People who listen to the news, listen to the politicians, are very good at jeering at individuals, or individual projects, which are part of the global effort to bring aid to Gaza (more about this down there, under the heading Aid for Gaza).

What they miss is that the meaning of aid here is not the corporate, PR-friendly sticking plaster we’re used to. What Gaza needs is for the world to understand that someone, somewhere amongst the circle of Epstein-legacy politicians and corporations, decided they wanted the coastal half of Gaza and as much of Gaza as possible should be razed so they could have it. Whatever happened on Oct 7th 2023, evil that it was (Israel has never allowed an independent investigation so don’t be distracted into who did what to whom rows) WHATEVER happened, HOWEVER EVIL, was just an excuse to trigger the destruction.

What the Epstein-legacy politicians and corporations miss is that humans know an existential threat when they see one. Really, they do. You can only fool so many people for so much of the time.

What I have learned about Palestine over the last 20 years

The population of Gaza were already refugees, and the young people in Gaza are the sons and daughters of refugees who were herded or fled into Gaza when their homes and lands were stolen in other parts of Palestine. This had gone on until Gaza was one of the most densely populated – and youngest – places in the world. There are a million reasons why people in Gaza are unlikely to live to an old age – the main one is the Israeli practice called ‘mowing the lawn’ — ie, bombing and sniping in heavily built-up areas, reducing the ‘demographic threat’.

(That means, whatever happens, make sure the population of Arabs remains smaller than the population of Israeli settlers, so Israel can claim it’s a democracy.)

And then, around 20 years ago, Israel walled Gaza in, and started a long-drawn out, bureaucratic process of reducing the amount of food, medicine, or anything useful, really, that could get into the country. For years, with the assistance of Israel-oriented governments and media across the world, Israel maintained the fiction that they had to do this, that Israel, with one of the most well funded and technologically tooled-up armies in the world, was under severe threat from a small bunch of resistance fighters armed with hand-held weapons and home made rockets. They were containing, starving and regularly strafing Gaza in ‘self-defence’. It was very difficult, they were doing their best.

The law

A point that can be laid out simply in one paragraph, but something the politicians and media of the world always manage to bury:

Gaza – in fact pretty much all of Palestine – is illegally occupied by what Israel pleases itself to call the IDF (their ‘defence’ force). Most of us call it the IOF (their occupation force) now. an army illegally occupying another country does NOT have the right to self-defence in occupied territory when the occupied people are trying to resist occupation. The whole thing is a crime from the start, however ‘difficult’ or ‘necessary’ they claim it is.

What now?

They have now drawn a yellow line down the middle of Gaza (yet another wall) and decided the coastal half (now reduced to rubble) is going to be ‘redeveloped’ in a way that suits them. The Gazans who have not been killed in the last few years of indescribable carnage are penned into what appear to be permanent tent-cities – and they still get regularly bombed by Israel for reasons we can only guess.

The global politicians, the real-estate gods and the other corporations involved are trusting to the news cycle. They believe this story will drop now, and they can get on with doing what they want.

But the game’s up

We are all connected now. During the three years or so that Israel has been shredding the people and infrastructure of Gaza, social media, whatapps and Zoom calls thrummed with what was happening to Gazans, and increasingly, to people in the West Bank, too. We made friends, we learned about each other, and half the population of the world learned the word ‘samud’ from the Palestinians.

We know

We know this is a global, corporate surveillance-and-control effort. We know we should be looking at the US, at the UK, and at corporations like Palantir. We know that, having got away with phase one, Israel has progressed to destroying other countries in the region, we know that that Syrian gas-attack was a fake, that it was the fabricated excuse dreamed up by Israeli/US/UK planners, to begin the process of destroying Syria. We know that either we stop this at some point, or we will all eventually be subsumed by violent, corporate surveillance and control projects led by psychopaths.

Samud means resilience

It is the very deepest, most instinctive and basic characteristic of humans.

The strength and resilience of the people of Palestine is the result of their literally had their backs against the wall for decades. As the realities of global, corporate surveillance and control becomes increasingly visible, more of us are coming to see where this is heading.

