The present war in Gaza has angered the world public opinion as the physical and human destruction inflicted on its people surpassed earlier levels. The Israeli relentless attacks on the civilian population have led to massive demonstrations and protests in almost every corner of the globe. To most people, the steadfastness of the Gazan population has become a source of inspiration for those seeking freedom and liberation. A new Middle East is now inevitable in which new political order will replace that of dictatorship and occupation.
6th August 2014
Michèle Renouf: I should first of all point out that although I am wearing a Muslim costume I am not Muslim. But I happen to love this costume because I think it looks good on all people young and old, large and small and also because it in this particular case it is the colour of my favourite group of people and that is Hamas. So I think of this colour as my Hamas silk and I love those people as I think of the phrase that has been used for our talk tonight: “to most people the steadfastness of the Gazan population has become a source of inspiration for those seeking freedom and liberation” … (and I would add) from the Neo-Con Zionist New World Order.
I certainly am one of those people who very much admires Hamas because I believe that they stand and fight for historical truth and international justice for all of us. And we will not have a free world until we have a free Gaza.
I would like to tell you that I have a habit of going into shops anywhere in the world and saying to the manager are you selling any goods from Israel because I will not buy any goods from criminal Israel. I do not at all mind being overhead! – in fact I love being overheard.
As to the aspect of the introduction to tonight’s seminar which is: “Israeli relentless attacks on the civilian population have led to massive demonstrations in every corner of the globe”, I have found that in my own little poll that people agree but they do it very quietly. They say they think that Israel is a criminal state and they too do not like to buy anything from Israel. It seems to me that the public do know, but for fear of the Jews – (and I quote from the biblical scripture “for fear of the Jews”) – people are too afraid to speak out clearly because our Predator runs the world by a simple expedient, that you cannot get someone to listen whose livelihood depends upon his not listening. You cannot get sensible journalists, documentary makers – anyone in any sphere of life – to actually say what the British should be stating: the bleeding obvious!
In the Sydney Morning Herald there was a Gaza cartoon. I don’t know if you have seen it. The Sydney Morning Herald retracted the cartoon and said it was wrong to publish on 7th July the cartoon about Gaza. They published the cartoon – then, they said it was wrong! If it has to be disdained at all then let it be this way round.
The article describes the cartoon by Ben Leviv, of an elderly man with a beard sitting at home with a remote control device in his hand looking at explosions in Gaza. The armchair has the Star of David on it and the man is wearing a skull cap. That is the picture [holds up cartoon]. That was accurate [holds up photograph of Israelis sitting in armchairs watching Gazans being bombed]. Do they not have drones? Do they not understand that the mothers and fathers of Israelis are quite happy for their sons and daughters to join the army because they are in no danger at all?
Then there was an outcry about this and the cartoonist justified the cartoon by saying that he simply took it from the picture that had been published of people sitting by the Israeli flag and watching the bombing. He was simply doing what many artists do in fact. At the same time the cartoon was accompanied by an opinion columnist, Mike Carlton who also received a lot of criticism.
He was accused of reverting to baseless accusations about genocide and the ethnic cleansing by Israel. He compared what is happening to the Palestinians to what the Nazis were supposed to have done. That is the opposite of the historical fact because it was 50 years before the pogroms of the 1940s in Germany and in Europe, in 1897 when Herzl the founding father of The Jewish State had declared that we will “disappear – spirit away the indigenous population” and replace them with us. That is genocide. You see it today. That was 50 years before WW2 and at the time Adolf Hitler was aged eight!
So let us not compare what is called “The Holocaust” with what is happening to the Palestinians: a genocide against totally innocent people devised in 1897. It is a great pity that this journalist Carlton did not know that.
There is also a follow up to this story. The editor issued a public apology for any offense caused by Carlton when he responded to readers over a controversial column he wrote about Gaza. Carlton resigned just recently when he was told he had been suspended for using “inappropriate and offensive language” during correspondence with Herald readers.
