In August of this year, former neonatal nurse Lucy Letby was sentenced to multiple counts of life imprisonment, and ordered to serve a whole life tariff, for the murder and attempted murder of high numbers of babies that had been placed under her care (it's believed that she killed more than she was convicted for). I wrote a bit about this case at the time, focussing in particular on how I felt politicians of all persuasions took advantage of the suffering that Letby caused, and the empathy we as human beings have for her victims and their families, to bolster their own popularity with the public. I still believe that, and it still sickens me.
But in the context of recent developments in the Gaza Strip, and the reaction of politicians to such developments, their haste to look compassionate in the face of Lucy Letby's crimes is even more obscene than it was two months ago. Letby's actions were undoubtedly horrific, her sentence was absolutely justified and I hope to never have to mention her name on this blog again - but at least as a sole practitioner committing murders undercover, the reach of her power was somewhat limited to the relatively small number of unfortunate souls that happened to find themselves in her specific hospital, in her specific ward. None of that is any consolation to her victims, of course.
But in the last few days, almost 3,000 innocents (perhaps even more, it's increasing so rapidly that I've struggled to find a reliable source) have been killed in the Gaza Strip. This includes around 500 children. The comparison with the case of Lucy Letby occurred to me when I read about babies having to have their life support machines turned off purely because the hospitals were running on backup generators and running out of power. Qualitatively, this is no different to the murders that Letby was jailed for. The only moral distinction is quantitative; these situations in Palestine have occurred to far, far more people, and are continuing to occur - unfortunately, with the world's blessing.
The Home Secretary Suella Braverman has instructed police to arrest people waving the Palestinian flag and suggested that chants like 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' could be incitement to violence and racial hatred (there's also a suggestion that support for Palestinians is equivalent to support for Hamas, which isn't true and I will talk about that more below). The leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer had this to say on the subject:
As the video clarifies, there isn't a way to do what Israel is doing in line with international law, so he's talking a load of baloney there.
Meanwhile, the Shadow Attorney General and former Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry had this to say when quizzed by journalist Victoria Derbyshire over whether cutting off food, water and electricity is acceptable within international law:
'I think Israel has an absolute right to defend itself against terrorism.'
Needless to say, these politicians and their parties were amongst the ones who rushed to show solidarity with the victims of Lucy Letby. Clearly, in their minds, the lives that she took were worth more than the lives of children abroad.
I've come to expect this from the Tories. But I do not expect it from the Labour Party. What is particularly egregious is that both Starmer and Thornberry were human rights lawyers before they were politicians. They do not even have the excuse of being ignorant. They know that these things are not allowed within international law. There is no possibility that they do not know this. Therefore, they are deliberately being dishonest with the media and the general public. Worse than that, they are complicit in human rights abuses so shocking that I don't actually have words bad enough to describe them. (Truthfully, this is one of the hardest blogs I've ever written in the thirteen years I've been doing this. I am physically shaking with anger right now as I type this.)
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I need to make a few things extremely clear, for the benefit of anyone who just doesn't know:
1) Support for Palestinians does not equate to hatred of Jews. This is not a debate about religion, this is purely political. I've met many Jews in the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction; a movement devoted to avoiding Israeli produce and services in protest at war crimes). The Jewish members are often the ones whose voices are the most powerful actually, and for good reasons - they know more than most how it feels to be a victim of racism.
2) Support for Palestinians does not equate to support for Hamas. If it did, following the same logic would expressing empathy for anyone who suffered in this country would equate to support for the Conservative Party. I don't think anyone would go along with that, because it's ridiculous to. Hamas is a political organisation, and like most political organisations does not really represent the feelings of the people it claims to represent.
3) Support for Palestinians does not equate to lack of support for Israelis. There are plenty of people who are from or live in Israel who fundamentally oppose what their Government does, and I shall paste something written by one of them at the end of this blog. It is my view that Palestinians and Israelis generally aren't that different from each other and have more things in common than either of them have with their elected Governments.
Conflict is ALWAYS stirred up by those in power. Ordinary civilians have little to no say in it, just as we couldn't stop Tony Blair okaying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (not that we didn't try). I have just as much compassion for people in Israel as I have for people in Palestine, and just as much sorrow for anyone who has lost a loved one to Hamas as I have for anyone who has lost a loved one to Likud. But the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties are Palestinians. This isn't a matter of morality; this is a matter of power, and of prioritising the people who are suffering most.
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It has become apparent to me that there is actually nothing Israel could physically do that would convince world leaders that its actions are in the wrong. World leaders are fundamentally welded to Israel as a source of morality, and this is ideological; it's not based on any of Israel's actual performance on the world stage. It is entirely political. This, my friends, is a fundamentally dangerous position to take, on Israel or on anything else. Even just in our personal lives, considering your friend or your family member to be a beacon of all righteousness, irrespective of anything that they theoretically might do in the future, makes it impossible to view them with any form of logic or reason. And it's important to do that, because if someone does something wrong they're more likely to change their behaviour when being called out by someone they consider an ally, rather than an enemy.
I have noticed that people defending the actions of Israel are unable to really fairly justify what they're saying. On a recent Sky News interview, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was confronted about the situation with babies on life support specifically, and his response to this question was to shout at journalist Kamali Melbourne, 'What's wrong with you?' and then continue to shout at him without addressing any of his points. (The video is here, if you can stand to suffer through it.) Here's another video from Sky News, this one of Owen Jones and Margaret Hodge, where Jones starts out by making some very salient points and Hodge is unable to counter them. All she does is put words in his mouth and accused him of being obsessed with Palestine, and she's not even able to string together a coherent sentence - you can see her stumbling over her words, including repeating the words 'At this moment in time' four times in a row. These people know deep down that they are defending the indefensible. But stubbornness is ingrained in them. They will stubbornly go on trying to divert attention from the issue as much as they possible can, no matter what Israel does. As a Palestine supporter, I've never particularly defended Hamas; I'm not in the business of defending political organisations, I am in the business of looking out for the most vulnerable people in the world.
