Week 23 | We Bear Witness to Genocide
23 weeks of marching. Cork City in Ireland tirelessly and passionately has advocated for Palestine during this Gaza Genocide. Below is my speech for Families for Gaza.
I’ve been photographing and documenting protests in Cork as an activist for over 20 years. One protest that stands out in my memory is an anti Iraq war protest in 2006, a year that while the US bombed Iraq based on the lie of weapons of mass destruction, Israel was bombing Gaza and Lebanon.
In 2006, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The UK abstained from voting. (1) Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Israel, at the same time as bombarding Gaza fired 4.6 million sub-munitions into dozens of towns and villages in southern Lebanon in 962 separate strikes, around 90% within the final 72 hours of the war, when the conflict already had been largely resolved. (2)
Back in 2006, we don’t have social media like we have today, it took people a long time, who put themselves in mortal danger to bring us the truth about how the US was waging war in Iraq. In 2010 WikiLeaks published whistleblower documents on civilian deaths in Iraq, they estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been admitted by the US government, and among this leak, was a video that would ultimately change the course of the war by inspiring a mass global anti war movement. (3) In 2007, US helicopter gunships had murdered two Reuters journalists, along with several men, all unarmed civilians. Yet listed as “enemy killed in action”. Is it any wonder the US doesn’t seem to care about journalist or civilian casualties? That same year, in 2007, Israel placed Gaza under a permanent illegal blockade that exists to this day.
Isn’t it unbelievable timing, that the publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is now in 2024 fighting what looks like his final court battle in the UK to resist extradition to the US. (4) At a time that history repeats itself in the Middle East. How quaint his publishing of that video seems now, when with social media, everyone here has watched with their own eyes, in real time, war crimes and genocide being committed against Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli soldiers even record themselves committing war crimes, and upload those videos to TikTok.
Never in history has this happened before. Palestinians do teach us life, and more. We watched journalists like Wael (Dahdouh) with Al Jazeera, continue to report from Gaza during and after his wife and children were murdered by Israel in a deliberate airstrike. The aspiring travel photographer Motaz, 25, becoming a photographer of genocide in Gaza overnight. Bisan (Owda), 25, who documents everything using her phone and camera, and greets us with ‘Hi this is Bisan from Gaza, I’m still alive’.
Even a single photograph has the power to move people who go on to change the world. Think of the 9 year old girl running from a napalm bomb in Vietnam that moved people as to the horrors of that war. The photographs of African American Emmet Till, 14, who was abducted, tortured and lynched in the Jim Crow era south that his mother wanted the world to see. The leaked 2004 photographs of prisoners in Abu Graib tortured by US and CIA operatives in Iraq. The video released by Wikileaks in 2010 of two Reuters journalists and civilians being murdered by US soldiers in Iraq. A single Syrian little boy two years old, Alan Kurdi photographed washed up, drowned, on a beach in 2015 near Turkey as his family attempted to flee war in a small boat.
Now think about the videos, images, witness testimony, journalism coming out of Gaza and West Bank. Think about the self-incriminating videos uploaded by IDF soldiers. Think about the fact that, people are using every legal avenue available in the world to ensure these people will be brought to justice.
People will be jailed for the war crimes they have performed. Nations will be isolated and tarnished forever based on what we’ve seen, and based on the strength and persistence of the global Palestinian movement for freedom.
Someone asked me what have all these protests changed, I answered with one word, everything.
Free Palestine. 🇵🇸
(1) https://press.un.org/en/2006/sc8775.doc.htm
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War