Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself
I wrote this for The Guardian, on how Western governments are limiting expressions of support for Palestinians. It’s one thing when those in power attempt to suppress your story by privileging another. It’s quite another when they criminalize your story by false attribution and make everyone afraid of you.
What are you doing to stop the imminent ethnic cleansing of Gaza? This is a serious question. If ever there was a time to stand up for the rights of an oppressed people, this is it. And yet, in many places in the western world, you can’t. It’s literally been outlawed. How is this even possible?
As I’m writing this, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, is pleading with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to demand Israel stop its killing. “The delay in calling on Israel to cease taking revenge on millions of Palestinian civilians,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “is intensifying the descent into [the] abyss.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by the Israeli military after the entire population of northern Gaza, some 1.1 million people, has been ordered to leave everything behind and move south. (Gaza’s population is mostly refugees from 1948, and some have refused to flee, having once lost their original homes 75 years ago.) Israeli bombs have killed more than 2,670 people, at least 724 of whom were children. And every single member of 47 different Palestinian families – some 500 people, including dozens of children and babies – has been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
The term genocide, like fascism, is often flung around carelessly these days, but it’s worth recalling that there is an official definition. The crime of genocide is “to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. No minimum number of victims is necessary to establish genocide, but the loss must be severe enough that it “will impact the group as a whole”. Since close to 50 families have already and horrifically been exterminated, and we’re only just past the first week of this carnage, what other word should we choose?
The urgency to demonstrate against such horrors could not be more necessary. Yet our contemporary ambassadors of the enlightenment have other ideas. Across the western world, our political leadership has decided that freedom of opinion must be curtailed, that expressions of support for Palestinians reflexively equate to support for Hamas and terrorism, and that Palestinian narratives simply must be suppressed. These notions aren’t just hollow. They’re dangerous.
The French minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, sent a message to French police banning pro-Palestinians protests. He wrote that “pro-Palestinian demonstrations must be prohibited because they are likely to generate disturbances to the public order”. Adopting this logic, I suppose we should amend the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man Unless Such Rights are Likely to Generate Disturbances to the Public Order. Needless to say, government prohibitions on freedom of speech amount to censorship.
Berlin also banned pro-Palestinian protests. Vienna banned pro-Palestinians protests. Several cities in Australia banned pro-Palestinian protests. In the UK, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, told senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or chanting specific phrases for Palestine may be a criminal offense.
It’s one thing when those in power attempt to suppress your story by privileging another. It’s quite another when they criminalize your story by false attribution and making everyone afraid of you…
Read the rest here.