We publish the Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture 2025, delivered by Ghassan Abu-Sittah at the Glasgow City Chambers on the 2nd October.
When I thought of Jimmy Reid on the day I gave my address as Rector at Glasgow University, I thought also of Arthur Balfour. I thought how unpleasant it must be for him that a working-class boy from Glasgow and then a Palestinian refugee would come and take his job in an institution which he had built through the exploitation and colonial plunder of others.
Before I begin, I would like to thank Jimmy himself. After coming out of Gaza, I was privileged to meet Alex Salmond, who told me that, when he was First Minister of Scotland, the five Chancellors of the Scottish universities wrote to him asking for a change to the law that allowed rectors to be elected in Scotland. He went and spoke to Jimmy, who was adamant in his defence of this democratic right by which students in Scotland were unique globally in being able to choose their rector.
Today, I would like to try, as we approach the third year of the genocide, to understand what we’ve learnt from this genocide.
The core components of settler-colonialism are a formative part of the development of European political identity. As the Princellos of Spain were unified, Europe began its colonial endeavour, and with it, its genocidal turn. European political identity is structurally attached to settler-colonialism and with it, its genocidal instinct.
We have seen over the last two years that, despite the advancement in artificial intelligence with Lavender – the AI software that allowed Israel to pick out its victims in Gaza – or another programme called Where’s Daddy – which allowed the IDF to choose 1,600 health workers for assassination; despite the 2,000lb laser guided bombs; despite the electronic surveillance planes that the RAF flies over Gaza, colonialism remains a very primitive enterprise that is essentially rooted in violence. It is composed of genocidal erasure. Erasure is not just the taking of lives. It is the taking of lives and the denial of the existence and the humanity of the victims. It is the removal of their history, of their present and their future. We also discovered that genocide denial is a critical component of this project. Ghosting the victims, censoring those witnesses of the genocide or pressuring them into censoring themselves is a critical part of this, and other, genocides.
The genocide still, despite all of this technology, needed its primitive components. Geographic clearance, which was started in Scotland at the embryonic phase of English colonialism; the use of famine, tested in Ireland with great success and then West Bengal; the fostering of public health conditions that generate epidemics, which multiply the lives taken through a genocidal project; and racism – that racialising hierarchy which places the victims of genocide at a much lower rung in order to justify their killing and to render them, and their children, ungrievable.
For us living in the United Kingdom, one of the harshest and most difficult things to accept is that had Israel killed 20,000 kittens the liberal outrage, from Blue Peter to the FA, would have been deafening.
At the very beginning of the genocide, the head of the Israeli army dog-whistled racism by calling Palestinians “human animals”, triggering the racialization of Palestinians. This meant that in order for you to speak about the suffering of the Palestinians, there was a gate that you had to go through. That gate was for you to accept that the lives of a handful of Israeli hostages were more important than the lives of millions of Palestinians. During each media interview, that gatekeeper – whether the BBC or CNN or Sky – would insist that you accept where the rungs occupied by the Israelis were and where the rungs occupied by the Palestinians were in order for you to voice your victimhood.
Another part of this genocide is what we once termed the scorched earth policy. We viewed the scorched earth policy in the 1940s, 50s and 60s as involving the burning and destruction of great parts of the countryside. But what we have witnessed now in the 21st century, when the majority of residents of the global south live in urban areas – many in refugee camps or slums – is that the scorched earth means the destruction of water and sewage treatment plants. Scorched earth means the dismantlement of the health system and the killing of its professionals. These are the components of scorched earth in a world where the majority of the inhabitants live in urban dwellings.
In the last couple of days, we were given the last component of genocide, also primitive. Trump’s plan for Gaza is, if you replace the Palestinians with Native Americans, is the plan for a Native American reservation – with its own casinos and hotels to generate an income for a population deemed so low on the racialising rung that their needs are purely biological. They need to be fed. They need to be watered. They need somewhere to sleep. Now, in addition to that, we see the return of Viscount Blair, showing how, for a political career, the blood of one million Iraqis is a gift that keeps on giving.
The return of the High Commissioner in Palestine, almost 80 years after Sir Herbert Samuel left the job in 1948, highlights that, despite the technology, settler-colonialism is a very primitive and basic enterprise that hasn’t really changed.
Standing where we are as Palestinians, as people of colour, as people from the global south, we wonder what the nature of the relationship is between Israel and Western imperialism. Israel is not an ally of Western imperialism. It’s not Taiwan. It’s not Ukraine. It’s not even a client state like Saudi Arabia or one of the Latin American banana republics. Israel is something much more. This genocide has acted as a stressor that has lit the power grid that links imperialism across the globe with its central empire: the United States.
