Vanished is part mystery thriller, part coming of age tale and part chronicle of recent history. Ahmed Masoud, a Palestinian ex-pat living in the UK, set out to introduce readers to a part of the world that most of us will never set foot in: Gaza.
The novel is framed by events of 2014: our protagonist, Omar, leaves his wife and son in London to make his way to Gaza during the bombardment of the strip by Israeli forces. Having had news that his former home has been bombed, and unable to reach his remaining relatives and friends by phone, he feels a strong obligation to return, no matter what the cost. En route, he begins to write down his life story, so that his toddling son might one day understand what drove Omar to leave him behind, should he not return.
Omar starts his life story with the year he decided to become a detective and find out what had happened to his own father. Omar was a baby when his father disappeared one night, and by the time he is eight years old, he wants nothing more than to find out how and why. His investigations are dangerous, however. Over the course of his quest, he finds himself embroiled with the Israeli security forces, rebel fighters, nationalist and Islamist politics, the peace process and the intifadas.
Vanished is a very readable novel. The prose is plain and matter of fact. The narrative moves briskly even when events don't (sometimes, years pass between significant events and paragraphs of text). Our protagonist's struggles are all too authentic. However, in its desire to present 25 years' worth of history alongside the mystery plot, the novel inevitably loses focus as time goes on - just as Omar's quest becomes sidelined in his life as larger events take hold of him.
There are many things about life in Gaza that seem a little surprising to outsiders like me. Though it's densely populated, there is a very strong sense of community in each street. People know each other. Similarly, everyone knows who runs the Israeli army in Gaza, and everyone refers to him by his first name. I cannot be the only one who is constantly perplexed that Benjamin Netanyahu is referred to as "Bibi" by politicians and media alike. After reading Vanished, I must conclude that this way of talking about people, which sounds overly familiar to my ears, must be the norm in that part of the world. Perhaps most importantly, the Gaza in this novel is a living, breathing enclave, with people leading everyday lives and having everyday concerns. Children go to school, treats, sweets and beatings are dished out by the grown ups, young people head to university and make plans for their futures and careers, while dreaming about and trying to hang out with members of the opposite sex...
However, the book does have its fair share of flaws and problems. Perhaps the most unsurprising is the way Israelis are portrayed: monstrous child-raping killers, nameless oppressors, bullies. There is no Israeli character with any redeeming features in the book: they are clearly the villains of the piece. For a book which handles shades of grey and complexities between the different resistance groups and political factions among Palestinians quite well, this treatment of Israel is a little too simplistic. Then again, I doubt the citizens of occupied France / Poland / Czechoslovakia / Jersey during WW2 had many nuanced things to say about the German occupation forces...
Towards the end, the story loses drive a little bit. Events speed up radically, to the point of becoming a little confusing. At one point, I really struggled to understand whether I was reading the framing narrative or the life story narrative. The ending feels rushed, as if the author had grown tired of the book and just wanted to get it out of the way. Or, perhaps, as if it received less editorial TLC than the start of the book.
For me, the most problematic aspect of the book lay in its gender politics. I have not read (m)any novels written by Arab authors. I tried reading one (HWJN), but gave up on it, due to problematic gender politics in that novel.
For most of its length, Vanished treats female characters as any other novel would. I can't really discuss the problematic aspects, but I do know that any feminist friends of mine would read certain elements with their teeth very firmly clenched, and even I felt quite uncomfortable.
Vanished does a good job of being entertaining. It is educational in the way it depicts Palestinian society, though very simplistic beyond that microcosm (Israel BAD, Palestinians OPPRESSED). It's worth a read for anyone who wants to know what living in Gaza must have been like in the recent past.
Rating: 3.5/5
PS: For a very nuanced, intelligent and nevertheless thrilling and exciting novel handling the effects of oppression on oppressors and oppressees alike, I would heartily recommend Kindred. Perhaps such things can only be written about with such masterful nuance a hundred years after the fact...
