I once met the journalist Patrick Cockburn, and he was a bit grumpy. Which made me sad because I have a long-term crush on Patrick. His sharp often caustic analysis, especially of violence and conflicts across the Middle East, has guided and inspired me for many years: I call him my intellectual crush, and there’s no sign my passion for his mind is fading.
In his most recent column for the Independent newspaper, Patrick stated in his typical blunt style that, ‘slaughter in Gaza is becoming the normalisation of evil’. He points out that ‘single atrocities’ such as an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Thursday 17th April that killed at least 23 people including five children, four women and a man from the same family, has become old news. We are, he says, ‘Seeing in hideous detail the normalisation of evil as Palestinians – two million people with nowhere to escape to – are killed daily by the dozen before the eyes of the world’.
Patrick quotes Medicine Sans Frontier’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, Amande Bazerolle, who says, equally bluntly, ‘We are witnessing in real time the destruction and forced displacement of the entire population in Gaza…. which has been turned into a mass grave of Palestinians and those coming to their assistance’. When Amande says ‘we’ she means us. All of us watching and listening to, the news. Including the news of the Israeli government’s tepid response to its own troops lying about the killing of fifteen Palestinian medical responders, their bodies dumped in a mass grave.
Patrick underlines that some of the sharpest criticism of Netanyahu ‘doubling down on the war in Gaza’ come from inside Israel itself. Almost one thousand Israeli Air Force veterans recently signed a letter demanding an end to the war on Gaza. They openly accused Netanyahu of using the war for blatant political objectives i.e. maintaining the support of his extreme right-wing coalition that seeks to empty the Strip of Palestinians. In everyday language we call this ethnic cleansing.
Jewish voices from outside Israel have also called out Netanyahu’s government. For example, three dozen members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, have just written a public letter warning that, ‘Israel’s soul is being ripped out’. I can only imagine the desperation and soul-searching that went into writing this letter – where they also stated they believe Israeli hostages can only be bought home by peaceful diplomacy, not through military action.
I have Gazan friends who are trapped inside Gaza with their families, including a single mother with two young sons. My WhatsApp contains thousands of messages I’ve exchanged with two women friends in particular since October 2023. One of these friends is originally from Rafah. She’s now living on the coastal strip of Moazi. She has a waterlogged tent on a strip of sand, and the home she lived in in Rafah has been destroyed.
Her last few messages to me have started with the pitiful words ‘please help me Louisa.’ Like many thousands of people around the world, I have tried to help my friends in Gaza. I eventually managed to send some money to this woman friend, whose name I’m deliberately not using, so she could buy some food at insane prices, because the Israeli government deliberately blocked aid entering Gaza fifty days ago, on 2nd March.
It took me more than four months – and three different countries – to have this money transferred from the UK into her hands. Because sending money to Gaza runs the risk of ‘funding terrorism’ even if you are sending this money directly to a Palestinian woman with no relationship to Hamas who is trying to feed her kids in a sodden tent.
We are witnessing the deliberate starvation and slaughter of an entire people. Thank you Patrick for your eloquent bluntness and precision and warning about where this path to hell will end for both Palestinians and Israelis. Let us never say we did not know what was happening inside Gaza. Let us never stop telling our political leaders that they read the news and make the news. And they know exactly what is happening to Palestinians inside Gaza right now.
