Gaza vs Bosnia, Hamas and free speech
The other day I saw a Twitter post about the ongoing genocide in Gaza by a local doctor who was asking where all the human rights advocates were, the “moral architects” who “wept in Bosnia [and] marched in Darfur”. It made me write a short thread about the differences and similarities between the two situations. I was a teenager while the war in Bosnia was going on in the early 1990s, and I was not Muslim then (I converted in 1998). There is also a legal effort going on in the UK to revoke the proscription of Hamas, which makes it an offence not only to raise funds for them or for the organisation itself to operate here, but also to use words indicating support for them and such things as wearing their emblems. This has led to an outpouring of contempt from the Tories and the right-wing commercial media, with one of the lawyers asked how he slept at night on GB News over the weekend. There is no chance of the appeal succeeding, but it has at least opened up debate.
The atrocities in Bosnia were regularly reported in the press and on TV. There was no Internet to speak of in the early 1990s (it was only opened to public access in 1991; most people did not even have dial-up Internet, blogs were ten years away and social media fifteen), so the “mainstream media” as we now call it was the media. We saw footage of emaciated men behind barbed wire, we heard stories of camps where women were held and raped by Serb militiamen, some of whom had recently been their neighbours. The siege of Sarajevo, and later of Srebrenica, Žepa and Goražde, were in the news regularly, along with atrocities such as the Sarajevo bread queue massacre and the snipers who picked off civilians in the street from positions in the mountains. Later, the outright genocide at Srebrenica, a designated “safe area” (the UN had pointedly refused to call it a safe haven) in which men and boys from the captured town were taken away, under the noses of Dutch UN peacekeepers for “war crimes screening” and then massacred; this was the incident which finally prompted western military action agains the Serbs which allowed the Bosnian army to make advances and free long-besieged enclaves such as Bihać in the north-west of the country. Throughout the war, there was public support for military action to stop the atrocities, expressed in demonstrations, letters, opinion columns and calls to radio shows; the government was resolutely opposed, refusing to even allow Bosnian refugees in. Some of the people calling for action were prominent politicians, including Margaret Thatcher. The pressure was contemptuously rebuffed; “everyone knows you don’t interfere in a civil war” was the refrain. An arms embargo was in force, resulting in the Bosnian army being unable to maintain its supplies while the Serbs got theirs from Russia. This was all very well-known.
Back then, the Gulf War was a recent memory and there was still a certain amount of confidence in the power of humanitarian interventions, that a short intervention (that was always the word used, never war or invasion) could check the power of a tyrant (or overthrow him) and stop mass murder. At the time, there were two “no-fly zones” in Iraq where Saddam Hussain’s air force was banned from flying in order to protect the Kurdish and Shi’ite Arab minorities he had been persecuting. That was the Middle East; if we could do that in Iraq, surely stopping a genocide in the mountains of eastern Europe were well within our capabilities. While at university, when I did have Internet access, I recall a posting on a Usenet newsgroup by a woman who said she had received a letter from the government, on House of Commons headed paper, telling her that there would be no intervention on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia as their aim was to secure “Christian Europe”. I did not and still have no way of verifying the posting’s claims, but more recently, we have heard from American politicians such as Bill Clinton who said that European leaders expressed exactly this sentiment: that a Muslim state just didn’t belong in Europe and they had no intention of intervening to bring one about. However, British troops did serve (if ineffectively for most of the war) as UN peacekeepers and were not tarnished by the failure to protect civilians at Srebrenica; some individuals went to fight for the Muslims, not all of whom were Muslims themselves. We were free to speak about the situation and no side was off limits as a result of being classified as terrorists.
