Genocide continues while we look away.
Even before this recent attack on Iran by Israel and the United States, lacking military objectives, serving primarily to distract from domestic political challenges, even before the current terrible events, the world had looked away from Gaza and the West Bank and the lethal oppression continued. These sketches were from the march against genocide in London five weeks ago.
I will not look away
To spare myself pain
Of witnessing grief
For the slain, slaughtered.
These were not warriors
Killed in combat,
But children, fenced in,
Shelled from afar,
Sighted by snipers,
Snares for rescuers.
Do not look away.
These sketches of Palestinian civilians mourning their children are to amplify the message of journalists working in Gaza.
These drawings are derived from images taken by Mahmoud Bassam, verified photographer in Gaza, published on Instagram.
In scrolling, I see new reports are coming out right now that the assault on the city of Rafah, that had been threatened to start in two weeks, is happening now. Rafah is the so called safe area designated by the occupying power, refuge for more than a million displaced people from the north of Gaza. No time has been given for the civilians to flee, and there was in any case nowhere left for them to go. They were already exhausted, starved and harried by the occupying army. I fear deaths may rise exponentially, from tens to hundreds of thousands in a very short time.
The following infographic comes from Euromedmonitor.
If you live in a democracy, and if you still believe in the rule of law, now is the time to be heard. Please do not look away.
I attended the municipal Holocaust Memorial Service on Monday, that I remember, primarily but not solely, the devastation of the Jewish population of Europe, the latest iteration, on a vast industrial scale, of the cyclical genocidal antisemitism perpetrated by Western European cultures over at least a thousand years.
“The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) encourages remembrance in a world scarred by genocide. We promote and support Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) – the international day on 27 January to remember the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.”
The Day took the theme of the Fragility of Freedom. It links to the “ten stages of genocide” tool to understand what this means. Those ten steps are labelled as classification, symbolism, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial.
“You need only ask yourself…where was I when genocidal acts were being committed in Gaza against the Palestinian people?”
When, in the Al Awda Hospital, the surgical case list whiteboard became useless because of the overwhelming number of people arriving severely injured by munitions and needing treatment, instead, these words were written:
“Whoever stays
Until the end
Will tell the story
We did what we could
*remember us*
The case was presented by South Africa at the International Court of Justice for an end to “The first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time”
“Some might say that the very reputation of international law, its ability and willingness to bind and to protect all people equally, hangs in the balance.”, (Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC).
The systematic destruction of the health care system in Gaza is a crime against humanity, a piece of the ongoing act of genocide as territories under occupation are made uninhabitable for the Palestinian people. I stand with other health care workers to protest against the UK government’s complicity.
Here are the designs for my banner for the health care workers’ march on Downing Street just before Christmas. Somehow making banners in the face of such horror feels childish. But what can we do? We have so little power or influence. I have asked myself before, what would I do if my country was complicit in genocide? Would I even recognize it as it unfolded? Though powerless, would I stand against the horror, or, instead, close my eyes and ears and heart, and comfort myself in the denial myths?
In Gaza we are witnessing the deprivation of means of sustenance, destruction of most housing and infrastructure needed for survival, displacement of most of the population from conflict zone to conflict zone, and the systematic and indiscriminate use of munitions against civilians. Today, the International Court of Justice began hearings in a case brought by South Africa seeking a provisional measure that would oblige the occupying power “not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide”. The UK government meanwhile is carefully sidestepping the issue, seemingly avoiding legal opinions on any aspect of this (see the sequence from parliamentary committee from minute 20). My protest is against the UK government. I want it to wake up, do its duty and use its considerable influence to stop this genocide before it is too late.
On 11th November, there was much hype from politicians of all hue that to march for a ceasefire and lifting of the siege in Gaza was in some way disrespectful to fallen and surviving soldiers. Very many of us, by contrast, felt Armistice or Remembrance Day to be the most important day on which to call for an end to the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the denial of the very basics for survival to an entrapped population.
This is an unfolding genocide by Israel, supported by the western powers. As I write, the news from Gaza grows thin as telecommunications fail. The largest hospital no longer functions and is now described as a “death zone”, another is surrounded. The death count stopped days ago at just short of 12000 as no infrastructure remains to number or name the killed.
With the siege ongoing, I fear that infectious disease, injury, exhaustion, malnutrition and ultimately dehydration will result in the numbers killed escalating exponentially. What will be found when once again Gaza is opened? How many of the more than two million people will have survived?
It is my understanding that no nation can claim “self defense” as a legal argument for making war on people living within territory it controls and nor is collective punishment of civilians permitted under international law. As citizens of the nations complicit in this slaughter, we have to make our voices heard. Together, in civic life, in our trades unions and political parties, on the streets in peaceful protest, we have influence.
