We are not OK
Selma Dabbagh
It’s happening again. Different territory, different people, but still friends, the messages going to Lebanon, to the women writers who contributed pieces to an anthology I edited during lockdown: are they OK? ‘No, we are not OK. Nobody here is OK.’
A friend in London tells me her family in Beirut are in a constant state of terror and anxiety. Others say that their family farm has been destroyed, that all their relatives have been displaced, that Israel has bombed the roads, that it’s a scorched earth policy, that the tactics used against Gaza this time last year are starting in Lebanon. Again, ambulances and health workers are being targeted. More than a million people have been displaced from the south to Beirut, where many are sheltered in schools.
The al-Jazeera journalist Imran Khan wrote on 27 October that he is ‘still processing the attack on the compound where journalists were staying in Southern Lebanon. Three killed and several injured … it was just dumb luck that our team stayed in a different part of the hill.’ ‘First they came for the journalists,’ says a demonstration placard, drawing on Martin Niemöller’s poem, which I first saw translated into Arabic and pinned on an Egyptian activist’s wall in Cairo in the 1990s. ‘We don’t know what happened after that,’ it concludes.
‘Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,’ the UN Security Council was told earlier this month. My friend Ghassan Abu Sitta, who this time last year was working as a war surgeon at al-Shifa Hospital, is now in Beirut doing the same. On 26 October he wrote that his friend and colleague, Dr Mohammad Obaid, had been arrested at al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya. ‘He exemplifies all that is noble, heroic and dignified in medicine as a tool for resisting the genocide,’ Ghassan wrote, ‘staying in Northern Gaza for over a year’ and returning to work ‘after he was shot by a sniper inside the hospital at the end of 2023. He embodies all that is great in our people.’
On 15 October, Oxfam and 37 other humanitarian organisations released an urgent joint statement:
The Israeli forces’ assault on Gaza has escalated to a horrifying level of atrocity. Northern Gaza is being wiped off the map. Under the guise of ‘evacuation’, Israeli forces have ordered the forced displacement of an estimated 400,000 Palestinians trapped in northern Gaza, including Gaza City. This is not an evacuation – this is forced displacement under gunfire. Since 1 October, no food has been allowed into the area, and civilians are being starved and bombed in their homes and their tents.
‘Global leaders have both a legal and moral duty to act now,’ the statement concludes, with reference to the ruling nine months ago by the International Court of Justice that Israel should ‘take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope’ of the Genocide Convention. The intent to destroy a people in whole or in part is often difficult to prove in cases of genocide, but when it comes to Israel’s leaders there are reams of official statements and interviews elucidating the desire to do exactly that.
Over a million people have protested in London this year and a majority of the British population think the Israeli prime minister should be arrested for war crimes, yet the UK government continues to prostrate itself before Israel.
As a permanent member of the Security Council, the UK could, following the military invasion by one member state (Israel) of the sovereign territory of another (Lebanon), explore the options of the UN exercising its Chapter VII powers, which include economic and military sanctions and the use of force against Israel. Instead, Britain endorses arms exports to the aggressor, despite legal challenges and civil servants resigning in protest because Israel is ‘perpetrating war crimes in plain sight’.
Arms are not policed, but anti-apartheid activists are: Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson, barred from entering the UK to conduct a tour in solidarity with Palestinian groups, was given no proper reason for the visa refusal, according to Roshan Dadoo of the South African Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Committee. The information presented by the UK authorities had been ‘quite out of the ordinary’. ‘This kind of censorship,’ she said, ‘goes against any kind of freedom of expression or human rights or any pretence of the Labour Party’s international solidarity which they had offered to us during our struggle.’
