The bronze statue of Winston Churchill, with the Houses of Parliament in the Palace of Westminster behind.
The British Empire, for which Churchill fought and served, was founded fundamentally on violence, often of an extreme and punitive nature, serving the high ideal of “liberal imperialism”: that England “brought civilisation to the ignorant, and those not ready to govern themselves”. Britain held the mandate for Palestine following the First World War, and for part of this time Churchill was secretary of state for the colonies, as well as later prime minister. Lessons in brutality learned elsewhere in the empire, not least in Ireland, were applied in Palestine to suppress rebellion. This is documented in Legacy of Violence: A history of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins.
Oh, my occupier, when you kill me don’t forget to steal what is in my pocket. There you will find humanity, justice and conscience. Don’t throw them away. Take them, practice them. Let my people find some hope.
Excerpt from a poem by Malak Hijazi, aged 19 years, October 1st 2019, Gaza.
We Are We Are Not Numbers (WANN) was exhibiting at the P21 gallery in London last weekend. WANN is a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project in the Gaza Strip. It tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for their human rights.
This was a chance discussion. I grabbed the words because they seemed illustrative. If we identify as White, or are identified as White, or pass as White day to day, do we have a White culture?
We each have multiple overlapping shared cultures deriving from our family, history, geography, migrations, sexuality, friends, education, experiences, faith and active acquisition. However, if we are White, all of these are influenced, if not wholly owned, by a culture that we can call White.
The concept of White is only loosely linked to skin colour and has nothing to do with genetics: race is a wholly social fabrication. Rather, the essence of Whiteness is power sourced in violence. The Whiteness of culture is intrinsically bound up with the last five hundred years of European colonialism and expropriation, enslavement and genocide, and delusions of supremacy. Whiteness is tied to the chance development of capitalism in the coffee houses and markets of London and Amsterdam.
White culture is so pervasive that we can take it to be universal and normal across much of the world. Indeed, where it holds sway, it is intrinsic to the idea of White culture that it is normative and holds us all to arbitrary standards. As a White person it can be hard to see this, looking at our culture from within as it were, just as we cannot readily perceive the curvature of space-time though we and all things round us are affected by gravity. Moreover, our inability to see White culture is wilful: we corrupt our vision and obscure our history and thus reproduce our cultural memes.
Capitalism is a powerful cultural mechanism that alienates us from our heritages, commodifies our identities and stories, and sells these back to us as pared-down, corrupted, corporate-owned and controlled shared dreams.
This was a sketch made in gouache in the moment – in a 3 minute music track – then later repainted over 20 minutes. Somehow this has something of what I am trying to capture in the blockiness and opacity of the medium.
Here are other 3-5 minute painted sketches, mostly done standing over a horizontal surface, with fairly stiff paint and broad flat brush.
The Israeli military said the investigation found that the officers mishandled critical information and violated the army’s rules of engagement. “The strike on the aid vehicles is a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification, errors in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the standard operating procedures,” it said. The army said it initially hit one car. As people scrambled away into a second car, it hit that vehicle as well. A third strike was launched as survivors scrambled into a third car. Excerpts from The Guardian. 5th April 2024
Note that this targeted killing had the effect of turning back ships of much needed aid under conditions of purposeful and intended famine caused by Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Furthermore, nearly 200 humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza since this catastrophic escalation in Israel’s occupation started in October.
Beware: All too often, we say What we hear others say. We think What we’re told that we think. We see What we’re permitted to see. Worse! We see What we’re told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see, even an obvious lie Again and again and again Maybe to say it, almost by reflex Then to defend it, because we’ve said it And at last to embrace it, because we’ve defended it And because we cannot admit that we’ve embraced and defended an obvious lie. Thus, without thought, without intent, We make mere echoes of ourselves — And we say What we hear others say.
I am finding drawing faces at speed (3 to 5 minutes mostly) very challenging and frustrating. I do not want to be restricted to a simple outline but to give a sense of volume and life. I want to use paint rather than pencil, but truthfully my technical skills drawing with a brush and my control of the medium (fluidity of the paint, colour and tone selection) are letting me down. In particular, I struggle to render eyes in these fast sketches. Here are two hour’s worth of attempts.
On 14th March, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Michael Gove), laid before Parliament non statutory plans to identify individuals and groups as “extremist”, disengaging them from democratic involvement with central government. He said: “The proposed definition will hold that extremism is the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance that aims to: negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve those results. While the Government in no way intend to restrict freedom of expression, religion or belief, we cannot be in a position where, unwittingly or not, we sponsor, subsidise or support in any way organisations and individuals opposed to the freedoms that we hold dear.”
The press release attached to this measure offers as context “Since the 7 October Hamas terror attacks in Israel concerns have been raised about the wide-ranging risk of radicalisation.” In considering causes of polarisation of opinion, no mention is made of the actions of Israel that has killed more than 30000 Palestinians in 6 months and destroyed all infrastructure for survival and civic life in land it occupies, and that is now subject to two direct instructions from the international Court of Justice to stop genocidal actions and to ensure provision of humanitarian aid and food to the people. In Parliament, examples were given of organisations to be investigated as extremist that include those promoting democratic engagement by Muslim citizens.
In our society, it is mainstream and not at all extreme to give moral and material support to an allied nation that, systematically and at scale, murders civilians and creates severely injured and traumatized children without any surviving family. In the debate, as an example, holding aloft a model of a dead baby in protest against complicity in genocide was considered “extremist”.
In which I explain the diary and point out that the title is ironic. My first page is a mix of barely-understood and half-remembered cosmology and existentialism.
“It’s said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers.
“Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
“Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.”
“I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”
Jacob Bronowski “The Ascent of Man” first aired on BBC one in 1973.
The destruction of Hamed town in Khan Younis left behind following the withdrawal of the occupation forces from the City. From Eye.On.Palestine
Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw reveal the fear at the heart of the White identity.