Now Mr Carlton said: ”I would have thought that in this country of ours occasionally telling people where to get off is not a crime. The sad thing is to see a once free newspaper like the Herald buckle to the bullies.” At least he got that aspect right!
There was another SMH article written on 5th August by Julia Nathan and she is talking about a chap called Peter Slezak who proclaims himself a Jew. Her trouble with him is that he has taken part in the marches with the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“. She claims he is calling for the destruction of the only Jewish State in the world. This is a lie. And it is a lie that even the Palestinians do not know about.
There is a Jewish homeland the size of Switzerland and it has been safe for Jews all around the world to go to since 1928 when Stalin accorded each and every ethnicity which comprised the Soviet Union their own autonomous region. Since 1934 American Jews were very keen on this project and they were sending money and supporting it. And many Jews from around the world went to what is called Birobidjan. It is the capital of what is known as the Jewish Oblast or in more recent times the Jewish Republic. If you want to know about it go to www.jewishrepublic.com where I tell about its circumstances.
I had a debate on Press TV with Netanyahu’s PR from New York and mentioned this and he screamed “Liar! Liar! Liar!”. It is 32,000 square kms, it is much bigger than Palestine. It was established without displacing any indigenous people, it has been there for 82 years. At the end of 1945 European Jewry could have gone immediately to their own peaceful Jewish homeland – and they still could.
So in 1946 there was no need to pirate Arab Palestine and from 1928 there was certainly no need of another Jewish homeland; and from 1897 there was no moral right to pirate Palestine where ethnic cleansing was intended from the outset.
So I have told you about the Jewish Republic v Herzl’s Jewish State. I should tell you about UN resolutions that could break the fear barrier so that people could actually be told of the options and every member state of the UN could actually bring forth a Resolution which will propose the first Jewish homeland as the first option as opposed to the second which is totally criminal. It is not quite impossible. Israel is loaded to the hilt since 1949 with weapons of mass destruction in the Negev. I do not know how it is possible that they were able to establish WMD’s in the Negev when we are to understand that all European Jewry went up in smoke just three years earlier! The world is bigger than Israel and the numbers of our peoples are greater. Yet we are led to believe that somehow the Israelis are a greater number than we are. We do not need to be fearful of being a minority. We are the majority and we should help people to get over the fear barrier. There are 193 nations that comprise the UN. We can get them to propose that we recognize the first Jewish homeland in Birobidjan and there is no need for the pirated second. Real international justice and historical truth could then be re-established.
It can be done through legal action and I would recommend Legal Action Against Wars. There is a pamphlet authored by Dr James Thring that tells you a great deal about how we could go about it. The only thing that frightens Netanyahu, the biggest bully on the planet, is legal action because they cannot get around real legal action despite the fact that the UN is a Zionist initiative. When the Palestinian children flee into a UN building they do not get refuge there! So we realize, if we did not know it before, that the UN is a Zionist initiative. Nevertheless it is possible it could put forward one Resolution that would help overcome the fear barrier. There is nothing “anti-Semitic” about claiming the first Jewish homeland as the peaceful first option.
There is much to be said but there is one last point, now that I am running out of time. To quote Gilad Atzmon – an Israeli-born “ex-Jew” – and that is the kind of Jew I like! One who throws aside the Talmud and all the anti-gentile predatory nature of that book. He wrote The Wandering Who? In it he noted: ”A Tel Aviv University poll which took place at the end of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza in 2008 to 2009 revealed that the IDF operation against Hamas in Gaza enjoyed the overwhelming support of Israeli Jews despite the loss of civilian lives. Ninety-four percent of the Israeli Jewish population supported or strongly supported Operation Cast Lead. The poll found that 92 percent of the Israeli Jews thought that the airforce attack on Gaza was justified despite the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population and the damage that was caused to the infrastructure.” So there you have it.
