Jews against the war on Gaza
This statement was prepared for distribution on the London Ceasefire Now march on 11th November.
When United Nations General Secretary António Guterres said the Hamas murders of Israelis in October 2023 did not happen in a vacuum, he was immediately accused by Israel’s ambassador to the UN of a “blood libel” against Jews for which he must apologise or resign.
He, like us, deplores the killings but he also challenged the Israeli assertion that history started on October 7. According to the Israeli narrative nothing, apart from bestial hate, explains October 7 and October 7 justifies everything the Israelis have done since.
The Israeli reaction to Guterres’ speech was outrageous, coming as it did from a government which was at that moment inflicting massive collective punishment on the people of Gaza, bombarding homes, hospitals and infrastructure, and indiscriminately killing thousands including children in unthinkable numbers.
Killing from 20,000 feet is no less immoral than killing at close quarters. Distance and technology does not confer morality. Guterres had stated a simple fact, acknowledged by us and many thousands of Jews around the world: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of occupation, their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution have been vanishing.”
This is the background to Palestinian resistance. It is a story which starts long before the current ultra-nationalist, racist, Israeli government. It is a story of dispossession and oppression dating back even before the 1948 foundation of the State of Israel and the resulting Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba. Every peaceful avenue for achieving justice, freedom and equality for the Palestinian people has now been closed off. They are expected to submit to subservience in a Jewish supremacist state, to flee their land, or to die.
Taking civilian hostages is wrong but so are Israeli Army raids in the middle of the night to seize Palestinians and hold them without charge or trial as happens continuously in the West Bank. The detainees must be freed.
When Israel claims to be at war with Hamas, defending itself against terror, it is in fact carrying out ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, committing war crimes and breaches of humanitarian law.
Israel claims to be protecting Jewish lives and accuses its critics of antisemitism. But in fact it is actually endangering Jews worldwide by associating all Jews with the deadly siege of Gaza, the illegal colonisation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and the continuing exile of more than six million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East and beyond.
There cannot be peace without justice, dignity and equality for all, Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims – all who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
WE SAY:
NOT IN OUR NAME
STOP KILLING GAZANS
NO MORE APARTHEID
END THE OCCUPATION
FREE THE HOSTAGES
FREE THE DETAINEES
Great statement with which all socialists should support.
“Killing from 20,000 feet is no less immoral than killing at close quarters ” is an important point. There is no rational basis for saying that the guilt of killing diminishes as the physical distance between killer and killed increases but this seems to be a pervasive moral intuition, very clearly demonstated in official treatments of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The probable explanation is that humans have millennia of experience of close quarters slaughter but have not had time to assimilate fully the implications of technological killing.
Whatever the reasons the effects are disastrous. If people regard modern ways of killing as morally superior to more primitive ones they inevitably conclude that in any conflict the more powerful party must also have right on its side.
Excellent, as were the London and other marches. The Palestinians arbitrarily picked up (well over 1,000) and detained indefinitely without charge or trial are generally overlooked: just something ‘Israel does’ and is not worthy of comment, but part of the ‘normalisation’ of dehumanising the Palestinian people (“human animals”) so contributing to the never-ending, brutal, creeping annexation of what was known as Palestine. The Israeli claim that Hamas represents “an existential threat to Israel” has echoes close to home, and is equally unbelievable. The current ultra-rightwing government is led by a PM who is avoiding trial for as long as he holds office, includes self-declared fascists who deny the existence of a Palestinian people. And yet our government and official opposition refuse to the back BDS movement, the most effective means available to peacefully influence the apartheid State of Israel.
This is a very well argued point and it’s true, nothing happens in a vacuum, life is sequential ,what happened is as a consequence of what went before !
Last night on the news there was a a man who was a relative of one who was killed by Hamas (we are told) he said he now is fearful of living in Britain, that’s a shame
Can we get this into some msm
It was wonderful to be on the march and I was grateful for the stickers … but might it be possible to have stickers which are not so closely linked graphically to the Stop The War organisation itself? I’ve often wondered in the past why many non-aligned marchers seem happy to march with placards printed by the SWP and its various offspring (STW/SUTR etc). But I didn’t realise till later that on this march I was doing something similar myself!
Of course on this huge occasion we are all on the same side, and probably much indebted to STW’s dedication and organisational abilities. However I have strong differences with their approach to Ukraine, as I had in the past over Bosnia and several other issues closer to home.
This does not take away from the wonderful upsurge of 1000 on the Jewish Bloc alone, and I am so grateful to everyone who made it happen, including the generous welcome from the Palestinian envoy.
BETWEEN THE RIVER+THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE !!
Justice is the only outcome in the end, Israel cannot continue their slaughter of innocents without a reckoning.
Israeli society has descended too far into the abyss of militarism and violence and can no longer be considered a rational Nation State.
The attack by Hamas was an unforgivable crime by murderous terrorists.