‘How can Israel, the illegal occupier, have the right to self-defence?’

‘How can Israel, the illegal occupier of Palestine, have the right to self-defence?’

Across the world, the Palestinians living abroad and away from Palestine are speaking about the Israeli occupation and bombing. Conrad Landin talks to Saga and Ahmed, two young Palestinians, now living in Scotland.

October 7th 2023 was just another rainy day in Dundee, Scotland. But for one young woman, Saga, it was to be a special day back home in Gaza. Saga is a young master’s student in dental public health. She moved from Gaza to Scotland a few weeks before. Her uncle was getting married on October 7th, and Saga spoke to family members as they prepared for the wedding.

She soon knew something was wrong. As her family went to their relatives’ home in Deir al-Balah, in the south of Gaza, ‘they all had pale faces, and they were struggling with the internet,’ she tells New Internationalist. In the space of a few hours, Hamas started their attack on Israel, and Palestinians began to understand that a serious attack would follow from Israel.

‘Normal life turned to emergency life,’ says Saga. And it’s different now. ‘I am afraid to ask about my relatives, or my friends. Because I don’t want to hear that they have died.’ It’s the seventh time Israel has attacked Gaza in her lifetime. She feels some protection because she is living abroad but her course lasts only a year and then she plans to return to Gaza.

‘Insha’allah, God willing, I will come back,’ she says. ‘To be honest I will not be happy to stay. I am very, very unhappy that life is very normal here, people are still laughing, people are still happy, but my family may be bombed at any minute in Gaza.’ Saga now often feels like she’s in ‘another world’, ‘a zombie film’. She says: ‘I am trying to tell myself that it is very normal to see people killed in the Gaza Strip at every minute. Would it be normal in the UK, for example? It is double standards.’

How not to help Gazans

Ahmed is another Palestinian now loving in Dundee. He had an idea there would be an attack earlier. On 22 September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the UN Security Council and held up a map of the Middle East. On this map, there was ‘no West Bank and Gaza… which is almost 12 per cent of the historical Palestine, so nothing,’ Ahmed says, ‘I knew they just wanted something to start the ethnic cleansing of all the people of the West Bank and Gaza.’

When Ahmed woke up on 7th October, he says he knew there would be a lot of killing of innocent people, and he knew of course the excuses would always be “human shields”. After six years studying and teaching engineering at universities in Britain, he moved to Scotland only a few months ago. Scotland’s Palestinian community is small, but now more people know about it because of Nadia El-Nakla, the Palestinian political activist from Dundee. She is married to Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf. El-Nakla’s parents live in Scotland but they were in Gaza at the start of the war and they were there until 3rd November.

Scottish First Minister Yousaf speaks from the heart about his family’s connection to Palestine and he called for a ceasefire in the war. He also called ‘on the international community to agree to a worldwide refugee programme for the people of Gaza.’ He said Scotland would be the first country to open its doors to the refugees.

But Ahmed says, ‘You should not say this about accepting refugees now. It’s like you are encouraging people to be ethnically cleansed. It is not how you help people in Gaza. If you want to help them, say we have to stop this killing.’

He disagrees with the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer. Last month, Keir Starmer said that ‘Israel has the right’ to stop water and power to the Palestinians. After the anger about this, Starmer tried to change his opinion and he said the comments were in reply to a previous question. Ahmed says, ‘He’s lying, because it’s on TV, it’s there on LBC radio. Of course, he said Israel has the right to stop water, food, and electricity. He’s lying one hundred per cent. I don’t understand as he is a humanitarian lawyer.’

‘Palestinians are not Hamas’

Saga worked in journalism and dentistry back in Palestine. She is very unhappy about the way the media is reporting the war. ‘It’s complete propaganda, it’s not something new, but this time it is clear the war in Gaza is genocide and ethnic cleansing. But the media says that Israel has the right to defend itself.

‘How could the illegal occupier have the right to defend itself against civilians?’ she says. ‘The Palestinian people are not Hamas.’

When you say all Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip are Hamas, it’s stupid. Because there are women, there are children, there are civilians, does that give you the right to bomb them?’

She talks about an article on the BBC website on 16th October and it was also on the BBC’s social media. It said: ‘Does Hamas build tunnels under hospitals and schools?’ The next day Israel bombed Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. ‘So it was like the BBC made the Israeli military bomb the hospitals,’ Saga says. Israel blamed the attack on a Palestinian rocket, but human rights experts say the Israel Defence Force’s story is not clear. And audio experts are not sure that a recording of Palestinian militants discussing the bombing is true.

Saga and Ahmed were planning to visit their families at home over Christmas, but this looks less and less likely. And the future does not look good. Ahmed says he wanted to go back to Gaza one day to work at the university. ‘But that is completely destroyed now,’ he says.

But nothing can stop Ahmed feeling he is a Palestinian. ‘I believe I can help my people back home better here,’ he says. And he doesn’t think his family wants to come to Britain. ‘When you are connected to a place, it’s very difficult to leave it.’