Israel has not commented on the attacks

Richard Davies 

I heard it on the news today. “Medical staff in Gaza say an Israeli air strike on Palestinians securing aid trucks in the southern city of Rafa has killed at least eight people. Israel has not commented on the attack.”

This has become part of the daily grind of news stories about Gaza for eighteen months now. Since the brutal attack and murder of more than one thousand two hundred civilians by Hamas terrorists on October 7th  (Figures from Anthony J Blinken, Secretary of State, US Government Press Statement October 7th 2024) I heard it on the news today is a constant refrain.

Between October 8th 2023 and June 24 it was estimated 37, 396 people had been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the coordination Humanitarian affairs ( The Lancet July 10th 2024.)

The figures have only gone up since then. The Lebanese writer A. Naji Bakhti who teaches at Aberystwyth University described the war as “a stain on humanity”.

Bakhti’s first novel From Beiruit to the Moon is based on a childhood when he had to hide in basements with his parents as Israeli bombs periodically exploded on “military targets” in crowded civilian suburbs.

This refrain of killing in the most brutal ways has continued unabated.

We, as listeners, civilians a few thousand miles away can do little but absorb it.

The details of each death are hard to imagine – burnt to death, shot, bombed, starved, riven by disease, combinations of all, death, it is war, every means seems to be available.

Killings

These killings have been perpetrated democratically against a civilian population who have had the misfortune, imposed on them, to be crowded into a a strip 41 km long and from 6 to 12 km wide, with a total area of only 365 km²  shared or protected by a proscribed terrorist organisation as their government.

Did they have any choice?

They couldn’t get out if they wanted to and since the war have been unable to flee.

Andrew Mitchell, shadow foreign secretary, on Radio 4 this summer claimed that Israel was the only democracy in the region and deserved our (British) support.

Kier Starmer in opposition refused to call for a ceasefire. Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister turned up in Tel Aviv to claim he was supporting “Team Israel” as if it was some college basketball game.

Israel is a democracy that has democratically supported the mass murder of over 40,000 members of what in effect are their own citizens in the occupied territory of Palestine as the democracy hasn’t been able to countenance allowing another people, agency and governance.

The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years (according to The Bible) – the Palestinians since the Nakba or disaster of 1947 to 1949 so around seventy-five so far.

The current Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has refused to countenance a state for Palestinians. She is an advocate of continued repression ( Political Thinking BBC Radio 4 interview 12th October 2024).

Culpable

Britain is culpable in this disaster, allowing colonisation after the Balfour Declaration (1917) which turned into forced displacement of people who had been living in a homeland for millennia.

We left them to “fight it out” as described in a memo written back to London by Cyril Marriott, the British consul-general in Haifa in 1948 after he had forcibly disarmed the supporting Palestinian forces.

The writer Jasmine Donahaye and Professor Emirta at Swansea university has written movingly of this realisation in her memoir Losing Israel (2016). Her heritage is through Sephardic Jewish, part of a diaspora scattered across the world by persecution, war and politics.

“a sorrowing account of how she peeled back Israel and saw that the true peasants in Palestine were not the kibbutzniks, like my grandfather, but the Arab fellahin… displaced by capital in the 1920s and 1930s, and then by war in 1948. It is also an interrogation of accountability: has she been complicit by loving a country… whose very existence is based on a wrong?
–Ahdaf Soueif, Times Literary Supplement

I understand only some of this. If, living in bucolic west Wales, I was threatened by random mortar and missile attacks from, say Gwynedd, I would want the state to take action. If my children had been murdered on the 7th of October I would want revenge never mind justice. It is hard for me to even write that. I don’t want to imagine it.

I grew up in a time when our state was repressing our own people.

The only thing I knew about Northern Ireland was that there were bombs and guns that randomly killed people.

I still haven’t been to the north of Ireland.

Bombs

Bombs were also killing people in pubs in Birmingham, in cars on the streets of London and hotels in Brighton. As the British Army were killing people on the streets of Derry and Belfast while exacting extra judicial killings on the British colony of Gibraltar.

The murder of three British citizens in car park on nominally British soil in Spain (Gibraltar): Daniel McCann, Mairead Farrell and Sean Savage, walking away and unarmed, by that outfit so beloved leader writers in the British free press– the Special Air Service – was investigated and documented by This Week, Thames Television 1988.

No one has ever been charged for this violation of human rights despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling that the killings had been “unnecessary” (Amnesty.Org)

At least two of the three murdered were holding their hands in the air, the murderers were in plain clothes while the British Government at the time claimed that the British citizens had just planted a 500lb bomb in a Renault 5. There was no bomb.

The gallant soldiers shot the two men in the back, on the ground, just to make sure.

A Conservative British government banned and censored any comments from Sinn Fein, a democratically constituted political party with elected members of parliament, from speaking in their own voice on the British Broadcasting Corporation news.

I remember the lines “these comments are voiced by an actor”. This was a disgrace. It is not that far away. The British government has a strong track record of labelling anyone they ruled who disagreed with them as terrorists – Kenya, Zimbabwe, the Indian “Mutiny”. It goes a long way back.

The government eventually had to talk to terrorists. John Major and Gerry Adams, Tony Blair and Martin McGuinness, Ian Paisley, Mo Mowlem, David Trimble, Bertie Ahern and many, many others tired of the cycle of violence, were able to break it. The world turned and changed. Enough.

This morning there is more killing. At least eight dead. Eight lives.

Israel seem intent on more.

Joy

A few days ago there was a rare moment of joy and hope in the Levant as another murderous regime, also mired in killing its own people, (620,000 of them by some estimates) collapsed in Damascus.

The United Nations had documented the deaths of 350,209 “identified individuals” in the conflict between March 2011 and March 2021. It is difficult to count bodies buried in the rubble of cities.

There were celebrations in Syria and across the world in the communities of refugees displaced by the war – Syrians in Aberystwyth, which has become a town of sanctuary, as Wales is hopefully a country of sanctuary and tolerance met on the streets to celebrate – Hope – a rare commodity in these times.

A few days later Israeli planes were bombing Syria – pre-emptive strikes according to a government led by an arraigned war criminal.

I have problems with the idea of war crimes – war is surely always a crime. Some wars more criminal than others – the war in Viet Nam perpetrated by the United States for a decade without ever actually declaring it. In Viet Nam it is known as the American War.

Dresden

The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 by the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force was a war crime. A city with limited military targets and overwhelmed by refugees was bombed with the intention of creating a firestorm.

It worked. 25,000 people were exploded or burnt to death. Kurt Vonnegut who was prisoner of war in the city at the time and was fortunate to survive, used the material in his anti-war novel Slaughter House-Five (1969).

It is part of our history as humans: war, crimes, war crimes. No other species kills each other in quite the way we have. It is deep in our DNA, fired and honed by men on horses: conquest, war, famine, death and religion. Five. And we are back to the Abrahamic faiths in one of the crucibles of civilisation fighting for dominance, survival.

Christmas

Last Christmas there was a spate of news stories that the decorations were not going to be erected in the town of Bethlehem. Tourism was down. On the West Bank there was grief and sadness.

On the last day of November, I was on the Pavement in Hay, just by the clock tower. There were poetry readings on the hour every hour between 10 and 3. It was a bright day in the border town.

The market square was full with stalls, people making the most of a day, out together, sharing coffees, buying presents drinking the first glass of mulled wine. There was no threat. No chance of being strafed by a McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, American-built fighter jet, or blown apart by a 750-1b M117 dumb bomb. (source Justin Bronk, Royal United Services Institute, Business Insider magazine – the “The M117 dates from the Korean War era,” Bronk told Insider, and “have a pretty distinctive design that’s very similar to the sort of general-purpose iron bombs used by the US Army Air Force in World War II.”) This implies that some bombs are intelligent.

The Israeli government insist they are only using “intelligent guided” bombs’, and they are taking all steps to limit civilian casualties (over 40,000 of them killed) and claim they are the most careful and moral army ever to enter combat.

Amnesty International disagree with a report published on August 24: “On 26 May 2024, two Israeli air strikes on the Kuwaiti Peace Camp, a makeshift camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Tal al-Sultan in west Rafah, killed at least 36 people – including six children – and injured more than 100. At least four of those killed were fighters.

“The air strikes, which targeted two Hamas commanders staying amid displaced civilians, consisted of two US-made GBU-39 guided bombs. The use of these munitions, which project deadly fragments over a wide area, in a camp housing civilians in overcrowded temporary shelters likely constituted a disproportionate and indiscriminate attack, and should be investigated as a war crime.”

An attack on a peace camp? Israel will claim that the attack was targeted and killed four fighters. And the thirty-six people killed including six children? Collateral damage.

Back on the streets of Hay the poems are raining out to an assembled audience of friends and bemused but interested passers-by.

Our minds are on the moment, living, breathing, talking to friends, being free.

It was at a Hay festival outreach event in Cardiff in April 2024 I listened to a poem ‘Do the Birds Still Sing in Gaza’ read by our National Poet, Hanan Issa, she had metaphorically taken her NP hat off while introducing her reading.

The poem was an expression of her anger and frustration at the world that produces dumb bombs and machine guns. A gun that is a machine to kill people. It was poignant, sad, angry: all of the above.

“Palestinian bakeries are targets. To kill the spirit you cannot

allow the scent of fresh baked bread because

loaves carry life. Day to day to day life and if you wish to

end a people you must crush all joy.

Silence the laughter. I wonder, do the birds still

sing in Gaza? I don’t know if they can”

Extract of poem  “Do the Birds Still Sing’ in Gaza on Literature Wales website by Hanan Issa

The constant drip of violence is debasing. I listen, absorb, do nothing. I could protest. I protested in my mind when demonstrators were criticized for demonstrating their right to protest at the killing.

There was an element of the press that thought they should be stopped while shouting “From The River to the Sea” was seen as a criminal offence. Back to the Future. I have a dream. But I did nothing but think about it.

What to do? There is a committed group of protestors every Saturday morning in front of the Guildhall in Cardigan Town. They are doing something. I have heard the reactions have been both supportive and hostile.

There’s a safe sanctuary group working hard to integrate and support refugee families from Syria in North Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion. A country of sanctuary.

Back on the streets of Hay, Patrick Jones is about to read. I have known Patrick for thirty years by now. His poetry has always been political, sometimes a rage and rail against the machine.

He has always had a direct voice to his words that has connected to a wider public than most. As he has got older, worked at the words, lived life he is sometimes more lyrical, personal and political.

He is down for the 2pm reading. A crowd gathers. The clock dutifully chimes on the tower. Patrick begins. It is a poem about his visit to Palestine.

He reads with a clarity and sense of purpose, an anger at his treatment by the Israeli border security forces who had opened his luggage and searched through it before he left the country.

They had helpfully left him a note to explain. I edge closer leaning into the crowd to get as many as the words as I can.

The names have been changed to protect the people who hosted (Patrick Jones) with kindness and generosity.

He visited Palestine with the support of The Amos Trust.

Patrick Jones reciting the poem with musical accompaniment by Palestinian oud player Salih Hassan.

THE HEART IS A SECURITY RISK by Patrick Jones

Thank you for searching my suitcase

As I left Palestine

Thank you for your note  you left explaining what you did and why

A kind thought indeed

So you felt the need to open my suitcase

To go through my possessions

As I was leaving the country

An hour away from a flight home

Because?

Because I had been to  The Occupied Territories?

Yeah I brought Palestinian  items as gifts

Yeah I brought spices for my aching joints

Yeah I brought flowers from the garden of gethsemane

I bought blown glass from Hebron

Did you see them?

I tell what you couldn’t find in my suitcase

Like a paranoid stalker

I brought the love back from Palestine

The meals offered in homes

The cold water shared freely

The watermelon and cucumber given to us by our new friends

I brought the  warming smells of falafel in Manger Square

Abdul’s naughty laugh and his knowledge of the best bars in town

I brought Farah‘ s gentle calming consonants

I remember Omar’s creative vision

I brought the voice of  Habib’s speech at the museum  who told us ‘he wouldn’t be your enemy’

Or Maryam who made a meal for us 30 strangers as  she recounted how one morning 300 IDF soldiers came to demolish her house in front her children

I swallowed  Mahmoud Darwish’s  nourishing poems whole

I brought the blue  Bethlehem sky

I carry the smiles from Mo at the Olive cafe

I didn’t bring your wall your guns your skunk juice your obsession with cameras your shoot round the corner shotguns settler violence armoured vehicles

your bullets your uniforms your checkpoints your guntowers your permits your apartheid

No I left them all there  They. Are. Yours.

They are yours

No

I brought  home the love from Palestine

I brought home the light in  5 year old  Bushra’s eyes as we played frisbee

I hold onto the Yamal

And the  voices of Dalia and the other women in Nazareth who weaved a tapestry of hope

Stitched into my soul

Yeah remember that

I brought those home

You will never take them

So keep going through the suitcases with your grubby paranoid military desecrating occupying hands

For you will never find

What I brought home

From Palestine