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OPEN LETTER TO THOSE IN THE UK WHO ARE SILENT ON GAZA

Chapter one - INTRODUCTION

This is the first of ten chapters examining what is happening in Gaza and why we must speak up. The situation in Gaza is an abomination and the UK Government is supporting and enabling it. The fate of two million people – around half of whom are children - trapped in Gaza and being starved and bombed to death is obviously a moral issue of the first order. In addition, as I argue later (in chapter 9), there will inevitably be extremely grave consequences for us all and it is absolutely in our self-interest to speak up now.

The further chapters (each a maximum of 1,000 words) will be: -

2. I am Jewish and for almost fifty years I was a Zionist
3. It is correct to call this a genocide and doing so has significant consequences
4. The role of Hamas and the war crimes it committed on 7 October
5. How Israel seeks to justify its actions in Gaza
6. Israeli propaganda now and over decades
7. How UK media has manufactured consent for genocide. Or, at least, manufactured silence
8. Why are so many decent people in the UK silent?
9. Why we should not be silent, not only morally but in our own self-interest
10. What can we actually do about it?

Two million of our fellow human beings are living and dying in Hell on earth in Gaza. Whilst continuing to bomb Gaza’s civilians, Israel has imposed a total siege of drinking water, food, medical supplies, electricity. Everything.

Huge bombs, designed to cause maximum deaths indiscriminately, rain down on the besieged, dehydrated and starving people. An expert in the field has said that the Israeli bombing of Gaza is “equivalent to six Hiroshimas”.

Gaza has been pulverised. The UN estimates that nine out of ten homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombs or bulldozers. At least a million and a half people have been driven from their homes to one bombarded tent camp after another, only to be bombarded again. Almost all medical facilities and infrastructure have been destroyed.

No one knows the numbers of the dead and injured to date, but experts agree that the current figures issued by the Gaza Health Ministry are an underestimate. In mid-April 2025 their figures were over 51,000 deaths and over 116,000 serious injuries.

Some 70% of those certified dead were women and children. Israel has killed more than 20,000 children in Gaza. On average, a child has been killed by Israel every 30 minutes since October 2023. Approaching 1,000 of the dead were babies killed before reaching their first birthdays.

Amongst the still living are more than a thousand child amputees. Like all patients in Gaza, including women having Caesareans, many have been operated on without anaesthetic. Israel blocked anaesthetics entering Gaza.

Thousands and thousands of children in Gaza have terrible life-long injuries: spinal injuries, brain injuries and profound psychiatric injuries.

Israel has targeted medical staff and journalists. Over 1,000 medical staff have been killed. No international journalists are allowed into Gaza. Israel has killed 211 Palestinian journalists.

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. Not a war. The term “genocide” is legally defined in the Genocide Convention 1948. I explain (in chapter 3) why what is happening in Gaza fits the legal definition. This matters because under the Genocide Convention, once a genocide has been identified, states have a duty to do everything they can to stop it. Instead, states like the UK are actively enabling it.

Israel’s actions in Gaza have been described as the world’s first “live-streamed genocide”. Those who follow events online see babies and children starving and the aftermaths of terrible massacres. On and on and on. These images of unimaginable horror are corroborated by eyewitness testimonies and in the sober reports of bodies such as the UN, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and Israeli and Palestinian human rights NGOs.

Israel denies it is committing a genocide or is doing anything wrong. It claims it is acting in legitimate self-defence and is targeting Hamas. I examine these claims in chapter 5.

The genocide in Gaza has coincided with commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of survivors from Nazi death camps in the Holocaust. The juxtaposition of Western politicians and media declaring “Never Again” at Holocaust events while they are supporting and enabling the genocide in Gaza has been troubling and revelatory.

No genocide can ever take place without the perpetrators dehumanising their victims. The dehumanising rhetoric used by the Israelis against the Palestinians is shockingly similar to that used by the Nazis against the Jews.

I never thought I would see a genocide, carried out in plain sight, backed by the UK Government. I could not imagine that the British public would allow it. However, those at the top of the major parties in England – Labour, Tory and Reform – all resolutely support the genocide (although obviously they would not put it in those words). None of the institutions of civil society are publicly opposing it.

I am Jewish. A large number of Jews in the UK and worldwide strongly oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza. I look at Judaism and Zionism (in chapter 2).

If enough people demand it, then the hope is that our government can be forced to stop supporting and enabling the genocide in Gaza and to apply the necessary pressure to Israel and/or the US to stop the genocide. Obviously, this might well not work but I hope to persuade you that it is necessary to try.

Please consider forwarding this and subsequent chapters to people you know and more widely. Please send to your MP. I am sure a properly informed electorate would not support this abomination. Chapter two of OPEN LETTER TO THOSE IN THE UK WHO ARE SILENT ON GAZA

SOME ESSENTIAL BACKGROUND AND A LITTLE ABOUT ME

I am a 63 year old British Jew. I am secular. I am proud of being Jewish.

