Hastings is one of many towns that’s been enduring an MP who can never talk about Palestine without first agonizing over October 7th. No context, no proportionality. It’s hard to see it as anything but callous, wilful ignorance and you know, I really don’t think they have any idea just how much they have destroyed their own credibility, that of their respective parties and of their government, in the estimation of most of the population.
The article Waiting for Answers by Rod Webb (Hastings Independent Press Issue 267, 20 December) discussed an open letter to our MP from Hastings & District Palestine Solidarity Campaign (made public on 4 December), calling for her condemnation of Israel’s murder of the Save the Children worker Ahmad Faisal Isleem Al-Qadi – and six other specific questions related to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
As the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign had not received a reply, HIP made a separate approach to Helena Dollimore and included her response in the article. Like most statements by Labour Party MPs, Dollimore’s only looks reasonable if you know nothing about Israel/Palestine.
Perhaps understandably, Ms Dollimore concluded her response by warning that she would not tolerate ‘abuse or harassment’ towards her or her staff, so I’ve made an effort to respond as calmly as possible. We agree that abuse is not helpful but, given the circumstances, anger is almost inevitable. To give just one example:
As I write, campaigners are asking: “Where is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya?” This heroic doctor was arrested by Israeli Occupation forces when they stormed the hospital where he worked, and forced his patients, however desperately ill, out into the cold. On January 2nd the Israeli Army said they had no record of his arrest. Doubtless he would have disappeared for good if thousands of activists had not been speaking and writing his name. We are doing politicians’ jobs because they refuse to do so.
Friends of Gaza in Hastings are receiving messages from civilians who are starving and injured, sitting shivering in tents that are now flooding, watching their children starve and fall sick with hypothermia while Israel continues to kill relief workers who attempt to provide aid.
So here I am, composing an open letter in reply to Dollimore’s reply, with no abuse, and no harassment… (an edited version of this letter was published in HIP Issue 268, 17th January)
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Dear Helena Dollimore,
You say in your letter that you consider the death and destruction since October 7th last year unbearable. I would like to ask you whether you found any events in the region before that date unbearable? Is it not unbearable that almost every Palestinian in Gaza is already a refugee several times over? Or that most were herded into Gaza when Israel ran them off their own lands and properties elsewhere in Palestine? Or that most of them have seen relatives abducted, beaten or shot by Israeli military, and some will have experienced that themselves? Or that Gaza has been blockaded and under frequent, lethal attack, against which Palestinians have next to no defence, for 17 years? Isn’t it unbearable that young adults in Gaza now were born into a place that’s walled in, kept short of food and clean water, and bombed? That all the while they were growing up, there were Israeli snipers ready to take pot-shots at them, or to arrest them and carry them off into detention illegally even for peacefully protesting?
Are you really that surprised that when, on October 7th, Hamas and some other resistance groups achieved a mass break out, some maddened individuals undoubtedly carried out criminal revenge attacks against Israelis?
You state that Labour is using ‘every diplomatic lever’ to stop ‘the fighting’; have you considered that the UK should stop selling arms to Israel, or stop our armed forces doing whatever it is they do when military planes fly out of Cyprus over Gaza? (I know Keir Starmer has said you can’t talk about what they are doing, so I’m not asking you to). Have you considered that perhaps the UK should stop arresting and imprisoning people here who protest about the genocide, since the international court has said that it is the duty of all of us to do all we can to stop Israel’s atrocities?
Isn’t it the duty of the UK government to comply with the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in relation not only to the agreement to investigate South Africa’s case that Israel’s acts in Gaza constitute “plausible” genocide but also with the conclusive findings in relation to a former submission that Israel IS illegally occupying, Gaza as well as the West Bank? (See ICJ’s ruling from July 2024) This is a decision accepted by the UK government on 4th November (by Hamish Falconer Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan)
You say you found it ‘harrowing to meet recently with families of hostages still being held by Hamas’. I’m sure it was and I, too, would offer them every sympathy if I met them. I know this, because I have met families of Palestinians being illegally held, starved and beaten in Israeli jails about which you say nothing even though over 6,000 have been incarcerated for long periods under “administrative detention”; ie without charge let alone trial, and some of them are children. It is very, very distressing but you must appreciate it is very difficult for campaigners to keep patience with politicians who only started finding the situation shocking when something bad happened to Israelis.
The majority of the people in this town – in this country – in this world – would be very glad to see our government making every effort to stop the genocide but you know, you can’t talk about stopping ‘the fighting’ just in Gaza. Over the past year attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have escalated exponentially, with at least 700 killed, several communities ethnically cleansed, and settler attacks on crops and livestock making it even harder for Palestinians to make a living.
Finally, may I remind you that international law requires that we consider proportionality. In recent weeks, Israel has carried its endless campaign of destruction into three other neighbouring countries (Lebanon, Syria and Yemen) and still had enough fire-power to spare to continue bombing civilians in Gaza. There is no opposition in Palestine that has even a remote fraction of the necessary fire-power to have an impact on that. Israel/Palestine is not a two-sided war. It is an illegal occupation by an army that commits daily, deadly, atrocities, and has done for decades. For all our sakes, please will our government try to stop them.
Yours sincerely,
Kay Green
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In the same week the letter was published, a ceasefire was declared, which is due to begin on 18th January. As always happens, Israel is using the interim days to kill as many people as possible. Despite this, those unbearable MPs will no doubt be chuntering on about a two state solution once more, so I decided to remind them what an impossible idea this is by using Brilliant Maps’ brilliant Palestine archipelago map as an illustration.
Let us not forget, there is not really innocent water between the fractured remains of the Palestinian lands, but stolen houses and plantations occupied by murderous settlers, lined with a network of military checkpoints at which Palestinians are routinely delayed, bullied, misdirected, beaten up and pointlessly arrested. It is perhaps possible that casual observers like the bloke who wrote the letter published next to mine in the paper don’t know this, but surely – surely, MPs commenting on Palestine must know … or if they don’t, why are we paying them?
And if they do know, how the **** do they have the nerve to pretend the unbearable trap-ridden jigsaw that is the West Bank, the toxic wreckage Israel has created in Gaza, and the couple of chunks of deep desert that Trump just added, could ever be described as a free Palestinian state?
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Kay Green 