I make no secret of the fact that I'm a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, so naturally I take an interest when a book about Israel is in with a shot at a literary award in my own backyard.
Here's the book's cover synopsis / blurb:
"During a phone call to her mother Jasmine Donahaye stumbled upon the collusion of her kibbutz family in the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 - and earlier, in the 1930s. She set out to learn the facts behind this revelation, and her discoveries challenged everything she thought she knew about the country and her family, transforming her understanding of Israel, and of herself. In a moving and honest account that spans travel writing, nature writing and memoir, Losing Israel explores the powerful attachments people have to place and to contested national stories. "
It's a promising description, as it offers a personal perspective of a complex situation. When I started reading, however, I very quickly found myself far away from my usual reading habits. As you might expect from a reader primarily interested in science fiction and fantasy, I enjoy stories with a plot and some exciting premise that takes me away from the everyday world. I do read occasional literary fiction and, less frequently, non-fiction books, but they often require a change of mental gears.
Losing Israel required a bigger gear shift than the other non-fiction books I've read: I found it very slow to begin with. The best nonfiction hooks you from the first page - like The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, and good travel writing usually lures you in with an intriguing, evocative start (e.g. the Wales Book of the Year Award winner Cloud Road, which then lost a lot of the momentum of the start of the narrative). Losing Israel, on the other hand, has a very slow, meandering beginning. The first quarter of the book is not very engrossing, which does not bode well for its chances at finding a large audience.
Once I got used to the nonlinear, meandering literary rambles, the book did become interesting. It never really moves beyond the cover blurb in terms of events, so whether you find it absorbing will rely heavily on how interested you are in getting a glimpse of another person's life and views. I would recommend the book to other people who have never themselves been to Israel or the Palestinian territories, but who want to understand the issues that cause the conflict in that area, and to readers wishing to glimpse the conflict through the eyes of a liberal Jewish Israeli Expat.
The book also stands out because it isn't biased and one-sided, unlike most things written about Israel and Palestine. Jasmine Donahaye interrogates the history of Israel through the microscopic perspective of her own family history, and then maps that onto the larger history. She goes out of her way to find truth and reality, and wrote as truthful a book as she could. However, it is very much a book about the past, with comparatively little interest in the present, and virtually no interest at all in the future. It's good background reading, but won't help anyone trying to imagine a different future for Israel or the Palestinians, and to me, that was a little disappointing.
Rating: 3.5/5
Commentary / Spoilers / Arguing with the text
I'm not sure whether a Spoiler Warning is necessary for literary non-fiction, but I felt a desire to discuss aspects of the book in more detail, or rather, to argue with the text. I think as a reader, I would not have wanted to know more than the back cover already reveals about the book's events, so: SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this blog post / review. I would only recommend reading the rest if you've already read Losing Israel.
One thing that struck me is that Jasmine Donahaye's ignorance of Israel's history was not wholly due to indoctrination and selective information. The blurb and the book present her realisation of a gap in her own narrative of Israel as an awakening, an accidental epiphany, triggered by a phone conversation with her mother. I'm sure that's true, but when you read the book, it also becomes clear that this revelation only really sank in because of the particular timing of that conversation.
There is a fascinating article about advertising, of all things, which relates to this: "How Target Figured Out a Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did". The article explains how researchers have found that humans become creatures of habit, including their consumer behaviour. The habits become so strong that it's very, very hard for advertisers to effect any changes. However, during certain periods when we go through big life changes, humans suddenly become incredibly flexible. All their habits are suddenly fluid and up for grabs. Getting married, having children, getting divorced, leaving university, starting university, moving to a new city, getting or losing a job. It seems self-evident that all of these would involve some changes, but on a purely intuitive level, you might wonder why, say, your shampoo or toothpaste brand choices should become more flexible just because you happen to have graduated from university. Advertisers don't care about the reasons, what they care about is the opportunity, and in this case, one particular period of pattern fluidity turned out to be identifiable to a chain of shops based on the things people bought using the reward cards - and once identified, those shoppers were targeted with extra and personalised advertising to tap into this flexibility.
