If There’s One Thing that Apologists for Israel's Genocide Can’t Stand Its Free
Speech
Susan Abuhalwa’s Speech to the Oxford Union – Unedited
On 28 November a debate at the Oxford
Union passed the motion “This house
believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide” by 278-59
votes. This set up a howl in the ruling class.
Their genocidal narrative about how Zionism
made the desert bloom and how Palestine was an empty land before the Zionists
colonised it was rejected by a vote of 4-1. They got just 21% of the vote at
the world’s mostprestigious debating
society.
today, the @OxfordUnion set the original version of my speech to private (see screenshot) and uploaded an edited version, one minute shorter, seemingly following zionist pressure. see their statement on the matter.
— susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى (@susanabulhawa) December 14, 2024
Oxford Union’s President when the
debate occurred, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, resisted all attempts of the Zionists to
stop or disrupt the debate. Not so his successor Israr Khan who like all
collaborators knows his place in the racial hierarchy and bowed to the demands
of the racists and Zionists to censor the recording of the debate. Instead Oxford
Union deleted their original recording on Youtube and they uploaded an ‘edited’ i.e. censored
version. The original can be found here.
No doubt the Zionists, led by the
far-right UK Liars, sorry Lawyers for Israel,
had various objections such as praise for the ‘terrorist’ Hamas. Hamas is
always singled out as the bogeyman just like all anti-colonial resistance
movements have been in the past. The only difference is that now proscription
makes speech in support of such groups a criminal offence. Israel’s murder of
17,000+ Palestinian children, its mass rape and torture is according to the
monsters who govern us the behaviour of a civilised society.
Susan Abulhawa on the rape and pillage of the Middle East by imperialism
Almost as soon
as the result of the debate was announced the British press went into overdrive
to discredit it. None other than Zionist hack Jonathan Sacerdoti, who himself
participated in the debate and lost, was writing
in the Spectator that
‘The chamber of the Oxford Union, that
once-proud institution, has been breached by the forces of bigotry, hatred, and
mob rule.’
Sacerdoti
continued in the same vein:
The motion for debate was itself a grotesque
provocation: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State
Responsible for Genocide.” Apartheid and genocide are not just loaded
terms; they are distortions when applied to Israel, as I planned to explain in
my speech. That the Union had decided to frame this debate around them was bad
enough.
The fact that the debate around Zionism
and Israel is continually framed around Israel’s ‘right to self defence’ and ‘terrorism’
doesn’t bother Sacerdoti a jot. It is the fact that the debate on Zionism and Israel
has gone beyond these establishment talking points to the real question of
racial discrimination and apartheid that worries the Zionists.
The openly genocidal statements of Israel’s
Prime Minister Netanyahu who invoked
Amalek or the Labour Zionist President Yisrael Herzog who says
all of the civilians in Gaza are a military target doesn’t bother Sacerdoti. To
say nothing of numerous cabinet ministerswho openly embrace talk of wiping out the Palestinians.
Israel’s professional propagandists
like Sacerdoti are used to portraying themselves as the victim. What they don’t
like is being seen in their true colours.
The Zionists chose as their
supporting speakers a disgusting collaborator Yoseph Haddad who was kicked out of the
debate for his aggression towards other members.
The other speaker for the Zionists, Mosab
Hassan Yousef, was, as the Jewish Chronicle described him ‘a son of a Hamas leader who became an
IDF informant’. It’s as if we had a debate on the Nazi holocaust and
invited a Jewish informant who had betrayed Jews in hiding to the Gestapo to
take part in the debate. The Zionists have no shame.
Reactions to Yoseph Haddad defacing Palestine murals
in London
The Jewish Chronicle argued
that the debate ‘descends into chaos as
students shout down Israeli speakers’ but we can hear during Susan Abuhalwa’s
brilliant speech constant Zionist attempts at interruption. It seems that the Zionists
didn’t like a taste of their own medicine and so they have tried to alter what
actually happened by getting their tame puppet Israr Khan, in whose hands the
Oxford Union now is, to censor the parts they liked least of Susan’s
speech.That is how Zionists work.
Of course when Tommy
Robinson and genocide supporter Tzipi
Hotoveli came to speak the Zionists had no objection. Racists are no
problem, its Palestinians and anti-Zionists who are their enemies.
For the Jerusalem Post the debate was
marred by heckling
and shouting. These Zionists are very sensitive souls. Only they are allowed to
shoot and heckle!
For the Telegraph the debate was no
less than ‘sinister’.
I imagine that anything that challenges the power of the genocidaires and war criminals
who rule us is sinister. Only the bombing of hospitals and the starvation
ofcivilians is civilised according to
the warped values of the Telegraph. The Torygraph spoke of how Zionist dons
And what
did the Open Letter say? That there was a ‘failure
on all counts’ to protect Jewish students from ‘antisemitism’ for ‘apartheid
state’ motion.’ Notice the sly way that these dons of mischief conflate anti-Semitism
and Jewish students? Calling Israel an apartheid state is itself anti-Semitic.
Since every
human rights organisation in the world holds that Israel is an apartheid state then
what these dons are doing is to deliberately endanger Jewish students by
associating them with the Nazi-like behaviour of the Israeli state.
It doesn’t
take the brain of a don to work out that an ethno-religious state must be racist
by definition. A Jewish state wherein Jews have greater privileges than non-Jews
cannot help but be racist. That is why neo-Nazis today love
Israel.
Jewish Supremacism,
discrimination and police violence are the lot of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
Bringing over a quisling like Haddad won’t change that fact. Even as I write the
Knesset is debating legislation to debar
Arab political parties altogether. Unless of course they consist of
collaborators such as we saw at Oxford.
One wonders
whether calling the Nazi state anti-Semitic 90 years ago would also have been
considered ‘inflammatory’ against German students studying at Oxford. Perhaps an
anti-Apartheid motion would have been inflammatory against White South African students
too. The Telegraph singled
out
Ebrahim Osman Mowafy, the president of the Union,
who is an Egyptian Arab, of being “openly
biased from the outset”, and “fostering
an environment of unchecked hostility”.
What has
Ebrahim’s nationality or ethnicity got to do with it? If someone had mentioned
the Jewish background of a debate chair the air would be thick with cries of ‘anti-Semitism’.
What however is interesting is that
even in the portals of a ruling class, the Oxford Union no less, the Zionists
can’t win anything more than derisory support. What Israel has ‘won’ on the
battlefield against Gaza’s population is being lost in the hall of public
opinion.
You Cannot Call BDS a ‘Cult’, Support the Existence of an Apartheid State
& Attack the Slogan of the Movement ‘Palestine
Must be Free’ & Expect To be Worshipped
Like An Ancient God
Norman Finkelstein has been a
remarkable analyst and critic but he has also acted like a bull in a china shop.
Finkelstein’s demolition of the
fraudulent Joan Peter’s From Time Immemorial,
which claimed that it was the Zionist settlement which attracted the
Palestinians to Palestine and that there were therefore no refugees, was a classic
example of how to deconstruct an opponent’s argument. To say that Finkelstein demolished Peters and her wretched book, whilst swimming against
the tide of favourable reviews in all the mainstream press, the NYT included,
is an understatement.
When Daniel Goldhagen wrote the
execrable ‘The
Germans: Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ which said that the Germans
killed Jews because they were a particularly sadistic and cruel nation, Finkelstein
tore him to pieces. So devastating was his criticism
that Goldhagen threatened him with libel initially, rather than reply to the
substance of the criticism.
Holocaust Industry
Finkelstein’s Holocaust
Industry, helped change the debate over the weaponisation of the memory
of the holocaust but it nonetheless refrained from drawing any conclusions
about the relations between the Zionists and the Nazis which are surely
relevant to the Zionists’ exploitation of the holocaust?
The pre-eminent holocaust scholar
Raul Hilberg, author of the Destruction
of European Jews was a ‘strong
supporter’ of Finkelstein. Finkelstein savaged the Zionist Jewish Claims Conference which has
embezzled millions of dollars, intended for the holocaust survivors, for the
Zionists’ pet projects (as well as engaging in more mundane corruption).
This was all too much for the Socialist Workers’ Party
resident guru, Professor Alex Callinicos [Finkelstein
and the holocaust] who declared, in a review which, more than anything,
demonstrated that the SWP is incapable of a serious analysis of anti-Semitism today
or how the holocaust has been used to undermine Palestine solidarity.
How different is his assertion that “the field of
Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not plain fraud” from the
Holocaust revisionist David Irving’s rantings during his recent libel case?... so
exaggerated is his polemic that at times he comes, quite contrary to his own
intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new
holocausts.
Perhaps this is one reason why the
SWP front organisation, Stand Up to
Racism, continues
to march with genocidal Zionist organisations like Glasgow Friends of Israel.
The misnamed Zionist group Honest Reporting was more than happy to take advantage of Finkelstein's attack on BDS as were other Zionists
Finkelstein is not an anti-Zionist
I say all this because Finkelstein
has one major flaw. And it’s not just an overweening ego. Finkelstein is not an
anti-Zionist nor is he a socialist, despite once having been a Maoist. His
support for a 2 State Solution, which he has never disavowed, is based on the
myth of the ‘International Community’ which is nothing more than an attempt to
cloak the interests of US imperialism in a democratic garb. His faith in
International Law as the arbiter of relations between states and nations has
been shown to be hollow with the genocide in Gaza.
Gaza has demonstrated that international
law is unable to prevent Israel from committing genocide in Gaza because it has no enforcement mechanism. As long as Israel is
backed by the United States it can and does act with impunity. International law can’t
even prevent states like Germany and Britain supplying arms
for the genocide.
Finkelstein is erratic in that he
took a correct position on the 7th October attack by the Palestinian
Resistance, namely that it was akin to a slave revolt against their masters,
but he refused to draw the necessary conclusion that the slaves destroyed the
institution of slavery where they could (Haiti) because it was incompatible
with their own freedom and liberty.
Norman has consistently supported the
continued existence of the Israeli state and played down its supremacist and
apartheid nature. That's what support for 2 States means.
Finkelstein's Opposition to
the slogan 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'echoes
what the Zionists say
In his interview with the Guardian,
Finkelstein made plain his disagreement with the slogan ‘Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea’ when he said:
“What do you mean by Palestine will be free? Do you
mean there is no room for Israel?”
But then he went on to say something
even more interesting.
“Palestine
will be free” can also mean something else. It can fit into what’s called the
settler colonial framework, which basically says, “Settlers do not have
legitimate rights to the land. The land belongs to those who are ‘Indigenous’
to it. And everybody else, at most, can live there on the sufferance of the
Indigenous majority, or they have to pack up and leave.” And the reason that
slogan is ambiguous is because the movement is ambiguous about what its goal
is. And if you try to remove the ambiguity, you risk breaking up the movement.
Finkelstein
did not say this to the encampment at Columbia University. At Columbia he beat about the
bush and was vague and waffled on about strategic
goals. He didn’t say ‘what about Israel’ there because he knows the reception
that would have got. As soon as he had he finished speaking the students
broke into the very slogan that he was trying to get them to disavow! Clearly
his argument was not very convincing.
What Finkelstein said in his Guardian
interview is that he doesn’t agree with the settler-colonial framing that apparently sees
Israel as a product of western colonialism and imperialism and in which the
settlers have no rights. What Finkelstein is doing is deliberately distorting and caricaturing the settler-colonial
paradigm. It does not say that the
settlers don’t have legitimate rights to the land. That was never said in South
Africa, quite the contrary. What it said was that the settlers were entitled to live as equals with
the indigenous and that is what Palestinians say today.Although to be blunt I wouldn’t blame Palestinians
for saying for example that the neo-Nazi settlers on the West Bank should fuck
off back home.
What the settler colonial framework does
say is that the settlers’ rights are no greater than those who are indigenous
to the land and they have to jettison their belief that they are superior. All
of this Finkelstein disparages and distorts.
In
essence Finkelstein is a liberal democrat. That is why he is so fond of the
reactionary Mahatma Ghandi whose acceptance of communal electorates helped pave
the way for Partition and the present day Hindu Supremacist state of India and
the permanent military dictatorship of Pakistan.
Finkelstein isn’t prepared to say
that Israel is a settler colonial state that has got to go. On the contrary he
admires the early Zionists, the kibbutzim, their ‘idealism’, the ‘austere life’
and the ‘rugged individualism’ of the early Labour Zionist settlers. This isn’t
a matter of speculation. It is what he wrote in correspondence to me.
It is unfortunate that Finkelstein,
who is very close politically to Noam Chomsky, who himself has never disavowed Zionism,
hasn’t made his position clear on Zionism and the continued existence of a Jewish
State. When Finkelstein calls Israel a ‘lunatic’ or ‘satanic’ state what he is
doing is saying that the genocide it is carrying out today and the expansion
now in Syria isn’t on account of Zionism but relates to the ‘thuggish’
messianic vision of Netanyahu as an individual.
— susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى (@susanabulhawa) November 30, 2024
Susan Abulhawa & the Oxford Union Debate
Susan Abulhawa,
who made that brilliant
speech at the Oxford Union debate on November 28, which was won by
278-59, was highly critical of Finkelstein’s behaviour for many of the same reasons as I've given. Susan wrote:
Finkelstein decided to back
out ostensibly because Morris wasn't coming, but in reality, I think he didn't
want to be overshadowed by actual Palestinians who can speak more cogently and
eloquently than him on the matters pertaining to our own lives, on which he
claims expertise, almost exclusively. Norman is a star and shall be treated as
a star. Therefore, he demanded to have his own Oxford Union session, undiluted
with the voices of pesky Palestinians. That left a gaping hole in the
opposition's side, which could not be filled on such short notice. That's why
the president of the union, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy stepped in....
Norman Finkelstein had his own event the following
day and everyone fawned over our white American savior. Yes, I'm angry. Norman
came to be invited because I suggested he be there to have an academic
counterweight to Morris. Rather than supporting Palestinians, he withdrew,
apparently because he's too special and important.
The Spires of Oxford
However it wasn’t Finkelstein’s event
the next day which made a political impact but the Oxford Union Debate which
the pro-Palestinian side won by 4-1. Given that he had been invited at Susan’s
suggestion his failure to co-ordinate tactics with her is indicative of
his individualistic and egotistical approach when it comes to being part of a collective movement.
Finkelstein's Infantile E-mail
It was because of my recent blog
in which I called on Finkelstein to ‘Stop Undermining the Global Movement in
Support of the Palestinians’
and then a subsequent challenge by me to debate his objections to the Palestine Must be Free slogan (which he
declined) that he sent me an infantile email. I guess I should be amused at finding
out how thin Norman’s skin is!
Norman’s email was notionally in response to a
circular I sent to people advertising a webinar on December 3, How
Anti-Semitism has Complemented Zionismin which Tony Lerman, Barnaby
Raine, Michael Richmond and myself spoke. Norman wrote:
I’m tempted to ask readers of my
book to email Finkelstein (normfinkelstein@gmail.com/norm6344@gmail.com) to disabuse him of his
belief! However that would be to respond in kind.
All I can say is that
it’s clear that Finkelstein was stung by my criticisms and instead of debating it out as we have done before, our usually
loquacious academic pundit responded with a temper tantrum. Clearly Finkelstein finds it difficult to defend his opposition to the slogan without having to defend his other views such as the two state solution.
On
December 20 2023 my home was raided
at 7 a.m. in the morning by South-East Counter-Terrorist Police who informed me
that I was being arrested on suspicion of committing an offence under s.12(1)A
of the Terrorism Act 2000.
This is what Starmer and Lammy Support By Approving Arms Sales
What
you may ask was my offence? Planting or conspiracy to plant a bomb? Assassinating
war criminals Starmer and Lammy? Not a bit of it. The Police referred to a tweet
I had posted a month before which expressed support for Palestinian Resistance in
its fight against Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza.
I understand that the charge that has now been laid
relates to a blog which I posted on October 7, Full
Support for the Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Its subtitle referred to
the hypocrisy of Biden & those who support Ukrainian resistance but condemn
Palestinian resistance.
I referred to the Commander of the Warsaw ghetto resistance, Marek Edelman, who comparedtheir resistance with that of the
Palestinians. This is not of course a message that is welcome to the British
state.
Despite the BBC and British press commenting favourably on the Syrian Jihadists of the HTS, who are still proscribed, there have been no arrests!
There can be no doubt
about the intention of s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act. It states quite
clearly:
A person commits an offence if the person (a)
expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation,
and (b) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression
is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.
The word ‘supportive’
is a weasel
word. It is intentionally
ambiguous or misleading. If what you say about a proscribed organisation is
at all positive, that can be held to be supportive, regardless of whether it is
true or not. This legislation deliberately embeds lies into British law.
The result is that when
writing an article you must look over your shoulder in case what you write might
offend the Zionist lobby which may report you to the Thought Police. This is
the stuff of 1984. We are sleep walking into an Orwellian Dystopia. It cannot
help but chill freedom of speech and is clearly contrary to Article
10 of the European Convention of Human Rights which guarantees the right of
freedom of speech and expression.
