At the Emergency Rally for Gaza in London
Glyn Secker at Emergency Rally for Kamal Adwan Hospital, 28th December 2024
Glyn Secker’s speech at the Emergency Rally for Kamal Adwan Hospital on 28 December 2024, published by Jewish Voice for Labour on 30 December 2024:
There are no words anymore.
Decades decrying abuse,
A lexicon of a lifetime,
And there are no words adequate to excoriate these acts by
Yisrael.
Frozen in the headlight,
Dumbstruck by the unbelievable,
Hoarse in voice
I scream into the void
“Not in my name”.
At school, just after the last war,
books passed around described in detail the personal barbarity
and the mechanised genocide.
Uncomprehending of the horror, my parents were silent,
No words were spoken,
The unconscionable was in the past and abroad.
Though I was born at its height,
On the date of the fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht,
I never learned their thoughts.
And now, how has it come to this?
Mechanised annihilation unleashed on civilians
By new Jews,
With old rabbis
Scripting an infanticide halacha in military yeshivas:
Babies in intensive care units have the power cut,
710 babies and 1,800 toddlers murdered,
Thousands of amputees, with no anesthetics,
7,000 orphans,
Children targeted by sniper drones.
A total of 17,400 children killed, and rising day by day,
A calculated, programmed massacre of the innocents.
Famine weaponised: the deliberate starvation of 350,000 in North Gaza, now in its third month.
Thousands, including medical staff, detained without charge, beaten and tortured, many to death.
How has it come to this?
The seeds were sown at its conception by its founding father, Hertzl: in Judenstaadt he wrote, “To clear a country of beasts we should not take lance or spear…but drive the animals together, and throw a gelignite bomb into their midst.” (i)
J.Weitz, Head of the Jewish Agency, responsible for the settlements wrote in his diary, “…there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs…not one village, not one tribe should be left.” (ii)
Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister, to the Haganah army commander,
‘The cleansing of Palestine remains the prime objective of plan Dallet’ (iii)
Weizman, President of the World Zionist Organisation, 1920, “There is a fundamental difference in quality between Jew and native.” (iv)
Moshe Smilansky, founder of the Moshav movement, in 1914 said:
“We must not forget that we are dealing here with a semi-savage people”. (v)
Israeli Zionism is founded on deep racism, superiority and territorialism. Essential to its construction of Jewish identity, of the New Jew, is an enemy, a people to be subjugated.
During my youth and Israel’s youth, in the 1950’s and 60’s it was shrouded by a cloak of socialism and humanist Zionism.
But the process of oppression created resistance by the oppressed and generated a self-fulfilling existential threat.
Thus the story of the Amaleks takes centre stage. Netanyahu, televised, reads it to his army.
Infanticide becomes ineluctable. The raising of hospitals and the assassination of doctors becomes an iron logic.
And the the chief rabbi just the other day, unblinking on national media, with no reference to Gaza, promotes Chanukah as the flickering flame of humanity, as a light unto the world. A rabbinical banishment of humanity from Gaza.
If this is the light unto nations,
If this is Jewish identity
Then I am not a Jew,
Because I am a Jew for justice,
Because I am a Jew against genocide,
A Jew against all genocides.
For evil to triumph the good need only stand by in silence.
So the deafening silence of BBC Verify verifies their own complicity,
As do the sealed lips of the human rights lawyer, our Prime Minister.
October the 7th. was a crime against humanity.
But to understand it we must learn from the slave rebellions, particularly from the leading one, from Haiti in 1791, where 7,000 white French civilians were murdered, the elderly, the women, the children, the babies.
Yes, it was a crime against humanity.
But no one deigns to describe it as an act of terrorism.
It’s understood as generated by the brutality of slavery, for which France and Britain bore responsibility.
As Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General said, the war on Gaza did not start of Oct. 7th, it came out of 57 years of the Occupation.
Add the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967, the massacres of Deir Yasin and 19 more villages, of Sabra and Shatila and Jenin, the 17 year blockade and bombardments of Gaza, the 17 failed peace talks:
October 7th came out of 3/4 of a century of brutal repression, for which Israel, the USA and the UK bear the responsibility.
Nelson Mandela famously said that Africans’ freedom would not be complete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
This is profoundly true for Jews, for a people who oppress another can never themselves be free.
O Palestine
I am numbed by your indescribable pain, I shake with rage
And salute your incredible Sumud,
I too will never surrender,
For we are two peoples with one future;
We will never be free until you are free
From all of the river to all of the sea
We shall all be free.
Notes:
(i) Judenstaadt P.26
(ii) Weitz. My Diary. vol.2 p181 Central Zionist Archives. A246.
(iii) Benny Morris.The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. p.257. 2004. CUP.
(iv) Tom Segev: One Palestine, Complete. p110 2002. Abacus. London
(v) Israeli historian Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 43 archive.org
The speech is reproduced in its entirety