Foreign Wars and their Impact on Local Feelings

Any Newham councillor knows that they should keep their collective mouths shut about Kashmir. 

Kashmir has been an ongoing sore since 1947. 

Those old enough to remember, will recall Labour’s Robin Cook making a hash of it as Foreign Secretary when he suggested using the “good offices” of HMG to facilitate a peace agreement between Pakistan and India over the issue. What he succeeded in doing was angering both sides and embroiling the monarch in a public controversy.

What he wanted, was to be helpful. But no good deed goes unpunished.

About 42% of Newham’s population is south Asian and they are predominantly in the NE of the borough. (ONS Map)

Some 11% identify as Indian and 9% as Pakistani . As such it seems that some 20% of the borough’s population has strong, and conflicting views on the problem. To become embroiled in the Kashmir question is a guaranteed vote loser.

There is another conflict in the news that will affect some of Newham’s population. 

If Kashmir is one foreign point of tension so is Israel/Palestine. The local demographics suggest that few of our elected representatives will put themselves out on a limb to condemn the sadistic and psychopathic killings by Hamas (some 35% of the population identifies as Muslim and only 0.1% identify as Jewish). 

We look forward to receiving, and ignoring, all the hate mail that will come from this description of the killers. However, how else do you describe the deliberate shooting of 250 unarmed young people at a party organised “for peace”!? 

How do you explain the ability of a Hamas “fighter” to drag someone from his car and slit his throat? It beggars belief, but reports are emerging of babies being murdered in kibbutzim close to the Gaza border and women and children being beheaded. 

A grandmother had her murder videoed and then posted by her murderers, for her family to watch on Facebook. If anything, the descriptions of psychopathy and sadism are mild.

We anticipate Newham politicians hiding behind the formula of “a faraway place of which we know little”. But then, there may be some who joined the gleeful celebrations in central London.

Open Newham challenged the mayor to express solidarity with the grieving people of Israel. We didn’t expect it. There are not enough Jews to make an electoral difference. Why alienate up to 35% of your voters for the sake of a fraction of 1%? And alienate it certainly would.

But we might be wrong. We are told that the Dockside building was illuminated with the Israeli flag, we don’t currently have a picture and we are not entirely sure of the report.

The mayor has posted the following on the Newham website.

The horror and human suffering unfolding in Israel and Gaza since the attacks by terrorist group Hamas against the people of Israel, has rightly shocked the world.

My deepest condolences to Israel and its people for all lives brutally taken; and to members of our Jewish community in Newham who have relatives and family members in Israel. I stand with you in condemning the heinous acts being perpetrated by Hamas.

As the situation escalates further, the images from Israel and Gaza are harrowing, as is the rising human cost on innocent people and communities both sides. I similarly stand by the Palestinian people who want a peaceful resolution and the promise of the two-state solution, where Israel and Palestine coexist as neighbours and friends.

I know that in our borough, and across the entirety of London, thousands of people will be deeply concerned about the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Israel and Gaza; and the impact it will have on community relations in our country as people protest.

The right to protest is the cornerstone of our democracy in our country, but not at the expense of fuelling hate. In Newham, we will continue to stand resolute in the face of antisemitism and Islamophobia that seeks to divide our community.

Our strength is the diversity of our people and our community bonds. In partnership with faith leaders and community organisations, we will strengthen our resolve to deepen understanding and respect.

I urge everyone to report any hate crimes to the police, as we work with them to ensure the safety of all our residents during this most perilous of times.

It might be the news of the illumination at Dockside that prompted the following from Cllr Mirza.

Seeking to ensure that community feelings are not outraged, he posted a letter to the Newham Chief Exec.

It is interesting to see the hashtags. It does suggest that this is not the intervention of a peacenik, there are no links to Peace Now or Jewish-Palestinian groups working across the ethnic/religious divide. The links are to highly partisan and pro-conflict groups who believe that the solution to the Israel problem is for the Jews to disappear. 

For the far-left, the events of 7th-9th October were to be celebrated.  “Palestine has struck a huge blow against settler colonialism”. 

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, we are told, exists to work “together for peace, equality, and justice and against racism, occupation, and colonisation”. The words are great. Unfortunately, in the current lexicon of the anti-imperialist left, none of them mean what they say. There is no “working together” with Israelis. “Justice” is revolutionary justice which requires that the interests of the revolution supersede the interests (or rights) of the individual particularly a “settler, colonial oppressor”. We have seen the effects of revolutionary justice in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. 

Their claims to be against racism stretch credulity when they support an ethno-religious war aimed at exterminating the Jews? But because Jews are “settler-colonialists” they don’t count as real people. The terms occupation and colonialism stem from the belief that all them Jews came from Europe, as some of them did. But half of them came from Arab lands when the creation of the state of Israel was a convenient excuse for Arab regimes to rid themselves of their unwanted Jews. 

And many were there for generations, before the first waves of Zionist immigration. And even Zionist immigrants had been there for decades before the state of Israel, not on stolen land but on land purchased. Since then, Jews have come from across Asia and Africa. When campaigners say that they want to end the occupation, what they mean end the existence of Israel. There is no two-state solution in this mindset; the way to peace in the middle east is to get rid of the Jews.

Cllr Mirza posted the text of his letter.

Whilst he “condemns the loss of civilian lives on both sides”, the only examples he can appear to relate are of the suffering of Gazans.

He is probably correct in asserting that there would probably be violence if Newham displayed the Israeli flag. The unspoken assumption is that this violence would be justified.

He concludes with, the way to peace is to end the occupation. He may mean the occupation of parts of the West Bank, (which are still occupied under the terms agreed by the PA in 1999) but that would beg the question as to why the PLO didn’t sign the final agreement at the end of the Oslo accords, an agreement that would have given them a state and self-government over the West  Bank/Judea and Samaria. 

Or he may mean the occupation of the Gaza Strip, an area Israel vacated in 2005, so that would make no sense. 

Our suspicion is that what he means is the occupation of “Palestine”, meaning the whole of the area of the mandate west of the Jordan river.

As we said, the way to peace in the middle east is to get rid of the Jews. According to Hamas, there is no place in Palestine for the Jews. The Hamas Charter goes on to state that, “Initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance movement”. The preamble of the 1988 Charter states that, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it”.

This is not about liberation, nor freedom. It is about genocide.