William Tyndale died at the stake because the state disapproved of what he said
The second part of
s.12(1A) criminalises the expression of an opinion or belief if the person is
reckless as to its effect on someone who reads it. This is the stuff of police
states. Recklessness forms part of the mens
rea in criminal cases such asgross
negligence manslaughter. Where the defendant was aware of the risks involved
but nonetheless pursued a particular course of conduct and someone died they may
be held liable. It is known as Cunningham recklessness.
Such a test is completely inappropriate when it
comes to someone’s opinion or belief. We are not dealing with any fatal
consequences. What is really intended is that you should keep your mouth shut
when talking about a group that the government doesn’t like, which it defines
as ‘terrorist’ or else face the consequences.
In the case of the expression of one’s opinion
nothing need happen but you are held to be reckless as to whether someone might support the said organisation.
Only a liar
and a bully
like Priti Patel could introduce such a clause into law.
I must confess that when I write an article, I hope
that this is not used in evidence against me (!), I don’t think of consequences
in terms of what my readers might do. I wonder if people understand the points
I’m making, I wonder how many hits it may get and what readers think of the
article but as regards what they might do? Nothing. Only a police state could
think of introducing such a subjective law.
There is the question of what is or is not
terrorism. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act defines terrorism as the use or
threat of violence designed to influence a government. This is completely
inappropriate when applied to a resistance or anti-colonial movement. Israel is
not the government of Gaza. It is an occupying power whose occupation has just
been ruled
illegal by the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice.
Since the occupation is illegal how can resistance to it anything other than legal?
Subsection 2 of Section 1 states that the action
must involve serious violence to a person, serious damage to property, endanger
a person’s life, create a serious danger to health and safety and be designed
to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system. These provisions
are not what most people call terrorism.
The irony is that the Israeli state itself played a key role in the formation of Hamas
Damage to property, health and safety or the
disruption of electronic systems have their own criminal offences. There is no
need to invoke the use of terrorism unless there are hidden motives and specific
political objectives in mind. It is, after all, highly unlikely that a company
which puts its workers at risk will be charged with terrorism, though it would be
nice if they were!
Thatcher
and Reagan
both described the African National Congress as a terrorist organisation. If
this law had been in operation back in the 1970s and 80s then support for the
overthrow of Apartheid in South Africa would have been a criminal offence.
Indeed support for any anti-colonial movement that used violence against the
occupier would have been ‘terrorism’. This is the law of the occupier, the
racist, the imperialist. It is no wonder that Starmer and Attorney General Hermer
and his Zionist
Deputy Sarah Sackman are so happy to use it.
Today the law is being used by the institutionally
racist Metropolitan Police to attack the Kurdish community in London who
largely support the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) who are conducting a struggle
against the semi-fascist Turkish state of Recep Erdogan. Erdogan is trying
to ban and has severely harassed the HDP, which obtained 6 million votes at
the last election.
The ban on the PKK in effect means supporting
Erdogan, who has been waging his own genocidal war in Kurdistan, which Turkey
occupies. It is another example of how this so-called anti-terrorist law is
being used to support colonial oppression and fascism. See Banning
the pro-Kurdish HDP in Turkey is a move towards fascism.
Terrorism is quite simple to define. It is the use
of violence against civilian populations by groups which have no mass base, the
intention of which is to coerce or frighten them. The Israeli state is the
classic example of a terrorist organisation. ISIS and Al Qaeda similarly.
Neither ISIS or Al Qaeda have any mass base and have never been elected by
anyone.That is why they send people to
Europe to commit random acts of mass murder such as at the attack on the Bataclan
in Paris when 130
people died and hundreds were injured.
Hamas, Hezbollah and the PKK are entirely different
organisations from ISIS. They operate within the territory of their own
countries. They have never planted bombs in this country. Hamas was elected
in 2006 by the majority of Palestinians. However the US and Israel didn’t like
the result so they ignored it and in 2007 Gaza was subject to a suffocating
siege and repeated attacks on it which Israel’s military called ‘mowing
the lawn’. Thousands died in these attacks but to reptiles like Starmer and
Lammy Palestinian deaths are of no consequence. Assassinated Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated
in 1992that “I
would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution
must be found”.
John McDonnell MP speaking truth to power -
Its time to act now. All arms licences need to be closed down. When will this government stop selling weapons to Israel who seem to be using their right to defend themselves as an excuse to kill children? pic.twitter.com/YjrLO5jJGf
Anti-colonial resistance struggles are lawful under
international law. The AdditionalProtocol
I of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 include the protection of
peoples fighting against colonial domination and occupation and against racist
régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination. Likewise UN General Assembly
Resolution 3314 (XXIX)confirms thatthose living under
colonial domination have the right to struggle to remove that occupation.
Nothing
in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the
right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the
Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the
Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations
and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United
Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms
of alien domination: nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and
to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter
and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.
Furthermore, the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva
Conventions (1977), to which Palestine acceded in 2014 (joining over 160
countries), in its Article 1(4), classifies conflicts in which peoples are
fighting against alien occupation and racist regimes as armed conflicts.
Individuals engaging in such “fighting,” if captured, should be afforded the
status of prisoners of war, meaning their fighting is legitimate.
To those who argue that Hamas, Hezbollah
and the PKK have no right to resist Israel militarily, I point them to Stanley
Cohen’s Palestinians
have a legal right to armed struggle Al Jazeera 27.7.16. Cohen points out that
the Israeli state was born in blood and fire. Its terrorism makes Hamas seem
like amateurs:
On April 12, 1938, the Irgun murdered two British police officers in a
train bombing in Haifa. On August 26, 1939, two
British officers were killed by an Irgun landmine in Jerusalem. On February 14, 1944, two British constables were shot dead when they
attempted to arrest people for pasting up wall posters in Haifa. On September 27,
1944, more than 100 members of the Irgun
attacked four British police stations, injuring hundreds of officers. Two days later a senior British police officer of the Criminal
Intelligence Department was assassinated in Jerusalem.
On November 1, 1945, another police officer was killed as five trains were
bombed. On December 27, 1945, seven British
officers lost their lives in a bombing on police headquarters in Jerusalem. Between
November
9 and 13, 1946, Jewish “underground” members
launched a series of landmine and suitcase bomb attacks in railway stations,
trains, and streetcars, killing 11 British soldiers and policemen and eight
Arab constables.
Four more officers were murdered in
another attack on a police headquarters on January 12, 1947. Nine months later, four British
police were murdered in an Irgun bank robbery and, but three days later, on September 26,
1947, an additional 13 officers werekilled in yet another terrorist attack on a
British police station.
Throughout this period, Jewish
terrorists also undertook countless attacks that spared no part of the British
and Palestinian infrastructure. Numerous attacks were carried out against the
oil industry including one, in March 1947, on a Shell oil refinery in Haifa
which destroyed some 16,000 tonnes of petroleum.
Zionist terrorists killed British
soldiers throughout Palestine, using booby traps, ambushes, snipers, and
vehicle blasts.
In 1947, the
Irgun kidnapped two British Army
Intelligence Corps non-commissioned officers and threathened to hang them if death
sentences of three of their own members were carried out. When these three
Irgun members were executed by hanging, the two British sergeants were hanged
in retaliation and their booby-trapped bodies were
left in an eucalyptus grove.
In announcing their execution, the
Irgun said that the two British soldiers were hanged following their conviction
for “criminal anti-Hebrew activities” which included: illegal entry into the
Hebrew homeland and membership in a British criminal terrorist organisation –
known as the Army of Occupation – which was “responsible for the torture,
murder, deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the right to live”. The
soldiers were also charged with illegal possession of arms, anti-Jewish spying
in civilian clothes, and premeditated hostile designs against the underground (pdf).
Well beyond the territorial
confines of Palestine, in late 1946-47 a continuing campaign of terrorism was
directed at the British. Acts of sabotage were carried out on British military
transportation routes in Germany.The Lehi also tried, unsuccessfully, to drop a bomb on the House of
Commons from a chartered plane flown from France and, in October 1946, bombed the
British Embassy in Rome. A number of
other explosive devices were detonated in and around strategic targets in
London. Some 21 letter bombs were addressed, at various times, to senior
British political figures. Many were intercepted, while others reached their
targets but were discovered before they could go off.
There are some who will say that it was the
Palestinian resistance that breached international law when they seized Israeli
captives and took them back to Gaza in order to exchange them for Palestinian
captives. If this is unlawful under international law then so is the holding
of 10,000+ Palestinians in Israeli captivity. A third of them have had no trial
at all and the remainder are ‘convicted’ in Israeli Military Courts which have
a 99.74%
conviction rate.
We should also bear
in mind, although our pitiful press won’t inform people of this, that Israel
has regularly captured hostages to exchange for its own prisoners. The
‘liberal’ President of the Israeli High Court Aharon Barak held in 1997 that
a detention is legal if it is designed to
promote State security, even if the danger to State Security does not emanate
from the detainees themselves.
and that “detention ... for the purpose of release of
... captured and missing soldiers is a vital interest to the State.”
In Starmer’s Brave New World It is a Crime to Hold or Express Opinions
that Oppose Genocide or War Crimes – War really is Peace
Tony Greenstein speech outside Westminster magistrates court
Last Thursday 19th December
2024 I was formally charged with inviting support for a proscribed organisation
and expressing an opinion or belief that was ‘supportive’ of them.
Needless to say I have done neither
and I pled not guilty to offences carrying a 14 year prison sentence. As I
explained to the 100 or so demonstrators outside, in a wonderful expression of solidarity,
if I had downloaded hard core child pornography and my name was Hugh Edwards, I
could expect a 6 months suspended sentence.
My real ‘offence’ was opposing
Israel’s 57 year old occupation of Gaza and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza. If
the proscription of anti-colonial resistance groups had been in place 40 years
ago then I could have been charged with supporting another ‘terrorist’
organisation – the ANC.Because that is
what Thatcher and Reagan called
the ANC.
Thatcher told
a press conference at the Commonwealth summit in Vancouver, in 1987:
A considerable number of the ANC leaders are Communists… When the ANC
says that they will target British companies, this shows what a typical
terrorist organisation it is. I fought terrorism all my life… I will have
nothing to do with any organisation that practises violence. I have never seen
anyone from ANC or the PLO or the IRA and would not do so.
Presumably Thatcher kept her distance
from the British army too! This is the hypocrisy that labels Hamas, Hezbollah
and the PKK as ‘terrorist’. The massively greater violence of the Israeli and
Turkish states simply does not exist for creatures like Thatcher or Starmer.
State violence is fine, but violence against the state is ‘terrorism’ unless, as
with Assad and Gaddafi, we oppose the state too.
Tony Greenstein speech outside Westminster magistrates court
Using the same ‘logic’ Thatcher should have condemned violence
by the Yugoslav resistance under Tito against the Nazi occupation. Because the
Special Operations Executive, which became the SAS, was aiding them, she would
have made an exception for them. This demonstrates that those who define resistance
organisations as ‘terrorist’ don’t have a single principle between them.
Outside Tony Greenstein's court hearing, end segment
If I’d been alive 80 years ago according
to the same logic people could have been charged with supporting the French and
Polish Resistance. The Nazis certainly called them ‘terrorists’.
The system of proscribing
organisations in force today enables any
support for any national
liberation or resistance organisation to be classified as ‘terrorist’ thus
making support for people seeking to overthrow colonialism or imperialism a
criminal offence.
International law supports the right of resistance of those
opposing colonialism and this includes the Palestinians but British law
deems this irrelevant. Except in the case of Ukraine of course!
Tony Greenstein speech outside Westminster magistrates court
Suffice to say those who profess
their support for freedom of speech also seek to outlaw anything that strays
outside the overton window of what is and is not allowed to be
discussed. It is a window that has been closing for the past half century.
Freedom of speech has limits and
those limits are not confined to incitement to racial hatred or violence
against another person but to support of organisations that the Establishment
deem to be ‘extreme’ i.e. anti-colonial or anti-capitalist.
‘Extremism’ is the new buzzword. When I was remanded in
custody I was asked at reception whether or not I was an extremist! When I
asked the young Black woman if she knew what an extremist was she confessed she
didn’t. I then explained that all those who fought for the freedoms we take for
granted (and which we are losing) like the Suffragettes, were also called extremists in
their time. The Jewish Chronicle then said that I compared myself to the
Suffragettes!
It is no surprise that Attorney
General Richard Hermer and his Zionist side-kick Sarah Sackman from the Jewish Labour Movement want to criminalise those who oppose British imperialism.
They have lost the battle to tar us with the ‘anti-Semitism’ brush and have
therefore sought the help of the Police to keep us silent.
Live: Outside Tony Greenstein's court hearing
It is untrue that I support Hamas as
a political organisation. What I do is to recognise that it was elected by the Palestinians in 2006 in
preference to Fateh. Instead of respecting the outcome of the elections, the Israeli
state together with the US and Britain supported a coup attempt by Palestinian
Quisling Mahmoud Abbas to overthrow the elected government of the Palestinians.
There are terrorist organisations
such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, both of which are the creations of US imperialism.
We see today how Al Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which was proscribed in May 2017 has quickly been taken
to the bosom of the imperialists. At the time the justification for their
proscription was that they:
‘should be treated as alternative names for
the organisation which is already proscribed under the name Al Qa’ida.’
All sorts
of people like MI6 former chief Sir John Sawers have called for the UK to deproscribe HTS. Sawers
argued that the organisation has changed significantly in the last several
years.
Sawers told Sky News that Jolani, the head of
HTS "has made great efforts over the
last 10 years to distance himself from those terrorist groups.
"Certainly, the actions we've seen of Tahrir al-Sham over the last
two weeks have been those of a liberation movement, not of a terrorist organisation,"
"It would be rather ridiculous, actually, if
we're unable to engage with the new leadership in Syria because of a
proscription dating back 12 years."
For once the Telegraph got it right when Nina Shea wrote
That commander Al-Jolani has now changed into a
Western suit and talks of moderation, they undoubtedly see,
is purely tactical. When before has a holy warrior, at the very moment of
triumph, pulled down his keffiyeh to reveal underneath a champion of religious
pluralism and freedom? These militants are no more credible than the Taliban,
who promised to respect women’s rights but who, three years after taking
control of Afghanistan, have “erased” women from public life, as
the UN reports.
Sawyer’s statements seem very
supportive of an organisation that is still proscribed yet the anti-terrorist
police have not conducted a dawn raid on his home in the early hours of the
morning because he is in breach of s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act. Clearly the
Police are making political decisions as to who is breaching the said Act.
If Sawers had said the same about a proscribed
Palestinian organisation his feet wouldn’t have touched the floor before he was
arrested by the Thought Police.
Proscription has nothing to do with terrorism.
It is about preventing people supporting organisations that are fighting for
the rights of their own people against regimes imposed by the West.
Terrorism contrary to the definition in
the Terrorism Act 2000 has nothing to do with ‘serious damage against property’,‘serious violence against a person’, the disruption of electronic
systems or health and safety. All of the above are covered by other
legislation.
Terrorism is the deliberate
infliction of violence and terror on civilian populations. ISIS, with its
attempted genocide of the Yazidis clearly fits into this as does Al Qaeda. ISIS
violence in Paris, the Bataclan attack and the London Bridge knife attacks or the Manchester Arena bombing of Ariana
Grande’s concert were
for the sake of spreading terror without any discernible political motive.
It is usually because an organisation
lacks a mass base that they resort to terrorism. Hamas (& Hezbollah) have
both been elected and carry large popular support. Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel
in support of Gaza was carefully calibrated and unlike Israel’s response did
not target civilians but military infrastructure primarily.
The worst terrorist attack in
Britain, the bombing of Ariana Grande’s concert in the Manchester Arena in May 2017
came about because of the collusion of MI5 with the bomber, Salman Abedi, who
had been sent to Libya to fight in jihadist organisations trying to overthrow
Col. Gaddafi.
The head of
MI5 said he was
"profoundly sorry" the
security service did not prevent the Manchester Arena attack but not so sorry
that he was prepared to reveal the truth about the bomber’s links with MI5.
An articleManchester Arena bombing inquiry delivers cover-up “in
the national interest”on the World Socialist Web Site explains:
The final report by Sir John
Saunders from the inquiry he led into the Manchester Arena terrorist bombing is
a state cover-up. It conceals the role of MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence and
successive British governments in the grooming and protection of far-right
Islamists who were deployed to achieve imperialist foreign policy objectives in
Libya and throughout the Middle East.
The
22-year-old Salman Abedi worked with Islamist fighters who were trained, armed,
and financed by the British state and NATO to topple Libyan leader Muammar and
install a puppet regime.
Abedi had
been sent to fight in Libya with Jihadi groups by MI5 as part of a plot to
overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. British imperialism aligned itself with the very
forces that they would later classify as terrorist. Again there was blowback
and 22 people died as a result.
The duplicity and dishonesty
of our war criminal leaders and the press means that Terrorism legislation is
being deployed to suppress political debate and discussion not terrorism.
