Social media post this week from Breaking the Silence…
This article is here because I went to an event about the Shu’fat Community Centre, but didn’t get around to publishing my account of it before the latest outbreak of horrors in Israel/Palestine. If you want to read my original post (there’s a link at the end of this piece) I’d be grateful if you’d consider looking at this one here first. It is the additional text I wrote this week…
The Shu’fat delegation were on a tour of the UK, sponsored by Unite, to talk about the work that needs doing to help a bullied, mistreated, confined community survive living under military occupation.
A few days after meeting the Shu’fat delegation in Hastings, I saw the message below going around on social media. It was a long way from being a surprise because it’s a long way from being the first time Jenin has been attacked like that. It’s quite a few years now, since I saw the Jenin Freedom Theatre people on tour in this country, telling the story of a former siege there.
Are there people out there on social media ‘justifying’ or ‘excusing’ this week’s violence? Well maybe there are some people that crazy but there’s something else going on, mostly. When stories come to people’s attention via organizations like the BBC, people with mainstream views immediately get angry with less orthodox thinkers who they accuse of ‘justifying’ the perpetrators. I think that’s a misunderstanding. I think there are a lot of people trying to explain what’s happening, and why, and a lot of other people who don’t have the patience to listen.
Personally, my view was formed by listening to friends of mine, mostly Jewish socialists, who’ve been to Israel, or to the occupied territories (ie, what’s left of Palestine), who have come back sad, angry and puzzled as to what to do. Apparently something like 6000 Palestinians have been killed so far, and several hundred Israelis, in this decades-long nightmare of a situation, and politicians are no nearer even attempting an effective intervention than they were decades ago.
Here are three things my Jewish socialist friends, and the books I have read, have taught me – things that you will never hear on the BBC:
Forget the “two-state solution”
They always present it as the civilized answer. They always have, ever since the disintegration of the British Empire. Men in suits would draw a line down the middle of regions where the UK government had been whipping up trouble since forever, and walk away assuming things would somehow work out. People don’t sit quietly on one side of a line if they have friends, family, jobs or land on the other side. In the case of Israel, there is no Palestinian ‘side’ now anyway, as the never-ending Israeli settlement projects have established Israeli homes, families and farms in just about every region that was supposed to be Palestinian. Uprooting them all would be no better than another nakba. (Nakba means ‘catastrophe’, it’s the name given to Israel’s original scouring of the land to get Palestinians out of their way, back in 1948).
Governments won’t fix it
Governments are rarely neutral. Our government certainly isn’t. They know ‘which side’ they want their populations to be on in any conflict, and political and business interests always dictate which side that is. Additionally, modern governments are inextricably tied up with various corporate interests; and corporations, particularly the arms trade, see wars and conflicts as profit generators. They won’t tolerate anti-war governments.
Peoples can lead governments
I know it can be hard to believe but, everything that’s good about our country – every right, every benefit, every privilege you have, is there because at some time in the past, a body of people, perhaps a trade union or social movement, made enough noise that they pressured their politicians into action.
Governments (and arms companies) need you to think in a certain way, in order to promote wars and other lucrative conflicts. They need you to watch a few film clips, or read about a few people, who’ve done horrible things, and they need you to believe those people represent a whole country, or political or ethnic or religious group. They need you to forget all the good things that group ever did, and forget the bad things people in the other group did.
We can resist that war-generating picture by always looking for other versions of stories, rather than just shouting about the first horrible thing we hear. We need lots of people – thousands of people – everywhere – to reach across all those lines governments draw, all those generalizations corporations live on, and we need to talk – we need to understand each other gradually, in ones and twos, then dozens, then hundreds, then millions, until we know a range of different people’s stories, until we see that we should be desperately pitying the bullies, the rapists, the killers, even as we work – seriously work – to protect others from them. We need to do that for two reasons:
First, because there are bullies, rapists and killers on every side of every national level conflict, and if we remember that, we can’t be led into the idea of a ‘just war’.
Second, because bullies, rapists and killers aren’t born, they are made. They are made by the violence, hate and confusions they have experienced. We need to force our governments to unravel all that violence, hate and confusion, whether it’s Ukrainians tying gypsy kids to lampposts and daubing their faces with foul chemicals or Israelis beating up youngsters at camp check points, whether it’s Hamas hostage-takers or US or UK soldiers bullying civilians or treating drone-attacks like funfair games. We need to demand politicians look deeper, and come up with solutions that at least might work.
Step one is to stop spitting vitriol at everyone we don’t agree with. I have friends waving banners for both sides of the Israel/Palestine situation. I experienced the same thing over Brexit, and over the women’s rights campaign. Real friends, not just social media chimeras. Didn’t you? If we can sit down and talk over some of those things we really are making a start on the road to world peace — because if the conversation takes us anywhere at all, it’ll take us to “how did this come about?” “Are these two ‘sides’ the only two things we can think?” “Who said we had to be on this side or that?” “How do we try to stop this?”
The first step, always, is to refuse to ‘take sides’. Instead, find out more about what’s really going on, then get talking. We need thousands and thousands of people doing the kind of work that Shu’fat Community Centre does, doing that work for years and years, to prevent the horrors that have been stored up in places like Israel/Palestine. You can read about Shu’fat in ‘.A people without a land’ part one – link below…
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Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 