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Following the impressive and multitudinous march organised by the Exeter Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) last Saturday, which drew the largest crowd on the topic of Palestine in the city in over fifteen years, Exeter’s city centre came to a standstill with over two thousand participants. Their message was clear. Many people in Devon are exerting their political pressure, asking their representatives, especially their MPs, to call for a permanent ceasefire. But this Saturday was neither the first day that the people of our county asked this of their representatives nor does it seem like it will be the last. Vigils have been happening every Wednesday since the beginning of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, one of many since the first Nakba in 1948. Weekly protests and sit-ins at the University, home to the European Centre for Palestine Studies, have aimed to elicit a substantial response and display of solidarity from the university administration. However, both the student body and the university staff have faced a deafening silence and an almost blatant disregard for the realities of its Palestinian members, many of whom have lost many of their relatives in Israel’s genocidal war. Where is the response? We don’t know and we are still waiting for it.
But why? Why do Palestinians have to constantly remind people of their humanity and that they too, deserve to live a life free of occupation and terror; free of attacks and death?
Over one hundred days have passed since the start of Israel’s latest episode of aggression against the people of Palestine. One hundred days of Palestinians being mercilessly killed by bombs and bullets, a number of which are manufactured in the United Kingdom. This ruthless attack on the civilian population has coincided with an Israeli-imposed siege, deliberately inflicted on the Gazan population, in order to starve and kill them through what would otherwise be treatable injuries. This strategy has led to the rise of curable illnesses, such as Hepatitis A, affecting over eight thousand people. With eighty-seven percent of the population having been internally displaced, over 1.7 million Palestinians have been forced to live in refugee camps in extremely cramped conditions on a strip of land which is a tenth of the total area of Devon County. In the past one hundred days, Israel has managed to kill at least 32,000 people, 29,000 of which have been officially counted and at least no less than 8,000 that remain under the rubble – almost 13,000 of these being children. The destruction of the Gazan infrastructure; hospitals, schools, shops, and universities, in a way, also represents the destruction of everyday life in occupied Palestine. Deliberate attacks on journalists, who have become our only eyes into the reality of besieged Gaza, have persisted, with over one hundred dead in just over three months, more than during the whole of World War II.
It’s been one hundred days of pleading: from Palestinians, from people in the streets, from humanitarian organisations and from the United Nations. One hundred days of silence. A silence that perhaps should not surprise us after all. Israel’s brutality has been long documented and their illegal occupation of the Palestinian territory has been allowed to go on for nearly eight decades. An occupation in which they have controlled every single aspect of Palestinian life, trying to destroy who they are not only as a people but as a nation. An occupation under which they have shown no mercy, in which they have killed, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and collectively punished Palestinians. An occupation wherein the acts of resistance of an occupied population against the settler colonial state they live under have been mercilessly crushed.
What else needs to happen for the collective conscience of the world to remember the promise they made eighty years ago? Where is the ‘never again’ for Gaza?
Additional resources:
https://www.instagram.com/exeter_palestine_action?igsh=aXQzNThzdmtjY25r
https://www.instagram.com/exeterpsc?igsh=MWdpaXR5OXBjeHJzMw==
Image: Mar Mengual, 2024
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