The next stage in my trial will
be the Old Bailey on Friday 31 January at 10.00 am and there will be a demonstration
outside the court because my prosecution is aimed at the Palestine solidarity
movement as a whole, not just me as an individual.
The turnout
last Thursday was impressive but it could have been better still. London PSC
groups were not in evidence unlike groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour,
Jewish Network for Palestine and the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. It is about
time that PSC took the attacks on the solidarity movement seriously.
It is not
enough to issue a statement condemning the
repression of Palestine Action
and then do nothing further. A statement on its own is useless. PSC has to
realise that the British state is attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and
that means it must defend those who are targeted by them. The problem with PSC
is that it has no anti-Zionist or anti-imperialist politics. It has become just
another NGO.
The attacks by the Police on the Palestine
solidarity movement are only part of the picture. The Met have also been acting
on behalf Recep
Erdogan and Turkey’s genocidal repression of the Kurds. The PKK, which is fighting
the Turkish army has a mass base amongst the Kurds. It is anything but a
terrorist group.
Through proscription the British state is
clamping down on support for the PKK in Britain. This has nothing to do with
terrorism. Palestine solidarity and Kurdish supporters have to start working
together.
Finally please also
contribute to my Crowdfunder: It is not
just for me but for activists caught up in the ‘terrorist’ trap.
As the Starmer Dalek Tells Us‘To care for one another’ he and Lammy Send More
Weapons to Israel to Kill Palestinian Kids
Starmer’s Xmas Message
goes from the mundane ‘This Christmas,
people will be travelling up and down the country.’ to the boring opposite of what
his government has been doing, ‘to
care for one another’ . What Starmer excells at though is lying, for example:
‘This Christmas, I will
be hoping for peace, particularly in the Middle East as the birthplace of
the Christmas story.’
This is the man who is sending Israel more weapons in order that
it can complete the extermination and ethnic cleaning of Palestinians in Gaza.
Was there ever such a combination in public life? A man without a personality
or principles, combined with compulsive lying and an overdose dose of hypocrisy?True Boris Johnson was a man to whom the
truth was a stranger but at least he had a personality.
Starmer
tells us that
I’ll be looking towards a
better, brighter future for every person and celebrating the joy and
wonder that Christmas brings.
You wouldn't think that Starmer has stripped pensioners of the winter fuel allowance, kept the
two-child benefit cap and has now betrayed the Waspi women. Is it any wonder that
Starmer Labour has plumbed unprecedented depths of
unpopularity?
Since
October 7th we have seen a collapse in the international legal architecture
that was put in place after the Nazi holocaust. The United States has made it
plain that the International Court of Justice is there solely to be used
against the West's perceived enemies. It ignores anything that does not go
along with its support for Israel, Hitler's
Bastard Offspring.
Starmer on Srebrenica an ‘Inhumane Genocide’
The United
States and Britain have tried to justify genocide in Gaza by denying it is
genocide. Israel’s atrocities are simply invisible even though every
doctor coming back from Gaza says they have never seen anything like Israel’s
attack on hospitals and the health sector. Torture and rape of prisoners, even
though admitted, is simply ignored. Israel’s deliberate sniping of children hasn’t
happened. Western imperialism justifies itself only through the naked
use of force and making its atrocities invisible.
Lammy says that not enough Palestinians have been killed but
hasn't told us how many would satisfy the definition of genocide even though
his boss was more than happy to call the massacre
of 8,000 people in Srebrenica a genocide when he was a young barrister.
Despite
the attempts of the BBC and Britain’s prostitute media to hide the reality of
the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, what has been happening has been obvious to all
those with eyes to see, despite the attempt of Facebook and the
BBC to outlaw the word ‘genocide’. No one can proclaim ignorance as they
did during the Nazi holocaust.
Our own
Church of England, led by child abuse defender Justin Welby, has said and done
absolutely nothing to oppose Israel’sGaza holocaust. It is to the credit of Pope Francis that he has repeatedly spoken out
about Israel’s atrocities, not least against Christians in Gaza.
To the CoE’s
Evangelicals, Palestinian Christians are invisible. These 'Christians' are
more interested in Rapture and the Second Coming, all on the back of the Jews who
will be slaughtered in the battles of Armageddon.
Perhaps we
should remember that in Germany it was the Protestant Church that was the most ardently pro-Nazi
with a Reich Church being established that barred Christian Jews from its
portals.
In Israel
those who use the Holocaust as their pretext for Apartheid and massacre openly
call for the extermination of the Palestinians. Israeli President, Labour Zionist
Isaac Herzog declared that
It’s an entire nation out
there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not
involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought
against that evil regime.
Defence
Minister Yoav Gallant initiated the genocide by calling
Palestinians 'human animals' the very
phrase Himmler used when
justifying the extermination of the Jews. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting
accordingly,” Gallant, said as he promised
to starve the Palestinians into submission.
“We’re fighting
Nazis,”declared Naftali Bennett, a former prime
minister, even though he had included them in his government.
“You must remember
what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,”said Benjamin
Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, who were wiped out
to every man, woman, child and infant.
The
parallels between the Nazis and the Zionists are obvious but that didn't stop
the institutionally Metropolitan Police arresting me on
October 4th this year for making such a comparison at the demonstration against
Israel's racist Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli.
Let us renew
our strength and vigour this Xmas to oppose Israel's genocide and the West's enablement
of that genocide. Hopefully we can get rid of the red Tory Starmer regime this coming year
Tony
Greenstein
MUST WATCH! @HRW explains how Israel has used water as a tool of genocide:
- Turned off water supply - Then Israel cut electricity & fuel to desalination plants etc - Then, it bulldozed solar panels for these plants - Prevented any repair
On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch
issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International
issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal
Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity
and war crimes.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of
Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide
in Gaza.
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human
rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries
like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli
genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries,
especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in
Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this
genocide.
Moreover, almost all of the many human
rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have
stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made
hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the
Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s
actions.
One wonders what people in the West who have either
supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their
behavior and sleep at night.
History will not treat them kindly.
Below is an article from Ha’aretz about the war crimes and other deeds
of Israel’s ‘most moral army in the world’.
"I have no problem with
women. One threw a slipper at me, so I gave her a kick here (pointing to the
groin), broke all this here. She can't have children today."
"X shot an Arab four
times in the back and got away with a self-defense claim. Four bullets in the
back from a distance of ten meters ... cold-blooded murder. We did things like
that every day."
"An Arab just walked
down the street, about 25 years old, didn't throw a stone, nothing. Bang, a
bullet in the stomach. Shot him in the stomach, and he was dying on the
sidewalk, and we drove away indifferently."
"A new commander came to us. We went out with him
on the first patrol at six in the morning. He stops. There's not a soul in the
streets, just a little 4-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The
commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the
elbow and his leg here. Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all
stood there with our mouths open. Looking at him in shock ... I asked the
commander: "What's your story?"He told me: “These kids need to be
killed from the day they are born. When a commander does that, it becomes
legit."
The eulogies at Shuvael Ben-Natan's funeral,
a reservist who was killed in Lebanon, illustrate this shift. One speaker
referred to Ben-Natan's killing of a 40-year-old Palestinian who was harvesting
olives with his children in the West Bank. Members of his military unit
recounted how he boosted morale in Gaza by setting a home on fire without
approval. They professed their commitment to continue with arson and revenge in
Gaza, Lebanon and Samaria (the West Bank).
Sde Teiman, a detention facility, is like a microcosm
of brutalization in the current war. It became notorious when an Incorruptible
veteran physician reported signs of severe sexual abuse in a detainee. Nine IDF
reserve soldiers were subsequently detained on suspicion of aggravated sodomy
and other forms of abuse.
According to media reports, there are
36 investigations regarding deaths of detainees who were held in Sde Teiman since October 7. Testimonies of released
Palestinians gathered by the Israeli human rights NGO B'Tselem indicate harsh,
arbitrary violence on a frequent basis, humiliation and degradation, deliberate
starvation and other abusive practices. Soldiers expressed anonymously how a
discourse of hatred and revenge normalized the abuse of detainees.
A Restrained student in the reserves
described brutalization and its effect on the Followers.
"I saw sadistic people there. People who enjoy
causing suffering to others. … What was most disturbing was to see how easily
and quickly ordinary people can detach themselves and not see the reality right
in front of their eyes when they are in a difficult and shocking human situation."
Similarly, a reservist doctor
stated:
"There is total dehumanization here. You don't
really treat them as if they are human beings ... in retrospect, the hardest
thing for me is what I felt, or actually what I didn't feel when I was there.
It bothers me that it didn't bother me. There is normalization of the process,
and at some point, it just stops bothering."
A Restrained female reservist
kept her standards by escaping the facility:
"The dehumanization scared me. The encounter
with such dangerous attitudes, which has become more normal in our society, was
traumatic for me ... I discharged myself from reserve duty with a
psychiatrist's help."
When the Hungarian Arrow Cross
fascists murdered, in January 1945, 92 medical staff and patients at two Jewish hospitals in
Maros Street and Vasosmajor Street in Budapest, Eugene Levai described it as ‘one of the blackest deeds of the Nyilasterrorism.’ (Black Book on the Martyrdom of
Hungarian Jewry p.419).
Two Nice Jewish Boys Join the Hitler Youth
Those who committed these
atrocities were later hanged by the Peoples Courts. Those Israeli government ministers
who were responsible for these atrocities, together with their military
commanders, deserve a similar fate.
The destruction of the Czech
village of Lidice in June
1942 in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich and the murder of
its children and 173 men above the age of 15 stands out among the most infamous
of Nazi deeds. As does the wiping out of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Israel’s attack and
storming of Kamal Adwan hospital and other hospitals in Gaza is no different from what the
Nazis and their Hungarian accomplices did. Israel’s military burned to the
ground the Indonesia hospital and utterly destroyed the main Al Shifa hospital.
All in order that Northern Gaza can be ‘cleansed’ (another Nazi term for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) whilst not only did the West look on but
supplied the weaponry to do it.
Kamal Adwan Al Jazeera
The destruction of Gaza’s
hospitals takes place under the pretext that they are Hamas bases.
Not one single photograph has been
produced of a Palestinian fighter inside a hospital. Anyone who pretends
otherwise is nothing other than a holocaust enabler.
Under International Humanitarian Law the principle is clear: Hospitals are protected, because of their life-saving function for wounded & sick.
Yes, they can lose their protection, but this is not a free license to attack. @CDroegeICRC, ICRC Chief Legal Officer, explains 👇 pic.twitter.com/ZbhHkvmd0y
The International Committee of the Red Cross states that
According to international
humanitarian law (IHL), health establishments and units, including hospitals,
should not be attacked. This protection extends to the wounded and sick as well
as to medical staff and means of transport.
The Death of Palestinian Babies
Attacks on hospitals are
particularly heinous yet not one of our war criminal leaders has protested
it. One would not expect Starmer to say anything. Nothing that the Palestinians
have suffered merits any sympathy from this cardboard cut out of a politician.
The only thing that stirs this dessicated politician is October 7and Israeli deaths.
Just 2 babies died according to
official Israeli statistics – both accidentally. Only one baby was killed in Kibbutz Beeri, 10-month-old
Mila Cohen, whose mother survived. The death was accidental as was another death.
Compare this to the deliberate massacre by Israel of babies and children of all
ages.
·The Kamal Adwan Hospital’s director said about 50
people have been killed, including five medical staff, in
an Israeli air strike on a building near the hospital in northern Gaza. Israel
ordered the evacuation of the hospital, endangering the remaining nearly 75
patients there.
·A fourth Palestinian baby has died due to extreme cold in Gaza over the
past 72 hours, as hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Israel’s war
struggle to keep warm in flimsy tents.
·Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least
45,436 Palestinians and wounded 108,038 since October 7, 2023.
Explosive Robots at the Gates of the Kamal Adwan Hospital
For 75
days, doctors in this north Gaza hospital have withstood the Israeli army's
attempts to forcibly evacuate them and their patients. In the face of death,
the doctors are still refusing to leave, even as the army steps up its attacks.
Patients are trying to sleep inside the Kamal Adwan
Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. But just outside, they can see a
remote-controlled robot carrying explosives sent by the Israeli army. It’s only
a matter of time before the bomb is detonated. Tanks and bulldozers move around
the hospital and in front of its entrances all day long. The sounds of
explosions and bullets do not stop.
Inside the hospital, there is a constant state of
panic. With each new explosion or round of fire, patients flee from one wing of
the hospital to another, crowding in the narrow hospital corridors to sleep
like sardines, hoping that they will be safe.
This is the current reality at the Kamal Adwan
Hospital in Beit Lahia, one of the last semi-functioning hospitals in northern
Gaza. For 75 days, the hospital has been under siege by the Israeli army, which
has banned the entry of food, medicine, and water, while periodically cutting
off communications inside the hospital, preventing doctors and patients from
communicating with the outside world. Not to mention the constant
bombings.
In recent days, the army has stepped up its attacks on
the hospital. According to witnesses, the Israeli army has deployed the use of
remote-controlled robots, which approach the hospital gates, the surrounding
areas, and its courtyard, dropping boxes filled with explosives that are later
detonated remotely. The Israeli army has attacked the
hospital dozens of times over the past 10 days, and in addition to the
remote-controlled explosives, the army has been firing live bullets and
artillery fire at the hospital, and has also been using drones and
quadcopters in its attacks.
“Yesterday
we went through a difficult night that no one can imagine. At dawn, there was
violent and direct targeting of the intensive care unit’,
Dr. Muhammad Barid told Mondoweiss
from inside the ICU at the hospital on Tuesday, December 24.
“Some of the effects are still present. Shells fell and set fires
inside the department. The department is crowded with cases because the
intensive care unit in Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only department operating in
the northern Gaza Strip,” he said.
Dr. Barid highlights the grim reality facing patients
in the intensive care unit, emphasizing that most patients are heavily
dependent on ventilators, and require constant care from medical
staff.
The intensive care unit, which is designed to
accommodate only 16 patients, is now treating 47 individuals. Due to lack of
supplies and a staff who are stretched thin, patients receive treatment only
once a day instead of the usual three times, while patients with wounds
struggle are given just one dressing change without further evaluation. Those
inside, including both patients and medical staff, rely on limited supplies
that have managed to enter the hospital via humanitarian organizations and
medical delegations amidst the prolonged siege.
Ahmed Al-Barawi, a wounded man lying in the hospital
recounts the horrific experiences that have made it impossible for him to
recover. He expresses that the dire circumstances he faces—due to treatment
shortcomings and a lack of essential medical supplies—has transformed the
hospital into something unrecognizable.
“It’s a hospital
in name only. The [Israeli] occupation has stripped even the most basic levels
of care from us,” he said. “We
suffer daily due to inadequate medical supplies, receiving only what amounts to
first aid. Meanwhile, the shelling and continuous gunfire at the hospital add
to our despair,” Al-Barawi explains.
He details the events from the previous day, December
23, when the hospital and its vicinity were targeted over ten times. According
to him, electric generators were set ablaze, buildings were damaged, and
patients were harmed by shattered doors and glass.
“Yesterday, they placed a robot next to the hospital and detonated it.
We had to flee from our beds and spent the whole night in the corridors.
Shelling and shooting were everywhere.”
Al-Barawi continues: “The hospital has become a place where people die rather than receive
care,” adding that not only is medicine in short supply, but so are food
and water.
“We urge the world to pay attention, to stand with us even just once,
and help us against this enemy and this siege—the pain we experience is
unbearable for any human being. We are humans, if you know what humanity means,
not the animals the Israeli occupation claims we are.”
Dr. Barid expresses profound frustration at the lack
of international response to months-long calls from
doctors at the hospital to stop the army’s attacks.
“There is no justification that gives anyone the right to target such
places. We have repeatedly appealed to the world to provide protection for
hospitals, but unfortunately, no one responded. There are no messages left to
send.hank you to the world,” he finishes sarcastically.
‘We will fulfill our oath as doctors’
The current situation at the Kamal Adwan Hospital
underscores the dire situation facing healthcare providers and patients across
Gaza. What were once places of healing have been turned into war zones by
Israel.
Since October 5, the Israeli army has been carrying
out an ethnic cleansing campaign in north Gaza, as part of ‘The General’s
Plan’. Starting in Jabalia, the army imposed a crippling siege aimed at starving
residents out, while also intensifying its military attacks. Since then, the
army has extended the siege and attacks to all areas in the north, such as Beit
Lahia and Beit Hanoun, forcing people to go south, towards Gaza City. It is
estimated that of the more than 200,000 inhabitants of northern Gaza that were
present as of October this year, some thousands remain.
Part of the army’s strategy to force people out of the
north, residents say, is by further crippling the already devastated healthcare
system. Throughout the siege, the army has stepped up its attacks on civil
defense teams and first responders, bombing their outposts and attacking their
crews, essentially making it impossible for the wounded to be rescued or
treated.