Judaism was an important part of my childhood. It was full of family, stories, and rituals which I loved. The weeks and months were marked by Friday Night family meals and so many festivals. At Seder Night, for years as the “youngest capable”, I recited Ma Nishtana. At 13, I was Bar Mitzvahed. A huge event for me.

I knew about Israel from a very young age. My father told me about the miracle that the Jews has returned to live in Israel after 2,000 years. I remember being ecstatic when “we” won the Six Day War. I have been to Israel five times.

I was a Zionist for some years after my childhood. I supported whatever Israel did, right or wrong, like people support their own countries or their football team.

What follows is some essential background to understand what is happening in Gaza now.

In 1948, in the war that broke out after the withdrawal of the British mandate, the state of Israel established its independence whereas the Palestinians suffered their first Nakba (Catastrophe) with hundreds of their villages and towns erased and resettled by Israelis, while over 750,000 Palestinian refugees were driven from their land.

Many escaped to Gaza, where they mostly lived in crowded refugee camps. They or their descendants are now facing a second Nakba.

Israel/Palestine in 2025 is divided into four parts: “Israel proper”, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

“Israel proper” is the land within the 1948 to 1967 borders. In 1967, Israel conquered the other three parts: East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

East Jerusalem has been annexed by Israel, illegally under international law.

The West Bank has been under military occupation since 1967, again illegally under international law. Palestinians in the West Bank have no civil rights, no freedom of movement or speech. Their lands and water sources are taken over by Israeli settlements and they suffer constant violence at the hands of settlers, army and police.

The situation in Gaza was similar to that in the West Bank until 2005 when Israel withdrew its soldiers from Gaza. What followed was a brutal blockade by land, air and sea, amounting to the continuation of occupation through harsh control of water, power, entry and exit of people and goods. In 2010, David Cameron, then UK prime minister, called Gaza the world’s largest open air prison.

Jews are defined in Israeli law and privileged above non-Jews in many ways. There is an apartheid system in Israel – see the Amnesty Report or Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Judaism is some 4,000 years old whereas Zionism is a nationalist movement and is some 150 years old.

Many Jews are not Zionists. Marek Edelman was a Polish Jew and the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He opposed Zionism. His definition of a Jew was: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.”

Many of the strongest supporters of Zionism are not Jewish. Many are Christian Zionists in the US and elsewhere or far right Islamophobes in Europe and in India.

Opposing Israel’s violence has become detrimental to holding a position of power in the West. The most important reason for this is that Israel is seen by the US as an essential military ally. American elites see the interests of Israel as identical with the US’s own interests.

Western elites’ support of Zionism has long been motivated by Holocaust guilt (Germany and others for perpetrating it and US & UK and others for not doing enough to save Jews). It is also constantly reinforced by powerful Israel Lobbies.

Israel decided very early as a matter of policy to insist that criticising Israel should be equated with Antisemitism. They sought to make Israel above criticism and have succeeded to an extraordinary degree.

Noam Chomsky, a Jewish American academic, described the advice given by highly influential Israeli statesman Abba Eban to the American Jewish community in the 1950’s. Eban told them that they had two crucial tasks to perform:

1. To label anyone who is anti-Zionist as an anti-Semite.
(Eban meant by “anti-Zionist”, anyone criticising the policies of Israel.)

2. If the person who is criticising Israel’s policy is Jewish, then they should be labelled as suffering from neurotic self-hatred, needing psychiatric treatment.

Criticising the actions of Israel is not antisemitic, but Israel and its allies will constantly insist it is. This tactic is effective in making decent people stay silent.

It was only 10 years ago that I became certain that I was not a Zionist. I could not be one, as I want the same human and civil rights for Israeli Jews and for Palestinians in all four parts of Israel/Palestine.

I support Israel’s right to exist but not in its current form as an apartheid state. Just as Nelson Mandela said apartheid South Africa had no right to exist.

10 years ago, I met an elderly Palestinian woman who told me how, when she was seven, her family were forced out of their home in Jerusalem. The house was stolen. They were forced out of the country and can never return. By contrast, any Jew has the right to go to Israel and to be granted immediate citizenship.

I also met a Palestinian man then who told me about planned protests in Gaza. They would be non-violent like Mahatma Gandhi. I followed those protests online when they happened. They were called the Great March of Return. Week after week in 2018 and 2019, unarmed Palestinians marched to the perimeter fence around Gaza, protesting. Israeli soldiers shot them through the fence. Over two hundred were killed. Many thousands suffered life-changing injuries.

Shooting unarmed protestors. In a foretaste of the UK media coverage of the genocide now, these shocking events were ignored or downplayed in the UK media.

