|
33,634 |
76,214 |
7,000 |
|
Killed |
Wounded |
Missing |
Mourners carry the body of a Palestinian who was killed during an
Israeli settler attack on their village of al-Mughayyir, in Ramallah
[Mohammed Torokman/Reuters]
- Five people have been killed and over 30 injured in an Israeli attack on central Gaza City, the Gaza Civil Defence says.
- One man killed as illegal Israeli settlers rampage in the occupied West Bank town of al-Mughayyir, one of nearly 700 settler attacks since October 7.
- In Gaza, Israeli forces bombed the Nuseirat refugee camp while in the West Bank, a raid in Tubas governorate has killed at least two Palestinians.
- The World Health Organization (WHO) has said destruction in Khan Younis and damage to the medical sector was “disproportionate to anything one can imagine” after the Israeli army withdrawal.
-
At
least 33,634 Palestinians have been killed and 76,214 injured in Israeli
attacks on Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s October
7 attacks stands at 1,139, with dozens of people still held captive.
Ghassan Abu Sitta
For us, all of us, part of our
resistance to the erasure of genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to
plan for the healing of the wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow.
Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day.
Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah during his address at the University of Glasgow
following his landslide victory as Rector with 80% of the vote, April
11, 2024. (Photo: The University of Glasgow)
On April 12, the German government prevented Dr. Ghassan
Abu-Sittah from entering the country to address a conference in Berlin as a
witness to the genocide in Gaza. The day before, on April 11, Abu-Sittah was
installed as Glasgow University Rector in Bute Hall following his landslide
election with 80% of the vote. Below is a transcript of Dr. Abu-Sittah’s
address.
“Each generation must discover its
mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth
The students of Glasgow University
decided to vote in memory of 52,000 Palestinians killed. In memory of 14,000
children murdered. They voted in solidarity with 17,000 Palestinian children
orphaned, 70,000 wounded — of whom 50% are children — and the 4-5,000 children
whose limbs have been amputated.
They voted to stand in solidarity with
the students and the teachers of 360 schools destroyed and 12 universities
completely leveled. They stood in solidarity with the family and the memory of
Dima Alhaj, a Glasgow University alumni murdered with her baby and with her
whole family.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
Lenin predicted that real revolutionary change in Western Europe depended on
its close contact with the liberation movements against imperialism and in the
slave colonies. Glasgow University students understood what we have to lose
when we allow our politics to become inhuman. They also understand that what is
important and different about Gaza is that it is the laboratory in which global
capital is looking at the management of surplus populations.
They stood next to Gaza and in
solidarity with its people because they understood that the weapons that
Benjamin Netanyahu uses today are the weapons that Narendra Modi will use
tomorrow. The quadcopters and drones fitted with sniper guns – used so deviously
and efficiently in Gaza that one night at Al-Ahli hospital we received over 30
wounded civilians shot outside our hospital by these inventions – used today in
Gaza will be used tomorrow in Mumbai, in Nairobi and in Sao Paulo. Eventually,
like the facial recognition software developed by the Israelis, they will come
to Easterhouse and Springburn.
So, in reality, who did these students
vote for? My name is Ghassan Solieman Hussain Dahashan Saqer Dahashan Ahmed
Mahmoud Abu-Sittah and, with the exception of myself, my father and all of my
forefathers were born in Palestine, a land that was given away by one of
Glasgow University’s previous rectors. Three decades before his forty-six-word
declaration announced the British government’s support for the settler
colonization of Palestine, Arthur Balfour was appointed Lord Rector of the
University of Glasgow. “A survey of the world… shows us a vast number of savage
communities, apparently at a stage of culture not profoundly different from
that which prevailed among pre-historic man,” said Balfour during his rectorial
address in 1891. Sixteen years later, this antisemite masterminded the Aliens
Act of 1905 to prevent Jews escaping from the pogroms of Eastern Europe from
coming to safety in the United Kingdom.
In 1920, my grandfather Sheikh Hussain
built a school with his own money in the small village where my family lived.
There he set the foundations for a relationship that made education central to
my family’s life. On May 15, 1948, Haganah forces ethnically cleansed that
village and drove my family, who had lived on that land for generations, into a
refugee camp in Khan Younis that now stands in ruins in the Gaza Strip. The
memoirs of the Haganah officer who had invaded my grandfather’s house were
found by my uncle. In these memoirs, the officer notes with incredulity how the
house was full of books and had a certificate for a law degree from the
University of Cairo, belonging to my grandfather.
The year after the Nakba, my father
graduated from medical school at Cairo University and moved back to Gaza to
work in UNRWA in its newly formed clinics. But like many of his generation, he
moved to the Gulf to help build the health system in those countries. In 1963,
he came to Glasgow to pursue his postgraduate training in pediatrics and fell
in love with the city and its people.
And so it was that in 1988, I came to
study medicine at Glasgow University, and here I discovered what medicine can
do, how a career in medicine places you at the cold face of people’s lives, and
how if you are equipped with the right political, sociological and economic
lenses, you can understand how people’s lives are being shaped, and many times
contorted, by political forces beyond their control.
And it was in Glasgow that I saw for
the first time the meaning of international solidarity. Glasgow in that time
was rife with groups that were organizing solidarity with El Salvador,
Nicaragua, and Palestine. Glasgow City Council was one of the first to twin
with cities in the West Bank and Glasgow University set up its first
scholarship for the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It really was
during my years in Glasgow that my journey as a war surgeon started, first as a
student when I went to the first American war in Iraq in 1991; then with Mike
Holmes to South Lebanon in 1993; then with my wife to Gaza during the Second
Intifada; then to the wars waged by the Israelis on Gaza in 2009, 2012, 2014
and 2021; to the war in Mosul in Northern Iraq, to Damascus during the Syrian
war and to the Yemen war. But it wasn’t until the 9th of October that I got to
Gaza and saw the genocide unfold.
Everything that I had known about wars
compared to nothing that I had seen. It was the difference between a flood and
a tsunami. For 43 days, I watched the killing machines tear apart the lives and
the bodies of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of whom were children.
After I came out, the students of Glasgow University reached out for me to run
for election as rector. Soon after, one of Balfour’s savages won the election.
So what have we learned from the
genocide and about genocide over the last 6 months? We’ve learned that
scholasticide, the elimination of whole educational institutions, both
infrastructure and human resources, is a critical component of the genocidal erasure
of a people. 12 universities completely flattened. 400 schools. 6,000 students
killed. 230 school teachers killed. 100 professors and deans and two university
presidents killed.
We also learnt, and this is something
I found out when I left Gaza, that the genocidal project is like an iceberg of
which Israel is only the tip. The rest of the iceberg is made up of an axis of
genocide. This axis of genocide is the United States, the United Kingdom,
Germany, Australia, Canada, and France… countries that have supported Israel
with arms – and continue to support the genocide with arms – and have
maintained political support for the genocidal project so that it would
continue. We should not be fooled by the United States’ attempts at
humanitarianizing the genocide: Killing people while dropping food aid by
parachute.
I also discovered that part of the
genocidal iceberg are genocide enablers. Little people, men and women, in every
facet of life, in every institution. These genocidal enablers come in three
types.
- The first are those whose racialization and total othering of Palestinians has rendered them unable to feel anything for the 14,000 children who have been killed and for whom Palestinian children remain ungrievable. Had Israel killed 14,000 puppies or kittens they would have been completely destroyed by the barbarity of it.
- The second group are those whom Hannah Arendt said in ‘The Banality of Evil’, “had no motives at all, except for extraordinary diligence in looking after his personal advancement.”
- The third are the apathetic. As Arendt said, “Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.”
In April 1915, one year after the
First World War began, Rosa Luxemburg wrote about German bourgeois society.
“Violated, dishonored, wading in blood… the ravening beast, the witches’
sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity.” Those of us who have
seen, smelt, and heard what the weapons of war do to a child’s body by design,
those of us who have amputated the unsalvageable limbs of wounded children can
never have anything but the utmost disdain for all involved in the manufacture,
design, and sale of these instruments of brutalism. The aim of weapons
manufacturing is to destroy life and to ravage nature. In the arms industry,
profits rise not only as a result of the resources captured in or through war,
but through the process of destruction of all life, both human and
environmental. The idea that there would be peace or an unpolluted world while
capital grows by war is ludicrous. Neither the arms trade nor the fossil fuel
trade, have any place at University.
So, what is our plan, this “savage”
and his accomplices?
We will campaign for divestment from
arms manufacturing and the fossil fuel industry in this University, both to
de-risk the University following the International Court of Justice’s ruling
that this is plausibly a genocidal war and the current case brought against
Germany by Nicaragua for complicity in genocide.
Genocidal blood money made as a profit
from these shares during the war will be used to set up a fund to help rebuild
Palestinian academic institutions. This fund will be in the name of Dima Alhaj
and in memory of a life cut short by this genocide.
We will form a coalition of student
and civil society groups and unions to turn Glasgow University into a campus
free from gender-based violence.
