On Saturday, for a few hours, I was finally able to breathe. Marching alongside tens of thousands of demonstrators in central London was reinvigorating. Like so many Palestinians abroad, I spent the week finding it hard to work or sleep; I watched in horror as Israel inflicted carnage on Gaza’s 2 million residents. In one week, according to one military expert, Israel dropped on the small and densely populated Gaza more bombs than the US dropped on Afghanistan in a year.
It was disturbing to see that the language of condemnation and political consensus was glaringly absent when it came to Palestinian civilian deaths in the face of an incomparably superior military force, which wiped out entire families and neighbourhoods live on-screen.
Despite Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, saying it will “eliminate everything” in Gaza and speaking of removing “restraints” on his troops, despite reported plans to raze entire cities to the ground and to drive out more than a million people from their homes, scores of British politicians repeatedly and bluntly refused to show concern for Palestinian civilian lives. This kind of disregard leads millions of Palestinians to reach an unavoidable conclusion: that, compared with Israelis, their lives are less precious, their freedom less urgent.
It is also astonishing when compared with western concern for Ukrainian lives. Only a year ago the EU considered Russian actions to cut water and electricity to be war crimes and “acts of pure terror”. But when Israel announced a similar policy to starve the population and inflict collective punishment, US and European leaders flew to Israel to show support. Are brown populations expendable?
The demonstrations rejected this double standard and the racist and inhumane logic it implied. In the aftermath of 7 October, it was immediately forgotten that Israel, according to the international legal consensus, remains the occupying power in Gaza. This erasure of the occupation is surprising because Israel’s is the longest military occupation in modern history, and recently the UN general assembly asked the international court of justice to rule on its legal status.
This lack of concern for Palestinian lives has long been apparent: after all, the cruel siege on Gaza has been in place for 16 years. In 2012, a UN report asked whether Gaza would be livable in 2020. This siege, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports have emphasised, has been an integral part of a system of domination and apartheid.
The UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, has claimed the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” could be understood “as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world”. But to my mind, this chant, and “Free Palestine”, are not calling for the erasure of Israel, but expressing the rejection of an apartheid system of domination. Few today would express support for the bygone apartheid system in South Africa. It is welcome in this context that the BBC very publicly retracted its claim that the protestors were supporters of Hamas.
Beyond hypocrisy and silence, what made me even more determined to participate in Saturday’s demonstration were the British government’s cynical attempts to limit free speech and the right to protest. The legislation blocking civil society attempts to pressure Israel through boycott initiatives, the legislation undermining the right to protest and Suella Braverman’s letter to the police prior to the weekend demonstrations are all attempts to prevent ordinary people of conscience from acting in solidarity with the oppressed, the occupied and the colonised.
It was heartening to see so many demonstrators from all ages and backgrounds showing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, undeterred by the one-sidedness of the corporate media and criminalisation attempts. I was also pleased to see the waving of Palestinian flags in the demonstration, because expressions of Palestinian history and identity cannot and should not be criminalised, Braverman’s letter notwithstanding.
As UN experts warn of ethnic cleansing, and scholars warn of genocide, more demonstrations are needed to save civilian lives. It is our political and moral duty to stop Israeli atrocities and to act until Palestinians are able to live in freedom and dignity in their homeland.
Nimer Sultany is reader in public law at Soas University of London. He is a Palestinian citizen of Israel
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