“This genocide implicates us all”
Source: in-cyprus.com
Three hundred and eighty writers from across the United Kingdom, including Jonathan Coe and Ian McEwan—both well-known to Greek-speaking readers—and 300 from France, including Nobel laureates Annie Ernaux and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, have denounced the genocide in Gaza, clarifying that the term genocide is not used as a slogan but as a necessary description of the horror.
“The term genocide is not a slogan,” they note. “It carries legal, political and moral responsibilities. Just as it is true to call the atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians on 7 October 2023 crimes of war and crimes against humanity, so today it is true to name the attack on the people of Gaza an atrocity of genocide, with crimes of war and crimes against humanity,” the writers explain.
The text opens with the poem “A Star Said Yesterday” by Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in October 2023. “And if one day, O Light/All the galaxies/Of the entire universe/Had no more room for us/You would say: ‘Enter my heart/There you will finally be safe.’”
As the writers state, “Palestinians are not the abstract victims of an abstract war. Too often, words have been used to justify the unjustifiable, deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible,” the British and Irish writers said. “Too often, also, the right words—those that mattered—have been erased, along with those who might have written them.”
They reference an interpretation by Alexis Deswaef, vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights and lawyer at the International Criminal Court, regarding the definition of one who approves, as interpreted by the special tribunal in the former Yugoslavia case. This refers to one who watches silently and whose silence is interpreted by the perpetrators as a green light.
“We refuse to be a public of bystander-approvers,” it continues. “This is not only about our common humanity and all human rights; this is about our moral fitness as the writers of our time.”
The writers urge people to join them in “ending our collective silence and inaction in the face of horror”. “This genocide implicates us all,” the letter says. “We bear witness to the crimes of genocide, and we refuse to approve them by our silence.”
The letter closes with a declaration condemning all forms of racism and violence: “We assert without reservation our absolute opposition to and loathing of antisemitism, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli prejudice. We reject and abhor attacks, hate and violence – in writing, speech and action – against Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish people in all and any form. We stand in solidarity with the resistance of Palestinian, Jewish, and Israeli people to the genocidal policies of the current Israeli government.”
P.S. Are you listening, Mr President, with your 6,000-book library?
The original article: belongs to in-cyprus.com .
