“Voltaire’s Gaza: Absurdities & Atrocities“ | Speech Extract

Gaza Protest | Bath Abbey, Saturday 20th July 2024 Last month, the old British government exploited a technicality to delay the ICC’s arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister. Yesterday, momentously, the World Court ruled that Israel’s occupation is illegal. This week, the new Foreign Secretary David Lammy visited Netanyahu and… shook his hand on camera. No handcuffs. Lammy could let the courts act, but he didn’t and, reportedly, won’t. The BBC says Lammy called for an “immediate ceasefire” but actually he skirted that - I saw with my own eyes he sat next to Netanyahu and said, “I hope we see a ceasefire soon”. He’s English - we all know “I hope that happens soon” means “I’ll be doing nothing about that - more tea?” During the 18th century religious wars, Voltaire said “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. But as these atrocities continue, so the absurdities grow in scale. During the ‘60s, American lieutenants would claim they had to destroy a village to save it from Communism. This irony was grim as it stood. But actually that principle applied, as it does now, beyond villages and in fact to whole regions - Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Eastern Ukraine, Gaza. In Vietnam, two thirds of American bombs landed on the very democracy it was protecting. Currently, through Israel, we see absurdities laced with sadism. As we deliver a pinprick of aid, we booby-trap canned goods - a tactic to lure out and kill the starving. We broadcast audio of crying babies from drones - a tactic to lure out and kill the compassionate. A.I technology means we track suspected militants to their most convenient location - the family residence. Can you imagine if your house was suddenly a target simply because your phone had at some point been contacted by a suspected criminal? I don’t even want to be in my WhatsApp groups! But what is truly perverted is the name the Israeli military gives to this A.I program: “Daddy’s Home”. The very act of a father coming back to his children can set off the missile that maims them. I sometimes feel like an odd person to be here. I’m not Palestinian. I did the test on because I hoped I might be something exotic but it turns out the furthest towards the equator my ancestors have been in a hundred thousand years of evolution is Newton Abbot. Nevertheless, I am devoted to this cause. And it is not a difficult choice - I am deeply committed to the survival of Muslims, Jews - and indeed Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, Taiwanese - and everybody, including my children, my country, my friends. So, please, good people, will you keep up the fight? Because we are up against some real idiots. A guy shouted, “if you love Palestine why don’t you go live in Gaza?” I said “I can’t… because of people like you”. He said, “if you were in Gaza, Hamas would throw you off a roof!” I said “they’d struggle to find a roof… because of people like you”. Which I thought was funny and clever of me, though then an old friend said Hamas would also struggle to lift me onto a roof because I’ve gained so much weight since school. Which I didn’t think was so funny and clever. And we’re up against Biden - a man so thoughtless that the Secret Service are hoping an assassin might blow his brains in. This isn’t about Labour or Tory, Left or Right. My own pronouns are “strongly” and “quickly” - because in the ‘80s schools never taught grammar so I often get them mixed up with adverbs. So, however much you may detest woke, anti-woke, or any of that bollocks, I tell you what you will like even less - a second Holocaust. Which is exactly where we are headed. For its part, Israel’s not-so-secret vision is a whole population permanently consigned to tents - an unliveable hellscape of rubble and burning canvas policed by machines. The official death toll the Lancet medical journal records is 186,000 but even by its own metric the dead may already number, in fact, over a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population. So how about we start thinking our own absurdities? The sort of absurdities thought by Emmeline Pankhurst and Rosa Parks and William Wilberforce and Nelson Mandela. How about a real absurdity? One democratic state, under the rule of law, a new constitution, imposed by the UN where necessary. So, how about the absurdity of a Marshall Plan for Palestine? How about money, real money, to fix its economy and for peace-building initiatives? How about the absurdity of lifting sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, Cuba… how about the absurdity of establishing a nuclear-free zone with Israel dismantling its 90 undeclared warheads? How about the absurdity of love, the absurdity of diplomacy, of treaties, the absurdity of decency. How about the absurdity of a sane new world? See: