MP Candidate Gordon Gregory: Israel has “no reason to stop occupying.”
A few days ago, I wrote to my MP Louise Haigh and Tory candidate Gordon Gregory, my potential MP representative in the constituency of Sheffield, Heeley, urging them to #VotePalestine and make sure Justice for Palestine is on their agenda.
“I am a Palestinian researcher and educator, born and bred in Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern the Gaza Strip which has turned uninhabitable according to the UN, due to an uninterrupted Israeli cycle of violence against the Palestinians that manifist more extremely in besieged Gaza,” I wrote introducing myself. “After years of feeling alienated by British establishment, for once I see hope with the policies that the latest labour manifesto supported, most importantly the UN-recognised right of return for Palestinian refugees and arms embargo on Israel. Justice for Palestine is an extremely important issue for not only me and my family who remain in Gaza at the receiving end of Israeli violence and British complicity, but many people in our constituency,” I emphasised before I asked them to participate in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s online survey.
The response of Gordon Gregory, the Tory candidate for Heeley, came as a shock (see screenshot below), stating in one way or another that he wouldn’t represent me, but represent Israel’s systems of colonial occupation and apartheid. Using classic Zionist justifications for its collective punishment of a stateless people, systematically dehumanised and stripped of their basic rights, Gregory blatantly argued that Israel has “no reason to stop occupying.”
Below is my response to Gregory’s email, which should also be in his inbox. I’m publishing it in fear of my words going unnoticed, following his outrageous response which basically declares that I’d penalised from his representation before government if he gets elected!
Dear Gordon,
Thanks for your response. However, although you started by a empathetic statement, the rest is really disappointing and contradictory. You exhibited a classical tactic of blaming the victim and normalising the unacceptable actions of an occupying power against a stateless population who are dispossessed, demeaned, dehumanised and incarcerated since 1948 Israel’s establishment on our ethnic cleansing, facilitated by the British. Your argument feeds into the normalisation of our unprecedented oppression, rationalised by Israel’s right to massacre and dispossess the Palestinians in the name of self-defence. This logic rather supports Israel’s right to oppression.
International law recognises the fundamental rights to self-determination, freedom and independence for the occupied, as well as the right to resist occupation, even through armed struggle if necessary. This applies to the Palestinians who are undergoing the longest standing colonial occupation of our modern history. Even if Palestinians were to “stop the violence” as you suggested and submitted to their enslavement and dehumanisation, Israel will never stop its uninterrupted violence which was devoted to break the Palestinians’ will for freedom and depress their aspirations for self-determination since its pre-state era, and Israel showed consistently and systematically ever since how it is willing to invest everything in its mighty power to do so. It doesn’t take a genius to see who the underdog is, and that such an oppressive system, like South Africa Apartheid, is not sustainable.
How would you justify the illegal military occupation, constant harassment of Palestinians at military checkpoints and the Israeli consistent campaigns of house-demolitions and arbitrary detention? The brutal siege on Gaza, the systematic indiscriminate acts of “mowing the loan” in Israeli parlance as well as the brutal repression of Gaza’s Great March of Return peaceful protests? The ever expanding settlement project and the associated theft of land and ethnic cleansing campaigns (a flagrant violation of International Law and the 4th article of Geneva Conventions)? The systematic racist denial of Palestinian refugees to return to their dispossessed homes according to UN resolution 194 of 1949? Your response unfortunately jumped over too many details to conclude that Palestinians deserve Israeli occupation’s brutality for not passively taking it, which is a typical imperial and short-sighted analysis.
We’re on the verge of witnessing a humanitarian explosion in the besieged Gaza Strip, caused by 7 decades of colonial oppression and acts of collective punishments which is banned under International Law, and you loosely use Hamas’ Zionist card, Israel’s necessary bogyman, to justify Israeli crimes? I expect my MP representative to be more responsible than that. To your knowledge, Hamas was only founded in the late 1980s. Before that, Israel has always needed to demonise the Palestinian natives and manufacture justifications for its illegal and criminal practices dedicated to maintain its apartheid and settler-colonial structures at the expense of our erasure. If you ever humble yourself enough to put yourself in the place of a Palestinian child, punished from their cradle for their identity, you would realise that resistance to oppression is not only a natural response but also a duty.
Living under military occupation is something you will never understand as you were never at the receiving end of this uninterrupted aggression. In fact, Britain was historically the perpetrator of such colonial occupations. The aggression we endure now is Britain’s responsibility which started with 1917 Balfour Declaration which ignored Palestine’s indigenous population and continues to do so in other means whether by welcoming war criminals for official visits or continuing to license arms sales for Israel so they ‘battle-test’ them on us. It would only be logical that you correct what your country committed against us since 1917 but I understand how entrenched imperial and colonial thinking is, and it takes active unlearning and searching within one’s soul to be liberated from such attitudes.
As a refugee and a survivor of many Israeli systematic campaigns of mass murder and destruction, I don’t expect you to understand the colonised perspective but I appeal to your conscience to do the right thing when it comes to Palestine given its urgency! Stop Arming Israel. We want to live in a world where all lives matter and justice and equality prevails.
Best,
Shahd
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My Speech for London Rally in Support of Palestinians’ Rights to Exist, Resist and Return
During a #StopArmingIsrael protest during a week of action against DSEI arms fair in September 2017. Photo by David Dinis Photography
My name is Shahd Abusalama and I’m a 3rdgeneration Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, northern Gaza. I’m standing here with so many Palestinians, born in Palestine and exile, to tell the founding Zionists of Israel who assumed that the old will die and the young will forget, that we will not forget Palestine, and we will never surrender our fundamental rights to exist, resist and return. We stand representative of many indigenous communities who faced various forms of oppression across the history of European colonialism and imperialism, to remind the world that settler colonialism is not a culture of the past, but a current reality that we have lived and defied from America, Australia and Ireland to Palestine.
My grandmother described a peaceful childhood in green fields of citrus and olive trees in our village Beit-Jirja. This life, the tastes, the sounds and the smells remained fixated only in her memories as Beit Jirja was dismantled alongside other 530 villages and towns that were depopulated and destroyed by Zionist thugs in 1948. For Palestinians, the Nakba was never a one-off event that happened in 1948. Israeli colonial oppression has never stopped and many Palestinian communities within Israel, including the people of Khan Al-Ahmar, are still fighting against their ethnic cleansing as we stand here.
My grandparents are present today more than ever as we mark the 71stanniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, for what happened then is why I was born in Jabalia with a gun pointed at my head. During my mother’s labour, Israeli soldiers disrupted her way to Jabalia UNRWA Clinic as they forced a curfew that indoctrinated to shoot any moving being. Shooting to kill was common in the 1st Intifada when I came to life, and is a common practice now.
We saw it in the shooting and maiming of Gaza’s Great Return March protestors who stood with their bare chests against Israeli snipers to claim their humanity and to bring their right of return, an issue that Israel firmly rejected across the past 7 decades on racist grounds, to the centre of political debate. Their cries for justice come amidst US-Israeli attempts to push the right of return and Jerusalem “off the table”. It is time that we call those world leaders what they are: racist trolls. It is time to stand firm in our support of the Palestinian right of return, as without justice, there will be no meaningful peace.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip just survived another a 3-day deadly Israeli attack last weekend, which claimed 25 lives, including two pregnant women, two toddlers and a 12 year old child. While world news was quick to move on after the truce was announced, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip returned to a daily struggle for survival while more deadly violence is expected at any moment. That’s how my family welcomed Ramadan. Following the truce, I heard my parents calling relatives and friends and saying, “glad you survived” before continuing “Ramadan Kareem”.
Imagine living in an open-air prison where there is constant presence of death, and fear of walls falling inwards. This fear of being uncertain about anything, including your own life, even while in your home, is terrifying. This is what 2 million people faced last weekend as they are besieged by Israeli weaponry from air, land and sea, turning Gaza into a laboratory for its lethal arms, which Israel markets as ‘battle-tested’ in notorious arms fairs around the world, such as DSEI which London is hosting again this year.
It is not a coincidence that Gaza comes under attack during Israeli elections over and over again. Those elections are led by criminals using Palestinian children’s blood to win popular support. Meanwhile, the world is about to celebrate Eurovision in Israeli Apartheid on top of an ethnically-cleansed Palestinian land, a show whose whole purpose is to expose Israel’s ‘prettier face’ while deflecting global attention from its daily crimes against the Palestinians. Shame on all contestant countries, all the participants and audiences if they still support Eurovision in Israel while our victims’ blood haven’t dried.
This is nothing new. This is our decades-long lived experience that is normalised by a dominant media discourse that finds it comfortable to avoid addressing the power imbalance between the occupier and the occupied, to remove the context of settler colonialism and reduce it to conflict, effectively demonizing Palestinians and their legitimate struggle against their systematic dehumanization. Our injustice is also normalized by tax payers whose money is paid as military ‘aid’ for Israel, by politicians who suddenly fall short on words of condemnation once the perpetrator is Israel, by international institutions doing buisness with Israel or corporations that enable Israeli crimes, by Muslims of the world who normalise relations with Israel and buy Israeli dates merged with our pains of loss and dispossession, by Zionist Jews and Christians who support the uninterrupted process of ethnic cleansing against the native people of the ‘promised land’ in the name of God.
The best response to such brutality and normalisation is active solidarity!
We have a beautiful demonstration of solidarity today with thousands uniting from different races, religions, genders, professions and cities, to say: we’re not turning our back to the Palestinian people. We know too well that whether Palestine on news headlines or not, Israel is perpetrating violence uninterruptedly.
Every minute, innocent souls are buried, and building that took a lifetime to build are flattened. It is urgent that people of conscience all over the world join in solidarity and resist the collusion of their governments and institutions in this long-standing crime against humanity.
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Living through Gaza’s horror from afar
Palestinian kids playing on the rubble of Al-Mishal Culture and Arts Theatre following an Israeli air strike on Gaza City, on 9 August. Photo by Ahmad Abu Awad
From the emergency room in Lewisham Hospital in London on Wednesday evening, I called my parents to inform them of a sudden allergic reaction I had to something that remains unknown.
I wanted to hear their voices which never fail to comfort me in exile whenever I experience moments of uncertainty – even though I know that they experience an extreme level of uncertainty at their end, in Gaza.
At that moment, around 11pm Palestine time, my parents would usually be asleep, but I called anyway, and to my surprise, my mom Halima answered quickly. She sounded troubled as she offered a list of instructions to avoid such allergic reactions.
The radio was playing in the background and my dad would interrupt the conversation, and both sounded distracted. Something was wrong.
“Bombings are everywhere. May God protect us and have mercy upon us. If you were here, you would have thought it was the beginning of another full-scale attack,” my mom said.
“The sky lights up and then a massive bombardment is heard, and within seconds another one, and another one, shaking the ground underneath us. The walls feel like they’re falling down.”
Parallel realities
My parents just celebrated the arrival of their first grandchild. They called her Eliya, one of Jerusalem’s ancient names. Ever since, she’s been the focus of our conversations.
“Eliya, bless her, is crying non-stop as if she senses the danger. We can hear her screams from here as your brother Muhammad and Asma [his wife] are trying to comfort her,” my mom said in distressed tones. “We are panicking ourselves. Imagine how kids are feeling this terror.”
The anti-allergy injection given to me in the ambulance was making me drowsy, but the impact of her words made me switch back on.
This experience seemed to sum up the parallel realities I’ve lived since since I left Gaza.
Growing up in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, uncertainty defined everyday life. Death is always present, even as you do your most mundane activity in your most secure place.
And yet we learned to face our worst fears and continue to live without internalizing this horror as if it were normal.
That is why resistance was a necessity in the face of this life of uncertainty and dehumanization.
Gaza is only a part of a much larger system of violence, displacement and confinement designed by Israel, and funded and normalized by the so-called international community.
The reality in Gaza is the product of settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, sadistic militarism, supremacist ideologies and moral hypocrisy. It is a showcase of not only Israel’s inhumanity, but that of the world as a whole.
Ever since I was old enough to understand the injustices that surrounded me as a child, I woke up every day questioning how despite its enchantment with human rights slogans, the world allowed this situation to continue.
Troubled silence
Thursday morning, I called my family as soon as I woke up. My brother and his wife had a sleepless night with their 2-week old daughter.
My mom, who just got home from work, was eager to have a nap after a restless night. She works as a nurse in Beach refugee camp, at a children’s clinic run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.
