In truth, rather than make me feel guilty it should remind of the honour it is to be part of a body of people for whom genocide is anathema, from which they resile with every fibre of their moral being. Missing the honour of standing here should serve to remind me of just how honourable a stance is taken each Saturday at 12 noon.
Even when it is dry, warm and the sun bathing our faces with its rays, we can still think of the title of Arthur Koestler's renowned novel, Darkness At Noon. We gather to protest the darkness that has enveloped Gaza in gas chamber like-fumes every single noon for almost three years. We also gather to proclaim that even when governments act like little Mary Sun Shine, there is no amount of rays emanating from their corridors of power that are bright enough to herald the arrival of a new dawn. Western societies need to fumigate not placate the malignancy of the reach of the Israeli lobby. Effective measures alone can dispel the darkness. What sort of commitment to ending a genocide is to be found in banning Palestinian students from this country but allowing IDF war criminals to enter at will and unhindered?
While Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, makes the point that, if we are prepared to go back far enough in the past, genocide has been a regular feature in human history, for long the rule rather than the exception. Pinker was no in any way justifying genocide but rather trying to demonstrate that society has progressed quite some way to a point where genocide is very much the exception.
For we who gather here on a weekly basis, no matter how prevalent genocide was in the history of our species, or how rare an event it might today be, it has never been right, has always been wrong, and is as wrong in Gaza as it was in Eastern Europe when the Nazis perpetrated the most heinous crime in human history: the war of extermination against the Soviet people, part of which included the Holocaust against the Jews.
While evil sounds more like a religious concept than a secular one, there are instances where its use in justified by secularists. The Nazis were indeed evil but they were not uniquely evil. Hutu Power which carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis - which the West also denied was happening in real time - was also evil. Israel, like the Hutus and the Nazis, is not uniquely evil. But it is evil nonetheless.
This may be underscored by the recent activity of Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. The Guardian columnist and author Owen Jones who has tried to refrain from comparing Israel to Nazi Germany - I am not really sure why - has relented and very pointedly labels Ben-Gvir a Nazi. His reason was simple. Ben-Gvir posted a Computer Generated Image video of emaciated, weeping Palestinian civilians being sent into a Nazi style death camp. Jones commented:What do you say? Not even any subtlety there . . . Look at it it. Look at it. It could not scream Nazi more loudly. Now look, I have shied away in general from comparisons with Nazis. But what else are you supposed to do when the National Security Minister is literally positing CGI videos of what are mocked up Nazi death camps and senior Israeli leaders are talking like Nazis, unequivocally, whilst committing every single war crime and crime against humanity there is to commit, indeed including genocide?
That is why I try to make this vigil every week. Israel's Nazi like activity occurs every week, every day, every noon. This vigil, no matter how small, helps ensure that a speck of light reaches into the darkness at noon, every noon.
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