We will campaign to find concrete
solutions to end student poverty at Glasgow University and to provide
affordable housing to all students.
We will campaign for a boycott of all
Israeli academic institutions that have progressed from being complicit in
apartheid and the denial of education to Palestinians to genocide and the
denial of life. We will campaign for a new definition of antisemitism that does
not conflate anti-zionism and anti-Israeli genocidal settler colonialism with
antisemitism.
We will fight with all othered and
racialized communities, including the Jewish community, the Roma community,
Muslims, black people, and all racialized groups, against the common enemy of a
rising right-wing fascism, now absolved of its antisemitic roots by an Israeli
government in exchange for their support for the elimination of the Palestinian
people.
Only this week, just this week, we saw
how a German government-funded institution censured a Jewish intellectual and
philosopher, Nancy Fraser, because of her support of the Palestinian people.
Over a year ago, we watched the Labour Party suspend Moshé Machover, a Jewish
anti-zionist campaigner, for antisemitism.
On the flight up, I was fortunate
enough to be reading ‘We Are Free to Change the World’ by Lyndsey Stonebridge. I quote from this book:
“It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history
seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being,
creatively, courageously and complicatedly matters the most.” 90 years ago, in
his “Solidarity Song,” Bertolt Brecht asked, “Whose tomorrow is tomorrow? And
whose world is the world?”
Well, my answer to him, to you, and to
the students of Glasgow University: It is your world to fight for. It is your
tomorrow to make. For us, all of us, part of our resistance to the erasure of
genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to plan for the healing of the
wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian
day.
In 1984, when Glasgow University made
Winnie Mandela its Rector in the darkest days of P. W. Botha’s rule under a
brutal apartheid regime, supported by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, no
one could have dreamt that in 40 years South African men and women could be
standing in front of the International Court of Justice defending the
Palestinian people’s right to life as free citizens of a free nation.
One of this genocide’s aims is to
drown us in our own sorrow. On a personal note, I want to hold space so that I
and my family can grieve for our loved ones. I dedicate this to the memory of
our beloved Abdelminim killed at 74 on the day of his birth. I dedicate it to
the memory of my colleague Dr. Midhat Saidam who had stepped out for half an
hour to take his sister to their house so that she could be safe with her
children and never came back. I dedicate it to my friend and my colleague Dr.
Ahmad Makadmeh who was executed by the Israeli army in Shifa Hospital just over
10 days ago with his wife. I dedicate it to the ever-smiling Dr. Haitham
Abu-Hani, head of the Emergency Department at Shifa Hospital, who always met me
with a smile and a pat on the shoulder. But most of all we dedicate this to our
land. In the words of the ever-present Mahmoud Darwish,
“To our land, and it is a prize of war,
the freedom to die from longing and burning
and our land, in its bloodied night,
is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far
and illuminates what’s outside it …
As for us, inside,
we suffocate more!”
And so I want to end with hope. In the
words of the immortal Bobby Sands, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our
children.”
The
US has asked a number of countries, including China, Turkiye, and Saudi Arabia,
to urge the Islamic Republic against retaliating to Israel’s attack on its
consulate in Damascus.
US
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken discussed the topic with several officials
over the week, including Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
“We
have also engaged with European allies and partners over the past few days and
urged them as well to send a clear message to Iran: that escalation is not in
Iran’s interest, it’s not in the region’s interest and it’s not in the world’s
interest,” State Department spokesman Mathew Miller said on 11 April.
Blinken
also spoke to the foreign ministers of Turkiye and Saudi Arabia and told them
to “urge Iran not to escalate."
While
speaking with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Blinken expressed
Washington’s “strong support for Israel against these threats," Miller
added.
“Washington
has informed allies that Iran’s retaliation could be imminent,” an informed
source told Financial Times (FT).
Another
source told FT that the US believes a direct Iranian strike on Israel is
possible.
According
to sources who spoke with the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, Iran is “proposing
the following: If a ceasefire is reached in Gaza and Israel does not attack the
city of Rafah, it is ready, in order to reduce escalation and tension, not to
take any action against Israel at the present time.” The sources said there has
been no response to this proposal.
They
added that Israel is attempting to get out of the “impasse” it faces in Gaza by
“provoking new crises” and trying to drag Iran and the US into direct
confrontation.
Israel’s
attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria’s capital, Damascus, on 1 April killed
several top officials and advisors, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza
Zahedi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It also leveled the
entire consulate building, marking an unprecedented violation of international
law’s protection of diplomatic missions.
Several
Iranian officials, including President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, have vowed that the strike will not go unanswered.
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