a political solution to this conflict in the early years of this century failed. If there had been a just and fair negotiated solution to the conflict back then, I have no doubt that all the Israelis killed last Saturday, and all the Palestinians killed then and and being killed now would be alive and well. 

Free Speech

I'm worried about the effects of the "I'M OFFENDED!" tactic on free speech.

The latest example was yesterday when Sir Kier Starmer, the new leader of the Labour Party, sacked the left winger Rebecca Long-Bailey for the heinous crime of approving an interview which contained an 'antisemitic' (i.e anti-Israel) remark.

Brendan O'Neil puts it much better than me in an article in today's Spiked:

The sacking of RLB by Labour leader Keir Starmer is wrong. It is a shrill overreaction to the mere sharing of an article. RLB’s tweetcrime was to praise the actress Maxine Peake and to share an interview with Peake that was published in the Independent today.

The Hurtful Truth as Explained by Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart comes as close a liberal Zionist can to expressing the justice of the Palestinian cause:

To say that American Jews need to hear from Palestinians is not to say that doing so will turn them into doves. To the contrary, in some ways a truly open conversation with Palestinians may be more discomforting to American Jews like myself who are committed to the two-state solution than to those skeptical of it. American Jewish liberals generally believe in the legitimacy of both Jewish and Palestinian nationalism. Many hope, therefore, that if they endorse the basic justness of the Palestinian bid for self-determination, Palestinians will endorse the justness of Zionism.

That’s highly unlikely. Virtually every Palestinian I’ve ever met considers Zionism to be colonialist, imperialist, and racist. When liberal American Jews think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they think about Isaac and Ishmael: brothers reared in the same land, each needing territory their progeny can call home. Palestinians are more likely to think about South Africa: a phalanx of European invaders, fired by religious and nationalistic zeal, dominating the indigenous population.

Because they see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle between rival but equally legitimate nationalisms, American Jewish liberals often suggest that the real problem began in 1967, when Israel became greedy and began to seize the land on which Palestinians could build a state. Palestinians, by contrast, often refocus attention on 1948, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in Israel’s war of independence, which Palestinians call the Nakba—“catastrophe.”

In my own interactions with Palestinians, I have been repeatedly struck by the central place they assign the Nakba in Palestinian identity, and by their deep insistence that those Palestinians whom the Nakba made refugees, and their descendants, have the right to return to their ancestral homes. In many ways, this focus on 1948 is more challenging to Jewish doves—who envision Palestinians abandoning a large-scale right of return in exchange for a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a capital in East Jerusalem—than for Jewish hawks who assume Palestinians will do no such thing.

Poor Peter. What is a liberal Zionist to do? 

You can read the entire article from the New York Review of Books here.

Aftermath

Most people don't realise that Palestine has a winter too - of course down in Gaza it's nothing like as severe as the sub-zero temperatures experienced in the mountains in places such as Ramallah. But even so, the next two to three months can have their share of miserable cold days. 

So my heart goes out to the thousands of people in Gaza who will have to endure that winter in tents or sharing crowded flats with friends and relatives. The long term effect of this kind of treatment on future Israeli Palestinian relations is easy to imagine. No excuse for asking "Why do they hate us so much?" 

NOTE: I found this image on the International-communities-against-Israel Facebook page. If you want me to remove it, please get in touch. 

Heroes

The surgical team of al Shifaa hospital in Gaza who continued working night and day over the past week dealing with the hundreds of civilian casualties caused  by Israel's last atrocity.

Photo courtesy of Marium Barghouti of Twitter 

The Horror of Gaza

Israel has been bombarding Gaza for nearly a week now, and the inevitable consequence of bombarding densely populated urban areas is a lot of dead children. Children killed in the cruellest way imaginable.

Until relatively recently, there was of course a complete taboo on images of this kind ever getting beyond paramedic and military training programmes. Like so much else in the world the Internet is changing all that, to the point when I wonder if aerial bombardment of urban areas even has a future.

It's hard to express how much Israel is damaging itself by bombarding Gaza, and how much images like this damage Israel's cause. The sheer RAGE I'm feeling now at people like Netanyahu and 'Mr Cool' President Obama is impossible to express. And I'm not alone.

NOTE: I've found these pictures being distributed from several places and on FaceBook, and am assuming they are in the public doman to help spread the word about Gaza. If you can prove to me you own a picture or pictures here, please let me know and I'll either remove them or credit you.