Chair of the Scottish PEN Writers at Risk Committee, Lizzie Eldridge, spoke at two of the recent protests in Glasgow. Her speeches are reproduced below.
31st December 2023
I’m Lizzie Eldridge, and I’m here representing Scottish PEN. We’re the Scottish centre of PEN International, an international NGO which advocates for peace and campaigns for writers facing censorship, oppression, torture and death right across the world.
Over the past few years, we’ve issued a number of statements concerning the situation in Palestine, including statements on the plight of writers in Gaza; the killings of journalists Shireen Abu Akleh and Ghufran Hamed Warasneh by Israeli forces; July’s so-called military operation in Jenin; PEN International’s call for a halt to hostilities; and, very recently, the demolition of the shrine to Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces. First, on 11th May 2022, the IDF killed Shireen; shortly after, they attacked mourners at her funeral; then, on the 26th October 2023, they desecrated her shrine in the West Bank and bulldozed over the site of her murder.
These are the Israeli forces that Biden and Sunak are busy supporting. These are the Israeli forces who, funded and armed by the West, have been trying to obliterate Gaza long before October 7th. These are the Israeli forces who, led by Netanyahu who deliberately ignored warnings about a possible attack by Hamas, used the 7th of October to whitewash more than 75 years of violence, oppression and occupation, and used it as the excuse they always wanted to commit genocide; to exterminate the Palestinian people; to slaughter babies, children, women and men, and to ensure their brutal dying by destroying their hospitals, kidnapping and killing their doctors, dropping bombs on the sick, on the injured and the dying to mercilessly smash up any chance of survival.
None of this began on October 7th. October 7th saw the rabid, mercenary, bloodthirsty intensification of decades of persecution of the Palestinian people by the Israeli Zionists. Gaza had already been turned into a prison, with Israel able to turn off its water, its electricity, its internet, its basic necessities at the cruel flick of a switch. Now, the tiny stretch of land that makes up Gaza has been turned into a killing ground, the scale and nature of which is beyond our capacity to fully take in.
It is callous. It is monstrous. It is psychopathic. It is bloodcurdling. It is insane. It is fascism on the rampage. It’s a horror movie on a loop – except it’s real. We see the photos. We watch the videos. We hear those agonising screams.
There are too many stories, thousands of stories, and each one moves us to tears. Just the other day, a doctor spoke of a little boy called Ahmed – 9 years old – dying in a hospital that had barely any supplies. The doctors gave him sedatives to try and ease his dying. A 9-year-old boy, brutally attacked by Israeli bombs, and still the Palestinian doctors tried to alleviate his final moments of pain.
The genocide in Gaza is like nothing we have ever seen. The number of people who have already been killed – a number which increases every minute of every day – is inconceivable.
I want to finish by drawing attention to the writers, the poets, the artists who have been brutally massacred by the murderous Israeli fascists whose appetite for blood knows no bounds. In addition to the huge number of journalists killed, at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers have been murdered in Gaza. The fascists hate the artists. They hate the truth-tellers. They hate the creators of beauty.
On the 7th December 2023, the Palestinian poet and academic, Refaat Alareer, was killed in his home by the Israeli bombs. Refaat refused to leave his home, knowing that nowhere in Gaza was safe. He was killed along with 6 members of his family.
In an interview given shortly before his death, he speaks as bombs fall outside. It is terrifying and it is also testimony to his strength and courage in the face of the barbaric attacks by the Israeli aggressors.
Testament to his strength, courage and integrity is the final poem he wrote and I’d like to share this with you now:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.
If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a story.
Never stop speaking this story. Never stop speaking out against this inhuman genocide. Never stop shouting THIS IS WRONG BEYOND WRONG.
Never stop demanding CEASEFIRE NOW.
6th January 2024
My name’s Lizzie Eldridge, and I’m here on behalf of Scottish PEN. We’re the Scottish centre of PEN International, an NGO which advocates for peace and campaigns for writers facing censorship, oppression, imprisonment and death all across the world.
Over the past few years, we’ve issued a number of statements concerning the situation in Palestine. These include statements on the plight of writers in Gaza; the killings of journalists Shireen Abu Akleh and Ghufran Hamed Warasneh by Israeli forces; last July’s so-called military operation in Jenin; PEN International’s call for a halt to hostilities; the killing of the poet and academic, Refaat Alareer, by Israeli bombs almost exactly one month ago today. When a genocide is being committed on a whole nation of people, no-one is safe.