As the last functioning hospital in north Gaza, the
Kamal Adwan Hospital has become one of the primary
targets of the Israeli military operations. According to doctors at
the hospital, over the course of 75 days, the Israeli army has killed 17
medical personnel from the hospital, injured over 50 others, and arrested 46
individuals from the hospital grounds.
Skwawkbox Video Dr Hussam Abu Safiya
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital director, who
himself has been targeted by
Israeli army bullets, says the attacks on the hospital are unfounded. He noted
that the Israeli army had previously raided the hospital’s ICU in November
2023, at which time no evidence was found to justify Israel’s claims that
hospitals were being used by Hamas or other armed groups. The Israeli army is “aware of its [the hospital’s] purpose, as
there are no other facilities providing such care in the northern Gaza Strip,”
Dr. Abu Safiya states,describing the targeting of the hospital as violent and
terrifying, likening it to a war zone.
“I don’t know why we are being bombed in this way. It is clear that the
bombing was done with the aim of killing, based on the level of fire on the
walls,” Abu Safiya says. “This is a dangerous matter, and we have asked the
world, and are still asking, for international protection.”
“What we seek is to neutralize the hospital from bombing and targeting.
This facility provides humanitarian services and is filled only with patients,
companions, the injured, and medical staff. Why we are being bombed in this
way, I don’t know,” he says.
Since the onset of the Israeli army’s invasion of the
northern Gaza Strip in early October, Dr. Abu Safiya has been actively urging
for measures to be taken to safeguard the lives of patients and assist the
wounded. However, in the wake of no international response, the Israeli army
has continued to enforce a suffocating siege on the facility in an effort to
drive the patients and doctors out, along with all residents who refuse to
leave northern Gaza.
“For 75 days, we have been calling on the world for international
protection for the health system. These are laws established by the Geneva
Conventions, which stipulate the protection of the health system,” Dr. Abu
Safiya says. “Where are these laws? What sin did we commit in this hospital to
be bombed and killed in this way?”
As Dr. Abu Safiya speaks, two massive explosions can
be heard in the background.
This is the case all day and night; we are bombarded with these bombs.
The shrapnel is flying as we speak in front of the world. We are bombed all day
and night like this, either around the hospital or inside it.
Despite the horrific conditions at the hospital,
doctors inside Kamal Adwan insist that they are dedicated to the humanitarian
oath they took when they began their medical careers, vowing to provide care to
those in need. They are resolute about remaining in the hospital, refusing to
leave under any circumstances.
“We will leave when the last Palestinian leaves the northern Gaza
Strip,” Dr. Abu Safiya declared defiantly. “We will stay and serve those who
are here. This is a humanitarian mission, and our message to the world is that
we deliver humanitarian care and should not be obstructed. We committed
ourselves to providing for those in need, and we will fulfill our oath as
doctors here at Kamal Adwan Hospital.”
Mohammed Al-Sharif contributed to this report from inside
the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, northern
Gaza.
Doctors have been forced out of the last real medical facility in
northern Gaza, the Kamal Adwan hospital, after occupation forces invaded the
hospital, arrested some staff and forced out others at gunpoint with only ten
minutes to move, after they refused to leave their patients. One of its
doctors, Dr Waleed Alboudi, managed to transmit a last desperate, moving
message to the world – asking for prayers and forgiveness if they ‘fell short in anyone’s rights’:
Israeli attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital puts ICU out of
service
Yesterday, Israel murdered at least five of
the hospital’s staff and numerous other civilians around the hospital, through
airstrikes and robotic bombs, some of the doctors targeted along with their
families as they brought them food, as a message from the hospital’s director,
Dr Hussam Abu Saffiya, explained last night:
Staff at Kamal Adwan Hospital describe night of ‘horror’ amid
Israel’s attack
Gaza doctors and other staff have
frequently been detained and tortured, in some cases to death, raising fears
for the fate of those detained now.
Al Jazeera broadcast the first
news of the forced evacuation – yet another war crime by the occupation regime:
Israel is a rogue state and a
terror state, supported shamefully by UK PM Keir Starmer and his cronies, who
will not even mention its crimes let alone condemn them.
For 75 days, doctors in this north Gaza hospital have withstood the Israeli army's attempts to forcibly evacuate them and their patients. In the face of death, the doctors are still refusing to leave, even as the army steps up its attacks. https://t.co/6OmFTzA8mP
New testimony
claims to reveal the moments that led to death of Dr Adnan al Bursh
Five journalists killed in Israeli strike near Gaza
hospital
Popular Israeli podcasters call to ‘erase every living being’ in Gaza and
West Bank– Middle East Eye
Half of Gaza’s children are so traumatised by Israel’s war on them that
they wish for death as a release – and 96% believe death is
imminent, according to a new study by the War Child Alliance.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been murdered
by Israel since October last year – some by bombs, missiles and hunger, others by sniper bullets– and many more have been maimed – Gaza has the largest population of child
amputees in history, according to the United Nations in October this year, with
many more severely burned or otherwise wounded.
Below are just a few examples of Israel’s atrocities against
Gaza’s children in the last week. Don’t look away – and if you have not
realised yet that Israel is committing genocide and this does not convince you,
get help:
Shattering testimony from Gaza surgeon ignored by media and
politicians
Surgeon breaks down in
parliament explaining how IDF drones target children
Imagine an
experienced British surgeon, recently returned from Ukraine, breaking down in
front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been
deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.
Imagine the
surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had
been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked
off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across
Western media.
Here, in
the real world, the horrific testimony
of a British surgeon who had operated on children in Gaza targeted by Israeli
drones after Israeli bombing attacks– something that happened ‘day after day
after day’ – has been largely blanked.
Professor
Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS surgeon who recently returned after working at
Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said he had ‘never seen anything on this
scale, ever’. He has worked in a number of conflicts around the world,
including the genocide in Rwanda. Prof Mamode worked for a month between August
and September as a volunteer for the charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians. In
a hearing on the
humanitarian situation in Gaza, he told members of the UK parliamentary International Development
Committee:
Israel's murder of Palestinian children
Drones
would come down and pick off civilians, children. This is not an occasional
thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, “I
was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter [a small,
remotely-piloted helicopter drone] came down and hovered over me and shot me”.
Prof Mamode
told MPs he saw children with sniper injuries to the head. He also noted that
the pellets fired by most drones were more destructive than bullets which would
go straight through a victim’s body. Instead, the pellets would bounce around
inside bodies, creating much more extensive damage.
A
seven-year-old boy, who had been caught up in an Israeli bombing and then
deliberately hit by an Israeli drone, came into the hospital with his stomach
hanging out of his chest. He had further injuries to his liver, spleen, bowel
and arteries.
He survived
that and went out a week later. Whether he is still alive, I don’t know.
The surgeon
broke down three times during his testimony. He described one case of an
8-year-old girl who was bleeding to death during surgery:
I asked for
a swab and they said, “No more swabs”.
As he spoke
to the MPs, he was momentarily overcome with emotion. Simple medical
items, such as sterile gloves and painkillers, are in short supply because of
Israel’s blocking of aid into Gaza, said Prof Mamode. This also applies to
basic items like soap and shampoo, leading to unhygienic conditions. He added:
I saw I
don’t know how many wounds with maggots in [them]. One of my colleagues took
maggots out of a child’s throat in intensive care. There were flies in
operating theatre landing in wounds.
He told MPs
that he had spent the entire month in the hospital, partly because it was not
safe to travel around. But also because, in January 2024, Israel had bombed the
guest house used by Medical Aid for Palestinians. The surgeon believes that
this was done deliberately by Israeli forces:
All of
those guest houses are in the Israeli army’s computers and are designated safe
houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the aim behind
it is to discourage aid workers from coming.
He said the
same applied to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was
in Gaza.
Labour MP
and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Prof Mamode if he meant that rogue
snipers were shooting at the armoured vehicles.
No, no.
This is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and deliberately shooting.
Prof
Mamode’s Palestinian colleagues told him that when Israeli forces attacked the
hospital in February, they killed members of staff and deposited them in a mass
grave with dead patients. Many other colleagues were taken away. The surgeon
related one such case:
They
[Israeli soldiers] just took him away and killed him. That’s what’s going on.
As far as I can see, it doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you are a
Palestinian in Gaza, you are a target.
The
Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary
testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are
not yet listening, they should be by now.
This should
have generated massive coverage across national news media, with the Prime
Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy being bombarded by
questions from journalists on what action the UK government would now take.
Instead, there has been virtual silence.
As far as
we can tell, there was no broadcast coverage on BBC News, Sky News or ITV,
although Channel 4 News did include an item on Prof Mamode’s testimony, at
least on its X feed (we
could not find a broadcast item, however, on the Channel 4 News programme catch-up page). We do not have the
resources to monitor all television and radio programmes, so we cannot rule out
that there was a passing mention on the BBC World Service or elsewhere.
Nor were
there any editorials or significant coverage in major news reports in UK
national newspapers. Prof Mamode’s appearance before the parliamentary
committee was reported in a live Guardian blog
about Gaza on 12 November, but his most compelling and harrowing evidence was
omitted or glossed over. To his credit, Owen Jones mentioned
the surgeon’s account in a Guardian opinion piece.
The
appalling lack of serious coverage is actually highlighted by the fact that
there wasone article on the
BBC News website about Prof Mamode’s testimony to the committee (we were
alerted to it by a post on X by one of our followers). The article was titled,
‘Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting
children’. As is often the case, the word ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli’ – as in
‘Israeli drones’ – was missing from the headline. In other words, the
perpetrator of violence was missing. Moreover, rather than refer to Prof Mamode
as a British surgeon, he was labelled as a ‘Gaza surgeon’, perhaps implying
that he was employed by the ‘Hamas-run health ministry’, the phrase that is
routinely deployed in BBC News reports.
But here
was the most glaring feature of the piece: rather than being placed on the
front page or even somewhere in the section marked, ‘Israel-Gaza war’, a
glaring misnomer for an ongoing genocide, it appeared deep inside the BBC’s
‘Local News’ category on the page for ‘Hampshire & Isle of Wight’. (As far
as we know, it never appeared in a more prominent place on the BBC News
website. But the fact that the bottom of the article contains the line, ‘Get in
touch: Do you have a story BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight should cover?’,
suggests that it was immediately placed in that section). The same treatment
was afforded to an earlier BBC News article in October, shortly after the surgeon had
returned from Gaza, but with the most disturbing details about the deliberate
targeting of children omitted.
Why place
such an important story in the ‘Hampshire & Isle Of Wight’ local news
section of the BBC website? The ostensible reason is that Prof Mamode comes
from Brockenhurst, a New Forest village in Hampshire. But surely the real
reason was to minimise public attention and thus evade pressure from the
powerful Israel lobby. After all, as we have mentioned before, senior BBC News
staff have admitted to
‘waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis’.
The Israel
lobby’s weaponising of antisemitism, which was deployed to prevent Jeremy
Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, is being used to suppress or silence criticism
of Israel. This has had a crippling effect on journalism and
free speech.
Regular
readers will recall the dearth of media coverage
given to the harrowing testimony provided by Professor Nick Maynard, a UK
surgeon who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University
Hospital, when he returned from Gaza earlier this year. He had described the
clear, deliberate targeting of hospital and healthcare facilities; but also the
actual execution of Palestinian surgeons and other medical staff.
In April,
Prof Maynard said that Israeli forces are:
systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling
the whole healthcare system.
He
described what had happened to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where he had
previously worked, and where around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been
killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces:
Every
single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the
hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague]
yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows
what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons
I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been
discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands
behind their back. [Our added emphasis].
He added:
And so,
there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed
there in the last few days.
All of the
above, taken together with the media’s recent gaslighting about
a supposed ‘pogrom’ against rampaging Israeli football fans chanting genocidal,
anti-Arab slogans in Amsterdam last week – disinformation expertly dissected by Richard Sanders
for Double Down News – reveals like never before the monstrous, genocide-enabling
reality of ‘mainstream’ news media.
Meanwhile,
Israel appears able to continue unimpeded in its brutal drive towards a ‘Greater Israel’, openly espoused by
Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, which would require the ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians ‘from the Jordan to the sea’.
Two documents outline the scale of
destruction upon Gaza’s health system and medical workers, threatening the very
possibility of sustaining life in the Strip.
Whenever the Israeli public is called upon to discuss the
fate of the Gaza Strip, the debate tends to focus on the question of who will
control the territory after the war. In recent weeks, this debate, too, seems
to have been sidelined by the escalating war on Lebanon and the Iranian
threat.
Gaza’s fate, however, is not limited to questions of
sovereignty or control, but to the very existence of life. Indeed, two recent
publications that focused on Gaza’s health system sharply illustrate how much
the current catastrophe challenges the very possibility of sustaining life in
the territory.
At the end of September, the Palestinian Ministry of Health
in Gaza issued a document that,
for the first time, comprehensively details the damage to hospitals in the
Strip over a year of war. The novelty of the report is not in the new information
it brings, but rather in the aggregation of over 100 incidents that were
reported in real time in the international and Arab media, as well as in
periodic reports by international humanitarian organizations, into one
document. It thus pieces together the gradual disintegration of Gaza’s health
system, the direct and indirect causes of which are the responsibility of
Israel and its army.
Meanwhile, on Oct. 2, 99 American medical professionals who
volunteered in Gaza during the war for a cumulative 254 weeks issued a public letter to
U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, presenting a stark
picture of the health of the civilian population in the Strip. These professionals
— some with extensive experience providing medical relief in war zones and
after natural disasters — said that the situation in Gaza was much worse than
anything they had encountered before, including in Afghanistan or Ukraine.
A few days after the letter’s publication, we spoke
separately with three of the signatories to get more detailed, first-hand
accounts of the state of Gaza’s health system. Their insights are shared here
alongside those of the documents above.
Doctors and patients begin to flee from the European Hospital
as the Israeli army requested an evacuation to begin a new military operation
east of the city of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 2, 2024.
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Easing suffering before death
The picture that emerges from the two documents and our
conversations with doctors shows the fatal blow dealt to Gaza’s entire health
system and infrastructure.
Only a few echoes of this disintegration reach the Israeli
media; in fact, the absence of these reports from the Israeli public discourse
creates the impression inside Israel that the early warnings of famine and
epidemics in Gaza have not materialized. Moreover, the only number that is
discussed is that of fatalities of Israeli attacks (over 43,061 Palestinians as of writing) —
a number that excludes deaths from disease, starvation, and the poor health of
the population after a year of war.
An examination of the data and testimonies, however, reveals
the scope of the harm to the general Palestinian population, and particularly
the lives of the most vulnerable — infants and toddlers, pregnant women, the
elderly, and the chronically ill.
For example, the medical professionals who signed the letter
to Biden and Harris estimate that it is likely that the death toll in
Gaza since the beginning of the war exceeds 118,908. The letter explicitly
states that, with marginal exceptions, the entire population of Gaza is sick
and/or injured, and almost all children under the age of 5 whom the doctors
encountered suffered from coughing and diarrhea.
In a survey
conducted by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American surgeon who returned from Gaza, in
conjunction with The New York Times, 63 of 65 American health care workers who
volunteered in Gaza described severe malnutrition among patients, Palestinian
health workers, and the general population. In addition, 52 medical
professionals described near-universal mental distress among young children,
noting that they had seen some who were suicidal or hoping to die. One of the
nurses said that the children did not respond to pain, even while they were
being stitched up after being wounded.
Palestinians injured in an Israeli airstirke at the Buraij
refugee camp brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the Gaza
Strip, September 7, 2024. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)
The doctors’ letter states that all medical personnel who
worked in Gaza’s emergency rooms, intensive care units (ICU), or surgical wards
said that they regularly treated small children who were shot in the head or
chest. Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency physician from Seattle who returned from
Gaza in September, told us that while working in the ICU of Nasser Hospital in
Khan Younis such injuries were very common, and that in some cases, all she and
the staff could do was to ease their patients’ suffering and let them die. In
her words:
The majority of my patients were anywhere from six months old
to early 20s. Most of them were on the lower end of that spectrum. There was a
day where we had nothing but gunshot wounds to the head reported to be
quadcopters by witnesses. And there was nothing to do for most of them. They
were in palliative care because their injuries were so devastating that we had
to just let them die. There must’ve been about eight patients that day in our
Trauma Bay.
In Dr. Sidhwa’s survey, 44
medical professionals reported that they had seen multiple such cases during
their stay in Gaza.
An
intentional pattern
The medical professionals’ letter places the blame for the
systematic and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health system on Israel.
Indeed, considering all the information regarding the state of the Strip’s
hospitals, one clearly sees an intentional pattern. Hospitals and clinics were
repeatedly hit by aerial bombardment; have suffered from a shortage of
electricity and diesel fuel for generators; have been encircled by tanks; saw
their medical staff and patients expelled as part of the evacuation of an
entire area; and in some cases, were turned into military bases.
As of late October,
20 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza were out of service, while 16 were only
partially functional. Of the 11 field hospitals, half are only partially
functional. The number of hospital beds across the Strip dropped by 75 percent
(from approximately 3,400 at the beginning of the war to around 1,200 in late
September), just as the need for them increased due to the large number of
wounded, the severe shortage of medicines and medical equipment, and the
near-universal spread of infectious diseases.
