Are Palestinians Invisible? The British establishment sure acts like it.

On Channel 4 last night, Emily Thornberry was asked: "Do you think there should be any red lines for Britain's political support of Israel?". In response, the MP for Islington South and Finsbury repeated a tired Labour line, that Israel has the right to defend itself. She also said: "There are war crimes on all sides during this conflict. There are war crimes being committed by Hamas, by Iran… on all sides". Somehow, she did not name Israel once.

The same day the world woke up to Palestinians engulfed in flames, David Lammy announced sanctions on Iran for the attack on 1 October against an Israeli military base. An attack that Iran said was “legal and rational”, having struck a military base with no fatalities. At a time when we expect to see arrest warrants for the main perpetrators of the Gaza genocide – Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant – this attack could be seen as the country fulfulling its positive obligation under the Genocide Convention, which requires all states to act to stop a genocide taking place. Instead, the Labour government played its part in manufacturing consent for Israel to continue its onslaught, placing all responsibility for escalation squarely with Iran. Again, Lammy was unable to, or perhaps unwilling to name Israel’s recent acts of terror against Palestinian civilians, despite the fact that recent days had seen countless massacres in Jabalia and across north Gaza.

On Sunday, Hezbollah launched strikes against an Israeli military base, killing four Israeli soldiers. Sky News went to great lengths to humanise them; their full names, ages, and photos were displayed while presenter Kay Burley somberly repeated that they were just 19 years old. In fact, the majority of traditional media outlets chose to focus on Hezbollah’s attack that day and the following morning.  Irrelevant then, that all four were soldiers fighting as part of Israel’s genocidal regime. Irrelevant also that another 19-year-old was killed that day; Palestinian student Sha’ban Al-Dalou, burned alive in his bed after the Israeli airstrike outside Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. His mother and two others were also burned alive, but their names were not mourned by establishment media.   

Scanning senior Labour figures’ social media accounts looking for condemnation of these attacks, for acknowledgement that they might carry a shred of humanity, seems only to confirm one thing: Palestinians have become invisible. Israel’s genocidal onslaught has become so normalised for them that this horrific incident did not even generate a single response

As many racialised communities know, you are visible when your existence is seen as equal to others – specifically white people in the west, the “familiar Self,” according to Edward Said. But decades of dehumanising brown and Black people abroad in the name of legitimate war tactics or collateral damage, coupled with the ever-pervasive racism in our institutions means our realities are not the same. Still, recent displays of double standards in media reporting and the inability to condemn the most depraved acts of Israeli terror have been particularly difficult to swallow: that Palestinians who have been displaced multiple times and survived more than a year of genocide only to be burned alive, that this did not cause any outrage or heartache in the hearts and minds of the establishment in the UK. And why should it, if Palestinians are not even seen, let alone seen as humans?

When David Lammy spoke recently at the UN, he launched into a sharp critique of Russia, explaining how he, as a Black man, knows imperialism when he sees it, invoking his ancestry and the horrors of slavery to dress down Putin specifically. But what good is a Black man in a position of responsibility and power when he betrays the most racialised and oppressed? How can we be more than a year into what the ICJ has all but declared a genocide, with British politicians consistently failing to acknowledge the elephant in the room? The answer is simple: Palestinians largely exist to the establishment not as real human beings, but through the ‘complex’ history narrated by liberals content with the status quo of occupation and apartheid; through the passive and blameless ‘humanitarian crisis’ that many Black and brown nations are relegated to once imperialist objectives are met. Palestinians are not here being killed, ethnically cleansed and starved, trying to live, just like everyone else. They don’t actually exist in the eyes of the racist establishment, because if they did, we would not have seen more than a day of bloodshed in the name of ‘self defence’.  

solidarity is a beautiful word

I know I have immense privilege where I’m sitting so let me get that out the way before saying: some of you wear your privilege like an embarrassing stain. It reeks of white supremacy. In my view, privilege is not to be greedily scooped up for you alone, but it is meant to be shared, symbolically and emphatically, out loud and in community. It is a sad existence, being alive on this precious earth and not feeling the expansive love and connection there is, not just to people you’ve never met, but those simply aligned to the same cause.

Over the last month, I have sat in rooms filled with strangers and felt their warmth and comradeship like they were old friends. People I’ve not spoken to in years have reached out online, finding common ground in being horrified by what we are witnessing, and connecting with strangers I barely know for the same reasons. Arabs, Muslims, and allies from all backgrounds. There is little comfort in the world right now, if you are unable to disconnect. Even if you are doing your best, it is impossible to fully switch off.

I find it difficult to describe solidarity at this moment as joyful, but there is a fractured and distorted joy to holding space with others who grieve the same thing you grieve. It is softly spoken and fleeting, you know deep down that this feeling won’t last; the pervasive, overriding horror is a stronger force than you can rid yourself of. Nevertheless, it is a joy you cling to while it’s here. Its visit is short, but it tells you something you are desperate to believe. While there is this moment, an evening, this hour, with strangers and friends, in person and online, while you can feel and extend deep compassion to strangers, then there is always a reason to hope.

We owe it to every resistance movement out there, to hold on to that. Our privilege is not just ours to hoard.

The in-between

It’s been a long time since I last wrote something on a public-facing website, so bear with me as I warm myself up. Going back to writing is something I’ve wanted to do for several months now, but I was channelling that into forced attempts trying new styles that didn’t really feel like me. It’s taken a brief stint back at my mum’s place, my old home, to finally have some time to get to this point, and once I got there the ideas came flooding back. I say flooding back, what I mean is I’ve got three other posts sitting in drafts with half-baked reflections that still need a great deal of refining before they get their spotlight.

I’ve been wondering how best to approach the 5+ years of absent writing, which led me to make the unfortunate mistake of reflecting on what’s actually happened in my life since then. I realised this most starkly when a friend of an ex recently asked me what I’d been up to since we last saw each other, which had been just over 4 years ago. There was a brief, dont-make-it-too-awkward-that-you-cant-come-back-from-this silence before I said something overly cliche about how lots has changed since then, “but also not much, you know?” Ugh.

The reality is that the last 6-12 months alone have felt like whole lifetimes have passed, and I feel fundamentally different as a person now than I did at the start of the year. But doesn’t everyone? Does anyone ever actually get to a point in their life, no matter what the age is, where they finally sit down and reflect on how well they know themselves, are comfortable and settled in their skin? Do you ever just look at yourself, happy that you’re living your life “true” to who you are as a person, that your actions properly reflect your desires, and that you’re not being fake, living life on autopilot, or anything in between? Does that happen periodically, in between shitty things happening that shake your life up, or overly mundane mediocrity that chews away at your passions? Or do things change too often for you to even reflect, and you keep adapting, learning something new about yourself, how much your interests and focus have shifted, and how little you knew about yourself before?

Besides asking too many questions, there’s no other way to describe my life and what’s happened over the last 4 years, that doesn’t sound overwhelmingly cliche or boring. I don’t even think it matters, but there is a part of me that wanted to acknowledge the time since I last “put myself out there” with my writing, even though I don’t really know how to make sense of the growth and everything that’s changed since.

This time around, despite walking on uncertain ground, partially caused by being freelance, things feel a little different. I’m not quite sure of anything long-term at the moment, but in the uncertain space of the last few years, I’ve built a little foundation on which my external self rests, and it’s a lot stronger than what the five-editions-ago version of myself might have been led to believe. That’s the in-between, so I guess we’ll start and see.