25 October 2023 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot in Middlemarsh
Defenceless under the night our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere, ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them of Eros, and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame.
Famous lines written by the great poet W.H. Auden in 1939 at the start of the Second World War.
Grief beyond grief on all sides of the conflict:
A few days ago I heard the awful and unimaginable news that Ahmed Alnaouq (29), one of our wise speakers at the recent ‘Listening to Palestinian Voices’ week arranged by the Iona Community at Iona Abbey, who is from Gaza and based in London, lost at least 23 members of his family last night (22 October 2023) including his father, brothers, sisters and their children. This is a further message about the tragedy from the Palestine Mission in London. Peter
֍ On Sunday morning our team at the Palestine Mission in London woke to the devastating news that the family of our beloved friend and colleague, Ahmed Alnaouq, has been killed in an Israeli missile strike on the Gaza Strip.
Ahmed tells us at least 23 members of his family, including his father, two brothers and three sisters and all their children have been killed after an Israeli fighter jet targeted their home in the south of the besieged Gaza Strip. “There were no injuries,” he tweeted.
At the beginning of October, Ahmed flew to Istanbul to celebrate the recent engagement to his fiancé who is also from Gaza. But their celebrations were quickly cut short. A few days into Israel’s relentless bombardments on Gaza, news reached them that his fiancé’s brother had been killed in an Israeli missile strike on her family home.
In the summer of 2014, Israeli forces also killed Ahmed’s brother along with 2,200 other Palestinians in Gaza in little over six weeks. And several years later, Ahmed’s mother succumbed to cancer after Israel delayed permission for her to leave Gaza for life-saving treatment.
Despite the pain of losing his brother in 2014, and the subsequent cycles of grief, desperation and the feelings of helplessness Palestinians so often endure at the hands of Israel’s siege and apartheid, Ahmed responded by co-founding We Are Not Numbers (WANN).
Through writing workshops, training sessions and one-on-one mentoring, WANN has gone on to train-up hundreds of Palestinian writers to tell their stories in the English language. Stories of life, love and resilience under siege and under occupation, stories so-often ignored by Western outlets. Many of their members are now leading voices in global media organisations and their pieces often feature in international news outlets.
Ahmed has tirelessly devoted his days to reversing the systematic silencing and dehumanisation Palestinians face in the West, addressing captivated audiences up and down the country, and internationally, and through his writings in major publications as a journalist.
Today Ahmed works alongside the Palestinian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Husam Zomlot, at the Palestine Mission in London.
Anyone who has worked with Ahmed knows him for being a kind, sweet and generous man with a big heart, and with an unwavering desire and commitment to see justice for his people at long last.
No words are adequate to soothe his grief amid Israel’s ongoing horrific onslaught on Gaza, which has already killed more than 6,000 Palestinians, but we neverthelesss send our deepest sympathies to him at this time.
Earlier on Sunday Ahmed tweeted, “Israelis pulled the tigger. But it was an American-made F16 that was used to kill my family. And it was the Western media that provided the cover and green light.”
Raz Segal, an Israeli holocaust and genocide scholar has recently described Israel’s ongoing assaults on Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide”.
On 15 October 2023, over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies also “sounded the alarm” about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in Gaza.
Now is not the time for the rest of us to give up in despair, but instead to dig deep, find our voice and to organise, educate and expose more unapologetically than ever the extent of Israel’s decades-long systematic oppression of the Palestinian people, and to hold our governments to account for their complicity.
Now is the time to demand permanent justice and freedom for the Palestinian people at long last. ֍
What are Israel’s options the day after ‘victory’? Peacekeepers, Fatah – or worse:
Tel Aviv’s dilemma is that ending Hamas rule in Gaza would create a power vacuum. (from a helpful and insightful article in The Observer UK)
֍ For two weeks Israel has pounded Gaza with missiles, as it gathers tanks and troops for a ground invasion with one stated goal, to destroy Hamas.
It is a deceptively simple target, one which sounds urgent and necessary to many in a nation profoundly traumatised by the massacre of 7 October, hoping to reclaim their sense of security, and a military determined to restore its damaged authority.
“Now we have a lot of pressure from the Israeli population,” a senior security official said. “We are really trying in headquarters here not to be emotionally irrational in every decision”.