The sequence of data and dates provided by the Gaza Health
Ministry’s report indicates a series of bombings in the first two weeks of the
war that shut down several hospitals, mainly in the northern Strip; it also
notes the takeover of hospital compounds in November, followed by the de facto
shutdown of all hospitals in northern Gaza and most hospitals in Gaza City.
Doctors and patients begin to flee from the European Hospital
as the Israeli army requested an evacuation to begin a new military operation
east of the city of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 2, 2024.
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital made headlines in
mid-October 2023 following an explosion that killed hundreds of men, women, and
children who found shelter there. Although the question of responsibility for
the blast remains disputed, the incident and the ensuing debates set a precedent
by normalizing attacks on hospitals in an unprecedented manner.
During November 2023 alone, 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were
put out of service temporarily or permanently. Al-Shifa Hospital was raided
twice by the army, in November 2023 and March 2024. While Israeli media chose
to focus on a Hamas tunnel and a number of militants in Al-Shifa compound,
international media reported on the massive destruction to the hospital and the
severe damage to its ability to function, resulting in its complete destruction
in the second raid. The second raid also led to the discovery of mass graves, some of which
had been dug by Gazans during an earlier siege of the hospital, and some of
which were dug while the military took over the compound.
Another wave of attacks on hospitals in the southern Gaza
Strip followed the takeover of the city of Rafah in May 2024. In some cases,
staff and patients were forced to leave hospital compounds, while others were
shelled or bombed. Some hospitals were completely destroyed or converted for
use as military outposts.
In early October 2024, the military ordered three hospitals in northern Gaza to
evacuate once more as part of a broader move to expel the entire civilian
population from the north (the so-called “Generals’ Plan”). This raised the alarm
among at least 38 humanitarian
organizations, which highlighted the harm caused to the medical system,
and the UN Human Rights Office,
which called the situation “desperate.” Israeli commentators havesimilarlyexpressed alarm
toward what appears to be ethnic cleansing.
‘Either the baby dies because of no
ventilator, or because of infection’
A series of monthly publications by the Palestinian Health
Ministry, as well as periodic reports by the World Health Organization (WHO)
and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), further
present the long-term consequences of the destruction of medical services in the
Strip.
Palestinians mourn the death of people killed in an Israeli
airstrike outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip,
September 21, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
According to the UN,
1,047 Palestinian medical personnel have been killed and 310 have been arrested
during the war — a reality that places an even greater strain on local medical
teams. The medical professionals’ letter states that their local Palestinian
colleagues were aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them
as targets, and that many of them were arrested, abused, and taken to detention
facilities in Israel before being returned to Gaza by the military. Many told
their American colleagues that they were simply waiting to die.
Many medical staff have not received their salaries for
months. A great number of them have lost family members, yet continue to come
to work. Many live in tents near the hospitals, or walk daily — sometimes for
hours — from the family tent to the hospitals.
Thousands of the over 100,000 wounded have had their limbs
amputated, at a time in which the Gaza Strip does not have crutches or
wheelchairs, let alone prosthetic limbs, to serve amputees. Meanwhile, children
who are injured require a series of surgeries that they cannot receive in the
current state of Gaza’s health system. All of these findings were backed up by
the medical professionals’ letter and by eyewitness accounts we collected.
The destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has drastic
implications for its ability to maintain a functioning health system. Of the 16
operating hospitals, only four have a full supply of water and sewage services,
while only two have regular electricity.
The consequences are obvious: without electricity, it is
impossible to operate oxygen machines or keep medicines refrigerated. Without
basic sanitation, the danger lies in contracting deadly diseases even inside
the hospital. The medical professionals’ letter states that they have found
cases of jaundice in almost all the hospital rooms where they volunteered, and
among the Gaza medical staff.
Due to severe shortages of soap and detergents throughout the
Strip — in Dr. Sidhwa’s survey, 64 out of 65 respondents said that even the
most basic medical equipment, such as soap and gloves, were usually unavailable
— the surgical environment could not be disinfected, leading to high death
rates from infections.
Members of the Jordanian field hospital install prosthetic
limbs for Palestinian amputees injured during the war, in Khan Younis, in the
southern Gaza Strip, September 17, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
In a conversation with us, pediatrician Dr. Aman Odeh, who
worked in Rafah during March, before the Rafah crossing to Egypt was closed,
testified that soap bottles in the operating room contained only a small amount
of liquid soap that had been diluted with water. In the absence of detergents,
the ventilator tube in the neonatal ward was not disinfected between uses,
leading to the spread of infections and mortality among premature babies. Dr.
Odeh describes the scenes she saw:
There was a newborn in the neonatal ICU who was deteriorating
very quickly no matter what we tried. We tried the strongest antibiotics, but
we were not able to control the infection. That was a day when we were able to
get a blood culture bottle from another place at the hospital. After the baby
passed away, they were able to identify what type of bacteria it was. It was a
multidrug resistant bacteria. But then the next day, other babies were showing
similar patterns. We didn’t have hand sanitizer. The soap bottle was a tiny bit
of soap and old water. We didn’t have gloves. The infections were spreading so
quickly.
A baby who was very, very sick, needed to be on a ventilator.
After the baby passed away, what are we going to do with that ventilator? There
is no way to sanitize the ventilator and get rid of that multidrug-resistant
bacteria. We also didn’t have tubing to change when we used the ventilator for
another baby. So there is a very big chance that you’re going to spread the
infection to other babies: so either the baby dies because there is no
ventilator or the baby dies because of the bacterial infection. Your options
were tragically limited.
Dr. Syed told us that while she was in Gaza, a shipment of
soap arrived, but the price of a small bottle rose to $40. One nurse said
she saw more maggots in wounds in one day in Gaza than she had seen in her
entire career as a wound specialist.
Lethal combinations
The medical professionals’ letter notes that a high
percentage of the incisions in their surgeries were contaminated. Dr. Thalia
Pachiyannakis, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Indiana, told us that
hospitals cut down on their air conditioning to save fuel, resulting in her
performing operations at Nasser Hospital at 40° Celsius (104°Fahrenheit), so
that sweat from her forehead and the foreheads of the other medical personnel
dripped into the wounds of the patients they were operating on.
The letter indicates that the surgeries, including cesarean
sections, were performed without anesthesia or pain relief. Afterward, women
were given only paracetamol to treat their pain.
Dr. Pachiyannakis also spoke about the lack of clean water
for herself as an international volunteer, which caused her and the rest of the
medical staff to become ill. “We were also very sick. You get sick with
diarrhea, then you get better, then you get it again, and you’re vomiting. Once
I was vomiting and had diarrhea at the same time,” she told us.
Palestinians donate blood at the Kuwait Field Hospital in
cooperation with the European Gaza Hospital, west of Rafah, in the southern
Gaza Strip, September 5, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
For young children born malnourished and who are fed formula
made with contaminated water, this condition becomes life-threatening;
according to the medical professionals’ letter, many have died as a result.
Twenty-five medical professionals interviewed for the survey said they saw
babies who had been born healthy return to hospitals and die of dehydration,
malnutrition, or infections.
Dr. Odeh testified that other babies, whose mothers were
unable to breastfeed them due to malnutrition and did not receive adequate
nutrition due to a lack of formula and lack of clean water, received an
infusion at the hospital but were returned home with the same condition that
led to their hospitalization.
The numerous testimonies emphasize the chronic lack of
equipment inside Gaza. The three doctors we spoke with testified that the
Israeli military forbade them from bringing medical equipment they had
purchased themselves into Gaza. In the delivery rooms where Dr. Odeh worked
there was only one ventilator, while in the delivery rooms where Dr.
Pachiyannakis worked, there was no refrigerator, which left the food
contaminated.
There’s no clean water, no pain medicine for women in labor,
the labor beds are broken. There’s only one warmer for the newborns, so when
they’re born they’re all put together in one warmer. And there’s only one
machine for monitoring a baby, so if a baby is having bad heart tones, you
cannot pick it up because there’s only one working machine. So there would be
fetal deaths.
One of the nurses reported that
nearly all of the new children admitted during her time in Gaza died, and that
these deaths could have been prevented with proper nutrition, basic
disinfectants, and adequate supplies.
As of the end of September, only 17 of the 113 dialysis units
that were present in the northern Gaza Strip on the eve of the war remained
operational, compared to 72 out of 178 in the south.
In their letter, the medical professionals worried that
thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition,
disease, and the inability to receive proper treatment, and that tens of
thousands more could die in the coming months due to winter conditions in Gaza.
Most of the dead, they warn, will be small children whose immune systems are
weaker than those of adults.
View of Al-Aqsa Hospital premature babies section after it
was evacuated, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, August 27, 2024. (Abed Rahim
Khatib/Flash90)
Unconvincing legal claims
In a recent policy paper
for the Institute for Palestine Studies, the scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve
Gordon argued that Israel very broadly interprets the reservation in
international law regarding the protection of hospitals. According to
international law, hospitals can be attacked only if combat activity is carried
out from within the hospital itself, and provided that the attack is
proportionate and done out of genuine military necessity, and provided that the
combat force protects the lives of non-combatants.
Testimonies describing Israel’s attacks on hospitals, the
expulsion of all their inhabitants, and the exposure of mass graves clearly
indicate non-compliance with these legal conditions. These, in turn, connect to
the larger picture of the nature of the military operation in the Gaza Strip
and the dire humanitarian situation arising from it, many details of which have
been published on +972.
Perugini and Gordon propose an amendment to international law
that would prohibit attacks on hospitals under any circumstances. The
widespread impact on all hospitals in Gaza, however, cannot wait for such a
change to unfold. And in light of the abundant evidence accumulated over the
past year, Israel’s arguments for meeting the reservations set forth in
international legal conventions are not convincing.
An independent UN commission of
inquiry on damage to the Strip’s health infrastructure published in
September found that Israel’s actions are part of a deliberate policy that
constitutes a crime against humanity, including in the form of extermination
and torture. The
report’s authors found no support for most of Israel’s claims about Hamas’
military use of hospitals, noting that Israel did not pass on information to
the report’s authors, despite requesting such information nine times.
The
destruction of the health system presents a bleak picture of Gaza’s present,
let alone its future. A war that destroys hospitals and does not allow for the
establishment of a suitable alternative is a war against a civilian population,
one that is now plagued by disease and starvation. Any discussion of the war in
the present or the “day after” must therefore take an honest and direct look at
the immediate consequences of Israel’s policies for its victims.
Liat Kozma
is a professor in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and is
in charge of the Harry Friedenwald Chair in the History of Medicine at the
Hebrew University.
Lee
Mordechai is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the Hebrew
University.
Injured Palestinians receive
treatment inside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after being targeted by Israeli
occupation forces, April 22, 2024. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images)
Since the
beginning of the war, I have volunteered as an emergency doctor in Gaza to help
my people. Over more than a year, I have witnessed countless horrors and been
repeatedly displaced by Israeli bombardments and invasion. I have lost loved
ones, seen patients die in horrific ways, and feared for my own life — and yet,
even in the darkest moments, I have found glimpses of light.
Awaiting
death in Al-Shifa
From the
very beginning, the situation at al-Shifa hospital
in Gaza City was catastrophic. There weren’t enough beds for the wounded, who
were scattered everywhere. Dead bodies piled up in a “martyrs tent” in the
hospital courtyard.
On November 9,
2023, I found among the martyrs my cousin, his wife, and their two little
daughters. Their bodies were torn into unrecognizable pieces, victims of the
indiscriminate Israeli shelling that ravaged their neighborhood. I didn’t
realize it was them until I saw their ID cards, which had fallen from the
remnants of their tattered clothes.
It was a
scene drenched in heartbreak — a cruel mosaic of innocence and tragedy.
Unable to
distinguish one from the other, we laid them to rest together, wrapped in a
single shroud, as if even death could not separate their bond. The silence that
followed was deafening, but their loss echoed in every corner of my soul.
In November
2023, Israel barred entry of fuel, food, and water into Gaza, as Israeli forces
besieged Al-Shifa. In the hospital, some of us drank saline solution we found
in the storage room to survive.
Hospital
officials pleaded with the Israeli military to allow patients to evacuate. As
soon as this happened, the electricity was cut off, leaving medical staff trapped
for two days, surrounded by the enemy, awaiting death.
We were
gathered in a dark reception in total silence, surrounded only by the sounds of
gunfire, tanks, and shelling. I remember missing my family, who had already
evacuated to southern Gaza at the time. I had no way of contacting them, and I
didn’t know if I would ever see them again.
Suddenly,
one of the doctors started singing Sawfa Nabqa Huna
(We will stay here), a song about life and its beauty. I think he wanted to
distract us, and himself, from the fear. His voice was beautiful as he sang the
words: “We will stay here until the pain disappears, we will live here, and the
melody will become beautiful, my homeland, my homeland.”
We
eventually evacuated the hospital, taken away in ambulances. Before we cleared
the area, we were searched by Israeli soldiers, who detained several senior
doctors.
New places,
same horror
When I
reached the south, I immediately went to find my family. While I felt happiness
and safety finally being reunited with them, I could feel a familiar sadness,
almost like it was lodged in my throat. After the time I spent in al-Shifa,
after witnessing what was happening to my homeland, I was filled with a painful
sense of loss. I spent that day hiding so no one would see me cry. I wondered:
what is left of martyrs after death? Bones and memories, are those all that
remains of a person? Who inherits their fear, anxiety, and sadness?
As soon as I
got to Khan Younis, I began to work at Nasser hospital.
It was a different place, but there I witnessed the same horror.
One
heartbreaking scene remains etched in my mind. A pregnant woman lay on the
floor, her abdomen open, her intestines and liver exposed. A doctor fought to
save her, but both she and her unborn child were lost. The blood, the screams,
and the tragedy froze me in place.
How could a
child who had yet to see life die alongside his mother? How could a mother
leave the world without holding her baby?
That baby
became just another number in an unimaginable toll. All we can hope is that
they rest together in peace.
Eventually,
the Israeli military also reached Nasser hospital. In March, we were evacuated
again and I went to work at al-Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah.
On March 25,
2024, while I was on duty at al-Kuwaiti, the reality of war hit me in the
cruelest way. At around 1:00 am, bodies of martyrs were brought to the
hospital, victims of the relentless bombardment. Among them was Razan Mohammed
Barhoum — a 24-year-old medical graduate, my friend, my classmate, my sister in
spirit. Razan Barhoum (left) and Dr. Shurooq Ahmed (right). (Photo courtesy of
Dr. Shurooq Ahmed).
Razan, who
had memorized the Qur’an and was in the first few months of her pregnancy after
a long struggle to conceive, had been killed in her sleep, alongside others in
her family, when their home was bombed.
I will never
forget the moment I wrapped her body in a shroud with my own hands, tears
streaming down my face. She was not just a friend; she was an example of grace
and resilience, someone who balanced her duties as a wife, student, and
soon-to-be mother with extraordinary strength.
The morgue
was filled with dozens of martyrs, placed in a special tent awaiting burial. As
I said my final goodbye to Razan, I couldn’t reconcile with the fact that this
was the last time I would see her.
Light in
the midst of darkness
I wish this
had been the final displacement.
In April,
after Israeli forces invaded Rafah, I fled to Deir al-Balah, where I joined the
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Since then, I have been a volunteer doctor in its
emergency department.
One
unforgettable moment happened in October 2024 while I was leaving work and
heading back to the tent where I stay with my family near the hospital. I heard
someone shouting, “Doctor Shurooq! The head is coming out!” A photo of baby
Shurooq, born in a tent in Deir al-Balah, and named after Dr. Shurooq Ahmed,
the doctor who delivered her/ (Photo courtesy of Dr. Shurooq Ahmed)
Grabbing my
emergency kit, I rushed to the woman’s tent and delivered a healthy baby girl
with only the tools I had on hand. Thankfully, both mother and baby were safe,
and everything went smoothly. It was a proud and grateful moment, a bright
light in the midst of darkness.
Her mother
named her Shurooq, like me.
This moment
illuminated the darkness within me and filled my heart with a glimmer of hope.
It made me feel that my existence holds meaning, that we are more than just
numbers on a screen. In my hands, I felt the miracle of new life being born — a
profound reminder that even amidst the shadows of despair, there is still
light, purpose, and the beauty of renewal.
Doctors,
babies, oxygen stores already attacked by Israel, now most desperately sick and
wounded are targeted
The
intensive care unit (ICU) at Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza is in flames
and completely out of service after what hospital staff describe as a ‘night of
horror’ under Israeli bombs and shells. The hospital has been a frequent target
for occupation forces, killing babies
and medical staff– including the hospital’s ICU
head– and destroying vital medicine and oxygen stores. More than
sixty patients are said to be still trapped inside the unit; the precise number
of casualties is unknown, but dozens are said to have been killed and more than
fifty wounded.
Dr Hussam
Abu Safiyeh, Kamal Adwan director, on the attack.