But instead she sat on the tiles by the garden door to let her body soak in the coolness, as the lack of electricity in Gaza, except for a few hours per day, means that the air conditioners my family had installed cannot be used.
As she sat there, she told me stories of the mothers who came to the clinic.
“Several women told me that they had a sleepless night with their children crying out of fear,” my mom recalled. “They were clinging to them.”
Others said their children, including older ones, wet their beds.
“May God help them,” my mom said shaking her head. “I raised you all in extraordinary situations, and I worry Eliya is going to grow up in similar conditions, if not worse.”
I was looking at my mom on the phone with one eye, the other glancing at London’s modern skyline from the 11th floor apartment of a friend that looked out on a city and world that seemed entirely undisturbed by what is happening in Palestine.
Our conversation was interrupted by a troubled silence that indicated there was more to be said.
I perfectly understood her without a word being spoken, however. I remember how we barely expressed our emotions as individuals when we were all in the same boat, experiencing the same violence.
We had no choice but to be strong for each other, and support one another to keep moving forward.
Then my mother spoke about how most families in Gaza had lost a loved one, or had someone suffer a permanent disability due to successive Israeli attacks. Amid the catastrophic humanitarian and economic situation caused by Israel’s siege, people are exhausted.
“Our situation is heaven in comparison to other families who are completely dependent on UN aid and do not have even one member with a regular income,” my mom observed.
In addition, cuts to UNRWA funding by the US and the Palestinian Authority’s withholding of salaries from civil servants, are making people’s lives even more precarious.
“We did not stand idle”
My mother sounded agonized as she spoke about the overwhelming situation and reflected that the challenges of wartime seem almost bearable compared with the grinding aftermath.
“Precisely!” I said, in an effort to bring some hope into the conversation. “What makes people go to protest near the fence with Israel is that they have nothing to lose but a life of misery.”
“Confronting and throwing stones at Israeli snipers lined up behind the fence is a means of survival to escape this cycle of powerlessness,” I said. I told my mother I thought it was an act of defiance and dignity.
At least 120 Palestinians have been killed during the Great March of Return protests that began on 30 March, more than 20 of them children.
“If only the world outside knew how we experience life. If only they put themselves in our shoes for a second,” I added.
“The times when we lived under physical military occupation were much better,” my mom said, interrupting me. She was referring to the years from 1967 until 2005, when Israel maintained soldiers and settlers deep inside the Gaza Strip, instead of besieging it from the perimeter.
I was confused and asked her to explain.
“We had confrontations then, similar to what we have experienced at the Great March of Return, but from even closer,” she said. “They would use their military power on us but we would have a brief window to express resistance, which was somehow consoling.”
“We would stand in their faces without any fear, despite our knowledge that they would eventually do what they are indoctrinated to do – imposing roadblocks, curfews, house raids and detention campaigns,” my mother explained. “We would stand tall in front of them as they attempted to kidnap your father, or one of your uncles, scream at them and curse them, eye to eye.”
“The Tamimis were every family in Gaza, during the first intifada,” she said, referring to the West Bank family of the teenager Ahed Tamimi, renowned for its role in the village of Nabi Saleh’s unarmed resistanceto Israeli occupation and colonization.
“I remember when the army broke into our house in the middle of the night, soon after your birth, looking for your father. They turned everything upside down and stole your father’s pictures and notebooks,” my mom said. “We did not stand still as they ruined everything. We resisted. We pushed them and threw our belongings which they had broken back at them.”
“But now they just drop missiles at us from their warplanes, gunboats or tanks as we sit in our homes unable to confront them.”
My mother mentioned the pregnant mother and her young daughter killed in their home in an Israeli airstrike Wednesday night.
“They could have been any of us,” she said.
Whenever I talk anyone in my family, they say nothing much has changed, as if time has forgotten about their corner of world.
But time did not forget them completely. They experience time differently: through an innovative form of military occupation which has turned Gaza into a caged laboratory for lethal technologies to be sold later to other countries as “battle tested.”
They experience the progress of time as a regression, with resistance – not accepting their abnormal situation as normal – the only way to break free.
This article was first published on the Electronic Intifada
PALESTINE FROM MY EYES 