When Israel bombed Iran last time, I thought – my dentist’s in Iran, visiting her mother. Please don’t kill my dentist!

It sounds like a joke when I write it that way, but that’s what normal people do, when a war starts. We think of the people we know, and try to find out if they are safe, then we widen the focus, and ask who is dying, how many are dying? It’s not what politicians do – most politicians, anyway. They think of war in terms of states, and they think of war as something whole countries can win or lose, and they assume the best outcome – whatever the cost – is their own country winning.

Actually now I think about it, maybe politicians do think first about the people they know. Maybe when we hear that they have started a war, they have already made sure the people they care about are somewhere safe.

The thing we’ve been dreading all our lives

Most of us – at least, those of us who are not mouthpieces for the arms industry – have been saying all our lives, ‘what if it escalates to war in the Middle East’ or, when there is military attack in Western Asia, ‘what if it escalates to USA v Russia’ (the great fear for most of my life) or more recently, ‘what if Israel/the USA attacks Iran?’

London today…

The focus and the targets change a little bit, but the idea was always the same one – that our politicians, worldwide, are playing fast and loose with all our lives. It’s been true ever since humans had weapons of mass destruction. And all my life, politicians and newspapers encourage us to talk in terms of states – do you side with Israel or Palestine, the USA or Iran — or Cuba or Venezuela or any of the other countries the USA attacks — the USA, after all, is far and away the world leader in military killing.

And now, the most recent nightmare has become a reality. Israel and the USA have attacked Iran and whilst Iran has responded by attacking the US military bases it is surrounded by, I see all too many people on social media listing ‘the countries’ Iran has attacked. What’s even more worrying is that those saying that are usually people who haven’t listed the countries Israel has attacked in the last couple of years (Palestine, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Qatar…) and today, people who think that way will not be thinking of the school that was bombed in the opening salvo…

No, they are thinking ‘Israel and the USA attacked Iran and Iran attacked these countries.’

It’s as though it were a football match, and people are instinctively reporting everything from the point of view of their favourite team. At this, the most dangerous of times, what we need above all else is for all of us to remember military action is never an attack on ‘a country’, it’s an attack on people – men, women and children and, given the massive destructiveness of modern weaponry, also on the wildlife, the soil, the rivers and seas and the very air we all breathe. Modern weaponry does not know about national borders – there is no way of telling, for example, how many Israelis, let alone Palestinians, will die of the poisoned air, earth and water that Israel’s phenomenal attack on Gaza will have caused.

Hastings responds to the attack on Iran…

I am glad to say this was one of many protests around the UK today, all of them attempting to push our politicians into thinking about people instead of which side of the current war they want ‘us’ to fight on.

At our Hastings event, speakers made that very point, talking about the men, women and children in Iran and the surrounding countries who will die if this war is not stopped.

Please join us in taking action now. Let’s work on everything we can think of that might make our politicians stop trying to win the war, and start thinking about the terrible, terrible cost of war in terms of the lives of men, women and children, of the animals and birds, and of our water and soil and the very air we breathe.

And let’s tell them to think about the size of Iran. If the USA and Israel plan to do to Iran what they have just done to Gaza well, destruction on that scale will almost certainly create the climate crisis tipping point that will kill us all.

Tell them to stop the war – now. For all our sakes.

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