The number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7th is impossible to take in, the vast majority of these being children and women. A huge number of journalists have also been killed. The Israeli authorities have banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza and reporting on the genocide. Palestinian journalists remain imprisoned in the Gaza Strip with no escape route. This is in total violation of the 2022 UN Security Council Resolution which requires member states to protect journalists along with all other civilians. Yet the number of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity just keeps rising.
Figures indicate that well over 100 journalists and media workers have been killed by the IDF since October 7th. These deaths are not ‘collateral damage’. These deaths are not some ‘side effect’ of Israel’s genocidal brutality. Journalists are deliberately being targeted and their families, too. Journalists are the people who are trying to get the truth out to the world, the truth about the crimes the IDF are committing in Gaza and in the West Bank. Journalists are the people who are risking and losing their lives in order to show us the horrific scale of the brutality being inflicted on the Palestinian people. The vast majority of journalists who’ve been killed are, of course, Palestinian.
Instagram – once awash with selfies and holiday snaps – has become a bloodbath, full of sensitive content warnings to warn of the horrors that lie beneath. Bear in mind, too, that this is only a fraction of the story as many of the social media platforms are regularly censoring Palestinian voices and their supporters.
Some of the journalists who’ve been killed in the atrocities were killed in their homes along with members of their families. Some were killed in the squalid refugee camps. Some were killed in UN schools. Nowhere is safe in Gaza.
Just yesterday, the UN said that Gaza is ‘uninhabitable’. And yet the genocide continues.
And we must never stop talking about this. The journalists haven’t stopped. Even in the face of death, they continue. We must keep on telling and sharing the thousands of stories coming out of Gaza. It’s the very least we can do.
Today, I want to tell the story of one man – the Gaza bureau chief for Al Jazeera, Wael Al-Dahdouh, because it gives such a strong illustration of what Palestinian journalists are facing when trying to get the news out to us about the Israeli genocide. Wael gave a live news report from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital where he was saying a final goodbye to his wife, his son, his daughter and his grandson, killed by Israeli bombs in a house they were sheltering in. His family, displaced, had moved from one location to another and were eventually killed in the South, where the Israelis had sadistically ordered people to go to avoid airstrikes.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza. Until there is a permanent and lasting ceasefire, nowhere is safe. Until Palestine is free from the murderous brutality of Israeli occupation, nowhere in Gaza or the West Bank can ever be safe. Until this brutal, bloodthirsty genocide is stopped, nowhere – nowhere in the world – is safe.
In the middle of this danger, Wael was doing a live news report while the bombs that killed his family could be heard. He was live on air when he got the news that his family had been killed in this attack. He went directly to the site of the explosion and began digging in the rubble with his bare hands. He managed to rescue one badly injured son and one of his daughters. This is life in Gaza – you risk your life reporting on the Israeli atrocities and then you dig beneath the rubble for your family.
Only weeks later, Wael was injured in a drone strike which killed his friend and colleague, Samer Abu Daqqer, left to bleed to death because Israeli snipers were surrounding the UN school which had already been bombed. While Wael was wounded in hospital, he never stopped crying out for the evacuation of his friend from the school. Wael was there, in his Press vest, at his friend’s funeral.
This is the face of humanity in the face of what we cannot even begin to imagine. This is the face of humanity in the face of unspeakable horrors. This is the face of humanity in the face of grotesque inhumanity and genocide.
We cannot look away. We simply cannot look away. We cannot turn away. Every single thing we do – and it doesn’t matter how big or how small – it matters. Everything we do to try to stop this brutal unspeakable genocide – everything we do matters.
Keep talking about Gaza. Keep talking about Palestine. Keep sharing posts. Keep sharing stories. Write to your MSP. Write to Glasgow City Council. Keep coming to demos, keep coming to vigils. Keep demanding an end to this genocide. Keep demanding CEASEFIRE NOW.
Footnote: The day after this speech was given, Sunday 7th January 2024, Wael Dahdouh’s eldest son, Hamza Dahdouh, was killed in a targeted Israeli missile attack on the vehicle he was travelling in. Hamza was also a journalist and fellow journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, was killed in this same attack. They were killed in a supposedly safe area in the southwest of Gaza. Describing his son as ‘the soul of my soul’, Wael has continued reporting, promising to show the world what’s happening in Gaza.