Renowned actors Tilda Swinton, Charles Dance, Steve Coogan, Miriam Margolyes, Peter Mullan, Maxine Peake and Khalid Abdalla are among more than two thousand people from across the arts who have signed a letter saying that: “Our governments are not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them.”
The artists, including Robert del Naja and playwrights Tanika Gupta and Abbie Spallen, condemn “every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them”.
Citing Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant’s depiction of Palestinians as “human animals”, directors Michael Winterbottom, Mike Leigh and Asif Kapadia, comedians Frankie Boyle and Josie Long, authors Marina Warner, Jacqueline Rose, Gillian Slovo and Courttia Newland, and poet Anthony Anaxagorou, say Palestinians “have become people to whom almost anything can be done”. The minister had made the comments while announcing Israel’s “complete siege”, and halting supply of water, power, food and medicine to 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
Visual artists Tai Shani and Oreet Ashery, Larissa Sansour, Rosalind Nashashibi, P. Staff, Florence Peake and Georgina Starr say that, in Gaza, “Palestinians whose grandparents were forced out of their homes at the barrel of a gun [in 1948] are again being told to flee – or face collective punishment on an unimaginable scale.”
The signatories include producers, curators, writers, DJs, architects and designers who support the “global movement against the destruction of Gaza and the mass displacement of the Palestinian people”. They cite the UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths, who has said that ‘the spectre of death’ is hanging over Gaza, and call for “an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered”.
THE LETTER IN FULL:
“We are witnessing a crime and a catastrophe. Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble, and cut off the supply of water, power, food and medicine to 2.3 million Palestinians. In the words of the UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, ‘the spectre of death’ is hanging over the territory.
Gaza is already a society of refugees and the children of refugees. Now, in their hundreds of thousands, bombarded from air, sea and land, Palestinians whose grandparents were forced out of their homes at the barrel of a gun are again being told to flee – or face collective punishment on a unimaginable scale. Dispossessed of rights, described by Israel’s minister of defence as “human animals”, they have become people to whom almost anything can be done.
Our governments are not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them. There will come a time when they are held to account for their complicity. But for now, while condemning every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them, our obligation is to do all we can to bring an end to the unprecedented cruelty being inflicted on Gaza.
We support the global movement against the destruction of Gaza and the mass displacement of the Palestinian people. We demand that our governments end their military and political support for Israel’s actions.
We call for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered.”