Some Palestinian women in this country and in Gaza say if only we could talk fact to face with Israeli women they would understand about our babies. Well, they won’t! Ninety-four percent of them have proved that they are psychopathic and they cannot be negotiated with. It is the same foolishness as the woman who would rather be “nice” by not telling her child bad things about sharks, because she wants always to be “nice”. Is that a sensible mother who does not want to draw attention to the difference between a dolphin and a shark and only to their similarity? Israel is a shark dressed as a dolphin. But as time goes on Israel, predictably, is undressing itself, and it is to be seen as no dolphin at all.
The two religions Christianity and Islam are the brother religions. They are the dolphin religions. But it is a big mistake to think that Judaism – not just World Zionism – is the dolphin. Judaism is anti gentile. Israel is the Judaic Talmud and the Torah made all too manifest.
Chairman: I should reserve the questions till the end of the session but I think in my role as the Chairman I would like to say that on several occasions you conflated Judaism with the Israeli project. You did so in your speech. That will bring on the charge of anti-Semitism.
Michèle Renouf : The Talmud says “do not expose your hand to the gentile”. That is its most significant tenet. That is why many Jews around the world did not want The Jewish State because it is going to show its hand to the gentile. The concept of Judaism is that you do not show your hand. But Israel has boasted and showed its hand and that is the only difference in essence between Judaism and Zionism.
Chairman: Referring to the cartoon that you presented. As a Muslim who is frequently facing Islamophobia. If you took that cartoon of the man with a beard with a crescent on his back holding a remote control to a bomb we would scream Islamaphobia. I would say this just to be fair.
Michèle Renouf: [Was drowned out when replying]: Cause and Consequence! Islam is not raining down a phosphorous Holocaust to burn alive babies via remote control. Islam was not responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel, for 9/11, for 7/7, for Iraq, etc.
Sheikh Ahmed Haneef: Peace be upon you all. One of the things I find very interesting about the whole struggle against Zionist colonialism is the paradox when we look at the concept of progression where we think we are better than our forefathers and that the crimes of our forefathers are crimes that we will not repeat.
And so we say for example that concentration camps in the Nazi era were evil so we will not tolerate concentration camps. Racist genocide is something evil that our forefathers or their fore parents perpetrated and we would not do this. The ethnic cleansing in terms of the destruction of an entire people are things that happened in the past and we will not tolerate this. Then you have countries like the United States, Australia, Canada and so forth where the leaders express apologies to the native people because of what their fore bearers did. The expressions of apology are assuming that we all accept that we have progressed and moved beyond slavery, colonialism, slavery and genocide.
But what we see is that the Western world is tolerating not only concentration camps but concentration camps that are put together to create ethnic cleansing. I will draw your attention to the struggle in Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbeniza and so forth. We are witnessing the example the gunning down of people who belong to a different belief configuration in the ISIS controlled territories in Iraq and we do not have the same kind of moral outrage that we would expect from the US government.
When we look at Palestine what we see is the development and the unfolding of a settler initiative. If you look back to the times of colonialism they had two kinds of colonies. There were colonies where the Europeans did not want to live. The climate was not conducive to them living there. So they made that colony into a huge mine or plantation and they would have representatives from their country or their companies to be there for short periods of time and they control the economy like it was supposed to provide raw materials for the manufacturing engines in the factories of Britain and Germany and France and so on.
In these economies there were slaves who were worked to death. There was disposable slavery. It meant that it was cheaper to work a slave to death than to maintain him. It was easier to buy another as they were so cheap. This is the economy that characterises the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Also the Kenyan highlands and some parts of Africa. These economies were targeted not only because they were resource rich but also they provided an equitable climate for Europeans who wanted to leave their country, own land and so on.
So you had these settler colonies. In the USA people would be attracted to a settler economy based on the level of alienation that they had in their own society: people who were well established and rich did not need to move to the colonies. People who did not have anything and felt oppressed and persecuted like the Pilgrim Fathers were the people who would go to the colonies. They went to the settler economies with ideals of a more democratic society and a more integrated society etc etc
But while they may have been oppressed in the West they did not have the same kind of mercy for the non white people that they found in those colonies. They considered them to be savages, little above animals and they considered themselves to have the God-given right of civilisation or Christianity in particular to take the land from these people who were like children. They did not know what to do with it and they turned the land into an extension of Europe. This was the settler economy.
