Palestine, what to think, what to do
The ongoing Israeli bombing of Gaza demands international intervention.
The ongoing situation in Palestine is unconscionable and has left anyone familiar with the situation, already attuned to images of Israeli violence against Palestinians, traumatised, numb, exhausted. I write because I have spent time in Palestine and have friends both Palestine and Israeli, so I appreciate that people might look to me for some kind of advice.
The first imperative is that the Israelis stop bombing Gaza, including their attacks on various hospitals, and increasingly on food infrastructure, particularly bakeries.
Thousands of Palestinians are already dead, and with hospitals having to operate on people without anaesthetic, there is ongoing suffering, and every appearance that the Israelis are trying to usher-in conditions of famine and disease by which, by all appearances, suggest they hope to create a genocide of Gaza’s two million Palestinians, half of them children.
This is an evil that has to be stopped. It is vital to call for international intervention, and whoever provides that intervention is quite clearly at this point protecting lives. It is a madness that the Israelis seem willing to usher-in greater conflict regionally, and madness that Western governments who speak of human rights in the case of far lesser abuses - and who speak of the Ukrainian right to resist - would be such obscene hypocrites.
It is important to stress that Palestinians, under a cruel occupation for 75-years, have a right to resist that is guaranteed under international law. They have the right to allies in that struggle, and all who believe in those rights - articulated by our government and media class so forcefully for Ukraine - must stand with them. You will be on the right side of history. It is important to articulate your own internal thinking around this right to resistance, because if you find yourself appealing only and exclusively to Western talk of rights or international law, you will find yourself appealing to what was - to an extent even I am now shocked by - a lie. If you find yourself asking exclusively for support from what was a lie, then your head will break, and then you will be no good to anyone.
It is nevertheless essential to call for deescalation, primarily in the form of a cessation of Israeli hostility. Equally, though, this a struggle it is impossible to sit-out. The UK has already seen its democracy, and certainly its opposition Labour Party, broken by false allegations of prejudice directed against those who have stood with Palestine. Nobody should ever vote for the UK Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer, on account of his public support of genocidal Israeli conduct including cutting of water and electricity to the Gaza refugee camp. I am happy to say that the UK Green Party is holding the line and will - it seems for now - be a good home for a pro-Palestinian vote in UK elections. This must be communicated to your MP. With the possible exception of Jeremy Corbyn, Tory MP for Reigate, Crispin Blunt, is one of the most unswerving advocates for Palestinian rights. Whatever your view and voting intention and how it might be altered following recent events, please write to your MP and communicate your concerns, outrage, voting intent. This cannot stand.
In the US, there appears to be the first talk that pro-Palestinian voters, many Muslim and Arab, will withold their vote for the Democrats at the next election, refusing to be bullied into supporting genocide in Gaza using the threat of Donald Trump at home.
In Chicago, a white-supremacist stabbed to death a 6 year old Palestinian boy, blaming Muslims and Palestinians for his own wild hate and violence, quite clearly a corollary of the white supremacy that is itself rampant in Israeli society and support.
In Germany, the police have banned German Jews from protesting in support of Palestine. Few have commented that the German state policing how Jewish people can and cannot express their Jewishness is quite clearly an attitude embedded with Nazism, and the European antisemitism that exported and turbocharged all of its horror to Palestine.
It is clear that after this, assuming and hoping against hope that we can secure a deescalation from the wild Israeli recklessness and violence, Europe needs to make a full reckoning with its history and guilt. It is no more (just as it never was) acceptable to keep demanding Palestinians atone for German, Austrian, Dutch, French and all the other criminals who actually perpetrated the Holocaust in Europe. Propaganda campaigns calling Palestinians “the new Nazis”, or associating them with ISIS (a group Hamas snuffed-out fast in Gaza, while Israel backed ISIS in Syria, out of opposition to Iran), are obvious signs of which way the Israeli messaging is going.
Put simply, too, none of this can be contained to Palestine or Gaza. Palestinians everywhere now stand strong for Gaza, because they know what goes there will follow (and indeed is already happening) in the West Bank, and what goes in the West Bank will follow for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. So too will it not stop there, because - while millions of Jews around the world stand in unity with Palestinians - there has been an unacceptable system in which the concerns, trauma and sensitivities among quarters of the Jewish community have been elevated above not only constant injustices against Palestinians, but also the concerns, traumas and sensitivities of many others who are being denied a full-right to their citizenships. A list including but not limited to Muslims, Arabs, black people, anti-Zionist Jews, white people with left-wing politics, have all been told implicitly or explicitly that they are not entitled to full citizenship in their countries, because they are not entitled to a politics in solidarity with Palestinians, and against the extremism of a country that erroneously refers to itself as “the Jewish state”.
As someone who was screened a number of times at airports, simply for being a single man flying occasionally back and forth to Istanbul, it is outraging to see US Jews in particular flying to Ben Gurion Airport draped in flags and then sharing social media posts with firearms and professing their intent to partake in atrocities. We did not shy from calling this what it was when young Western men travelled to join ISIS, but those man did not have the passport of whiteness to travel under.
Likewise as someone who has and will always publicly support Palestinians and stand against the injustices they have suffered, I do receive hate-mail, and have been targeted by propaganda campaigns, so - again - that I know that it does not stop in Palestine.
The actions of the Israeli lobby and its supporters are rooted not in faith but in an extreme nationalism that does not know where, or how, to stop. Initial claims about “40 babies”, raped or beheaded in the initial attack outside Gaza, have already - predictably enough - transpired to be disinformation, with even The White House confirming that claims made by Joe Biden were untrue. Muslim men - or those on the wild, sprawling list presumed by racists to be Muslim - will be left with the risks of these smears as they go on circulating, uncorrected, in Western media. I cannot stay quiet, and nor can any person of conscience, because this political current will come for the rights of others, too.
For now, signing off and hoping to write more before long, the imperative is to go on elevating Palestinian voices, especially in Gaza, and demanding an end to Israeli massacres and airstrikes.