In every country in the world, growing numbers of people are waking up, and doing what they can. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK is growing exponentially, and teaching samud. By the time the UK government had bent the law far enough to proscribe Palestine Action in the UK, six Palestine Action groups had sprung up in other countries. Stop one activity, another one starts. Wear down one activist, another ten are inspired. Scare people off #FreePalestine activities, they join #StopTheWar, or #StopPalantir, or one of the South American solidarity groups, raising awareness and sending support where Trumpian forces are now doing what Israel did to Gaza.

You don’t have to be a hero

As the Palestinians have done for decades, we all do what we can. You don’t have to be an ocean-going hero. From spending a Saturday morning on a fund-raising bric-a-brac stall to joining a march to raiding a weapons factory to risking your very life by joining an activists’ aid convoy, millions upon millions of people are doing what they can, and they won’t stop.

Me? I write blogs. If they stop me writing blogs, I’ll look around and find something else I can do. So will everyone else who’s woken up to it all.

Aid for Gaza

The people who jeer at the flotilla boats do so because they are still seeing them as presented by the media, as individuals doing something unrealistic or irresponsible, something doomed to failure. Just as the media rarely let slip that Gaza is illegally occupied, they rarely let slip that the aid for Gaza movement is contributed to by many, many organisations and solidarity groups. When one attempted shipment is stopped, another is already on the way and another at the planning stage. There’s an overland convoy in Libya right now, heading for the Rafah crossing. Being kidnapped and beaten by Israelis is not failure. The convoys can end two ways — by reaching Gaza, or by being violently intercepted by Israel, which creates another spectacle of horror that brings thousands more into the movement.

And every spectacle draws more people away from the nonsense legacy media, and into wanting to find out what’s actually going on.

Ben Gvir

This time, it was an Israeli Government Minister, Ben Gvir, who created the spectacle for us. These flotilla activists had been abducted by Israel in a particularly violent act of piracy in international waters, illegally carried to Israel, and – well, you know the next bit, because Ben Gvir made it part of his current election campaign (Israel is probably the most violent country in the world right now. Apparently, about 80% of its citizens love stuff like this…)

A mistake, perhaps? In at least half a dozen countries, politicians who had managed to ignore the carnage in Gaza woke up, and some called in Israeli ambassadors to complain about their citizens being treated like this. The flotilla crews were flown out of Israel to Istambul, where most were found to have bruises and broken bones, dozens had been sexually assaulted, some raped, and the Israeli prison service sat there saying ‘oh, we followed normal procedures…’ so Israel’s £25m worth of propaganda setting out to convince the world that they don’t rape and beat, they are still the victims in this, was £25m wasted.

The forces of corporate control are everywhere, and they are very afraid

Then, when a contingent of those flotilla heroes arrive back in their home country, there’s a bit of muddle at the airport. It looks to me as though one of those bruised, tired, traumatized activists doesn’t move where an officer wants him to move, and another runs forward before he should, to greet a friend who’s waiting to welcome him. I think the officers had, like the Met, come in thinking Palestine activists are borderline terrorists, so they went ‘argh, we’re losing control!’ and went nuts.

The result looks like a street-fight, except that all the beating and kicking is coming from one side.

Yet another spectacle of state violence. That’ll be thousands more samud activists for us, thanks.

According to Thiego Avila, more than a few flotilla activists are still in hospital in Istanbul, needing multiple surgeries because of the injuries Israel inflicted on them. There will be medical reports going to the UN about broken bones, rapes and all the rest of it, alongside the Israeli Prison Service’s statement that this is normal process for them, so I think that’s the end of Israel’s claims that they’re the good guys.

As Israel’s systematic machine of destruction moves its focus onto Lebanon, more and more people are coming to understand that this is a global force that we need to stop. The incredible noise we’re getting at the moment from the remaining Zionists is proof that things are going our way. Similarly, when Elon Musk’s pet activist Tommy Robinson tried to get his little gathering in London to cheer his US-based billionaire heroes, they er… kind of didn’t. Everywhere you look, the corporate propaganda is failing.

The game’s up. Samud. See you on the streets!

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