I know I've written blogs about the plight of Palestine and the current Gaza conflict twice before (October 2023 and November 2024) but I'm going to do so again today. Please bear with me. It feels like a moral imperative.
Regardless of how we got to this dire situation, with nearly two million displaced Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are at imminent risk of starvation, international pressure must surely force the Israelis to halt their policy of 'enforced scarcity', release the stranglehold on Gaza, and allow the aid trucks to roll in in huge numbers so the international humanitarian organisations - not the US/Israeli GHF - can resume their efforts to distribute water, food and medicines to alleviate the inhumane suffering being deliberately inflicted on the people of the Strip.
Regardless of how we got to this dire situation, with nearly two million displaced Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are at imminent risk of starvation, international pressure must surely force the Israelis to halt their policy of 'enforced scarcity', release the stranglehold on Gaza, and allow the aid trucks to roll in in huge numbers so the international humanitarian organisations - not the US/Israeli GHF - can resume their efforts to distribute water, food and medicines to alleviate the inhumane suffering being deliberately inflicted on the people of the Strip.
As Leila Sansour, the Middle Eastern film director, has written, "Experts remind us that famine does not descend like wildfire; it must be built, engineered over time. Starvation is not an accident but a decision, an architecture of cruelty. To bring an entire people to such an end requires not neglect but intention: borders sealed, aid choked, infrastructure destroyed. And hunger, once it matures, does not merely gnaw at the body; it devours the very fabric of society, leaving chaos where human purpose once lived. This is Gaza today – and no one any longer doubts whose hand shaped this monstrosity."
I am of the opinion that what we are witnessing is genocide, that ordinary Israelis are in denial of what is being done, that the international community cannot be effective in condemnation as long as Trump and the US are backing Netanyahu, and that a large faction of the coalition Israeli government would dearly like to annex the Strip as Israeli territory and force the relocation of the Palestinians elsewhere (to Egypt? to Jordan?) The Israeli cabinet has even voted in principle to proceed with a formal annexation of the West Bank, territory they have held illegally since 1967. But first and foremost must be aid relief for the starving in Gaza, or the world doesn't have a conscience anymore.
What is equally troubling is that in the wake of the decision by the UK government to declare Palestine Action a proscribed "terrorist" organisation, any member of the public peacefully demonstrating against the actions of the Israeli IDF or the illegal Israeli settlers, and in favour of action towards recognition of a Palestinian state, could face arrest and imprisonment if they appear to be sympathetic towards Palestine Action. It's as though 1984 has arrived here forty years late, and it's scary.
I find it difficult to write a poem to order about something as monstrous as what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, but I hope this hits the mark. I must also warn you that because it's a 'concrete' poem approximately in she shape of the Gaza Strip (see above), it may look completely jumbled up unless viewed in landscape mode. Anyway, here goes...
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| Gaza graffiti, London July 2025 |
I am in favour of an immediate ceasefire. Hamas appears willing. After that can come negotiations to end the war, and I believe it is vital that western nations formally recognise the State of Palestine as part of an eventual 'two state' solution in the middle east. That to my way of thinking will require the giving up of territory by Israel, at least back to pre-1967 boundaries.
Of course it should never be forgotten that it was an Israeli terrorist organisation that first commenced a civil war in Palestine after WWII and unilaterally annexed part of the region, expelling nearly a million Palestinians from their homeland, to create the State of Israel in 1948. The UN and western powers failed Palestine's Arab population then, under pressure from the United States. We must not fail again.
I find it difficult to write a poem to order about something as monstrous as what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, but I hope this hits the mark. I must also warn you that because it's a 'concrete' poem approximately in she shape of the Gaza Strip (see above), it may look completely jumbled up unless viewed in landscape mode. Anyway, here goes...
Gaza Stripped
From north to south,
neither living nor dead
but breathing corpses,
nil by mouth. Dr Josef
Mengele could hardly
have managed it better
this inhumane suffering
imposed on a population.
Hungry on waking,
walking like sticks
their thin shadows
pointing seawards
where Israeli warships
block aid. Constantly
defiled. Hungry on
sleeping, emaciated ribs
encaging hopeless hearts,
huddled into rubble, their
shadows at dusk lengthening
eastward across what was once
their homeland, before the Nakba.
Israeli soldiers fence them in, block aid,
shoot down men, women, children, babies
desperate for food. The IDF are razing the
Gaza Strip, hoping it will be theirs some
day, this riviera death camp ripe for
redevelopment. Lots are being
reserved already as we view
skin and bone newsreels
nightly, wringing our
complicit hands
again.
Those previous blogs on topic are linked here. I invite you to read them too:
Glittering Prize? (the detailed historical background - part one)
Injustice (the detailed historical background - part two)
Thanks for reading, S ;-)