“The only conclusion is that we have to go in. We have to go in and clean it and to eliminate Hamas from the roots, not only militarily, but also economically, its administration. Everything should go away.”
But destroying Hamas is a political objective, not a military one. Even if Israel claims success after assassinating senior Hamas figures, destroying arsenal and tunnels, and dismantling their administration, they have not said what they will do the day after “victory”.
The Gaza strip will still be there, albeit mostly in ruins. The population who survive the war will still be there, mourning new losses of loved ones and their homes. And the poverty and other deprivations that fed Hamas will only have intensified.
The national rage, the massing of military might, looked disturbingly familiar to US president Joe Biden, who warned Israel last week: “Justice must be done. But I caution this – while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
He did not say which mistakes, perhaps because there are so many. In Afghanistan and later Iraq, the US won the initial battles – as Israel is likely to – because of overwhelming military and financial resources.
Yet American agents didn’t reach Osama Bin Laden for a decade. In that time the war in Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, turned the country into a sectarian bloodbath, and sowed the seeds for the rise of Islamic State. The Taliban fought for 20 years and eventually returned to power, humiliating Washington in the process.
US politicians and military whether from arrogance, naivety or blind optimism, had given dangerously little thought to what might come after they humbled their enemy.
Israel appears to be heading down a similar road, with a leadership that has not defined what victory looks like and has made no plans for how Gaza might be run when any military campaign ends. It will be in ruins, with thousands dead at least, possibly tens of thousands, and the surviving population deeply traumatised.
There is little appetite in Israel to administer Gaza directly. Nor does Israel want the corrupt, sclerotic Palestinian Authority to run it because it worries about unity between the separated fragments of a potential Palestinian state.
“Israel in all cases wants to prevent integrity of the Gaza strip with the West Bank” said Jamal Zakkout, former adviser to Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad. “Israel has no strategy for any political solution including what they want from Gaza in the future, before or after this war.”
Even if the Palestinian Authority could be pressured or bribed into considering taking control, it is far from clear if they would be accepted, or able to do it. A government installed by Israeli military would not be seen as legitimate. The Palestinian Authority are already widely resented in the West Bank for their weakness and corruption. And though the majority of Gazans were not old enough to vote when Fatah lost elections to Hamas in 2007, there is no real reason to think they have become more popular. The only idea floated by Israeli politicians for Gaza’s future, an international peacekeeping force, seems rooted more in wishful thinking than reality.
The senior security official suggested regional powers would have a self-interest in paying for Gaza’s future. “We need goodwill from our neighbouring countries because they know that it’s destabilising the region. Those countries with money, with assets, should invest in Gaza,” he said.
But there is no indication that they would want to be drawn into the expense and political exposure of running Gaza, essentially on behalf of the Israeli government. Many countries are already financially strapped and have hosted large numbers of Palestinian refugees for decades.
Many people in the strip and across the region fear that hardline Israelis are not planning for a future administration in Gaza, because they want to empty it of Palestinians entirely.
“[The scale of death] shows that what is happening in Gaza is only targeting civilians and its main purpose is to displace Gazans to southern area of the Gaza strip, and maybe to Sinai,” Zakkout said, describing the campaign as “ethnic cleansing”.
They see in the frantic march out of Gaza city echoes of the Nakba, the Arabic term for the forcible expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian during the creation of Israel in 1948.
A tent city in Sinai for Palestinians is an idea with a long history; former deputy defence minister Danny Ayalon said Gazans should “clear the area temporarily”.
The Israeli security official admitted that the army has no idea how to fight this war without radicalising a new generation of young Palestinians.
“I wish I had the answer. Because if we knew the answer, we would have done it many years ago. We don’t have the answer to that, but we think that we have got to the bottom of the barrel and nothing can get worse than this.”
That kind of naive fatalism drove Americans trying to fight al–Qaida and sectarian militia with violence and torture; their policies fed an even greater monster, one Netanyahu uses to describe Hamas: Islamic State.
֍ From an article in The Observer of the UK on 22 October 2023 by Emma Graham-Harrison, Julian Borger and Ruth Michaelson
֍ Please share this article with friends and colleagues. Thank you, Peter.
֍ May we hold in our hearts both Israel and Palestine in this dark time.
