MAN burning alive, a report from a reputable journalist, of children separated from mothers, thrown into a north Gaza pit in Jabalia Refugee Camp, left until their bones start cracking under the weight of sand being bulldozed onto them, and then dragged out by Israeli Occupying Force soldiers, and thrown randomly at horrified mothers, whether or not it was their child, who were then told to run, at gunpoint.
For more than a year now, I have been, like so many readers, lost for words in the midst of terror, in the midst of horror. But I do not have the luxury of being lost for words. It’s my task, it’s literally in my job description as an academic linguist, as a thinker, writer and as a poet, to find the words.
So, I’ve gone looking for words. Here are seven that I have found may be of help.
Genocide
I NOW use this word as in common parlance, ahead of an actual legal determination, and in the spirit of the Lemkin Institute For Genocide Prevention.
It is the International Court of Justice – if it survives the pressure to drop the case brought in January 2024 by South Africa, against Israel – that will make a legal determination on the basis of the evidence amassed.
READ MORE: Israel trying to 'silence' media with 'terrorist' claims, says Palestinian journalist
South Africa will make their full submission to the Court next week. Israel has until next July to respond.
The Lemkin Institute – founded after Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, who established the term “genocide” – has established 11 principles for genocide prevention.
Prevention
THE principles for prevention, for the Lemkin Institute, are paraphrased as follows:
- Genocide prevention cannot be exclusive to elites in governments, militaries and non-governmental organisations
- It must be a tool from the grassroots
- It supports the popularisation of elite knowledge and elite training systems in genocide prevention
- It works to create a global shared language of genocide prevention and peacebuilding as necessary foundations for effective prevention in the 21st century
- It operates within a decolonial framework that seeks to build horizontal relationships of knowledge production and knowledge sharing across the hierarchical and dehumanising divides of the global economy
- It eschews concepts of prevention that associate preventative models with specific geographic, historical or civilizational narratives – every society is vulnerable to genocide and almost every society has experienced genocide at some point in its history
- It works to bridge divided communities as well as between those communities, national governmental institutions and the international community
- It engages in multicultural, multinational and multireligious dialogue
- It endorses the principle of non-exclusions and thus engages in dialogue with all actors relevant to and interested in genocide prevention
- It promotes the values of independence, non-partisanship and grassroots engagement as existentially necessary
- It firmly believes that genocide can be prevented through the international collaboration of ordinary people as peacemakers.
Helpful
I’VE found these principles helpful. I have found them encouraging and grounding as an academic member of what is easily considered an elite, and I’ve found their inducement to myself to keep writing columns like this, or using social media, or publishing popularising texts, important.
They have given me a backbone when I’ve been tempted to spinelessness. They have helped me remember that when I have asked myself the question “what would I have done to prevent mass killings in the past?” that what I do today is the answer to that question. So, I write.
Lean
NO-ONE can sustain the entry of genocide into their lives, their phones, their live streams, their consciousness, and the many ways the brain-melting denials take shape and utterance, without being profoundly affected.
Either we are rendered speechless, furious, numb, or we weep or we question or – and this is part of the structure of genocide – vehemently deny and double down on the violence.
This last week in particular, I have found myself receiving news from Gaza of depravity, beyond depravity, in both north Gaza and in the central and south of Gaza, where we witnessed just last week the young man, a guitar player named Sha’ban Al-Dalou burned alive in front of our eyes. He isn’t the first. He was the one filmed, so we saw it happen.
READ MORE: Are these six Palestinian journalists really terrorists as Israel claims?
In these times we need to lean in and on one another but even more importantly, we need to lean on the normative principles established – those of the Lemkin Institute, of International Conventions, of the Refugee Convention, The Hague Convention, the Rome Statute, and through collective action at grassroots and through elites, to hold those who represent, who were elected to represent, the ongoing commitment to those precious signatures in the past, to absolute account.
If our elected leaders are indeed committing war crimes, then a court must judge.
