Speech at Mountains for Palestine Rally
The text of a speech I gave at event in Katoomba NSW, 29 September 2024.
I’d like to start by saying thanks to the organisers, and offering my respect to people for coming out so consistently, in spite of the weather, the hostility we’ve faced, and the grinding sense that the decision makers are studiously ignoring us.
I’ve volunteered to speak today because things are escalating rapidly in Lebanon. I lived for two years in Lebanon, including during the last invasion, back in 2006. Iworked as a journalist during that war, and I’m proud of the work I did there.
But I like to think my perspective on the conflict was different to the other foreign correspondents.
I had originally gone to Lebanon on student exchange, and had spent the first half of 2006 having the greatest time of my life. Beirut was an incredibly vibrant city, full of sparkling intellects and cultural cross pollination.
If ever a nightlife scene deserved a unesco world heritage listing, it was Beirut, between the Syrian withdrawal in April of 2005, and the second Israeli invasion, in the summer of 2006.
My overwhelming impression of Lebanon and the Lebanese, is of a people who love life, who live with an unsurpassed energy and warmth. My time in Lebanon, during this rare period of relative peace, is a treasure, a movable feast, which has stayed with me in the years since.
When the war came and shattered that peace, I decided to stay and started a blog, with the goal of leveraging my privilege against the system that created it. This got picked up by the Canberra times, and led to some other journalism work.
I quickly ran into the ideological limits of what was possible, for example a story I submitted to the ABC was rejected, I was told, because I had used the word “invasion” to describe the entry of Israeli troops and tanks into Lebanese territory.
The Israelis, I was told, didn’t believe it was an invasion, because it was being carried out for defensive purposes.
I was told I could rework the piece to say the Lebanese believed they were being invaded, pushing what was an objective fact into the realm of subjective interpretation.
But there were some victories too.
One story, in particular, which I was proud of, was published on news.com.au of all places, involving an Israeli air strike on a red cross ambulance. A Dutch photographer and I worked together documenting this war crime, getting images and testimony out into the global media. This was back in the day, before smartphones were ubiquitous — so it felt like we were really doing something — and maybe we were. Maybe without that kind of attention, things would have been even worse.
But in the intervening years, instead of a decrease, we’ve seen these attacks on aid workers, civilians and civilian infrastructure, become more common.
This, the third Israeli invasion of Lebanon, while no less doomed to failure, will clearly be more violent.
So while raising awareness of these crimes might be a necessary step towards justice, it’s far from sufficient, and we should take the time to think deeply and strategically about how we can effectively push for a lasting, just peace.
Now, as then, our chief ally, the United States, bears the ultimate responsibility.
A point of dark humour was the fact that the US was making a big public show of shipping aid to Lebanon during the bombing, the aid included tents, to house the people whose homes had been destroyed by the bombs they shipped to Israel.
Those bombs, by the way, literally said “made in America” on them. Those words were printed on the steel that becomes shrapnel, that trauma surgeons have to cut out of little children’s bodies.
Years later, I would be working in Egypt during the Arab Spring, and I would see those same words, “made in America”, on the tear gas canisters fired to disperse crowds in Tahrir square.
We should understand Israeli aggression in this context, as an extension of western, especially American, violence.
It’s the Israelis actually, who are millions of human shields, used by the west as cover in order to move military hardware into the region, with the goal of of preventing the emergence of a united Arab nation, which would be a significant geopolitical rival.
But in the end, military hardware alone, without a moral vision, cannot win. I’d like to finish with a quote from Bertrand Russel. This was actually the last published work he ever wrote. It was written in December of 1970, and read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo.
The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and de to termination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.
The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.
Hearing these words it might sound like nothing has changed in the last half century. But things have changed — the protests in response to this most recent round of aggression have been unprecedented.
The world, we can hope, is waking up. America and her allies, like Australia, we can hope, are waking up to themselves. If we look deep within our souls, I hope we’ll find we have more to offer the world than bombs, aggression, racism and colonialism. We can export hope, and prosperity, not hatred and destruction.