Jasmine Donahaye had the conversation with her mother shortly after a tragic bereavement - her sister had died from cancer, not having told Jasmine about her illness until a few days before her death. Following on from these devastating developments, the author was clearly in one of those periods of being shaken and suddenly fluid and flexible in all aspects of her life. So, when a phone conversation turned to her grandfather's scars and her mother mentioned "villagers" and "Arabs" who probably caused the scars, her brain just happened to be receptive to change, and she suddenly found herself asking "what villagers?" because she did not know of any Arab villages near her grandfather's kibbutz...
She does mention the massacre at Deir Yassin, and a wider awareness of the Nakba:
"What I knew about the Nakba I knew in a broad, general sense. Even though I had learned a little bit about this other history, about people fleeing their homes in fear, I knew and didn’t know, just as many Jews, many Israelis, deliberately or otherwise, know and don’t know. The details of who and how and where are passed over or sidelined in the ongoing argument about why people left, about what created the Palestinian refugee ‘problem’. There are exceptions, like the massacre at Deir Yassin, although I had never heard of Deir Yassin as a child or a teenager. In many ways it is the argument over such extreme cases that has allowed the particular stories elsewhere to be lost in the broad generality of the term ‘Nakba’ or the ‘War of Independence’.
(...)
When, earlier, I had learned in a general sense about Palestinian Arabs fleeing the threat of war and then fleeing war, about villages being destroyed to prevent their return, and to erase their memory, I had been outraged, and am still outraged. Nevertheless, there was always something detached about my reaction; it was always an outrage that had happened somewhere else. But here it was close to home, not in the abstract: here it was near Beit Hashita, in the place my mother came from. What had happened there? How had it happened – and how was it that I could not have known? All the many times I’d visited the kibbutz, all the long weeks and months I’d spent there, nobody had ever mentioned the villages. I’d never heard them spoken about, never heard the story told – and hearing nothing, knowing nothing, I’d never had a reason to ask. "
...and this is where I simply cannot agree with the author. To say she'd "never had a reason to ask" is not quite right. To know about a massacre and ethnic cleansing, and about outrageous deeds committed by one's country is a reason to either ask, or at least to not treat it as "abstract" and something "that had happened somewhere else". It seems to me that her ignorance prior to the period she describes in this memoir was not purely other people's fault: not to interrogate the past had simply been her routine, and when her sister died, that routine collapsed, became fluid, and she suddenly became open to a radically different view of her own family history.
The book is a story of a woman trying to find herself, to gain an understanding of the history that shaped her, her mother, and the way her family shaped the history of a land she'd loved and worshipped. There's quite a lot of navel-gazing introspection, a heavy dose of Weltschmerz, a great dollop of uncertainty.
On the one hand, I want to applaud the author for bothering. Her efforts to seek out Palestinians, Arabs and their views are commendable. Going through a reassessment of one's sense of belonging must have been traumatic. And I also want to applaud her braveness for daring to write about a topic that frequently results in bullying and hate campaigns against anyone who dares to say anything at all.
However, having found her world view changed, it's disappointing that she does not seem interested in taking much action to affect the world in turn. The very existence of the book is clearly an achievement, and months of work must have gone into it, but I can't help wondering, is that it? Will she be sending a copy to the racist aunt whose deeply racist proclamations about Arabs and Africans she did not dare challenge at the time due to being a guest and bound by the rules of hospitality? Probably not.
"What can I say to Myriam? I know that if I were to describe the hospitality I received from Abu Omar, from Randa and Ghaith, she would surely say, as she said about the man who changed my tyre the previous year, ‘Nu, so there are some good Arabs.’ It would not affect her feelings about the undifferentiated mass of ‘the Arabs’. What I am doing and where I have been travelling is a provocation to her – and it is therefore harder, and it costs more for her to offer me hospitality than for me to accept it. She welcomes me into her home despite what she herself is appalled by in me, despite what I am doing, which to her is treacherous and dangerous. She must be raw with aggravation, but she does not tell me to go and never come back – I am family. She welcomes me because hospitality is, to her, something unbreakable. Also, I realise, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, that she loves me. I watch her, sitting exhausted and shrunk in the huge chair, with her tired, angry face, and she looks up at me and gives me her ironic, lopsided smile and that ineffable Israeli shrug, and the breach, the gulf, is sealed up, and none of it matters, because I love her too."
Having just searched for the name Myriam in my Kindle edition, about half the instances of the name ask "What can I say to Myriam", and in the end, the author never says anything. This, the end of a chapter and final appearance of Myriam, shows the exact thing I found so frustrating: an unwillingness to challenge the darkness, and an overly conciliatory attitude: that sense that Myriam must be even more appalled by Jasmine's actions than Jasmine is by Myriam's attitudes, so therefore, despite their differences, everything is somehow alright, and family ties and love matter more than right and wrong. This is simply not a perspective I can sympathise with.
Finally, towards the very end, Jasmine Haye seems to be making her uncomfortable peace with Israel:
"It is a bad sign, I think, if I can begin to use the word Palestine without discomfort and uncertainty. None of the approximations or conjoined names that attempt to repudiate that future deliberate amnesia are satisfactory – 'Israel/Palestine' or 'Israel-Palestine', or their reverse. Better that the name Palestine remain bulbous and burgeoning with ambiguity; better that the landscape remain complex and difficult; better that I hesitate between naming this tiny iridescent bird an orange-tufted sunbird, or a Palestine sunbird."
(...)
"My country Israel is leaving me too, but not 'into the hands and possession of another country and another civilization', as J.R. Jones saw the predicament of Wales, and as is the predicament of Palestine. My country is leaving me because its story is ceasing to exist, and because of what it has strangled out of existence. I grieve the loss, I grieve its departure from me, but it’s a grief coloured darkly by shame."
(...)
"Love of a person, of a place – the more you know, the more complicated it is. The knowledge that the person is wounded, that the place is stained doesn't diminish your love. The person and the place matter less, perhaps, than your need to love,"
These three passages struck an unhappy chord for me. I am glad the author expended the energy to look into Israel's history, and her own family history. I am very glad that her certainty in the Goodness of Israel has been shaken, that she has grown sympathetic to the Palestinians' perspective. But the world does not need her to feel "discomfort" about terminology. The world does not need her to grieve for an Israel that never really was real, or to wallow in shame. Neither does it matter whether she feels a need to love the place, tainted though it may be.
The world needs people to care, to talk, to speak out. It needs people who can see different sides (as the author does) and who can advocate for empathy and justice and decency. I was initially quite excited about the book, hoping that it might be a useful one to recommend to people as a nuanced, truthful and worthwhile introduction to the Israel / Palestine issues. And the book is nuanced, truthful and worthwhile about the events of 1948. So it's a shame that it ends with more introspection, with wallowing, seemingly without any desire to work towards any change. Does Jasmine Donahaye join Jewish Voice for Peace? Does she share the work of Breaking the Silence? Does she take any interest in the present and the future? (In the postscript she talks about "another war between Israel and Hamas", which suggests not: it's the Israeli government's narrative that it is fighting "Hamas". It uses the phrase "Hamas" the way the author's racist aunt uses the word "Arabs". Israel does not fight Hamas, it fights Palestinians. As even-handed as her take on the past is, the book doesn't suggest she takes any strong interest in the present.) The book makes it seem as if all she really got for her research were mixed feelings about the past, rather than any drive to try and fix the broken land of Israel and Palestine, and that is heartbreaking. What good is shame, if one does not take any action as a result?
And, to be honest, I'd hoped for a more accessible text, too. The book, written for a Welsh audience, uses the Welsh word hiraeth a few times - as a non-Welsh person, I know it's a unique word in the Welsh language, without a direct English equivalent. This, I guess, limits who the book it is written for. It's written for the Welsh literati. It's not written for Israelis or Palestinians. It's not written for Joe Public in the UK or America, or for politicians and leaders. I had hoped this book would be great to make people think, perhaps re-evaluate and change their minds, but, with its niche audience, I fear that it will struggle to get enough readers to make much of a difference.
There is a lot to like about the way the book handles history, but I, personally, did not like the way the book sees the present or the future. History is there to be learnt from, not to be discovered and filed away.
I've been handed the keys to the city Twitter account this week. One of the things I decided early on that I should do is use this power for good - in particular, for supporting the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign (BDS) which aims to apply pressure on Israel to treat Palestinians fairly, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Both of these are very important to me (and, I believe, to general principles of justice)
This blog post is going to be a bit of an essay, and it might just be slightly controversial.
Why the World Needs to do Something about Israel
Israel's government is essentially an extremist right wing one, imposing an Apartheid regime that is based on religion and ethnicity. The Gaza Strip has been turned into a concentration camp. If that is not enough, every two years or so, Israel carries out military operations that can only be described as mass murder.
Unless something is done, every indication is that Israel is gearing up to commit genocide.
Genocide
The word genocide is thrown around a lot these days. It's become a rhetoric device, a dramatic turn of phrase used to describe anything from injustice and cultural repression to the Holocaust.
So let me be clear what I mean when I use the phrase: the intentional eradication of a people - in this case, Palestinians.
So far, this has not happened yet. There have been wars and war crimes, there is continual oppression and there have certainly been crimes against humanity, but there has not (yet) been a genocide. After all, there are still Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza.
The evidence, however, is that a genocide is being brewed. Just look at what the politicians who currently make up the Israeli cabinet say and believe:
The current Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, in 2014 (before being part of government) quoted an essay in full and highlighted her support of its ideas: "The entire Palestinian people is the enemy. (...) in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure."
The Speaker of the Knesset, Moshe Feiglin, in 2014 (he was Speaker of the Knesset at the time, too): "There are no two states, and there are no two peoples. There is only one state for one people. (...) The tasks: Conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters. (...) the strategic goal: To turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city (...) Israel must do the following: a) The IDF [Israeli army] shall designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined. The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected. (...) d) Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza. e) Those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem"
Deputy Defence Minister Ben Dahan, in 2013 (prior to current role): "To me, they (Palestinians) are like animals, they aren’t human."
Culture Minister Miri Regev has compared African refugees to cancer. After criticisms, she apologised to cancer victims for comparing their disease to Africans.
Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel openly states that there will never be a Palestinian State. Only Palestinians who learn Hebrew and swear loyalty to Israel would be recognised as citizens under his suggestions. In 2008, he was even more blunt: “We must encourage Arabs to willingly leave, both from the cities and from the state.”
How the Genocide Will Happen
For Gaza, it's easy to see. The Blockade / Siege of Gaza started out by calculating how many calories Gazans would need, and then letting in less than that (about 2/3 of the required amount) in order to inflict non-lethal suffering and weaken people. This policy is no longer current - but it shows the mindset that still very much is.
Now, it's utilities and essentials - electricity, sewage treatement and drinking water - which are largely unavailable. Electricity is available for only a few hours a day. Sewage is largely pumped untreated into the Mediterranean, and drinking water supplies are in crisis. The UN predicts that, five years from now, the Gaza strip will be uninhabitable as a result. Hospitals lack supplies and struggle with the electricity problem: healthcare is in crisis, too.
So, Gaza's genocide will not take the form of gas chambers and mass executions. Gaza will die of cholera, typhoid and disease, of water contamination. It will die of an artificially created, intentional humanitarian catastrophe, inflicted on Gaza by Israeli policies.
As for the West Bank - chances are, Palestinian areas there will eventually experience the same fate as Gaza.
These are not just rebellious backbenchers, or thugs celebrating the killing of children in Gaza - they are now members of the government. (In some cases, their quotes predate their cabinet membership). Some talk of giving Palestinians Israeli statehood on conditions that they know won't be met - thereby rendering them stateless. Others openly talk of Arabs and Palestinians as the enemy, who should be destroyed, women, children and elderly people alike.
The language has become utterly dehumanising. Palestinians are described as 'snakes' by some (Avelet Shaked), and Gaza is universally referred to as 'Hamastan' - a Bantustan for Hamas (even by Netanyaho himself). Some propose to move any undesirable Palestinian forcibly to Gaza, showing that the Gaza strip is seen as a camp for concentrating the enemies of Israel.
These conditions are almost identical to Germany in the 1930s. Apartheid segregation, forced ghettoisation, and contempt for a group of people based on their birth / faith. Dehumanisation and violence. Talk of evicting the group of people they don't want - and encouraging emigration - is rampant. (And, just like in the 1930s, it's not as if any other country has open doors...).
What has it got to do with us (UK/Europe)?
Let's ignore historic responsibility for the moment (I'll go into that later). Let's just focus on the here and now:
Why should we care about what happens in Israel/Palestine?
The answer is simple: our governments are complicit.
Our governments trade arms with Israel, buying Israeli technology (e.g. drones which are 'battle tested' - i.e. which have been used in assaults on Palestinians), and selling Israel weapons. (The US does more selling of big items than we do, but Europe sells plenty of components and buys plenty of weapons from Israel)
While the EU agrees with the entire world that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal, products from there are allowed into Europe - and the strongest proposal so far is that they may have to be 'labelled' in future. What other illegally created products can be bought in our local shops? And how does labelling that they were produced illegally make it OK to sell them?
Our governments have largely abstained from any vote critical of Israel at the UN.
In short, unless we as citizens put pressure on our lawmakers and leaders to change their policies, some of the blood being shed is on our hands.
What Can We Do?
Campaigning against Israeli policies is not antisemitism
"Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is not antisemitism. Do business with Jews, organize with them, love them. But don’t support – militarily, economically or politically – the machinery of an apartheid-state. We can’t do business as normal because conditions in the Holy Land are totally abnormal.
Please tell your government that mere words of concern are insufficient. They don’t change anything. The appropriate response when confronting injustice is to take real steps to confront and eradicate it.
The late Richard von Weizsäcker, former President of Germany and President of the Kirchentag, demanded just this in a letter to the EU signed by many European elder statesmen in 2010.
Beware of anti-semitism, and all other forms of racism, but beware also of being cowed into silence by those who seek to stifle criticism of the oppressive politics of Israel by labeling you anti-Semitic."
- Desmond Tutu
There are, of course, petitions. (Aren't there always?)
You can boycott companies that are complicit with human rights violations, such as Hewlett Packard. If you work for a company, you can make sure to only buy devices from other suppliers, and/or you could ask for ethical purchasing policies to be implemented and HP products to be boycotted by your employer.
You can boycott Israeli products entirely
As Israel spends a lot of money on culture and sport as propaganda tools, to present Israel in a positive light abroad and generate positive news stories (so called 'whitewashing'), you can take part in a cultural boycott and protest against Israeli touring companies and sports teams.
When you see PSC campaigners at upcoming Wales matches, say hello, pick up a leaflet, sign petitions, and have a friendly chat with them.
Join the march against Israel's continued UEFA membership in Cardiff in September
Share! On Twitter, on Facebook, on any and all networks - don't be afraid to share news stories, retweet links to petitions and campaigns. Don't be silent while Apartheid is in place, and while the risk of a genocide in the future is great.
Donate to provide relief to Palestinians:
Medical Aid for Palestinians is a highly reputable UK charity which does exactly what it says on the tin. In the aftermath of the 2014 war, even the UK government donated to MAP.