‘Today I woke up with both my eyes closed.’ My friend Marwa’s voice is slow in the note she leaves. She is in the south of Gaza, in a tent, ‘with, I think, a pus infection, but for me I can understand when this happens to me that I don’t want to see anything. It’s psychosomatic … Here everything is the same. We are in the same cycle of expectation and frustration … The north is very, very tense. My mother [in Gaza City] is OK. This week, her voice is weak, waiting for us. Everything is very, very expensive. One kilo of sugar costs almost 130 shekels – no, thirty Jordanian dinars [£32].’
Four thousand international journalists are accredited by Israel. They could cover the war on Gaza if they were allowed to, but very few do. The only way in is a ‘deep embed’ with Israeli forces. The 19-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad was one of the few still reporting from north Gaza. Patchy internet meant it would take him hours to upload footage from his phone. An Israeli officer threatened him, ordering him to desist: ‘Listen, if you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next and turn your family into […] This is your last warning.’ He shared the message with a friend before an airstrike killed him on 5 October. He had taken the precaution of moving away from his family for their protection. The pieces of his body were gathered into plastic bags for burial.
At the British Library on 14 October, Naomi Klein described Hamad’s killing. She was speaking at a ceremony to award Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el-Fattah this year’s PEN Pinter Prize for writers who have sought (in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech) to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. Abd el-Fattah was due for release from Egyptian prison at the end of September. PEN’s invitation to Klein included the caveat: ‘Given the state of the world and the targeting by governments of both Alaa and Arundhati, it’s possible that both will be able to join us in person, but also that neither will.’
Roy managed to attend the event in person, but Abd el-Fattah’s sentence was arbitrarily extended until at least 2027. Roy spoke of her ‘friends and comrades in prison in India, lawyers, academics, students, journalists’, and the ‘thousands incarcerated in Kashmir’. She spoke of the atrocities committed by the US or its proxies in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan before turning to the atrocities now being committed by Israel with American and British support:
To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another … The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed … No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide.
Roy and Klein are among the thousand writers who have announced a ‘mass boycott of Israeli publishers complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people’.
The following evening at the Royal Geographic Society, the Palestinian human rights lawyer Raji Sourani delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture (the talk was supported by the LRB, among others; I was Sourani’s interlocutor). ‘We want no more than the rule of law,’ he said. ‘We have no right to just be good victims.’
Sourani lives by his belief that individuals should either speak up or shut up. He has spoken out against the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and spent years in Israeli prisons, where he was tortured. ‘I know what it feels like when fifty times a day you just want to die.’ He estimated that between 17,000 and 21,000 Palestinians are currently being detained – mostly incommunicado – by Israel. Many of these arrests or disappearances happen as Palestinians try to traverse the Gaza Strip. There are accounts of extreme torture, degradation and rape. The Palestine Centre for Human Rights, of which Sourani is the director, continues to report on such abuses, even though all three of its offices in Gaza have been bombed. Sourani’s home was hit by an airstrike a year ago. He, his wife and son were rescued from the rubble.
In July, the International Court of Justice issued a groundbreaking advisory opinion:
Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources … Israel’s legislation and measures violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. The ICJ mandated Israel to end its occupation, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to Palestinian victims and facilitate the return of displaced people.
Sourani praised the lawyers who created the international legal system after the Second World War. Among those continuing their legacy are the group of 39 independent experts who advised the UN in September, urging states to ‘take meaningful steps … that would ensure compliance with the ICJ opinion’. They warned: ‘The world stands upon the edge of a knife. Either we travel collectively towards a future of just peace and lawfulness – or hurtle towards anarchy and dystopia, and a world where might makes right.’
Marwa’s colleague K in Jabaliya in the north of Gaza had told me that there were ‘daily attacks, unfortunately’. The food situation was slightly better, although there was no fresh food available. She moved to Gaza City with, I presume, the eleven children in her care, leaving her father and brother in Jabaliya. When I asked her to describe her situation, she replied: ‘I can say there are no words to express what is happening, unfortunately.’ On 28 October, as the Knesset was passing a bill to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating in Israel, I heard that her brother has since been taken by Israeli forces.