We were here at the start of the genocide. We will be here to see it end. We do not come to virtue signal but to signal our opposition to atrocity and to make an urgent plea to our fellow citizens in this town to absorb the meaning of Never Again.
The French Algerian writer Albert Camus once admonished those who ignore the rules of war with the words that "even in destruction, there's a right way and a wrong way—and there are limits." But like the Nazis who provided an impetus for the creation of the Kapo state of Israel, there is only a wrong way and no limits to what Israel might do. No limits to the lives lost, no limits to the children starved, no limits to the civilians maimed forever. The limits Israel wants are limitations on the rights of their detractors to speak out against them. This week we witnessed the kowtowing to Israeli demands by the institutions of British officialdom. As Barry Malone tweeted, in a tone dripping in justified sarcasm, echoing Jonathan Swift's proposal to feed Irish people during the British enforced starvation of 1841-45:
After more than 60,000 dead - including 1,800 children - I'm pleased to see that Kneecap and Gary Lineker have finally been brought to account.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of a no limits total war on children may be excused for thinking to himself that the only people who want him for who he really is are the judges serving on the bench of the International Criminal Court.
Netanyahu, we hope, is fighting a losing battle to maintain the pretence that his genocide in Gaza is a noble war waged by the world's most moral army. Nobody ever really believed him although in recent days that pretence has become harder to maintain. An increasing number of his allies in the West are expressing horror at the atrocities he is committing as the Gazans facing starvation come to increasingly resemble the emaciated souls of Nazi concentration camps. It is not that some Western leaders have had a change of heart. The anti-human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, now Prime Minister of Britain, endorsed Israel's intention to commit war crimes when he gave his approval in 2023 for electricity and water supplies to the civilian population of Gaza to be cut off. Now that Israel is doing just that, political leaders like Starmer are simply unable to convince ever growing numbers of their own supporters that mass starvation is good for the human digestive system. For all his chest beating, Starmer still refuses to call the holocaust inflicted on the Palestinians by its name - genocide. That Starmer can be nudged not through his conscience but by pressure from below, should tell us something about the value of turning out every Saturday to demand that our own political leaders do the ethical thing, even if not for ethical reasons.
Stung by the diminution in Western support, Netanyahu has fought back in the only way he can: playing the threadbare antisemitic card. In a statement crafted in some Knesset theatre of the absurd, the Israeli leader has claimed after the killing of two low level Zionist emissaries in the US that the chant Free Palestine is now the modern equivalent of Heil Hitler. That says more about his genocidal urge to obliterate the Palestinian people than it is an accurate description of what the statement means. He no more wants free Palestinians than Hitler wanted free Jews. When the neo-Nazi Netanyahu demonises the chant Free Palestine, the response should be repeated ad nauseum: Free Palestine-Free Palestine-Free Palestine. No matter how loud we shout it the effect, unfortunately, will not burst his eardrums like those of the children of Gaza when US supplied bombs rain down from Israeli planes onto their schools, hospitals and refugee centres.
Netanyahu accuses his critics of standing on the wrong side of history. There is only one side of history those who perpetrate genocide are on - the Nazi side. Professor John Mearsheimer has referred to the concept of Never Again which was supposed to set its face like stone against genocide yet here they are allowing it to happen again. In his words from last December:
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks. Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.
The killings in Washington DC demonstrate that Netanyahu's genocide has not protected Jewish lives but has endangered them. If the attack was indeed antisemitic as Starmer and others have rushed to proclaim, then it has come against a backdrop of atrocity carried out on behalf of a state that is not defined as the state of Israeli citizens but a Jewish state. Netanyahu has unpardonably put a target on the back of Jewish people.
He further claimed that the killings were carried out by a person who wanted to kill Jews and nothing else. If that is true then the killings are antisemitic. If the dead were targeted because they were Zionist emissaries, then they are anti-Zionist attacks, not antisemitic - the Jewishness of the victims was not a factor. Were two Nazi emissaries to have been executed by World War 2 partisans, who would describe it as a hate-fulled racist attack on ordinary Germans?
Still, we do not gather weekly to celebrate the death of anyone, nor to oppose one vile form of racism while seeking to replace it with another. Antisemitism has no place amongst us. We do not assemble to support war but to demand an end to it. When reflecting on the deaths of the two Israeli officials in Washington I am again reminded of another Albert Camus reflection on war: "there are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."
Not always practical in lived experience but a light worth striding towards as we wade through the darkness of Israeli carnage.
In Drogheda we gather because we are in tune with the perspective of John Mearsheimer:
One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night. History will not treat them kindly.
If we are kept awake tonight it will not be by a bad conscience.
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