Interpal is a UK charity which helps Palestinians. It has faced accusations of supporting terrorism and been cleared of the allegations. It has even won a libel case against another organisation - sadly, slander and libel are very common propaganda tools. If you don't want to donate online, there is an Interpal charity shop on Woodville Road in Cathays
Keep up-to-date with news from Palestinian territories. The problems don't go away when the bombs stop falling, and the media in the UK often report about Israel with incredible bias. (Even the BBC). Electronic Intifada is a reputable citizen journalism website based in Palestine and London - but it is intentionally on the Palestinian side. The Middle East Monitor is another reputable source, striving to be unbiased. The journalism of Gideon Levy for Haaretz (an Israeli newspaper) is award winning, reputable and worth reading. It does not take a lot of effort: just follow them on Twitter and only read the articles that catch your attention.
Don't look away. The greatest shames of the German people are to have perpetrated the Holocaust, and that the vast majority of Germans intentionally looked the other way and let it happen. Those who claim ignorance were willfully ignorant. We must not repeat those mistakes - it's our moral duty to pay attention to what our governments do, whom our governments support, and hold them to account when they are complicit with atrocities.
Remember: there has not yet been a genocide. It's not too late to prevent one. To make a genocide impossible, the Apartheid regime needs to end. The blockade of Gaza needs to end. And Palestinians must be treated with human rights, must be able to live under decent conditions, with autonomy over their own planning and building, and ability to trade.
Why should we care about what happens to Hamas? What about ISIS / Iran / Saudi Arabia?
Almost inevitably when anyone campaigns for fair treatment / human rights of Palestinians, someone voices these objections. So, here's my answer:
Hamas is a political movement with armed brigades. I won't defend them - they have done despicable things. Some solidarity campaigners say that Palestinians have a right to resistance - but Hamas cross the line between resistance to oppression and outright terrorism (against Israel). They are also guilty of oppression (against people in the territories they control)
Anyone who interchanges the words 'Palestinians' with 'Hamas' is intentionally dehumanising people in order to justify atrocities. You'll hear Israeli politicians and spokespeople do this a lot. They rarely talk of Palestinians - they talk of Hamas. Whatever their sympathies, most Palestinians are not Hamas members. (Frankly, anyone living under the oppressive conditions, perpetual state bullying and /or siege has every right to be angry. Saying Palestinians deserve no rights because many voted for Hamas is like saying UK citizens don't deserve human rights because UKIP won the European election there.)
The difference between Israel and ISIS & Iran is that our governments are not allies of ISIS and Iran. By being allied with Israel, our governments tacitly support what goes on there. Without that support, Israel would not be able to function the way it does - and it is that support we must erode. Israel should be every bit as isolated from the international community as Iran and ISIS: it too is a pariah state.
Also, I absolutely believe our governments need to take a different stance on Saudi Arabia. All the oil in the world isn't worth turning a blind eye to the oppression of all women, and the dire and medieval attitude to human life imposed by the regime over there.
Enough of this what-about-ery.
History: How did we get into this Mess?
In terms of the post-1945 history, this is probably the most unbiased and clear explanation that can be achieved in about five minutes:
If you look back further in history, Britain has a lot to answer for.
In 1915, Britain promised self-rule to people in the region if they fought / rose up against the Ottomoan empire. The McMahon Agreement basically promised Palestinians self-rule.
In 1917, Britain promised the holy land to Zionists, in return for funding. It promised land that it a) did not yet control and b) had already promised to the local residents - Britain sold the same land twice, once for fighters and once for money,
After WW1, Britain controlled Palestine as a Protectorate, until the end of WW2
After WW2, the UN (with Britain's consent) created the state of Israel.
Zionists moved in. Palestinians fled. This is the Nakba - the catastrophe of the Palestinian people. Some claim they fled because they knew that Arab armies would attack. Some say they fled in fear. Some say they were forcibly driven out. All of these versions are true - the Deir Yassin Massacre (where Zionist brigades under control of a later Israeli Prime Minister massacred Palestinians) was a high profile atrocity which resulted in most Palestinians fleeing. Those who fled were not allowed to return, and their property was taken into Israeli ownership by the new state.
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