Language is a tricky business. It’s full of traps and snares. I refrained from writing about the conflict in Israel/Palestine for over a week. This is because there were so many conflicting voices and it was hard to make out what was going on. Also because, as a British person living in relative peace, not having seen any of the events that were taking place half way across the globe, I felt I wasn’t qualified to pass judgment.
At the same time I couldn’t think about anything else. It was everywhere, on my screen, radio, every front page. I was left stupefied, caught between two poles: unable to say anything, but unable to remain silent, with a growing sense of horror at what I felt was about to unfold in front of the world’s eyes. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
That changed when I went on a march and rally in London in support of the Palestinians. Being there inspired me to want to add my own voice to the mix. I was proud of my nation for a day. So many people, of all ages and nationalities, all colors, all races, raising their voices in support for a people living under the yoke of violence and oppression. I was particularly pleased to see a number of Jewish groups there, loudly and proudly proclaiming their solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
I was right at the start of the march. I met Hugh Lanning, ex-Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and one time-parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party in my own constituency of Canterbury. He’s written for my online magazine, Whitstable Views. It was good to recognize a familiar face in that vast crowd, shake his hand and wish him well. He gave a rousing speech.
I can’t say how many people there were on the march. Estimates put it in the region of 100,000-150,000. I took my own measure. I stood on a wall outside the Canadian High Commission on Pall Mall, on the approach to Trafalgar Square, and watched as the procession passed by. It took about an hour and a half. Every so often a group would stop outside the Canadian Embassy and throw a few chants in that direction. The Canadian House of Commons had recently applauded an ex-Nazi member of the Waffen-SS as a freedom fighter, because he’d fought the Russians in the Second World War. Such is the strange nature of politics in our world right now.
There were a number of chants and slogans which I joined in with, but my favorite is this: In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians. It reminds me that we’re all in the same boat, mostly doing our best, scuttling about, unable to escape. At the moment it’s a hell for the people of Gaza, who, through no fault of their own—beyond born of the wrong race, at the wrong time, in the wrong place—came to be locked up in what is described by many as “the world’s largest open-air prison.”
Later I heard an interview on Sky News with someone I know: another Jew, Katy Colley. "The root of the violence is the occupation,” she said. “The root of the violence is apartheid. Palestinians have been screaming for decades about this and no one was listening. And in our silence they experience violence on a daily basis.” She ended with these words: “I grew up in the shadow of the holocaust. I grew up being told, never again. That means never again for anybody.”
The reason I emphasize the presence of Jews at the march is to show that the conflict is not about religion. The attack on October 7 wasn’t motivated by a hatred of Jews for being Jews, despite how the Israeli government likes to portray it. It’s about land and occupation. It’s about dignity and respect. It’s about freedom.
This is the background to the attacks on October 7. It didn’t come out of nowhere. There is a context which people ought to remember. We also need to know that the Israeli government lies. It lies regularly and with impunity, its lies being amplified around the world by a compliant media, and by the voices of politicians in power, almost exclusively, in the West. In the Arab world, in the Asian world, in Africa and South America, in the Global South, the voices say different things. It’s a pity we never get to hear them.
There are at least four atrocity stories so far that have turned out to be fake. Like the one about the beheaded babies, or the one about Shani Louk who was reported to have been raped and killed by Palestinian fighters, but who turned out to be alive and well in a hospital in Gaza. Currently there’s a recorded intercept purportedly by two Hamas fighters discussing the attack upon the Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza, claiming it was Islamic Jihad that did it. This is odd. We’re supposed to believe that, despite the fact that the Israeli intelligence services were unable to overhear the two-year-long preparations for the worst breach of security in Israeli military history, they somehow managed to intercept this particular conversation which apparently absolves them of all responsibility for the hospital attack, despite the fact that they’ve attacked hospitals many times before and will probably do so again. You can read more about that here.
This isn’t to say that atrocities did not occur on October 7. There almost certainly were, but there were other stories too. For instance, I heard one about a woman who said that the militants who invaded her home treated her with respect. She was afraid, but their leader reassured her. “We are Muslims,” he said. “We don’t kill women and children.” When asked if she had any food she gave them each a banana.
I do have this link, however. It focuses on an interview on Israeli radio, given by a kibbutz survivor, who says that the fighters treated her humanely. She also says that many of the civilians who died did so in the crossfire. That makes perfect sense to me. This is a common occurrence in war, and shouldn’t surprise us. It also fits in with Israeli policy, the so-called Hannibal Directive, which says that Israeli forces should fire on opposing forces who may be about to take hostages, even at the risk of killing them. “Better dead than abducted,” it says.
Does that mean that post-mortem atrocities were committed on the bodies of civilians by Israelis in order to incriminate the fighters? I’d hate to think so. But it’s a measure of the unacknowledged prejudice of the West that we’d rather imagine that the atrocities were committed on live bodies by Palestinians, than on dead bodies by cynical propagandists after the event.
The piece I wrote focused upon something I knew about and could discuss with confidence. It made an analogy between the way the BBC treated the notorious serial sex abuser, Jimmy Savile, and the way it treats the conflict in Israel/Palestine. That came about because I had just watched The Reckoning, a drama-documentary in which the corporation attempts to deal with its tricky relationship with the one-time star of its Saturday evening schedule. Savile managed to gaslight an entire population using the BBC as its means.
It seems to me that Israel is doing the same. And not just the BBC either, but every major news outlet in the Western World, and every leading politician. Why or how this happens, I can’t say except to quote another Palestinian-supporting Jew, Noam Chomsky, who said that the reason the world ignores the Palestinians is that they don’t count.
My article was written in the throes of emotion and I was rightly questioned on it. Particularly, I was questioned on one line that stated that Israel has the fourth largest army in the world. It was one of those facts that I didn’t check and it’s not true. It’s true however—at least according to the Times of Israel—that it is the fourth most powerful army in the world, a slightly different concept. I have since had the article edited to amend that.
After that I was surprised to see a piece in Splice Today that mentions me by name. You can read that here. The writer, Chris Beck, takes me to task on a number of points. To do this he repeats some of the atrocity stories, which you can find everywhere in the mainstream media, and reiterates at least one of the more obvious constructs of the Israeli disinformation machine: the one where protesters at Sydney Opera House can be heard chanting “gas the Jews!” Take a look at that video again. You’ll see that you never actually see anyone’s mouth moving. You’ll also see jump cuts where the chanting continues uninterrupted, despite the fact that the scene has changed. A more obvious piece of propaganda would be hard to find.
As someone famously said, “The first casualty of war is the truth.” The mere repetition of lies is enough. They lodge in your brain. They’re meant to elicit an emotional response and to short-circuit your critical faculties. There’s a history of propaganda lies, from the German troops who bayoneted babies in WWI, to the famous Nayirah testimony which led the United States into the first Gulf War. You can read about some of those here.
Analogies between October 7 and 9/11 have become one of the tropes of the current propaganda exchange, with Biden even warning Netanyahu not to make the same mistakes. So let’s remember those mistakes. Let’s remember the weapons of mass destruction, Abu Ghraib, the extraordinary rendition to black sites where torture was practiced, and the ongoing, still unresolved stain of prisoners held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. Let’s remember the up to one million dead, and the rise of ISIS, along with some of the other jihadist groups that were later utilized as allies to the United States in Syria. Let’s remember the lies that took us into that war and the consequences, still devastating, throughout the region. Let’s get our critical faculties back into gear and recognize that clever propagandists can manipulate us into thinking all sorts of things that are not true.
I don’t want to get into a slanging match with one of my fellow Splice Today contributors. Things probably look very different here in the UK than they do in the United States. I’ve been a long-term supporter of the Palestinian cause so I’ve watched this process develop over many years. As an ex-member of the Labour Party, once home to a vibrant and energetic anti-Zionist faction, I’ve been vilified as an anti-Semite and kicked out, along with Jeremy Corbyn and a large number of Jews. We’ve been subjected to a McCarthyite witch-hunt where a mere accusation is enough to get you banished. I was investigated specifically for being a member of a Facebook group that was later proscribed. I was a member before it was proscribed. In other words, my membership was rescinded retrospectively, a clear breach of natural justice. The group was The Labour in Exile Network, now The Socialist Labour Network. I joined it to show solidarity with friends who had been kicked out previously. Many of them are Jews. I’m not, and never have been, an anti-Semite.
I won’t answer Beck’s article point by point. Some parts of my piece could’ve been phrased in a different way, but I take none of it back. I was attempting to get people to use their imagination: to picture how it must seem to a young man who has spent his whole life incarcerated in a concentration camp, and what his reaction might be after flying over a supposedly impregnable wall on what he must’ve known was a suicide mission. I also think that some of the Israeli soldiers would’ve been just as scared, just as mad, just as capable of insane acts. Such is the nature of war. Beck points out that the Hamas operation took two years to plan, and he’s right: but the long-term plan of the Israeli government has been clear for years. They want to remove the Palestinian population altogether, by any means necessary, and the current rape of Gaza is just another move in that direction.
Governments around the world should call for an immediate ceasefire. There needs to be a peace process and, whether the Israelis like it or not, it’ll have to involve talking to Hamas. We have to see humanitarian aid to Gaza. Biden’s negotiation of 20 trucks is derisory given the scale of the devastation and the number of people involved. We have to see an end to the bombing and the reinstatement of the water, food and fuel supplies. We have to see the removal of all illegal Israeli settlements from the West Bank. We have to see equality and human rights for all the people on that grief-ridden patch of land. We have to see the end of Western compliance in Israeli war crimes. We can’t complain at Iranian or Russian or Chinese interference without acknowledging our own.
Beck makes a very telling and emotive point. He was right to do so. He says: “Maybe Stone, since he’s in the business of making complex moral calculations, could tell us how many children, given the level of oppression being redressed, Hamas is morally allowed to kidnap and murder. I want a number.”
I’ll do that. The number is none. Now I’ll ask the same question in reverse: how many dead Palestinian children will it take to satisfy the Israeli need for revenge?
—Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone
