Palestinians have a right to resist Israeli aparthied.

I need to start this post by explaining that I don't condone the killing of anyone, anywhere, anytime. I'm against wars and for peace. Likewise, I don't support the death penalty and wouldn't even for someone like Harold Shipman.

I'm horrified by what is happening now in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinian people, including 6,500 or so children, are dead. Many more have been injured and maimed. Hospitals have been bombed and destroyed. In addition, Palestinians are being killed and displaced from their land in the West Bank. I utterly condemn this genocide, and with many others have been calling for a ceasefire for weeks. 

The seventh of October will go down in history, but the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians started decades before. This has been going on for seventy-five years since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 when seven hundred thousand were expelled from Palestine.

It's important to understand that Palestinians under occupation, and subjected to ethnic cleansing, and genocide by the Israeli government have a right to resist under international law, and that includes armed resistance. As Al Jazeera reports:

"In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere."

Don't expect the media to tell you this. You won't hear about it.

It's time there was peace in Palestine and the international community brokered a one-state solution where Jews and Arabs can live in peace together. With western support for the war on Palestinians, don't expect this to happen any time soon.

In the meantime, we all need to work to #FreePalestine.

Free Palestine

Last Sunday I attended a rally and march in Liverpool calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the terrible bombing and destruction which has cost so far an estimated 9,061 Gazan lives. Of these 3,760 are children. Of course, I condemn the attacks on Israelis by Hamas, but the Israeli response has been disproportionate and amounts to war crimes which include, collective punishment, the use of phosphorous bombs, and the denial of food water and energy to a population of two point two million, half of whom are children. 

We met up at the bombed out church in Liverpool

The March started off down Bold Street

The march was full of energy with people chanting 'ceasefire now!', 'free Palestine' and 'from the river to the sea Palestine will be free'. I'd estimate the crowd to be about two and a half to three thousand people. Not as big as the London demo the day before - which attracted half a million protestors - but nonetheless significant and satisfying.

Sadly but predictably, Zionists have been claiming that 'from the river to the sea Palestine will be free' is an antisemitic chant - it isn't. It's a call for the only solution - a one-state solution where Palestinians and Jews can live together in peace.

How long this horror will continue, I don't know. I pray it will end soon. One thing I know for sure is that it won't bring an end to Hamas or Palestinian resistance to the racist, apartheid state of Israel which has been involved in the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since 1948.

They're not 'their' children they're 'our children'.

A while ago, I wrote a post about western culture. It was called "Western culture is toxic and damages all of our lives". Here is a link. In it, I explored the way our culture actually harms people through patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, criminalisation, othering of nature and many other factors. This post should be read in that context. But it's not just prejudice that damages us, it's the way we live our lives.

Recently we witnessed one of the horrors of the climate crisis. In Derna, Libya, horrific flooding led to many thousands of deaths after a storm and heavy rainfall. The flooding was exacerbated by the collapse of two dams. What most of the media failed to mention was that the infrastructure hadn't been maintained, and this was due in large part to the destruction of Libya by western powers. Libya, once one of the most affluent countries in Africa, is now one of the poorest - due to western interference. There's a lot of blood on the hands of western leaders.

One of the key features of western culture is the nuclear family. We live in small family units isolated from our neighbours. This weakens our communities and isolates many people. There are probably about 400 houses on my street. About a quarter of these are lived in by elderly couples or older individuals. The nuclear family weakens our communities and makes them less sociable and supportive. That doesn't mean there aren't good things happening in communities, but our communities could be much stronger if we lived collectively as other cultures such as indigenous peoples do.

In the Derna flood, many died, and hundreds of children were orphaned. The Guardian reported :

"Nawal Alghazal, a 62-year-old resident of Benghazi, has started a campaign to collect breastmilk from women already breastfeeding their own children and distribute it to children whose mothers are dead or missing.

“The least we can do for our country and the people in Derna is to take care of their children,” said Alghazal, who has taken 70 young children into her care since the disaster."

It's great that the local people are offering to support and care for these children, but maybe it's time we thought about them and other children people's children as 'our children'. We are social animals. We need to escape from the prison of the nuclear family and begin to learn to live together better. That is the one of the routes to building a better, fairer, more inclusive world.