Sir Philippe Sands KC one of Britain’s most prominent war crimes lawyers told the BBC: “It’s impossible to see what is going on now in Gaza … and not say crimes are screaming out” and that “IDF soldiers should refuse orders which may be war crimes”. Sir Philippe is also a former Israeli adviser.
Tell
IN the meantime, right now, we are watching a genocide being livestreamed from northern Gaza by brave Palestinian journalists from Al Jazeera who have just been declared “terrorists” on the basis of what looks very much to be fabricated evidence by the state of Israel.
This comes on the back of similar such politically motivated in the last year, declarations about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, that were investigated and found to be baseless.
Again, we must lean on the words of conventions and tell of or read what is just and true. Journalists must be allowed to report. The Blue Vest is not a target. It is, indeed, genocide prevention.
In a meme last week, the famous prayer of Pastor Niemöller was modified: “First, they came for the journalists. And we don’t know what happened next.”
It's my job to find the words, to tell of things, and I keep stumbling. I keep finding my words emptied of meaning, exhausted, sounding like platitudes, incapable of stretching to contain and offer precision and understanding.
But every day, my first task is to write lines of poetry for Gaza. It’s become a lifeline. Telling.
Abomination
THE news from Gaza – the depravity of the depravity of the depravity – was planned by human minds and executed by human hands and it is an abomination. It helps to say it out loud.
But of course we – the United Kingdom – a Kingdom made “great” by perpetuating precursors to genocide worldwide (seven in point of fact, according to Declassified News), from concentration camps to massacres in our colonies, we stand “unfailingly” with the perpetrators; arming and encouraging, murmuring platitudes with no content or action, committed to sending aid in the full knowledge that it cannot and will not enter and will be a colossal waste of resource.
READ MORE: Israel launches air strikes on Iran as explosions heard near Tehran
This is what Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories describes as “humanitarian camouflage” – a horrifying new dimension to genocidal intent.
It was brought into being in Gaza by Israel and her allies, to assist the strong men, to allow statements like “we will surge aid” whilst journalists investigate the fact that 47% of so-called “reconnaissance flights” donated to Israel to assist the slaughter in Gaza appear to have been operated by UK armed forces, according to the latest news from investigative journalists.
Humanitarian camouflage is abominable.
Last week Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, managed to find a slot in his assuredly busy diary, to meet with the Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, who has himself lost untold members of his family in the mass killings, and with grieving relatives in the UK.
These are relatives who were denied the ability to get their family members out of Gaza under our visa restrictions.
We got to see the posed photo with the PM and Ambassador Husam Zomlot on social media with a platitudinous “humbled by their immeasurable grief” caption.
Of course, a true statesman would take active measures to cease all supplies of weapons and ensure absolute measures to comply with the International Court of Justice’s Order to take all measures possible to prevent genocide from unfolding, given the conditions were plausibly met.
Meanwhile, in the US, the rotten electoral choice is between genocidal, ecocidal fascism and genocidal, ecocidal democracy. It’s a rotten choice. Rotten to the core.
Love
I THINK something has died inside me. I can’t cry and I can’t scream. Everyone just looks blankly at me and says nothing; we are awkward with each other and this level of horror.
Maybe we’ve got used to it but know we must not. Maybe some wish I’d go away with the determination to stay alongside colleagues of 15 years, our refusal to abandon faith in the orderings of peace against this evil.
But mostly I think we are lost, lost for words, and that shows we are alive, and desperately feeling and needing words by which we can reach out and love again, and mend, and mind and know what courage is, those “ordinary grassroots” forms of peace building that make tea, and hold and hug.
For we must not find the capacity to tolerate any of this – not the lies, nor the cowardice, nor the impunity, nor the depravity, nor the spinelessness of self-centred discomfort, nor the resignation, nor the cynicism.
We must never tolerate the intolerable. We must never surrender our love.
Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at University of Glasgow and has worked with colleagues in now-destroyed universities in Gaza for 15 years
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