Arzu reflects on the month of January thus far, including the current ceasefire in the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, the LA wildfires, and Holocaust Memorial.
It is midway through January, -ish. People are celebrating the ceasefire in Gaza. It is a difficult moment. Of course, any stay in the bloodletting is very, very welcome and very, very overdue. There have been a million people before me pointing out that the ceasefire agreement is substantially the same as the one proposed by Hamas in May 2024. There are many millions, if not billions of voices clamouring: why so many months of genocide when this was on the table?
This is also the 16th anniversary of the ceasefire during Operation Cast Lead. This so-called operation was launched by the Israelis over Christmas 2008, and was at the time the epitome of Israeli barbarity. Thousands took part in impromptu demonstrations. A 24 hour seven day a week vigil being held outside the Israeli embassy in London saw people from around the country attend. It even saw the veteran activist Brian Haw leave his own vigil outside Parliament (in protest at the invasion of Iraq) to join on some evenings.
At one point thousands of youngsters protesting in that space found themselves profiled, targeted and eventually prosecuted by the British police and courts. That story is one of the most important and one of the most forgotten in the history of law and race relations in this country. Suffice to say that amongst the tactics of the police, kettling was very much in evidence; and as part of that process, the identifying of racialised protesters by the police took place. Those who appeared to be from the majority community, generally speaking were (eventually) allowed to leave without any question whereas those who were racially marked and in particular who were taken to be Muslims had their details – names addresses and so forth, taken from them. Weeks and months later many of them found themselves and their families having their homes raided at dawn by the police. Hundreds were arrested and charged. An in-depth look at what happened can be found in the work of Adam Majeed and Joe Gilmore.
Genuinely this happened, and genuinely it has affected not only the way activists and young people have taken to protest but more significantly how civil society whether Muslim, anti-racist, pro-Palestinian or a combination of any and all organise themselves and have organised themselves in the years since.
This is not the focus of my comment just now. There is a ceasefire coming into existence on Sunday 19th January. However the bombing has been so relentless that at least 71 people were killed on the first night after the ceasefire agreement was announced (i.e. Thursday). Who knows how many more are buried under rubble, missing with none of us having an idea as to whether they are alive. And we have the recent ceasefire called in Lebanon after which Israel has carried on bombing and targeting civil infrastructure buildings and Lebanese people[1].
And that takes me back to Operation Cast Lead. It was a deeply traumatising moment, and at that time for a whole new generation and even for those older it seemed to be a peak of genocidal intent and action. The Israelis, it appeared would stop at nothing, including the annihilation of people. The death toll was 1400, those injured substantially more. Al-Haq’s analysis of the impact of these killings is a must read, those forgotten issues beyond the number killed – who is left behind, who was reliant on those killed, what is the long-term impact of the weapons used and so on. So how is it then, 16 years later, somehow we – that is those of us who claimed we cared – were surprised, or caught off guard? We allowed the slow genocide: the siege, the control of calories and supplies, the arrests, detentions, show trials, kidnappings, rapes, house destructions, the incarceration of children and more to become normalised. And it is this normalisation that has mattered as much if not more than the normalisation and state recognition of a few, rickety, corrupt Arab regimes.
If we can learn anything from those events, surely it is this: there will be no suspension, and things can and will only get worse if we continue to normalise it. We cannot go back to the status quo ante. We cannot allow things – those genocidal things – to go unchecked. We must not, whoever we are, however insignificant our actions or our voice may be, allow things to go back to the way they were. If this ceasefire is to have any meaning, it must be as the starting point for a mass mobilisation of resistance against the Israeli regime. We saw it in action through the Axis. Nothing else is acceptable.
*****
We have seen Gaza aflame these last 15 months. These last few weeks, however we have seen Los Angeles burning, so it appears, to the ground. It has given me a moment to pause. Flicking through The White Album for a completely different reason, I stumbled immediately upon Joan Didion’s essay, ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’. The collection of essays has been described as a ‘fond and fascinating remembrance of the fire-haunted beach community[Malibu] she and her family were preparing to leave…’ Fire-haunted. I dug that quote up for this essay, but it reflects the normalisation of this phenomenon to its inhabitants, and I suppose US society and those familiar with it. The ‘season’ is usually between June and October. So current events are ‘not normal.’ The fires were immortalised by Didion thus:
One morning during the fire season of 1978, some months after we had sold the house on the Pacific Coast Highway, a brush fire caught in Agoura, in the San Fernando Valley. Within two hours a Santa Ana wind had pushed this fire across 25,000 acres and thirteen miles to the coast, where it jumped the Pacific Coast Highway as a half-mile fire storm generating winds of 100 miles per hour and temperatures up to 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. Refugees huddled on Zuma Beach. Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air. Houses did not explode but imploded, as in a nuclear strike.[2]
I thought it powerfully poetic until I read minutes later (courtesy of an LRB tweet) Mike Davis’ ‘California Burns’, an unpicking of the environmental degradation that made these fires, less and less natural phenomena and more and more evidence of planetary demise at the hands of unrestrained capitalism, with the: ‘loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone… the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate’. The culprit being ‘‘wildland-urban interface’, where real estate collides with fire ecology.’
Despite a brutal put down of Didion’s observations ‘through the rolled-up window of her speeding car,’ Davis and the corporate media (and even celebrities who have lost homes) can’t help analogising the(ir) loss, the impact of the fires, with war. Didion’s refugees, and houses imploded as if struck by a nuclear missile, complement Davis’ description of buildings in some 9-11 state of degradation; Jamie Lee Curtis infamously described the remains of her house as like something from Gaza.