Although the march never went near the Cenotaph, London is so full of monuments to war, it is hard to avoid them. In some of these sketches can be seen the Wellington Arch, proclaiming Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon. A bronze on top of this depicts the Angel of Peace descending on the four-horsed chariot of War.
I believe there will be another march in London this coming Saturday.
Like countless others across the world, I mourn the many people brutally murdered by Hamas three weeks ago.
Yesterday, along with hundreds of thousands of others in London, I marched for Palestine, to desperately urge that our democratic leaders pressure Israel now for a ceasefire and lifting of the siege on Gaza.
With decades of isolation and deprivation, now under almost unprecedented bombardment, with civil infrastructure destroyed, with forced movement of populace and without fuel, food, and safe water, Palestinians in Gaza are imminently facing mass deaths. These are approaching 8000 in three weeks from munitions (40% of them children). However, without ceasefire and lifting of the siege, the killing, from infectious and water-borne disease, from starvation, from untreated injury and illness, and then finally from dehydration, will rise exponentially from tens to hundreds of thousands of people, or maybe more.
If this proceeds, what is unfolding amounts to genocide. Even now this can be stopped under pressure from democratic nations allied to Israel. This is on us to grieve with citizens of Israel and Gaza, and demand of our elected representatives clear-sightedness, moral leadership and urgency, that this imminent mass killing is averted.
In the UK we can write to our MP.
Email your MP: Take action to stop the assault on Gaza
History of Palestine and Israel
BBC Radio 4 – Understand
Links to donate and help
Major UK charities open Israel and Gaza fundraising appeals (civilsociety.co.uk)
How to help victims of the Israel-Hamas war : NPR
On the Trans Pride march in Brighton last weekend, I carried a bag of art equipment and had drawings planned in my mind. However, my 18 year old offspring did not allow me to drop out of the crowd, find a vantage point and sketch. I have had to make do with memory and photos as references. This is my first sketch. More to come.
The Conservative Party is on course for a triple figure majority in the 8th June general election despite causing impoverishment and cutting us off from our main trading partners without planning. They can spin a good yarn and have powerful interested media outlets to promote it. As for the three left of centre parties, Labour lacks an engaging narrative whereas the Liberal Democrats and Green Parties both tell clear stories. All three seem to have at best niche appeal while May is pitching for the kind of nationwide approval only Tony Blair achieved in recent times.
We cannot despair. We remain a parliamentary democracy and the government must answer to elected MPs. Every seat denied the Conservatives, indeed every seat they hold by only a slender margin, brings them closer to scrutiny. Though left centre parties face defeat, it is still worth campaigning.
A progressive alliance, as called for by the Green Party, is unlikely to deliver a left centre government but it can make it harder for Theresa May to narrow state-funded healthcare provision or impose divisive education policies: she may be opposed by some in her own side as well as by a slightly stronger opposition. What we do now may help sow the seeds of change for the future.
In at least one seat there are moves to give an anti-Tory candidate a clear run. Lists of marginal constituencies and how to vote tactically are starting to circulate on-line. A think tank, Compass, is crowd funding for a website to help people build non-partisan alliances. Small groups seem to be springing up of non-aligned inexperienced people, wanting to know how to help.
I think we need a non-partisan campaigning handbook if we are to make democracy work for us. One of the earliest tasks is to work to increase voter registration. Even if local parties cannot make way for a joint candidate, might they at least cooperate on that?
On Thursday, I will vote to Remain in the European Union as one small act to avert a Zombie Apocalypse.
The Leave side has been fronted chiefly by Boris Johnson, combining personal ambition with muddled thinking, Nigel Farage, whose mission it is to make racism respectable, Ian Duncan Smith, whose brand is bland callousness and the shiny neo-conservative zealot, Michael Gove. They have chosen to lead with meme-like lies, fanning the flames of hatred and xenophobia.
I acknowledge that for people of good will, there are rational arguments for staying in or exiting the EU. In or out, we must continue the struggle to protect the planet, promote diversity and opportunity, and favour freedom from poverty, disease, ignorance and oppression. Like many others, I have an instinctive distrust of self-styled experts and think tanks lining up alongside a political elite.
However, for me the chief argument against leaving the EU is the Leave campaign itself. We have seen the politics of greed and entitlement lead to the politics of austerity, now transformed to the politics of hate. This is the pathway to fascism.
On Thursday, I will vote Remain as one small act to avert that particular Zombie Apocalypse.
kestrelart 