After joining Bristol anti-fascists to smother the pathetic efforts of a bunch of anti-migrant protesters to terrorise a hotel for asylum seekers, I addressed a Palestine Rally in Broadmead, where mounted police upset shoppers and their children by helping the neo-fascists to get home.
It has been a busy old Saturday. This morning we were defending refugees against the ignoramuses of the far right who know nothing of the circumstances that drive people to cross continents, often on foot, to seek safety and security from war and persecution, from drought and flood and famine.
Now they are being egged on by cynical Tory politicians happy to jump on whichever convenient bandwagon comes by. They are like the politicians of all stripes who pander to Trump and to Netanyahu because they believe the lie that ‘it all started on Thursday 7 October 2023‘.
At least here in Bristol we live in a City of Sanctuary. We can be proud of the city council, and the headteacher at Cotham School, who have stood up against the racists and xenophobes. They deserve our congratulations.
But they are functioning in a society which has changed fundamentally from the liberal democracy we all think we are living in.
When I was campaigning against the arms trade back in the 1960s, I never thought I would be living under a Labour government complicit in the arming of an aggressor state, a genocidal regime killing defenceless women and children trapped in what is little more than a giant concentration camp.
And when I was writing a column for Private Eye back in the 1990s I never thought that protesting about genocide with a copy of a satirical magazine’s front cover would render me liable to arrest.
Nor did I ever dream that simply by showing support for an Irish rap band I might land up in gaol.
We live in a very changed world where the so-called American dream has turned into a fascist nightmare presided over by an orange toadwart. And where the interests of those who make, sell and delivered weapons that kill indiscriminately take precedence over those who declare opposition to genocide. Where support for Palestine Action has become a crime punishable by 14 years in the clink.
Our only hope is that the jury system will prove its worth yet again by refusing to find guilty those cocking a snoot at this unfair and untenable law.
It is quite scary to see what the UK has become. The authoritarians who rule over us object to our calling them out for accepting money from the Zionist lobby. They delight in awarding contracts to Israeli firm Elbit Systems and have no compunction about flying reconnaissance flights over Gaza for Israel’s benefit. No doubt it fits in with their strategy for growth.
More health workers, and humanitarian workers and media workers have been killed in this god-forsaken catastrophe than in any other war in human knowledge. The families of these workers have also been targeted; innocent victims of a cooked-up ideology in the latest crusade to shelter under an irrational religious belief system. How anyone can sustain any sort of faith under these conditions is beyond belief.
On Friday evening at the Cascade Steps members of the National Union of Journalists read out the names of more than 200 media workers assassinated by Israel’s military since 2023. NUJ colleagues held similar vigils throughout the UK and Ireland last week.
At the same time as our Bristol vigil a similar event took place outside the BBC in Whiteladies Road. It was a pity we were not all together and that deserves a word of explanation.
Many journalists have criticisms of BBC coverage of Gaza, including many at the BBC who are deeply unhappy about the constraints under which they must operate. The institution is currently presided over by Tory lickspittles, anxious to protect it from politicians as Charter renewal looms in 2027 when the licence fee is also at risk. But as trade unionists we were commemorating our journalist colleagues, and not any particular institution.
Our task as trade union members is to defend workers best interests – whether they work for al Jazeera, the BBC or CNN. It is vital in any conflict that we do not put colleagues at risk. Any perception of bias or partisanship provides an excuse for the assassins to move in. As I explained on Friday, colleagues I have worked with in many of the world’s hotspots have ended up dead, in gaol or in exile, simply trying to do their job, whoever they worked for.
International journalists are not allowed into Gaza unless accompanied by Israeli troops. Netanyahu doesn’t want the world to know what is going inside the concentration camp know as Gaza. Or the depravity of what is happening on the West Bank. That is why al Jazeera is banned from operating in any part of Israel or Palestine, and must function from Jordan.
Luckily they are supplied by brave journalists who live in Gaza and the West Bank. Through them and humanitarian workers, we have known for some time about the use of starvation as a weapon in Israel’s arsenal.
As in Ireland 175 years ago, it has been happening in the knowledge of the world while plentiful supplies of food are available nearby. You would think Britain’s government would not wish to allow history to repeat itself.
Were they listening yesterday when UN spokesperson Tom Fletcher announced formal recognition of famine in Gaza? As he said it is ‘a famine both predictable and preventable. It is a famine caused by cruelty; justified by revenge; enabled by indifference; and sustained by complicity’.
It is true that the BBC was quick to relay what they called Israel’s “firm denial”, but by allowing Netanyahu’s spokespeople to both rebut the suggestion of a famine AND blame Hamas for it, hopefully they were allowing us to recognise the lies and hypocrisy we have become used to.
We must keep talking about Palestine and our government’s complicity what ever the cost.
Free, free Palestine!
gosh well written.
did you write a regular column for PE?
x
For a short while, when I was working in Parliament.