Free Palestine

I was four months into secondary school when I sat my first exam. That was back in December 1977.

Our English teacher came up with a task that was revolutionary for its time. We were invited to write an essay on anything we liked. I felt emboldened, as though the shackles of primary school had been cast off and I was heading into a life of free thought and independence. That was shortly disabused, as it later became clear that that the vague instructions were due to a Christmas Party induced hangover and not the first light of liberation.

 I took pen to paper and decided to write about what I had seen on the news in the previous nights. I don’t remember the exact events, but Israel had done something bad to the Palestinians and as a twelve-year-old I was filled with righteous anger. I wrote my first opinion piece, laying down what I thought were cogent arguments weighing up the morality of the situation and handed it in with the flourish and excitement of a Washington Times journalist who had just penned the first article about Watergate.

I got my essay back the next day, dappled in red pen and exclamation marks. In the corner was a mark of 55% and I quickly determined that he had corrected spelling and grammar only and had deducted five marks for each error. I don’t think I could correctly spell Palestinian now without the electronic assistance of spell checker. I had nine errors and had barely scraped above a pass mark. If I had written the essay in the style of a ladybird bird book aimed at four-year-olds, I would have scored top marks.

I got no credit, good or bad, for my writing style or argument. The only feedback was a note in red pen at the end that said, “You’re a bit hard on the Israelis”.

I thought about this recently because it struck me that I was brave enough to speak up when I was twelve but feel nervous to do so now. I guess part of this is related to age. We naturally become more cautious as we get older when protecting your family becomes paramount. I think there is also an element of exhaustion. At sixty, there is very little new under the sun and while the situation in Gaza is horrible, it has been horrible for most of my life. Nothing was done to fix the problems in 1977, so it’s hard to build up an expectation that pressure and public opinion will change things now.

The other thing is social media and the connected world we now live in. That essay I wrote when I was twelve was only seen by me and my English teacher. And unless he was an undercover agent for Mossad, it is unlikely that I would have ended up on a watchlist.

This blog, on the other hand will probably attract as many actual human readers as my 1977 essay but will live forever in digital form in a data centre. It will then be harvested by AI tools and parsed and sliced and fed through algorithms. I’m not a conspiracy theorists (not that anyone ever admits to being one) but it wouldn’t take much effort to figure out that this is a pro-Palestine post and to then link it to my identity.

If Mossad or the Americans are listening, I might as well tell them what I think.

I was born twenty years after the end of World War Two. The war still dominated popular culture in the 1970s from Lawrence Olivia narrated documentaries to comic books like Commando and Battle and TV shows like Colditz. I was fascinated by the subject and particularly the Holocaust. I couldn’t understand how a country that spawned Beethoven and Einstein could descend into depravity in the lifetime of my parents. I had immense sympathy for the Jewish population and felt that the barbarity of the Holocaust would ensure that it would never happen again.

History, of course, has a nasty habit of repeating itself and I know enough now about the origins of World War Two to realise that the desire for genocide didn’t appear out of thin air.

It is of course ironic that is the abused that has now become the abuser. What Israel is doing in Gaza is barbaric and genocidal. They have taken the sympathy that we felt for their treatment in World War Two and flung in back in our faces. But what is worse is the lack of pushback they get from foreign governments.

When people wonder why western governments seem to be slipping towards fascism dressed in the sheep’s clothing of populism, they should look at how previous governments have behaved. We like to think that we get the governments we deserve. The truth is that we elect governments to do one thing, and they end up doing something completely different. Nobody in the UK would have voted for austerity in 2010. Nobody in Ireland would have voted for a bank bailout and nobody in the Western World would have voted for military and political support for Israel. It is as though election campaigns are between two similar centrist parties who will enact the same policies regardless of what the public want.

Is it any wonder that the west is getting tired of the same old politics from our leaders and look to nutcases like Trump to at least provide some entertainment. They are going to ignore us and focus on strategic interests and national security. Which is code for protecting trade interests and keeping rich people happy. We might as well have a soap opera to watch or a chance to express all the nasty thoughts we dared not previously expressed.

The world is not so different to the way it was in 1977. I hope I’m the same and can keep calling out evil when I see it. Even if I am being a little tough on the Israelis.