While UK
media have remained silent on the attack, Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera has
covered it:
Staff
described last night as a ‘night of horror’:
Medical
staff in the UK and Ireland have called on their governments to take urgent
action against Israel’s war crimes against their colleagues and their patients
in Palestine. Neither UK PM Keir Starmer nor Foreign Secretary David Lammy have
mentioned, let alone condemned, Israel’s war on Gaza’s hospitals, doctors and
sick.
The hospital
has been under intense Israeli military bombardment for days, with its
intensive care unit coming under direct fire.
The
Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas has condemned the Israeli military’s
ongoing assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, describing it as an “unprecedented crime against humanity.”
“The occupation army
continues its relentless bombing and systematic destruction of northern Gaza,
focusing particularly on the Jabalia refugee camp and Beit Lahia,”
Hamas said
on Sunday, according to the Anadolu news agency.
“The strikes are targeting
residential areas, shelters, schools and especially Kamal Adwan Hospital,” it
added.
The hospital
has been under intense Israeli military bombardment for days, with its
intensive care unit coming under direct fire. On Sunday, the hospital, which is
caring for critically ill patients, was ordered to evacuate.
Hamas called
this “a crime of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement under the shadow of
international silence and inaction.”
The movement
appealed to Arab and Islamic nations as well as governments and global entities
to take immediate action using all means to support the Palestinian people,
protect holy sites and liberate their land from occupation, Anadolu reported.
‘Without
Warning’
On Monday,
the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, shared footage
documenting the Israel army placing explosive-laden robots at the gates of the
facility.
This follows
an earlier urgent video message in which Dr. Abu Safiya said that the hospital
had come under heavy shelling and direct sniper fire.
He said that
“without warning” the hospital’s intensive care unit, the neonatal unit, the
maternity ward, and all other hospital departments were being “bombarded by the
occupation forces.”
The army was
using “all kinds of weapons, snipers, tanks and quadcopter drones,” he stated.
‘Critically Ill Patients’
“This is a disaster, we are
currently the only hospital still providing humanitarian services in northern
Gaza,” he warned, adding that evacuating meant “displacing 66 patients,
removing all hospital equipment, and evacuating all medical staff.”
Video
footage captured
critically ill patients in the ICU and neonatal ward, as well as patients seen sheltering in
the hospital corridors amid heavy bombardment.
“We hold the world
responsible for what is happening, we hold the world accountable for ignoring
our pleas as we have been calling on them for more than 70 days to protect this
healthcare system but unfortunately, no one is responding,” he stated.
‘A Big
Crime’
In an interview with
the Al-Jazeera Arabic channel, Dr. Muneer Alboursh, Director-General of Gaza’s
Ministry of Health, said the hospital “now
has no lighting except from solar power in the morning.”
He described
Israel’s demand for the hospital to be evacuated as “a big crime.”
Alboursh shared a photo on
his X page of a person lying amidst rubble and destruction of buildings. The
caption stated that a “citizen was targeted and burned in front of the gate of
Kamal Adwan Hospital,” according to a Google translation.
Ongoing
Genocide
Meanwhile,
the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip continued with the death toll among
starved and besieged Palestinian civilians rising daily.
Currently on
trial before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for genocide against
Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7,
2023.
According to
Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 45,259 Palestinians have, to date, been killed, and 107,627
wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead
under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Israel says
that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood
Operation on October 7. However, Israeli media published reports suggesting
that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.
Millions Displaced
Palestinian
and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and
wounded are women and children.
The Israeli
war has resulted in an acute famine resulting in the death of many
Palestinians, mostly children.
The Israeli military is targeting Gaza’s
Kamal Adwan Hospital, Indonesian Hospital and al-Awda Hospital.
Al Jazeera English
The Israeli
military is targeting three major hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip as
doctors and authorities in the enclave request immediate intervention by the
international community.
On Tuesday,
weeklong Israeli attacks intensified on the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital and
Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, and the al-Awda Hospital located east of
the Jabalia refugee camp.
Two explosive-laden unmanned robotic vehicles planted earlier by
the Israeli military blew up in the vicinity of Kamal Adwan in the early hours
of Tuesday, wounding approximately 20 patients and medical staff, hospital
director Hussam Abu Safia told Al Jazeera.
The death toll from the bombing carried out by Israeli drones on the tents of the displaced in the Al-Mawasi area (west of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip) has risen to seven. pic.twitter.com/GsgTfibyxW
This was the first time Israeli forces used the
explosives outside Kamal Adwan, but there have been similar reports of them
being used to detonate buildings in northern Gaza.
Reporting
from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said,
“An eyewitness told us that much of the area around
the hospital has been cleared from buildings, the infrastructure destroyed and
severely damaged, impeding movement in and out of the hospital.”
The hospital
has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, rendering various
departments, including the intensive care unit, inoperable.
Repeated Attacks (Al Jazeera)
Al-Awda, a
charitable facility providing free healthcare in the northern part of the
enclave, was hit on its third floor by the Israeli military on Tuesday. Parts
of the building caught fire, which also spread to nearby residential buildings.
The
Indonesian Hospital, a larger health facility that also been experiencing
increased attacks, was threatened by the Israeli forces to evacuate the entire
facility.
Munir
Al-Bursh, director of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, said the Israeli army had
ordered hospital officials to evacuate it on Monday, before storming it in the
early hours of Tuesday and forcing those inside to leave.
Al Jazeera’s
Mahmoud said the two hospitals have been providing medical supplies to besieged
Kamal Adwan and also transferring patients out of there when possible.
“The Indonesian Hospital has been crippled by the
attacks in the past few months. Much of the facility has been damaged, forcing
many to evacuate it. As of midnight, the Israeli military issued a warning to
everyone inside the hospital, including the patients, to leave the building and
be in the streets in the cold weather amid the intimidation by the tanks and
quadcopters,” he said.
Hospital
directors, health authorities and rights organisations inside and outside Gaza
have been condemning the attacks and calling for international help, but the
situation in the north has only deteriorated.
Gaza’s
Health Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the Israeli military is
trying to put all three hospitals in the north out of service, and appealed for
intervention.
The
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said more than 20 attacks on Kamal
Adwan Hospital in recent days using drones, shelling and gunfire show that
“genocide persists” in Gaza.
Aid
delivery ‘almost impossible’
The Israeli
military continues to launch numerous deadly air raids on Gaza each day, with
medical sources confirming on Tuesday there were at least 32 deaths in the past
24 hours.
Some of the
latest Israeli attacks included the bombing of a house in central Gaza that
killed four, including a child and two women.
The Israeli
military has kept blocking humanitarian aid bound for the enclave, with the
chaos created by its ground offensive presenting myriad challenges for safely
getting the meagre trucks coming in to designated locations, aid groups say.
On Monday
night, an Israeli drone attack hit an area approximately 1km away from Al-Aqsa
Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, targeting a humanitarian aid convoy.
Al Jazeera’s
Mahmoud, reporting from the hospital, said the Israeli military first allowed
gangs to attack the convoy with the aim of looting it, to later launch a drone
attack against security guards trying to protect the cargo.
“These seem to be deliberate attacks to cause more
mayhem. Israel has killed 30 of these security guards so far.”
Tom
Fletcher, the head of the United Nations humanitarian agency (OCHA), said in a year
when more humanitarians have been killed than any on record, Gaza is currently
dealing with its most dangerous situation yet.
“As a result, despite the massive humanitarian needs,
it has become almost impossible to deliver even a fraction of the aid that is
so urgently required. The Israeli authorities continue to deny us meaningful
access – over 100 requests to access North Gaza were denied since 6 October. We
are also now seeing the breakdown of law and order and the systematic armed
looting of our supplies by local gangs.”
Please Join Me in Protesting Against Israel’s Racist Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli this Friday 5.30 pm, Swiss Cottage
Hin & Ajam on their treatment as captives in Gaza – compare this to Israel’s torture of Palestinian captives
This Friday I will again be speaking at the weekly picket outside Hotoveli’s residence in Swiss Cottage. I intend to elaborate on my comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany in the light of the destruction of Kamal Adwan hospital and the torture and murder of its doctors including its Director, Dr Hussam Abu-Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients or fellow doctors.
On Friday October 4th I was one of four Jewish speakers at the protest outside the Israeli Ambassador’s residence at Swiss Cottage. At the end of the protest I was arrested by the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police for a ‘racially aggravated’ offence.
What they were effectively accusing me, as a Jewish person? Anti-Semitism! You couldn’t make it up. Being racists, the Met Police think in strictly racist terms. Jews are therefore expected to support the ‘Jewish state’ and if they don’t they must be anti-Semitic! Such is the way that simple minds work.
This mentality found its absurd culmination in the decision of the Met to ‘protect’ the Jewish Bloc on the 9 December Palestine demonstration in London. The Police have a colonial attitude to policing society. They divide people into racial categories. So the Palestine demonstrations must be inherently anti-Jewish. They can’t get their heads around the fact that many Jews are anti-Zionist.
On October 4 the police objected to my comparing the Zionists to the Nazis and in particular my reference to a Jewish Chronicle article some 5 years ago in which I was reported as saying that Israel is ‘Hitler’s bastard offspring’ .
What the Met were doing was turning the ‘non-legally binding’ IHRA definition of anti-Semitism into a criminal offence. One of the illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the IHRA is:
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Today it is more obvious than ever that Israel and Nazi Germany share the same racial supremacist ideology and practice.
On 13 November I was informed, after having been held for several hours in a cell, that I was not going to be charged. I have instructed solicitors to bring a claim for wrongful arrest and unlawful imprisonment.
October
4th was, although the Police were not aware of it, the 88th
anniversary of the Battle of
Cable Street when
up to 200,000 people, including Jewish and non-Jewish workers, prevented the
Metropolitan Police from allowing the British Union of Fascists and National
Socialists marching through the Jewish East End of London.
The Board of Deputies, Zionists and Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to allow the anti-Semites and fascists to march - and the police did their best to help them
East End Jews ignored the call from the Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies and the Zionists for Jews to stay at home and let the fascists and British Nazis march. The Zionists, who today run the Jewish Supremacist State of Israel, have never fought genuine anti-Semitism, which is hatred or hostility to Jews as Jews. Instead they have redefined anti-Semitism as hostility to the State of Israel.
It is no surprise that the Metropolitan Police, which is as racist as their predecessors, therefore arrested me. Whereas the Met in the 1930s was riddled with supporters of the British Union of Fascists and in the 70s and 80s had large numbers of supporters of the National Front, today they fall over themselves to support Jewish racial supremacists, i.e. the Zionists.
Two weeks after I was arrested Professor Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli anti-Zionist was also arrested and held overnight in Holborn Police Station. Haim is suffering from cancer but despite this was kept in a cold cell all night, not given access to his medication and abused by police officers. The police are not proceeding with charges again him either.
Whilst I was awaiting to hear whether I would be charged I had restrictive bail conditions imposed on me preventing me attending the weekly picket outside Hotoveli’s residence and also taking part in any Palestine solidarity demonstration in London.
After successfully appealing against my bail conditions
I appealed against these bail conditions and on 1 November at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court I succeeded in having the ban on me attending Palestine solidarity demonstrations in London lifted.
Dr Abu-Safiya has according to accounts from fellow prisoners been whipped with an electric cable before being taken to Israel’s main torture camp, Sde Teiman.
Israel’s bombing and destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital, its murder of doctors, its torture of doctors and its forcible evacuation of patients is a war crime. YET THAT PITIFUL, PATHETIC WAR CRIMINAL, KEIR STARMER, HAS SAID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
We should
perhaps remind ourselves that when Israel’s hostages were released in October
23 as part of an exchange for Palestinian prisoners, many of them testified
about how humane their Hamas captors had been. Yocheved Lifshitz 85 gave a
press conference at Ichilov Hospital, where she was taken to, explaining why
she shook hands with her captors. Other
prisoners also testified as to their
humane treatment.
Avi Shoshan, the hospital employee who facilitated
the press conference was immediately suspended and forced to resign, because as
Ha’aretz explained:
Her statements caused an uproar in Israel, with some
government and diplomatic figures accusing the conference organizers of
damaging the country's advocacy efforts by portraying a positive image of
Hamas.
In other
words telling the truth about what actually happened when Israel’s hostages
were in captivity, that Hamas were not monsters like most Israelis, was ‘damaging’ Israel’s propaganda, sorry ‘advocacy efforts’.
And there you have it. Everything
about October 7 is a propaganda narrative.
Truth doesn’t come into it as was show by the false story of beheaded
babies. The fact that Hamas treated its captives well compared to Israel’s torture
of prisoners, is simply disregarded.
Another hostage, Danielle Aloni, said her 5 year
old daughter Emilia, “felt like a queen.” Not one Palestinian prisoner has said the
same about their treatment. On the contrary about 70 prisoners have died
under torture including Dr Adnan al-Bursh who was literally raped to death by
the beasts who ran the facility.
These monsters even went on Israeli TV to boast of their deeds and 65% of Israelis said that they opposed their prosecution. When there were attempts at arresting them, the Military Police were attacked by hundreds of far-right demonstrators, including members of the Knesset. Meir Ben-Shitrit, the chief rapist even became a media star.
Israel is a depraved society run by corrupt monsters like Netanyahu. Yet Biden and Starmer are happy to turn a blind eye and repeat ad nauseum that Israel is the Middle East’s ‘only democracy’
It is because most ordinary people see through these lies that the Metropolitan Police see it as their duty to try and prevent free speech by arresting those who call the war criminals out.
This Friday I will explain to the demonstration and any police who happen to attend, just why comparisons between Israel, Zionism and the Nazis is valid. That after all is what my book was about. And the police, above all, need educating!
Berlin's Jewish Hospital after liberation from the Nazis
I will end with this thought. Whereas Israel has attacked every single hospital in Gaza and destroyed most of them, even the Nazis left untouched the Jewish hospital in Berlin to the end of the war. What does that say about Zionism?
Below is the Speech I Would Have Made When Challenging the Police to
Arrest Me Again
Last night I posted a blog
advertising a speech I was going to give at the picket of Tzipi Hotoveli on
Friday evening. Tonight I received an email from Sam Weinstein of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
(IJAN) withdrawing that invitation. You can judge for yourselves whether the
reasons given were the real reasons and whether IJAN
feared that events were getting out of their control. I have saved both emails here.
In the last few days, our researchers at Fake Reporter alongside @HablocOrg have been monitoring far-right groups on Whatsapp and Telegram.
We saw how civilians are organizing and arming themselves, in order to violently attacks Arab businesses and civilians.
— פייק ריפורטר | FakeReporter (@FakeReporter) May 13, 2021
The alleged reason for the cancellation
concerns my refusal to get involved, despite considerable pressure, in the case
of alleged harassment of an Israeli activist which dates back many years. I was
accused of taking the side of the alleged harasser, which I reject, but
nonetheless I confess that I have wrestled with the issue. I have taken the
advice of others not to make any further comment on it.
What is important though is the issue
of the Metropolitan Police implementing the ‘illustration’ of anti-Semitism in
the Zionists’ IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli
policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic. At a time of genocide this
and only this, is what matters, not an arcane personal dispute.
Below is what would have been my
speech to the picket/ demonstration next Friday.
I am only going to provide a few links,
not only because of the time it takes but because, if I had made the speech, I
would not have given any links!
Why comparisons between Israel’s
holocaust in Gaza and the Nazi holocaust are valid and relevant
Comrades,
Three months ago, on October 4 2023,
I was arrested at this demonstration by the institutionally racist Metropolitan
Police for a ‘racially aggravated’ public order offence. In essence I was being
accused of anti-Semitism for having compared the Zionist holocaust in Gaza to the
Nazi holocaust. Comparing the Nazi treatment of Jews to Israel’s treatment of
the Palestinians is now deemed by the Met to be ‘anti-Semitic’.
Despite being arrested, held for 7
hours in a cell and subject to restrictive bail conditions, I was informed 7
weeks later that the Crown Prosecution Service were not going to charge me. No
doubt even the CPS could see the absurdity of charging someone who is Jewish with
‘anti-Semitism’!
People often say to me that even if
allegations of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis is true it is better not to
mention them for fear of giving unnecessary offence to Jewish people. My response
is simple. We will never understand why Israel behaves the way it does unless
we understand Zionism, the ideology that governs the actions of the Israeli state
– its ethnic cleansing, its desire to ‘cleanse’ Gaza of the Palestinians and
now its deliberate and targeted extermination of Palestinian civilians.
Bear in mind that even the
terminology of the Israeli state today when it talks of ‘cleansing’ Gaza is
identical to Nazi descriptions of ‘cleansing’
areas of Jews.
The Nazi holocaust against the Jews is
being used today to justify Israel’s holocaust of the Palestinians. In the words of Gideon Levy, a Ha’aretz columnist:
I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and
say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a
school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said,
Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of
Auschwitz.
People often say that Israelis are
suffering from an ‘inter-generational holocaust trauma’. My response is no. What they are suffering
from is a settler-colonial trauma. The fear that the indigenous population that
they have oppressed so long will rise up against them.