EXTRACTS from
WHY SOCIALISM? by Albert Einstein, an article published in the US magazine May 1949

1/ Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

2/

Extracts from "Exterminate All the Brutes" by Sven Lindqvist

The title comes from "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad

Book is about genocides carried out by European colonialists who (despite their high-flown rhetoric) considered indigenous peoples inferior or non-human
1/ Hannah Arendt showed how racism is central to imperialism, colonialism, occupation

#Gaza #WestBank

2/

"When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds.
When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad n____ so there won't be any more like him"
- James Baldwin "The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world"
- James Baldwin

Extracts from "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" by Edward Said (1979)

Very little is said about what Zionism entailed for non-Jews who happened to have encountered it; for that matter, nothing is said about where (outside Jewish history) it took place, and from what in the historical context of nineteenth-century Europe Zionism drew its force. To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else's idea imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about Zionism are the very things that are centrally important. Edward Said (continued)

Present political and cultural actualities make...an examination extraordinarily difficult, as much because Zionism in the postindustrial West has acquired for itself an almost unchallenged hegemony in liberal "establishment" discourse, as because in keeping with one of its central ideological characteristics, Zionism has hidden, or caused to disappear, the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militantly oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews.

“It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion “...we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact”
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

"Silence in the face of injustice is complicity"
- Henrik Ibsen

#Gaza "The measure of a civilised society is how it treats its dissenters"
- Henrik Ibsen

#repressionofprotest

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language: -
"The words [fascism], democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides ... Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different" George Orwell: -
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"

"Love of Zionism in West has always had a troubled relationship with genocide. Its origins as a political ideology lay in an era when European empires routinely justified the exterminability of what they considered to be inferior people & uncivilised barbarians"
- Article by @UssamaMakdisi in @jacobin
1/? "The latest instalment of philozionism [Oct to Dec 2023] exposes more clearly than ever the ruthless double standard that underlies it: Israeli history and life are cherished; Muslim and Christian Palestinian history and life are fundamentally devalued"
- @UssamaMakdisi
2/?

Hannah Arendt was one of the most brilliant writers on the human condition of the 20th C. She wrote this about PROPAGANDA. Very relevant in 2023.

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil”
- Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Otto Rene Castillo was a Guatemalan revolutionary and poet. He was executed by the Guatemalan Army on March 19, 1967. This is a translation of his poem Intelectuales Apoliticos.

1/? APOLITICAL INTELLECTUALS

One day
the apolitical intellectuals
of our land
will be interrogated
by the poorest of people.
They will be asked what they did
while their community
was extinguished,
like a sweet fire, small and alone.

2/?

The great Bertrand Russell on my political hero Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine, though prominent in two revolutions and almost hanged for attempting to raise a third, is grown, in our day, somewhat dim. To our greatgrandfathers, he seemed a kind of earthly Satan, a subversive

1/? infidel rebellious alike against his God and his King. He incurred the bitter hostility of three men not generally united: Pitt, Robespierre, and Washington. Of these, the first two sought his death, while the third carefully abstained from measures designed to save his life.
2/?

“Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm”
- C. Wright Mills “If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell”
- C. Wright Mills

Oliver Cromwell dismissing Rump Parliament,
20 April 1653

"It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.

1/? Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

2/?

The Tory Govt EXPECT mass protests

That is why they are lining up the most illiberal, brutal, anti-freedom laws to criminalise protestors

THIS MUST NOT STAND The Tory Govt EXPECT mass strikes

That is why they are lining up the most draconian, illiberal, anti-freedom laws to curtail union rights and the right to strike

THIS MUST NOT STAND

"George Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Aldous Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history.

1/2 As Huxley saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think"
- Neil Postman

2/2

THIS EXTRACT from Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963, is for all the COMFORTABLE, COMPLACENT, DUNDERHEAD media commentators criticising @JustStop_Oil

King addresses "white moderates"; let's just say for current purposes "moderates"

1/? "First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not ... the Ku Klux Klanner, but

2??

The Problem Is Civil Obedience
By Howard Zinn (extracts of speech, Nov 1970)

I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail & the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and
1/? the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country & the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don’t have to say too much about this because
2/

Just finished #FordeReport

Some thoughts
At the centre of the Report is the toxic relationship between the Party "Civil Service" (HQ) and Corbyn's Office (LOTO)
Forde does a great deal of blaming both sides BUT LOTO had a democratic mandate that HQ were trying to obstruct
1/? A number of times, Forde is concerned about a "hierarchy of protected characteristics, a hierarchy of racism..."
I think he means antisemitism cases were given higher priority than say anti-black racism or sexism or Islamophobia, for example
2/?

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken" Carl Sagan “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception”
- Carl Sagan

"If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion"
- Noam Chomsky "All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume"
- Noam Chomsky