Except none of them are targeted thus. They have not been the targets of Israeli genocide, or US atomic warfare, or even targeted by violent non-state actors. Their connections to the wars, specifically, let’s take the case of Gaza, are at least two-fold. Firstly in the consideration of worth – we lament the loss of that prime real estate, we ignore the day to day struggles of the residents of LA and other parts of California without profile, without options. We neglect that their ‘government’ federal and state have defunded fire services and in the case of California not only increased spending on the police, but given even more money to the Israeli entity. Yes, you read that correctly.
See this impassioned commentary from a Palestinian resident of LA, who connects all these issues and more in one of the most eloquent and perceptive commentaries on how everything is connected.
The recently published pamphlet The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm reemphasises the genocidal and ecocidal outcomes of Western (bourgeois) civilisation from the Holocaust to Gaza to the planet. He ends thus:
If the destruction of Palestine in at least some sense is the destruction of the earth, then, yes, the Palestinians are up against Western, bourgeois civilisation in toto. So is the rest of propertyless humanity. Whether that recognition is empowering or disempowering is a moot point. But if people marching on the streets of New York and elsewhere learn to hate the society that systematically turns the children of Gaza into ash and cinder, just as it does more and more regions of this planet, then I would not counsel them otherwise. They would be right to do so.
*****
Will Malm be prosecuted for hate speech? His publishers Verso, subjected to reams of questions from The Telegraph and The Jewish Chronicle accusing author and publisher of anti-Semitism, support for terrorism, undermining British values and so on? It’s a genuine question. Part of me hazards not. That fate awaits writers, organisations and publishers like Islamic Human Rights Commission. Right now they are being accused of all such and more in response to their call for the inclusion of Gaza in Holocaust Memorial Day services. There is no call to ’hate the society’. There is a call to boycott those events that refuse to recognise the current genocide in their memorialisation. It’s actually not that controversial, except of course that parts of the extreme right wish to make it so.
And the question remains who can and who cannot speak thus? Islamophobia, raging rampant for the last few decades, has meant that the type of points Malm has made have become the preserve of ever decreasing numbers of intellectuals and activists. The IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day has been repeatedly attacked because it was inaugurated to commemorate the one year anniversary of the ceasefire in Operation Cast Lead on 17th January 2009.
Palestine, the headlines scream, cannot be memorialised alongside the Jewish Holocaust (or for that matter the Transatlatic slave trade, Bosnia, the Philippines, Nanking, the genocide of the Herero or any of the other many, many atrocities that GMD memorialises). It’s even more incredible when we see that the Holocaust Education Trust (one of those which have contributed to those screaming headlines) organised a multifaith trip to Auschwitz in 2008 which included amongst its number, the trust’s founder Greville Janner, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ibrahim Mogra on behalf of the Muslim Council of Britain. This trip is reported in The Jewish Chronicle, without criticism or complaint either from journalist or the event organises or any other participants in the event. Simon Rocker in the paper writes that Mogra:
…the sheikh, who chairs the Muslim Council of Britain’s interfaith committee, was left wondering how far the cry of “never again” had been taken up.
“We have seen genocide and ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and indeed, in the Holy land, in Palestine, Sabra, Shatila, India, Gujerat… the list is a never-ending list, sadly and we haven’t learned the lessons”, he said.
“What troubles me is the fact that a vast majority of people murdered here were Jewish, yet we find in the Holy land, in Palestine and in the occupied Territories, it is the Jewish people, the Israeli army and the Israelis, who are mistreating fellow human beings in an unacceptable manner, ghettoising, discriminating, demonising, isolating.” It was, he added, “sad”.
As this last week’s articles – including those in The Jewish Chronicle – have shown in response to IHRC’s call for the inclusion of Gaza in Holocaust Memorial Day programs, Muslims can no longer make such comments at least not in the mainstream.
Incredibly it appears just to prove this point, as I was writing this I received an email from a journalist at The Jewish Chronicle (her short email and my short response can be found here). Apparently she has been emailing my former colleagues at IHRC for days. It’s not just us: trustees of charities, weekend Islamic schools, anyone who has had anything to say about resistance these last few months, whether accused of being pro-Iran or pro-HTS or anything in between has been targeted.
Is it actually possible for us to break out of this cycle, when the spaces for politics, speech and even existence are routinely removed from us, our very citizenship denied, the protections of law and decency no longer, or maybe never, available to us? As Malm reflects, this question may be moot. But let us in any event do exactly that which our detractors and attackers wish us to desist from. IHRC’s Genocide Memorial Day took place today. Find the video here. The most basic thing we can do is take up the call to ensure that this genocide is not forgotten, even if all we do is remind ourselves to ensure that unlike with Operation Cast Lead, and all the genocidal acts in between, WE don’t forget. It can be the basis for the mobilisation we need to ensure we never go back. At the very least, it is the right thing to do.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. Follow her on X, Instagram and Bluesky @arzumerali.
Image: 2009 Station Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains, above La Cañada Flintridge in Los Angeles County, California. CC by 2-0
[1] I am adding this footnote on 29th January. In this interview with Palestine Declassified, journalist Rania Khalek explains the level of ceasefire violation in Lebanon. She believes the number of ceasefire violations since 25 November numbers almost a thousand, and that a third to half of the buildings destroyed in South Lebanon by Israeli forces have been destroyed after the date of the ceasefire.
"Hundreds and hundreds of times"@RaniaKhalek goes into detail regarding Israeli violations of the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/ATgaVRgF3p
— Palestine Declassified (@PDeclassified) January 29, 2025
[2] Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (pp. 222-223). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.