The slave owners in the Caribbean and
the American colonies suffered from a similar trauma and their reaction to
slave uprisings was not dissimilar to that of Israel’s reaction to October 7.
The Zionists have magnified October 7
out of all proportion. They have said that this was the largest slaughter of Jews
since the holocaust. In fact the largest death of Jews since the holocaust was
under the Argentinian Junta (1976-83) which tortured to death 3,000 Jews, up to
12.5% of those who disappeared.
Israel doesn’t mention what happened
in Argentina however because at the time it was arming and training the Argentine
military. It even refused visas to Argentine Jews because they were ‘the wrong sort of Jew’, a phrase you may
have heard recently.
This is however a particularly
noxious and racist comparison. Jews in Nazi Germany were killed because they were Jews. Israelis were killed on October 7 because
they were occupiers not because they were Jews.
Israeli deaths on October 7 pale in
comparison with Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza.
In Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 some 2,200 Palestinians,
including 515 children, were killed.
Death of Israelis on October 7 were 1139, half of this. It is estimated that since the Nakba some 134,000 Palestinians
and Arabs have been killed.
On 7 October 400 of the dead were
soldiers and police and therefore legitimate targets. Because of Israel’s
Hannibal Directive, which mandates that it’s better to kill your own people if
they are taken hostage rather than allow them to be swapped for prisoners, that
it’s highly likely that the majority of the remaining 739 Israeli deaths were
at the hands of their own trigger happy military.
The New York Times Fraudulent Article that Alleged that Hamas had Planned October 7 as a Mass Rape Expedition
That is why we have had a non-stop
barrage of atrocity propaganda from Israel.
First it was 40 beheaded babies, baked babies and babies hung from
clothes lines. Then it the mass rape story despite there being no victims and
no forensic evidence.
October 7 was the catalyst not the
reason for the genocide taking place in Gaza today. Chants of ‘Death to the Arabs’ didn’t begin on
October 7. Ben-Gvir, who had a picture of Baruch Goldstein on his wall (the man
who murdered 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994) became Israel’s
Minister of Police at the beginning of 2023. Gvir is a fully-fledged Jewish Nazi. A Jewish Nazi list became the third
largest in the Knesset in the November 2022 elections, not October 2023.
The reasons for making comparisons between
Israel today and the Nazi period is quite simple. Any group of people, given
the right set of conditions and circumstances, can become genocidal maniacs and
Nazis. Racism is not a biological property.
There was nothing German about the Nazis’
extermination of the Jews. The Romanians were even more enthusiastic about
killing Jews when the Germans seemed to
be winning the war. Slovakia asked the Nazis to take the Jews off their hands.
Croatia even set up its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.
When Israeli ‘Defence’ Minister Yoav
Gallant began the genocide, he described the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ the very phrase that Himmler
had used about the Jews, when justifying the
Holocaust on October 4 1943 to senior SS Generals. Gallant also promised
to starve them and deny water and fuel. Also Nazi tactics.
Netanyahu invoked the example of
Amalek, the tribe that god had commanded the Israelites to wipe out – every man,
woman, child and infant was to be murdered.
The number of calls to genocide by Israeli
politicians is limitless. Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu suggested
that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities”. Law for Palestine released a database of over
500 genocidal statements by influential Israelis, including the President and
Cabinet members.
Wiping out the Palestinians is a very
popular idea in Israel. The most popular car bumper sticker in Israel is ‘finish them off’. Indeed if the
comparison with Nazi Germany is wrong it is because the level of anti-Semitism amongst
ordinary Germans was far less than that in Israel.
When the presenters of Israel’s
oldest podcast ‘two nice Jewish boys’ said
‘If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza,
every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would
press it in a second’
there was
no condemnation in Israel, let alone a prosecution as would happen if an Israeli
Arab were to say the same about Jews. Incitement to murder Palestinians is not
an offence in Israel.
There are
some who go even further. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, of the pre-military Yeshivah Shirat
Moshe, said:
‘“Whoever comes to kill you... does not only include the young man aged
16, 18, 20, or 30 who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future
generation (the children of Gaza), and those who produce the future generation
(women of Gaza), because there is really no difference,”
In other
words one should kill children as well as their mothers because they may become
the fighters of the future. Compare this with what Himmler said about killing Jewish
children in a speech on October 6th 1943.
‘I did not assume to have the
right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children
to become adults for our children and grandchildren.’
When pogroms against Arabs broke out
in Israeli towns in 2021one user wrote
“We are no longer Jews today. People from Holon, Bat
Yam and Rishon Lezion go out to bring war. Today we are Nazis.”
Today in Gaza, with the destruction
of hospitals and the murder of patients and doctors and the detention of people
like Dr. Hussam Abu
Safiya,the
Director of Kamal Adwan hospital, in the Sdei Teiman torture centre, we can see
the degeneration of Israeli society before our eyes. A society where 65% of the
population is opposed to criminal prosecutions of those who rape prisoners.
Indeed in some respects Israel is
going beyond what the Nazis did. In Budapest it was the Nazis’ protégés in the Arrow
Cross, a Hungarian Nazi party, that murdered doctors and patients at two Jewish hospitals (Maros Street
and Varosmajor Street). The Gestapo did not touch the hospitals. In Berlin the Jewish
hospital survived untouched until the end of the war. It is Israel which has a peculiar attraction
for destroying Palestinian hospitals.
We should
also ask ourselves whether the Nazi destruction of Jewish synagogues during
Kristallnacht is any different to the Zionist destruction of virtually every
mosque in Gaza?
Ever
since its creation Israel has laid claim to inherit the memory of the Jews who
died in the holocaust. The reality, as Gaza shows, is that Israel inherits the
memory of those who killed Europe’s Jews.
In the
words of an
article in the Jewish Chronicle quoting
what I said at Palestine Expo in 2019, ‘Israel
is Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’.
I
leave you with just one thought. If the level of racism in Israel today had
been present in Europe during the Holocaust it wouldn’t have been 6 million Jews
who died but 7 or even 8 million.
I Responded by Asking
Them Why They Wanted to Commemorate the Holocaust and what ‘Truth’ was it That
They Wanted to Preserve?
I didn’t know that I was on Yad Vashem’s mailing
list of donors. Clearly I now walk in exalted company! Perhaps that’s because
Yad Vashem now has a copy of my book, given to them in memory of Yehuda
Schwarzbaum (1930-2011) and his relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem
Clearly Zohar Neumann, who sent me the begging
letter, hadn’t read my book because if he had he would have come across more
criticism of Yad Vashem than I expect he is used to.Founded in 1953 as an Israeli State propaganda
institution, Yad Vashem is the main institution charged with developing a
Zionist holocaust narrative, distorting holocaust history and creating what is
called ‘holocaust awareness’ or consciousness.
Despite its commitment to learning the lessons of
the holocaust, Yad Vashem does not include Israel’s numerous racist laws against its own Arab
citizens in that lesson. Nor does it consider the vicious anti-Arab discrimination in Israel, the pogroms against
Arabs and calls to expel refugees as forming any part of those lessons. The ‘lessons of the
Holocaust’ are Zionist not anti-racist ones.
Lenni Brenner - the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and 51 Documents on Zionist-Nazi Collaboration
In Yad Vashem’s sanitised world we learn nothing
about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. Nor do we learn about how the
Zionist leaders made every effort to sabotage rescue schemes where the
destination was not Palestine. Or how the Zionists undermined the Jewish
Boycott of Nazi German and instead did their best to ensure that the Nazi
regime was not destabilised.
the police authorities were entirely satisfied by 1938 that Zionism had
become the dominant political force among those Jews who remained in Germany (p.123)
Yad Vashem doesn’t ask why no Zionist Congress
before 1939 condemned the Nazi attacks on Jews or why the Nazi
state viewed the Zionists in Germany as the good, ‘racial’ Jews and why the
Zionist Federation of Germany consciously used their favoured status to try and
displace the existing non-Zionist leadership.
Still less do we find out why the heads of the Jewish Desks in the Gestapo were allowed to attend their conferences and use the German Jewish delegation as their proxies?
Eichmann attended the
1937 Zionist Congress in Zurich and his predecessor, Baron von Mildenstein attended the 1935 Congress in Lucerne. Nor do they ask why Eichmann visited the Zionists
in Palestine alongside Haganah and Gestapo double-agent Feivel Polkes before the British expelled them.
What we do know is that there is no more ardent
supporters of the traditional Jewish leadership in the ghettos, the Judenrate, than Yad Vashem, even though they were despised by the very Resistance that they purport to support.
Yad Vashem is involved in constructing an utterly
false version of Zionism’s role in the holocaust. It doesn’t mention the letter
that the Zionist Federation of Germany wrote to Hitler on June 21, (which is published
in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader).
The letter spoke about how
On the foundation of the new state, which has
established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is
possible’
In Yad Vashem’s version of history Zionists aren’t
collaborators but resistance fighters. The fact that two out of every three
members of the Judenrate (Jewish Councils) which rounded up Jews for the death camps were Zionists passes them by. Yad
Vashem has a very important role.Rewriting the history of the holocaust in order that the Israeli state
can justify its apartheid and genocidal policies.
It is no small task and I know that readers of my
blog will be sensitive as to how enormous this undertaking is. Because of Yad Vashem's determination to ensure that Holocaust history fits their preconceived ideological framing, Yad Vashem has had to reject a number of books that they might have published which any holocaust institute worthy of the name would have grasped with 2 hands.
The first such was Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. First published in 1961 and updated since it remains the most comprehensive history of the holocaust. Even Yad Vashem's academic advisor, Professor Yehuda Bauer was forced to admit it is 'unsurpassed'. It is not for nothing that Yad Vashem is incapable of producing a general and comprehensive history of the Holocaust.
Hilberg, who became the Professor of Holocaust History at Vermont University, saw the Judenrate as an instrument of the Nazis who were essential to the implementation of the Final Solution. Yad Vashem didn't appreciate such an analysis since two-thirds of the Judenrate were Zionists!
Polish fascist Michal Kaminski who justified the murder of Polish Jews in Jedwabne visits Yad Vashem
Likewise Yad Vashem didn't appreciate Hilberg's dismissal of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust as minor as Zionist history consciously magnifies it and on occasion invents it in order to provide itself with a retrospective justification and back story.
When it came to the escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler from Auschwitz in April 1944 Yad Vashem decided that the best thing to do was to ignore them. Not only were they not Zionists but they came into conflict with Zionist collaborator, Rudolf Kasztner who, in the words of Israeli Judge Benjamin Halevi in 1955, 'sold his soul to Satan'when he agreed a deal with Eichmann for a train out of Hungary for 1684 of the Zionist/Jewish elite in return for silence about where the deportation trains were heading.
Kasztner, who was the plaintiff in a libel trial in Israel in 1954 when accused of collaboration, rapidly turned into the de-facto defendant. When Israel's second government led by Moshe Sharrett decided to appeal the verdict of the first trial, that Kasztner was a collaborator, it promptly fell. Kasztner has nonetheless been rehabilitated by Yad Vashem.
No matter that Kasztner’s deal with Eichmann led to the truth of Auschwitz being kept from Hungary’s 700,000 Jews resulting in nearly 2/3 of them being deported to their deaths. This is a minor matter. What is important is that his deal with Eichmann saved 1600 Zionist and Jewish leaders. The fact that he went to Nuremberg after the war to provide testimony for major Nazi war criminals is erased from history.
Suffice to say YV wouldn't publish Vrba's memoirs 'I cannot forgive'. In fact they were determined to erase Vrba and Wetzler's very names from Yad Vashem. It is with difficulty that one could find any mention of them until, the late 1990's when Ruth Linn, Professor of Education at Haifa University, began a campaign in their favour. At one point Yehuda Bauer called Linn an 'anti-Zionist'. There is no worse insult in the Zionist dictionary than that!!
Suffice to say Yad Vashem weren't interested in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt by its last Commander, Marek Edelman. Edelman's misfortune was being a member of the anti-Zionist Bund and a supporter of the Palestinian resistance.
In
the words of Daniel
Blatman, an Israeli
holocaust scholar, Yad Vashem is a 'diplomatic laundromat for every fascist and
anti-Semite who darkens its doors.' And there have been a lot of them –
Trump,Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the
Philipenes Duterte and assorted neo-Nazis from Germany and Austria.
In
1976 South Africa’s Prime Minister, John Vorster, who had been interned during
the war because he was a member of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Broederbond and
Ossewa Brandwag, visited Israel as a guest of the Israeli Labor Party
government. Naturally he was taken on a tour of Yad Vashem.
Israel
Shahak, a survivor of
the Warsaw Ghettoand Bergen-Belsen wrote
Of the Yad
Vashem…
theatre, I do not wish to speak, at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as
honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis, are truly beneath
contempt.
Zohar Neumann of YV wrote to me just before Xmas begging
for money in order that they could counter those who deny that the Holocaust
occurred. Of course there are a few political flat earthers but they are
nothing as compared with Zionist genocidaires.
Zohar told me that ‘the urgency to act has never been greater’. I agree but it’s not
the few people who deny what happened between 1939 and 1945 who are the problem
but those who deny that there is a holocaust happening barely 20 miles away
from where Yad Vashem is based, which itself is built on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem.
The problem is, as I explained to Zohar, Yad
Vashem is on the side of today’s holocaust deniers – the Keir Starmers and Joe
Bidens of this world who not only deny that there is a holocaust happening but
actively support it by sending the Israeli state more weapons to kill more
Palestinians.
When 50 holocaust researchers asked Yad Vashem to condemn the genocidal statements made by Israeli
politicians, military and other public figures, including Israeli government
ministers, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli President Herzog, its Chair
Dani Dayan refused.
Instead
Dayan asserted that the Israeli army was not conducting a genocide but was
acting ‘within the constraints Hamas
imposeson us to comply with the
proper moral standards and the laws of war.’
Dayan himself illustrates everything I have described above. He was Secretary-General of the
fascist anti-Arab Tehiya
party, and a candidate to the Knesset on
its list in the Israeli legislative elections in 1988
and 1992.
Dayan
was also on the Executive of the settler Yesha Council, which is a kind of
government for West Bank settlers. Unsurprisingly in 2015 Brazil rejected him
as Israel’s nomination as its Ambassador because of his fascist credentials.
Clearly Dani Dayan is an excellent choice to run Yad Vashem!
One can
only assume that support for the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, universities
and extermination of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are what passes for
high moral standards at Yad Vashem.
Dayan told
those who suggested that Yad Vashem say something about the holocaust in Gaza that:
the outrageous statements you
cited do not express the moral position of the very large majority of the
Israeli public or the IDF and its commanders.
This is
the same Israeli army which is busy torturing to death prisoners, raping to
death doctors and running over hundreds of Palestinians with tanks. Clearly
what Yad Vashem considers a ‘moral position’ is not one shared by most civilised people.
Ironically
Dayan is teaching us a lesson, which is how senior Nazis were also able to
justify to themselves and live with the holocaust.
I
therefore wrote a letter in response to Zohar which is below the one from
Zohar. Despite not contributing a penny farthing to the appeal,Zohar wrote me a gushing thank you
letter!!Clearly these PR merchants
don’t care about anything except the bottom line!
Thanks to compassionate supporters like you, we’ve already reached 25% of our
goal! Every donation helps us commemorate, educate, and preserve the truth of
the Holocaust.
But we can’t stop here. Every day, falsehoods about the Holocaust—claims that
“death camps” were merely “work camps” or that far fewer lives were
lost—continue to spread. Imagine the heartbreak of survivors who see their
stories obliterated by denial and distortion. History is being rewritten, and
the urgency to act has never been greater.
With your support, we can reach more people, counter misinformation, and ensure
the light of truth shines even brighter. Every click strengthens the fight
against those who twist history for their own ends.
Thank you for standing with us and ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust remain
a beacon of truth for generations to come. Together, let’s keep the momentum
going!
Thank you,
Zohar Neumann
Director, Partnerships and Global Campaign Desk, Yad Vashem #TruthShinesBright
Re: We’re Making Progress Together
15:05 23 Dec. 24
Zohar,
Thank you for
your email asking me to make a financial contribution towards your appeal.
There is a
genocide, or a holocaust if you prefer, taking place in Gaza even as I write.
The similarities with the Nazi holocaust of Jews, Roma and the Disabled is all
too obvious. There is an exterminationist mentality in Israel today.
'Finish
them off'is
Israel's most popular car bumper sticker. 'Two nice Jewish boys' Israel's oldest and most
popular podcast broadcast
a program
saying how hosts Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein
would press a button and wipe out the Palestinians without a second's thought. In defending their
stance, they claimed that their views reflect mainstream Israeli sentiment.
These
nice Jewish boys would also erase the whole population of the West Bank too.
Yoav Gallant
when opening Israel's war on the civilians of Gaza called
the
Palestinians 'human animals' the very same term that Heinrich Himmler used to
SS Generals on 4 October 1943 at Posen when justifying
the
extermination of the Jews.