There have, of course, been protests against the genocide in Gaza. Politicians have gradually moved from blunt refusals to acknowledge that Israel is doing anything but defending itself to half-hearted demands that they obey international and humanitarian law, knowing full well that they have no intention of doing so. The mainstream media’s spectrum of opinion runs from open support, with flat denial that it is genocide, to a fearful omertà, every mention of genocide being met with a mandatory statement about Israel’s right to self-defence (eighteen months into an onslaught against civilians) and the matter of genocide being under consideration by the International Criminal Court, as if the matter was going to be decided by a jury rather than a panel of expert judges. There has been the same policing of ‘antisemitism’ as dictated by the same Zionist ‘mainstream’ Jewish organisations and the same newspaper columnists that led the campaign to destroy the Labour party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership; there have been numerous incidents of people being told not to display ‘antisemitic’ posters, such as those comparing Israelis to Nazis, or arrested for calling Asian politicians coconuts, and one march on a Saturday was banned because a synagogue was nearby, while the protesters bend over backwards to avoid blaming the Jewish community.
However, the protests have been timid in terms of their demands. There is no call for military action, despite this being the only way to arrest a genocide. The Holocaust was ended when the allied armies captured the concentration camps; the Rwanda genocide ended when the Rwanda Patriotic Front routed the Hutu Interahamwe; the genocide in Bosnia ended when the international community finally stepped up after Srebrenica. Perhaps the reason is partly that the anti-genocide protests are partly led by the same anti-war forces as the 2003 anti-war protests who have an instinctive distrust of western military intervention, but without other Arab countries lifting a finger (Egypt, most obviously), I fail to see any other avenue. Yes, there were abuses by American forces especially during the recent wars, but they did not approach the viciousness or the death toll of Israel’s in 18 months. The only forces resisting Israel’s genocide are Hamas and the three other small armed factions in Gaza itself. An aspect of the history of genocide that isn’t often acknowledged is that a genocide can be arrested, or at least resisted, by forces whose other behaviour is unsavoury; the Red Army, in between raping their way across eastern Europe, liberated a number of the Nazi death camps while even the collaborationist fascist regimes either refused to submit Jews to Hitler’s ‘resettlement’ plans (as with Franco), or stopped once they learned that ‘resettlement’ meant murder. Rwanda’s forces under Paul Kagame have committed atrocities during their involvement with the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Winston Churchill was known for breaking strikes in the UK and for colonial policies that caused famines in India. The list goes on.
We don’t have to support Hamas as such, or excuse their past behaviour (not only the suicide bomb tactic; they have long served the interests of the Israeli hard right, and both sides oppose any meaningful peace process) to acknowledge that they are currently the only people offering the slightest protection to Palestinians in Gaza from Israel’s murderous intentions. It shouldn’t have been left to them, or indeed to any local faction, to save mostly innocent people from a nation that cares nothing for human rights, as seen in the West Bank before and during the Gaza genocide, and thinks nothing of bombing hospitals, ambulances and tents and sniping children in the head. That is on the international community and the rulers of the Arab world. But the appeal to de-proscribe Hamas in the UK should succeed, because they are doing now is not terrorism; it is the defence of their people, and people should be free to say so, as they did the last time a genocide was being broadcast into our homes daily.
Finally, among the repeated reminders of past Jewish victimhood the state and corporate media has been drip-feeding us recently, there was a play on Radio 4 the other night called The Film, about the move to film the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps in 1945 (the lead characters are the director Alfred Hitchcock and future Granada TV founder Sidney Bernstein). I listened to it as long as I could tolerate, but there was a section where one of the two held the whole German nation culpable for the camps that were all over the place and which they said everyone knew about. If a nation is culpable by just doing nothing, living in a police state, what can we say about a community not dragooned by a police state that actively cheers a genocide on? A community whose schools inculcate children to support Israel regardless of a worsening human rights record or outright genocide, a media that issues propaganda for Israel, sowing false doubts and blaming victims of atrocities, the student groups that do the same, the mass letter-writing campaigns to silence criticism of Israel, the smear campaigns against any Muslims who achieve positions of influence (e.g. Shaima Dallali), the demands that they not be reminded of Palestinian existence (such as by children’s artwork), and most recently the doxing of anti-genocide protesters who are legal immigrants to the US immigration police. Of course, not every individual Jew is responsible for the crimes of the state of Israel and some actively oppose them but there are whole sections of it, major community organisations and mainstream community leaders, who fully support Israel’s genocide. If you are helping Israel’s settlers, snipers and other thugs and mass killers with propaganda and intimidation, you are no better than they are and it’s time you were treated as such.
Image source: Michael Büker, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.
