Document:Pulling no punches at yesterday's rally for Palestine in Bath
| "From their own mouths, Lammy and Starmer have told us who they are. They are genocide deniers. They are enablers of genocide. They are conspirators in genocide, just like those who preceded them in the British government." |
Speech by Jonathan Cook dated 17 November 2024Subjects: David Lammy, Keir Starmer, Israel, genocide, UNRWA, ethnic cleansing
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"Starmer excels at one thing: being a grubby, cynical, craven politician, utterly subservient to the American empire and its interests in the oil-rich Middle East."
Award-winning journalist Jonathan Cook was pulling no punches at Saturday's rally for Palestine in Bath. Watch and share here.
TRANSCRIPT
“For 13 months, Western governments have shown us who they are. They are indifferent to the mass murder of children in Gaza. In fact, the West supplies the weapons and intelligence to help Israel slaughter more Palestinian children. Western leaders seem fine too with an aid blockade denying food, water, and power to more than two million people, starving them. Our politicians and media call it self-defence.
"Similarly, the West has quietly consented to Israel’s war on the United Nations and its banning of UNRWA, the only refugee agency capable of feeding and caring for Gaza’s families. Western leaders have gradually resigned themselves to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres, as well as the documented killing, torture, and kidnapping of medical workers. Western politicians and media have shrugged their shoulders as Israel has targeted more than 150 journalists in Gaza—the largest massacre of media workers in history. Israel prefers to carry out its crimes unobserved.
"Israel has carved up tiny Gaza into a northern and a southern zone and is terrorising 400,000 Palestinians out of the ruins of North Gaza into the ruins of South Gaza. They’re being herded into South Gaza—a so-called ‘safe zone’—only to be bombarded and starved nearly as intensely as in the north. The West has watched mutely as Israeli leaders have declared Palestinians in North Gaza will never be allowed back. They are being ethnically cleansed, as they were in 1948 during the Nakba.
"Day by day, Israel shrinks the space for Palestinians in what was, even before Israel’s genocide, one of the most overcrowded, besieged, attacked, and surveilled places on the planet. Israel is making a hell on earth for the Palestinians ever more hellish. And yet the West’s leaders have barely bothered to call for restraint. Even after 13 months of genocide, we are told this is a ‘necessary war against Hamas’. Even Israel’s aid blockade and starvation of Gaza’s population—an indisputable crime against humanity—is framed as an ‘awful humanitarian crisis’.
"Industrial-scale murder in Gaza, carried out with the supply of British weapons and intelligence, has become so routine that even the BBC barely bothers to report it anymore. Our protests are smeared as antisemitism. Like Israel, the West has stood on its head the very international legal order it developed after the Second World War to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust. As Israeli scholar Jeff Halper warned many years ago, sooner or later—likely sooner—Palestine’s fate will head our way.
"David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, says not enough people in Gaza have died yet for us to call it a genocide, as though accountants and mathematicians are the ones to decide when crimes against humanity are being committed. In any case, Lammy knows that Gaza has been so utterly devastated that it now has no capacity to count its dead. He knows that, according to experts, Gaza’s death toll is more likely in the hundreds of thousands than the tens of thousands.
"Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, spoke this week in the House of Commons to tell us two things: first, that any questioning of Israel’s conduct is improper unless it is preceded and overshadowed by condemnation of Hamas’s actions more than a year ago; and second, that, as an expert in human rights law, he can categorically say no genocide is taking place in Gaza.
“Today, Starmer excels at one thing: he’s a grubby, cynical, craven politician, utterly subservient to the American empire and its interests in the oil-rich Middle East. But Starmer is right about one thing: he knows the definition of genocide. In 2014, he defined genocide to the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the world, during a war crimes hearing into Serbia’s three-month siege of Vukovar, the Croatian city, in 1991. He would prefer that we forget his words, so let’s remember them.
"Starmer said, and I quote: 'Serbian forces carried out a sustained campaign of shelling, systematic expulsion, denial of food, water, electricity, sanitation, and medical treatment, bombing, burning, brutal killings, and torture, which reduced the city of Vukovar to rubble and destroyed its Croat population.” Starmer defined Serbia’s actions as genocidal because they were a “radically disproportionate attack deliberately intended to devastate the town and its civilian population.'[2]
"Israel’s crimes in Gaza are immeasurably worse, on a far larger scale, and far more sustained than anything suffered by Vukovar. And unlike the case of Serbia, there can be no doubt about the intent. Israeli leaders have endlessly repeated that the goal is to lay waste to Gaza, to make it uninhabitable, to starve its population.
"This week, an eminent doctor who has volunteered in Gaza explained how Israel dealt with Palestinian children it failed to kill with its bombs. Dr Nizam Mamode broke down as he told a parliamentary committee that, after refugee shelters were struck, Israel would send in small armed drones to identify and shoot survivors. Children he operated on would tell him how the drone hovered over them as they lay on the ground, and then shot them. He called it a deliberate and persistent targeting of children.[3]
"UN figures show that 70% of verified violent deaths in Gaza are women and children, with the highest proportion in the age group of 5 to 9 years. Is this not genocide, Sir Keir, as you defined it in 2014? Is this not genocide as the Genocide Convention defines it? And if it is not, Sir Keir, you urgently need to explain why.
"From their own mouths, Lammy and Starmer have told us who they are. They are genocide deniers. They are enablers of genocide. They are conspirators in genocide, just like those who preceded them in the British government.
"We may be exhausted by 13 months of lies, disinformation, smears, and gaslighting, but we are not voiceless or powerless. Our leaders seek to exhaust us, to smear us, to bully us into submission, and to silence us because they fear us. Every time we raise our voices, we shame them. We expose them. We remind ourselves and others that this is not normal—that we’re being led by immoral monsters.
"Solidarity with Gaza.”
