Remigration is Genocide: On Palestine, Uganda and Germany.

Genocide. We should probably start there. Genocide, the act that Israel is still committing against Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, is something which - as someone whose family comes from the north of Uganda - continues to shape my life. Our ethnic group endured a genocide at the hands of the Ugandan government that lasted twenty years, and the world didn’t care. It still doesn’t care, because the victims were poor and black. When Ed Sheeran’s tour began to disintegrate, as I read the response to his actions and comments, I was reminded that the greatest crime of Palestinians, committed in 1948, was to exist on the soil on the same soil that Israel wanted for itself. Israel has never forgiven them for that, and perhaps it never will. It never forgave them for the Great March of Return, the 2018 protest that ended in a hail of bullets and hundreds of Palestinian deaths, a fifth of which were children. 

I thought of Ed a lot last week, someone I have known since he began performing in London, but who I sadly see too rarely these days. I thought of the Ed who, then broke and mostly unknown, played a large community fundraiser for the Haiti earthquake, raised £200 from CD sales, then handed us the cash and headed off into the night. It was an eighth of our total take that evening. I watched the various critiques of the position that he had taken, and I thought: this day was coming, he is a public figure and this is by far the most intense political discussion of our time, and he hasn’t been here before: he has understandably become the focus of genuine rage and resentment, and he has blinked in a game of dare with a group of wealthy, powerful men. It was upsetting to watch, of course it was, because I still saw the teenager who turned up in London as a determined but vulnerable outsider. But Ed is an adult now, and there will be many other moments for him to meet in the years ahead. I root for him to make them, as I always will.

Israel cannot deal with its genocide against the Palestinians because it is such an intimate act, because its perpetrators are either part of or only a few degrees removed from several members of Israeli society and the diaspora. Behind and beneath the furious social media posts, it is just not deniable enough, especially not at the dinner table. Genocide infects and corrupts everything it touches. It remains shameful to many and that is one of its punishments. As Israel continued its process of revenge against the Palestinian population, carpet-bombing entire families out of existence, using children for target practice, I was reminded of what the Ugandan government had done to we Acholi, either burning us alive in pits or starving us far from the eyes of the media.

I thought of Ed’s decision to take Macklemore on tour, which is not a choice I thought he or any other major artist would make if he was not moving towards a more public expression of what he truly felt about what Israel is doing to Palestinians. I then saw a path for Ed to use his leverage to do something bold and truly profound. He didn’t take it, possibly because he didn’t anticipate this scale of backlash from stadium owners he thought he could deal with, and, well, he has had the week that he has had. I hope he takes whatever he can from this moment and moves forward for the better, like the once-unknown guy who turned up and gave money to those who needed it much more.

But back to genocide. I wish for a free Palestine partly because I slowly gave up hope that the world would ever see we Acholi, even in death. That’s why the definition of genocide matters so much - it is not just technical, it is spiritual. It says: “we were here and we mattered. We are here and we matter still”. Of course Israel’s society largely rejects the definition, even as its senior ministers boast of its fulfilment. It is a historical mark that is horrifying to bear. It is a word that even now the far-right will not claim. Today they call it “Remigration”. But it’s genocide, all right. It’s genocide. What else can it mean when senior members of this party call for a reduction of the population from 80 million to 60 million, and a significant number of those 20 million do not want to leave? 

The AfD’s voters are voting for a path that ends in genocide and the vast majority of them either know that or do not care. In the end, it doesn’t matter to me what they think, just as it doesn’t matter to the victim of the hit-and-run accident whether the driver who hit them was drunk or not. They have very loudly or quietly, politely decided that black people like me are inhuman, just as a large part of Israel’s society has decided about Palestinians, just as the Ugandan government, which seized power in 1986, decided about we Acholi. We have all seen this movie before, and we are seeing it play out on our smartphones now. All that is left is for the AfD to take power, and within a few years the forced displacements will begin, as will the killings of many of those who refuse to go quietly. You can count on it. You can be sure that the AfD are.

To end with Palestine. It’s not about learning from history, in the end. It’s about learning from now. When a friend asked me, but what else did you expect us to do when Hamas attacked us, I said, you could have done anything. Israel at that point in its history had the most moral leverage I have known them to have. A massacre of hundreds of your civilians - you could have called for all manner of personal and commercial sanctions, for the expulsion of Hamas members. You could have called for the expulsion of state-owned clubs from the UEFA Champions League. But instead Israel chose this course and it will mark them for all time. He said, but who can even verify what is happening there. Well, we all know that. And we can’t unknow it, no matter how loud the denials or the silences grow in the years to come.