I'd like to leave you with this fantastic article by Ricky of Council Estate Media - really worth reading. (I very much hope he's wrong in thinking this is a vote winner - I don't believe it is, I don't think anyone likes war really.) But he makes some incredibly important points - most particularly the fact that actually, refugees can't win, can they? If they try to escape, we have the Suellas of the world pulling up the borders and the media calling them 'economic migrants'. And if they stay and try to fight, they're called terrorists. If you support Israel, I ask, what can a person living in Gaza actually do to protect themselves?
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And finally (my God, this blog has taken me a long time to write) here's a piece from the Israeli comedian Daphna Baram wrote, following a visit to her family in Israel (shared with permission). This is an example of what I was saying about Jewish, even Israeli, voices sometimes being the most important on this. As I said - I think people in both Palestine and Israel just want peace. They could unite on that, if politicians would let them.
I was in Jerusalem on Friday night, and my niece Maya, 11, wanted to host me for the night in her newly decorated room, across from my mother's flat. I woke up in the early morning from the sound of an alarm going up and down. That's the sign of a true alarm, we all know that; Maya does too. She pulled a face and waved her hand dismissively but then, almost automatically, got up and led the way to the "safe space" on the stairs, where my family, together with the other neighbours in the 8-floor development, gathered, and we waited for the explosion sound that told us we can go back to the flat. It happened six more times throughout the morning.
Message by message the catastrophe unfolds. What we couldn't imagine, but always knew: that if you keep two million people in the largest concentration camp on earth and bomb thousands of them to death on occasion, you create a volcano that is bound to erupt in your face one day, causing horrid atrocities in its wake. But this was only half the reckoning.
The other had hit most Israelis much harder: the state's apparatus failed. People in the south were hiding in safe-rooms, under beds and in wardrobes, hoping and believing that help was forthcoming; that in this kind of situation, the army and police would come to their rescue within minutes. But no one came.
They had to wait for a whole day, calling television newsrooms and whispering in their cries for help; many did not survive. The army was nowhere in sight. A few regiments were obliterated by the invading Palestinian forces, but most of the army was stationed far away in the West Bank, securing settlers' provocations at the heart of Palestinian villages.
The prime Minister had taken his time to return from his holiday in the North. He has shown his face on television only in the early afternoon, promising vengeance, rivers of blood and balls of fire to people who were still being held captive and whose loved ones were taken hostages without even mentioning what he was about to do in order to save them from this plight. Ever since, the huge mismanagement of the country under his reckless government is being exposed with every minute that goes by. The army lacks supplies, soldiers have no shoes, civilians volunteer to prepare food for them and to provide supplies for fellow civilians who were uprooted and abandoned. The governments now wants to provide a "victory image" of distraction in Gaza, as if we have not been shown the outcomes of such massacres thousands of times, to no avail.
Cabinet ministers call to "flatten Gaza regardless of the hostages". The "Hannibal routine" - normally referring to shooting at soldiers who are captured - was often mentioned in relation to the taken citizens, including children and elderly people.
But feeding the desire of some Israelis for revenge is not going to save Netanyahu and his cronies.
This day of reckoning, like that of 1973, will be their day of doom, too. The protest that engulfed Israel over the last few months, and which now turned into a determined spirit of helpfulness and volunteering, will turn back at them. Would it come with a new understanding of the futility of the occupation and the blockade of Gaza is another question, but experience tells us that it would be a mistake to think that the murderousness of the current attack makes such conclusions impossible. Israelis often say that Arabs only understand the language of force, but this is, more often than not, a sad reflection of our own nature.
My flight back was booked for Saturday night, and I made it, leaving my family behind with a heavy heart. While waiting to board, there was another alarm. Who knew the safe-space at the airport was the duty-free shop. While I was wondering whether this was just a clever marketing ploy, I got a message from my other brother, and another friend. The rocket we were sheltering from has landed just between their houses.
Attila the cab driver picked me up at Luton and was, as ever, full of chat. Mainly he wanted to know why people hurt each other. Had I known, maybe I'd have had the heart to quote Rihanna to him: "shut up and drive".
Sunday was all about doing the washing, distracting myself by watching the football with friends, and calling my father to tell him the one good news of the weekend: West Ham drew against Newcastle. I am grateful that the care home is in an underground floor. He is safe there. "Describe that second goal it to me", he asked, and again came the tears. I am terrible at describing goals; And at holding back tears.
My friends and family are still struggling to shelter their children from the more graphic and distressing bits of news, and to monitor what they watch and consume on their telephones; but they all know that this is a losing battle. This same building where my brother and I grew up was a young couples' development in the early 70s. Everybody had young children. I remember meeting my mates in the building's shelter in 1973. Now my nephews meet their friends in the "safe space" on the stairs. In-between, they enjoy my brother's lax attitude towards "screen times". He lets them play as much Xbox as they want. Anything to make sure they do not accidentally stumble upon a news channel.
On Wednesday I am to speak and perform at a conference in Brunel University about my PhD research, which is about Immigrants' stand-up comedy in the UK. I have no idea how I am going to do it. The only thing that comes to my mind are the words of Emanuel Levinas, which I found in my search for what is it that makes the "other" able to communicate with those who view themselves as "us", whether through laughter, or any other embodiment of our own experience: "The face of the other in its precariousness and defencelessness is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call for peace, the 'thou shall not kill"'. May we finally be able to hear that call.'
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