Israeli government
ministers, e.g. Netanyahu's comparison
of the
Palestinians with Amalek, have used genocidal language about the Palestinians.
In this case a call to treat the Palestinians as the ancient Hebrew tribes
supposedly treated the tribe of Amalek, when they wiped out every man, woman & child.
Influential
Israelis have even justified the wiping out of Palestinian children using the
same arguments as Himmler on 6 October 1943, also at Posen (Posnan). E.g. Rabbi
Eliyahu Mali, of the Kiryat Moshe Yeshivah, who said on 7 March 2024 that:
"Today's
terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them
alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the
terrorists," he said, adding that when someone comes to kill you, you
should be quick to kill them. "It's not only the 14- or 16-year-old
boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the
future generation. There's really no difference,"
Compare this
with Himmler's remarks
‘I
did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers
personified in the children to become adults for our children and
grandchildren.’
Perhaps you
can spot a difference between the two? Naturally the Israeli Police recommended that no charges be brought
against Mali but if he had been an Israeli Palestinian they would have been
arrested, beaten up and charged months ago.
You say in your begging
letter that you want to:
commemorate,
educate, and preserve the truth of the Holocaust (thus)... ensuring the
lessons of the Holocaust remain a beacon of truth for generations to come
Perhaps Yad
Vashem or you can tell me what these lessons of the Holocaust are? Are
they universal or do they only apply to Jews? Is opposition to genocide and the
extermination of whole peoples a principle or does it only relate to
Jews? What are you preserving the truth and commemorating the Holocaust
for? Is it only to preserve Jewish racial supremacy?
Surely one of
the lessons of the Holocaust is that all peoples, be they German, Jewish or
Arab can, if the circumstances are right, become genocidaires. There is nothing
special about which ethnicity/religion one belongs to. Racism is not something that we
inherit biologically. It is a product of the societies we live in and Israel
is, as many of us have argued, an apartheid, Jewish Supremacist State in
exactly the same way that Nazi Germany or South Africa was.
The reality
is that Yad Vashem, throughout its 71 years existence, has set its face against
drawing any universal lessons from the Holocaust. You have remembered the
Holocaust in order that others can repeat it, as is now happening with Israel.
You were even established next to the village of Deir Yassin which Zionist
militias wiped out yet you fired a guide, Itamar Shapira, for pointing out this fact to visitors.
The fact that
an exterminationist and racist mentality pervades in Israel is proof in itself
that you have failed. You commemorate the holocaust, not in order to warn
against the dangers of racism but in order to justify them.
Not once have
you condemned or protested against Israel's many anti-Arab laws. Nor have you protested against the genocide in Gaza that has led to a quarter
of a million Palestinians at least being killed. Genocide is only wrong when Jews are
the victims. This is the Zionist mentality that you propagate.
You remind me
of when Ha'aretz journalist
Nir Gontarz rang Yad Vashem and asked them to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s
attempt to deport 60,000 African refugeesfrom
Israel because they were threatening its
racial identity. The 'crime' of these refugees was being neither White nor
Jewish. Gontarz described what happened next:
One after the other of the senior staff
there, including Mr. Avner Shalev [the director], slammed the phone down
on me when I asked to speak to them... I asked them this morning to remove from
their database the details I gave them in the past about my family. (Ha'aretz 24.1.18)
Yad Vashem serves no useful
purpose. As Professor Yehuda Elkana, himself an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in March 1988 in Ha'aretz,
it is better to forget the Holocaust than allow its memory to be used to
justify further racism and genocide.
You will not
be surprised to learn that I will not be contributing a penny farthing to your
appeal. Whatever spare money I have is going to relief in Gaza.
Yours
sincerely,
Tony
Greenstein
I was
even more surprised to receive an email on New Year’s day from Zohar thanking
me for the donation I didn’t make! I give up!
Dear tony,
We did it—because of you!
Thanks to your incredible generosity, Yad Vashem reached an astounding
$180,000 in our end of year campaign, and we are equipped better than ever to
preserve the truth and honor the memory of the Holocaust.
Your support enables us to:
Safeguard
Holocaust history by preserving irreplaceable testimonies, artifacts, and
documents for future generations.
Combat
the rise of Holocaust distortion by providing accessible, fact-based
resources that make the truth undeniable.
Empower
educators and students worldwide, ensuring the Holocaust’s lessons are
passed down and understood across borders.
Honor
the memory of the six million victims, the survivors, and the courageous
Righteous Among the Nations who stood up against evil.
This victory is as much yours as it is ours. Together, we’re keeping the
light of truth burning bright. We are deeply grateful for your commitment to
Yad Vashem’s mission.
From all of us at Yad Vashem, thank you for standing with us. We look
forward to the important work we will continue to do together in the coming
year!
Thank you!
Zohar Neumann
Director, Partnerships and Global Campaign Desk, Yad Vashem
#truthshinesbright
For those who don’t like to compare Israel & Nazi Germany my message is ‘Compare, Compare, Compare’ – At A Time Of Extermination it's Important to Understand Just What Kind of State Israel Is
Crispin Flintoff & Tony Greenstein
Outside Westminster Magistrates Court
2024 has been a very busy year for me and below are some of
the things that I did.I had a tour of
Scotland and speaking engagements in Ireland and the Netherlands as well as
speaking at demonstrations in Glasgow, Liverpool and my home town Brighton.
I continued to promote my book which came out at the end of
2022. Quite remarkably sales were higher by far in the first half of 2024 than in
the first half of 2023. You don’t get to learn of the sales figures until about
3 months after the end of the half year but I expect they will have increased
again.
I did a wide range of interviews and talks, only some of
which are below with audiences in the United States, South Africa and
Australia. The theme of my book can be summed up in that Jewish Chronicle headline
‘Infamous anti-Israel activist Tony
Greenstein called Jewish state 'Hitler's bastard offspring’. Israel has
demonstrated that the only thing it learnt from Nazi Germany was how to emulate
them.
On 21st December Katie Halper and I finally managed to
arrange an interview. Katie was a stand-up comedian before taking to podcasts
and political commentary. She runs her own Katie
Halper Show and is co-host of the podcast Useful Idiots with Aaron Maté.
Katie was a very challenging interviewer and I was pleased
with the outcome. Recorded separately were interviews with Jenny Manson, the
co-chair of Jewish Voices for Labour and Rabbi Herschel Gluck.
On November 7 I was invited to Cork
in Ireland to speak. The atmosphere in Ireland is totally different from that
in Britain where the State is breathing down our necks and harassing our
marches. Ireland doesn’t have a genocidal supporting government supplying Israel
with more weaponry to murder civilians and destroy hospitals.
I spoke in a hotel on the evening
of the November 7 and the room was packed and I nearly sold out of books. At
the end of the meeting I was taken aback when I was given a standing ovation. It
shows the enthusiasm and solidarity of the Irish with the Palestinians.
On the Friday night I spoke at a
bar in a small town in West Cork, Skibbereen. I’d never heard of the place
before but again the room was packed to the rafters. The following day I took
part in a march in the town and afterwards spoke at the rally.
This was in the middle of the Irish
General Election. There were sarcastic comments about the Social Democrats
taking part in the march having never done previously! The experience of
British colonialism has ensured that the Irish understand what is happening and
it is no surprise that Israel has closed its Embassy in Ireland.
I was therefore pleased to be invited
to an interview with EI on my birthday, 30 December! It was a very useful and
productive interview. Electronic Intifada is the premiere Palestine Solidarity
website. Having written for many papers, journals and sites I have to say that
no one gives you such a hard time as EI! They check virtually every word and quote
to see that you can back it up.Nothing escapes
the scrutiny of their fact checkers. Would that the British tabloids or Elon
Musk had to undergo the same level of scrutiny!
Another interview, in
fact two interviews was with Rania Khalek, a young Lebanese woman who runs Breakthrough News. Rania is a feisty
interviewer who clearly feels the pain of what has happened in Lebanon with
Israel’s savage bombing of its civilian population.
Rania first
interviewed me in Budapest on 10 April, where I had gone for dental implant
surgery.However the Internet connection
was not good and my computer had problems so we completed the interview on 15
April back in Brighton. This is the full
interview and this is the cut down version.
On 14 June Rania interviewed me about
my book and this time it was completed in one session. I found it a fascinating
interview and thanks to Rania for the time she took over this. Subsequently
Rania was invited to speak at a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network and
Jewish Network for Palestine on a Jewish or a Democratic State and on January
27 she will speak at our Holocaust Memorial Day meeting. You can go here for the
full length interview.
I
have never been attracted to the idea of an autobiography or even a biography.
Life is too short to waste time describing what you have done with your life and
its bound to be partial and self-exculpatory. However I was happy to work with
Helen Aksentijevic to produce a short, half hour film summarising some of the
things I’ve tried to do.
Helen
has produced similar films on other Jewish anti-Zionist such as Moshe Machover, Haim Bresheeth and
Sabby Sagall so I was very flattered to be asked.
Tony Greenstein - An Ordinary Rebel
plus Question & Answer Session at the P21
At the end of October I was invited to the wedding of an old
friend, a long standing Palestine solidarity activist, SusanBlackwell.She lives in the Netherlands and so I said that I would be happy to
do a meeting whilst there.
Sue got in touch with students at the main technical
university in the Netherlands, Delft University, and I was invited to speak
to a meeting. The only problem was that the university, which was happy to
invite Admiral Ellis, a representative of US arms company Lockheed Martin to
campus and a ghoul of many US wars, they didn’t want me to speak because I
might hurt the feelings of those students who supported the genocide in Gaza.
Of course when you contrast the hurt feelings of Zionists with
the dead bodies of Palestinian children there is no contest.So I wrote to the Rector His Magnificus
(yes that’s his title) Timothy van der Hagen
suggesting that freedom of speech is worth preserving. After all Hagen had written on the
university website that
‘The most important task of TU Delft is to make a
contribution towards building a better society’.
Yet Magnificus Hagen’s idea of a better society and mine were
not the same. Hagen is just another ruling class hypocrite.
However the students had other ideas. Although I was banned
from campus I turned up anyway
and with just 2 hours notice over 100 students gathered to listen to me on the
steps of the library. Not only had the stupid Magnificus built my meeting for
me but by his own actions he had ensured that my message went out to thousands.
The Rector of Delft University - the Magnificus Timothy van der Hagen
The security, although watching, did not intervene.A magnificus victory! I did write to Magnificus
Hagen afterwards but he seems to be a man of few words and even fewer thoughts!
Tony Greenstein's Speech at Delft
University Which the Administration Tried to Ban
As readers of this blog will know I was arrested a year ago
on ‘terrorism’ charges and my last court appearance was on 19 December at
Westminster magistrates court. There was a demonstration
outside and I will be next appearing at the Old Bailey on 31 January where I
hope people will also demonstrate their opposition to the use of terrorism
legislation to silence Palestine solidarity activists.
Tony Greenstein's
speech outside Westminster Magistrates Court
On the 4 AugustI came
back from my holiday in the Outer Hebrides and stopped off in Liverpool, where
I spent my childhood, to speak to the Palestine demonstration outside the Roman
Catholic Cathedral. I always enjoy going back to Liverpool with its magnificent
waterfront and city buildings.
On 3 December I spoke on behalf of Jewish Network for
Palestine at a seminar organised by the Open University Palestine group. Other
speakers were Tony Lerman, an expert in anti-Semitism and former Director of
the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, Barnaby Raine, a Ph D student and
young firebrand and Michael Richmond who spoke about philosemitism, the other
side of the anti-Semitism coin. The title was ‘How anti-Semitism has
complemented Zionism’.
How antisemitism has complemented
Zionism – Tony Greenstein
The JNP and SLN organised
a seminar on the 12 November in the wake of my review
of Jonathan Freedland’s dishonest biography of Rudolf Vrba, The Escape Artist, about the
anti-Zionist Jewish hero who escaped, with Alfred Wetzler, from Auschwitz in
order to warn Hungarian Jews of preparations being made to exterminate them.
Speakers included
Stephen Kapos, a survivor of the Hungarian holocaust, Haim Bresheeth, an
anti-Zionist Israeli and member of JNP and Tom Suarez, author Palestine HijackedandState of Terror. Below
is my contribution. A comprehensive website
on Vrba has been set up by Alan Twigg, a journalist who knew him.
Zionism & the Holocaust – Tony
Greenstein
The Complete Seminar – Rewriting the Holocaust
To commemorate the one
year anniversary of October 7, the SLN and JNP organised a seminar to discuss
the Gaza holocaust. Speakers included Ghada Karmi, a refugee from 1948, Rania
Khalek, Haim Bresheeth and myself. Below is my speech but people can go to the
SLN’s Youtube channel to listen to the complete seminar, ‘A Jewish State or a Democratic State’.
Most most people agree that it was an extremely good seminar and I highly
recommend listening to the whole seminar as I do the previous one on Vrba.
For One Democratic State
In the wake of
Starmer’s election, the SLN organised a star studded panel including myself!
Speakers included Ian Hodson, General Secretary of the Bakers Union,Graham Bash – founding editor of National
Labour Briefing, David Miller – who was sacked for his anti-Zionist views by
Bristol University and who later won a landmark employment tribunal, Chris Williamson,
the former Labour MP who was forced out of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn
and Crispin Flintoff, presenter of the Not
the Andrew Marr show and latterly the Crispin Flintoff show which has a
regular attendance of 500 every Sunday morning. You can hear the full video on
the SLN Youtube channel here.
SLN Tony Greenstein – Where to for
the Left 12 07 24
Every year for the
past 2 years the SLN and the JNP have organised a meeting on Holocaust Memorial
Day, January 27. As the Zionists weaponise the holocaust we have to be prepared
to stand up and say ‘Never Again Means Never Again for Everyone’. For the
Zionists of course, Never Again means never again only for Jews, or the right
kind of Jew.
On January 27 2024 we
had an excellent line up including Professor Ilan Pappe, Ghada Karmi, Ronnie
Kasrills – the former head of Umkonte We Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing as well
as former South African Police Minister , Stephen Kapos – a child holocaust
survivor from Budapest, Suzanne Weiss – a child survivor from France and
myself. Again a remarkable meeting. For the full meeting go here
or here.
When Israel had been a month into the genocide in Gaza the
JNP and SLN organised a webinar on the theme of stopping Israel’s onslaught. Speakers
included Huda Ammori from Palestine Action, Asa Winstanley of Electronic
Intifada, Stephen Kapos, Ronnie Barkan – an Israeli anti-Zionist activist and Tony
Greenstein. You can watch the complete video here.
Stop the Genocide in Gaza 10.11.23
Last January I undertook a tour of Scotland at the invitation
of Scottish PSC. I spoke in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. I also spoke at a
large demonstration in Glasgow city centre.
Tony Greenstein speaking at Palestine Demonstration
in Glasgow January 6 2024
Two months later I was back in
Glasgow. It was March 16, UN Anti-Racism Day and the SWP’sStand
Up to Racism were also holding a march. On the tiny SUTR march was none other than Glasgow Friends of Israel.
Ever since 2017 the SWP/SUTR have
insisted on marching with Zionists against racism! It’s like campaigning
against rape alongside rapists.
This has been the subject of
heated controversy in Scotland and the Police were always willing to lend a
helping hand to ensure that the Zionists could march. This year, at a time of
genocide in Palestine, the SWP’s decision to march with Zionists was particularly
disgraceful.
Tony Greenstein speaking at the Anti-Racism
Demonstration in Glasgow March 16 2024
On October 4th, the 88th
anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street,
when the Police unsuccessfully tried to batter a way through the East End of
London for the British Union of Fascists. The same Metropolitan Police arrested
me after a picket of racist Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli for comparing Israel’s
genocide in Gaza to the Nazi holocaust. Their pretext was that I had committed
a ‘racially aggravated offence’ under the Public Order Act. After being held
for 7 hours I was released fromHolborn
Police Station. A few weeks later I was informed that I would not be charged
with any offence.This is the speech
that so annoyed the Met!
Tony Greenstein Speech Which Led
to his Arrrest at Picket of Tzipi Hotoveli 4 Oct 2024
At 8 a.m. on the 26
November 2024 I gave a talk to listeners in Australia about my book, Zionism During the Holocaust. It was 7
pm there!
In this interview with Crispin
Flintoff I tried to explain why people believe I’m outspoken and what motivates
me
Interview Tony Greenstein on the
Crispin Flintoff Show - Why I'm Outspoken
On 23 November 2023 I
spoke to a meeting of the Labour Left Alliance in the wake of October 7. There
was then an extensive Question & Answer session.
LLA meeting 23 November 2023
On 15 November I spoke
at a demonstration organised by the Trades Council outside Hove Town Hall
And finally the one time
I appeared on Question Time at Sussex University’s Gardener Centre. It was when
Norman Tebbit, the Chingford skinhead was on the panel. I spoke from the
audience attacking him for his racist cricket test directed against immigrants
from the Indian sub-continent. Also on the panel was Clare Short. Peter Sissons
was in the Chair. I don’t think I would have got away with it with today’s
far-right Fiona Bruce!
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