On Tuesday, 15th August I attended a packed meeting organised by the
Stop the War Coalition, now an established annual event during the
Edinburgh Festival. The evening began with some anti- war poetry
in both Arabic and English, followed by a selection of anti–war protest
songs. The first speaker was Fatima Adoul, a young Palestinian woman
who, together with all her family, had suffered terribly at the hands
of the Israeli state. She gave a shocking account of her experiences
during the Chatila massacre by the LebaneseMaronite militia from 16th to 18th September, 1982.
Tony Benn identified his younger self with the subject of one of the
earlier songs, that of the young soldier longing for home and gave a
rendition of “Bless ‘em All”.He praised the Stop the War Coalition ,
saying it united Moslems, Jews and Christians and referred to his own
multi – cultural family members. The veteran left – winger said it was
a lie that the “West” wanted democracy and condemned Bush as the worst
fundamentalist of all. The present conflicts were all about restoration
of western power in the middle east because of oil. He referred to
the Suez invasion of 1956 and said that the only reason America
had not supported Britain then was because it wanted to replace British
imperialism with American imperialism. In all situations we should ask
three questions: what is going on? Why? And what should we do about it
?There was time for only four questions and I said the suffering Arab
and Israeli working class had more matters in common than those that
divided them. I spoke about the Israeli farmers surveying the damage to
their fields from Hezbollah's rockets; about the Lebanese fisherman
unable to make a livelihood due to the vast oil slick in the
Mediterranean from the Israeli bombing of the power station,;of
the grieving Israeli mother over the death of her soldier son and
the Palestinian mother mourning the death of her children.
I asked Tony Benn whether he would agree that the only answer to these
problems was through Socialism. He replied that you could not impose
socialism by getting people to sign up on the dotted line and that
anyway socialist factions had split and split and split. It was left to
Fatima Helou to point out that until 1948 , Moslems,Jews and Christians had lived together in peace.
Fifteen Journals were sold, £6 collected for the Fighting Fund and three e-mail addresses collected.