This settler economy was therefore imbued with racism and policies to decimate the people because they wanted to take their land. In America they gave the American Indians small pox infested blankets. It was germ warfare at that particular time. Tens of thousands of people would die at once. If these people resisted they were considered to blood thirsty savages who wanted the blood of white men. Collective punishments were inflicted on them. Whole chunks of tribes would be gunned down and killed with the latest technology.
This was also accompanied by a myth that the people were in the depths of sin and passion and so forth. There is a myth that is being perpetuated. It is the myth that Hamas is hiding behind its people. So if I want to take out Hamas I have to take out the people. It is not my fault it is the fault of Hamas because they do not attach the importance of love and responsibility to their families and their children than we do. It is making the other a savage and they have to make them into savages in order to justify the extermination of these people.
Israel, the settler state, refuses to co-exist with the people who were originally on that land. They have been made de facto refugees who according to the United States and others have no right to go back to their country. Why is it that? What I am trying to point out here is that we have not moved ahead from the 1800s and the 1700s. We have just become a little bit more sophisticated and convoluted with our arguments. We have just become, or fallen prey, to the most sophisticated propaganda apparatus where on one level you could mourn for a dying Palestinian baby and on the other level you could justify the brutalisation inflicted on the Palestinian people by the only democracy in the Middle East.
So we have not moved ahead. It becomes important for us to become the conscience of the people in society. What brought colonialism and slavery to an end? That is the problem with young people. They do not read history. And if you don’t read history you are condemned to be hockwinked by those people who read history.
The colonial legacy and the history of Britain is not taught in the high schools. That is what I heard. The movement for change to place in the “mother country” by the very citizens of that country who are a minority but who had a moral conscience and they were undefeatable in trying to get this message across and they did it.
We should not just be criticising. We should be organising just as the abolitionists did. We have to come out with our own particular websites. We have to educate our children. We have to set up a mass movement to change the unfortunate trend of events in the world and the essential role this government plays in perpetuating this criminal status quo.
I heard there was a massive march against the Iraq invasion but it did not have any political consequence. It is because we have to move beyond the demonstration. We have to have the demonstration but we also have to create data bases, coherent ideology, understanding and analysis of the system and a programme of action. If we do not do these things we just become a protest movement.
Stephen Sizer: I am interested in the last sentence of the flyer for tonight’s meeting which talks about the steadfastness of the Gazan population which has become a source of inspiration for those seeking freedom and liberation. We have been moved by their tenacity and their perseverance in the same way that the Lebanese resisted and thwarted the Zionist aggression.
It is the last sentence that I found worth discussing. A new Middle East is inevitable in which a new political order will replace dictatorship and occupation. I don’t personally think it is inevitable. It is very much down to us: public opinion and mass movement. A change has got to occur is there is to be a new political order.
I do think that there is a greater sense of anger and frustration and a rejection of the Zionist model of expansion, colonialism and racism. There is a much greater global recognition that this is intolerable. The West in particular has been inconsistent in threatening Russia, Syria and other countries with sanctions and bombing and so on while we turn a blind eye to what Israel is doing.
So I don’t think it is inevitable. I think we are in danger of just another cycle of violence. The Israelis may withdraw to the outside of the open prison which is Gaza and they will continue to target Hamas leaders, they will continue to destroy the possibility of a viable existence within Gaza. They will exploit propaganda and give the impression that they are compromising and tolerant but in reality they have an agenda to create a land with no people. They do not want the Palestinians to dwell with the historic borders of Palestine. They want the land without the people. That is why house demolitions are occurring, settlements are expanding and there are military campaigns which are destroying the infrastructure: the hospitals, the schools, the water, the medical supplies, the electricity. That is why they target those institutions to make life intolerable.
On my way here I was preparing a brief presentation about what must happen if we are to see a new political order. It is not inevitable. The first is we have got to build a momentum. The media are incredibly fickle. They are like locusts. They focus on one story and then they move on.
You will notice that during the appalling events in Gaza there has been nothing said about Syria. It is like Syria does not exist. We do not hear about Iraq. Now it is all about Gaza. This week Time Magazine does not have a single reference to Gaza. It has moved on. The BBC website only has one brief reference to the peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They have moved on. It is Ebola, we are back to the Ukraine, whatever.
We have got to keep the momentum going which is why the march on Saturday (August 9th 2014) is so important. 12pm at the BBC. We are then going to go to Hyde Park via the Israeli Embassy. If you are in London on Saturday join us.
The second thing is that we have got to push the war crimes button. The PA is debating whether they are going to go to the ICC. It is blatantly obvious that they need to go to the ICC. We have got to pressure our allies in the Gulf, in the Middle East and in Europe, Norway, Ireland s and some of the other countries that are a lot more astute on Middle Eastern issues, to push the war crimes button. Israeli is scared of that. They know it is coming – it is a question of when.
We have seen Baroness Warsi make a heroic resignation. I admire her for doing that. I think Nick Clegg is calling for an arms embargo. It is easy when you are a minority party or in the opposition to wag your finger but the reality is you have to put pressure on the politicians to push the government on an arms embargo and much stronger criticism for Israeli war crimes.
Spain is going for an arms embargo. I think Ireland and France are close by. I don’t know what they sell to the Israelis. We have a much greater share of the blame for what is happening in Gaza.
Thirdly an arms embargo. We are totally inconsistent against Iran, Syria and Russia when there should be sanctions against Israel. There should be requisition and sequestration. We should be seizing Israeli assets to reimburse and rebuild Gaza. They have destroyed Gaza and they should pay to rebuild it.
BDS: Boycott, demonstrations and sanctions. There was a demo this week at an arms factory. There was a demonstration on the roof of the factory. The NUS is now boycotting Israel. We need to move from a boycott of settlement goods to a boycott of Israel. If Israel genuinely has 92 percent support for what is happening in Gaza then they need to know that we disagree with them.
Any sense of moving from a ceasefire to genuine peace must involve the lifting of the siege of Gaza as an absolute minimum. The siege must be lifted. The Egyptians must open the border in Rafa, we must have normality return at least to Gaza and then we begin negotiations on the one state. We have got to move forward with one state: it is one state, or two states but not no state.
We can build on the inspiration and the example given to us by our Palestinian friends but a new Middle East is not inevitable unless we take these issues seriously. A mass movement, pressurising our parliament, an arms embargo, sequestration, a war crimes tribunal and a popular galvanising of the BDS movement and pressuring Israel to lift the siege and move towards one state. Then, indeed we will have a Middle East.
*Michèle Renouf was born in 1946 in Australia. She is now a British national, and a lifelong international television commercials actress with a thirty-year membership of British Actors Equity. In 1968 she graduated with a Diploma in Art (Education) after four years training at what became Newcastle Technical College, then affiliated to the National Art School and now part of the Hunter Institute. During 1991-92, Renouf gained a diploma in Landscape Design. at the English Gardening School. From 1999 to 2001, she studied for a post-graduate degree in the Psychology of Religion at the University of London. Over the past decade she has been a pro-Palestinian activist, expressing strong views and challenging main Western narratives on Palestine.
*Sheikh Ahmed Haneef is an active cleric working with the youth and within the interfaith circles. He was born in 1956 in San Fernando, Trinidad. In 1974 he migrated to Canada where he attended York University and graduated in 1982. In the 1970s Sheikh Haneef was involved in the struggle for the rights of the black people and was staunch activist in anti-racism struggle. He was also active in the anti-Apartheid movements of the 1980s. His interest in the Palestinian cause was natural, given his personal and religious background.
Stephen Sizer: Is an Anglican priest in Virginia Water,Surrey, England. He is involved in a number of NGO’s in Israel and Palestine and is a patron of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He is active in the Islamic Human Rights Commission and a few other charities supporting work among the Palestinians and the Interfaith Movement.