We have discovered the way in which Israel has been woven into the very fabric of power and powerful institutions in the West. I will give you a basic example. The Guardian ran a story on the 17th of July about a British company called MBDA Ltd. MBDA Ltd. manufactures the wings of a bomb called the GBU-39. The Guardian was able to identify 34 attacks in Gaza using the GBU-39 – including one which became famous for the silhouette of a 5-year-old girl who was trying to escape the fire. This girl, Hanin al-Wadie, lost both her parents and her siblings in one of these attacks, whose bomb had wings made by MBDA.
MBDA has a £3 million research grant with Glasgow University. The £350 million that it made in the last two years goes back to its parent company, BAE Systems. Glasgow University is one of the shareholders of BAE Systems.
The blood of Hanin al-Wadie’s parents and siblings, her burnt flesh, materialised into value extraction at Glasgow University. The same applies to the lab at Edinburgh University, which plays a crucial part in the research on laser-guided bombs along with Tel Aviv University. Whether it’s the Universities or the medical institutions – like the Royal Colleges, who refuse to condemn the killing of some of their members – we discover the mirage of liberal historicisation.
In the last few years, these universities have claimed to want to decolonise everything from the curriculum to the soft furnishings. This actually was just that an age-old liberal trick of historisation and mystification. These institutions, built on slavery money and colonial theft, that perpetuated racialising theories about colonial endeavours and that rooted colonial endeavours in the inferiority of people of colour, have not really evolved. They are as primitive as colonialism itself.
So the next question that we need to ask is whose genocide is this? Is this Netanyahu’s genocide? Is this Israel’s genocide?
Of the $26 billion that the war cost the Israeli economy between the 7th of October 2023 and the 7th of October 2024, the United States paid $17.9 billion. The rest? 30% of the rest came from Germany – which increased its arms sales to Israel tenfold following the 7th of October – and the United Kingdom, France and Italy. 60% of electronic surveillance is being done by the Royal Air Force over Gaza. Italian air force planes refuel Israeli planes on their way to bomb Yemen.
But also, we discovered in the Arab world that Sykes-Picot, the plan to divide the Arab world and create these modern states, had Israel at the centre of the Arab regimes that were created as a result of this plan. Unlike what these Arab regimes were being told, their job was to protect Israel and not the other way around. They have contributed either directly, as in the case of many of the Gulf countries, or by allowing aid to Israel, as in the case of Palestine’s neighbours. The other thing that we have learnt is that the performative brutalism that we have witnessed in the genocide has become a vehicle for the normalisation of an anti-humanist racialising language.
We have been subjected to a process in which we have watched people of colour being killed in a performative way. Premature babies at al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital being left to die so that the ICRC staff find them. Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, was intentionally turned into a mass grave by executing 400 of its patients and staff and then burying them in very shallow graves in the courtyard of the hospital. The reason for this performative violence is that it was necessary as a vehicle for the return of fascism from the margins to the centre of politics.
Dehumanisation and an anti-humanist approach to others allowed fascism to make its way back from the margins of unacceptability to the Nigel Farages and the Donald Trumps of today. Western liberal institutions committing genocide could not claim to be able to fight the discourse of fascism while practising in a performative way the same racialising, brutal violence against people of colour. But in order for this to happen, something very important had to happen in the last 5-10 years.
We have watched the Netanyahu government and the Israeli right wing create an alliance with anti-semitic forces, fascist parties in Europe. They have reached a historic agreement with them that a change to the definition of anti-semitism – that links it to the hatred of Jews and Jewish communities and links it directly to the twentieth century’s worst atrocity – is changed to that purely of anti-Israeli opposition. By the end, when Trump was elected again, in his inaugural festivities the Anti-Defamation League – the most rabid American Zionist organisation – described Elon Musk’s Sieg Heil shoulder salute as an awkward shoulder movement. This sent the message that the twentieth-century definition of anti-Semitism is behind us, and that a new form of anti-Semitism that emboldens Israel’s new partners is now the accepted definition.
I think Jimmy Reid was an extremely far-sighted reader of capitalism. In a lot of ways, he was more akin to Engels than to Marx. One of the most important observations he made was about expendable human beings. These expendable human beings have now become surplus populations in the eyes of global capital, surplus to the needs of the market, surplus to the need to keep them healthy and to keep them alive. Gaza has become a template for the removal of surplus political populations, a laboratory where the language, the philosophy and the logic for getting rid of these surplus populations is developed.
The weapons, the language and the logic of Gaza will be seen in Kashmir and Brazil. Wherever global capital deems populations as surplus to its needs, they will be eliminated in the same way. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Keir Starmer, in the midst of his support for the genocidal erasure of politically surplus Palestinians, brings in the most draconian measures to shorten the lives of disabled women and men in the United Kingdom through an act that denies access to healthcare and social welfare. This social measure is a mechanism by which he can reduce the life expectancy of surplus populations. In the global north, Glasgow has always been and remains an example of how social murder is used through the reduction of life expectancy for those populations that are deemed surplus.
I came to the United Kingdom in 1988 and came straight to Scotland and to Glasgow, where I had my formative political years. Having been a citizen of this country, raising my children here, Starmer’s description of “real Britain” has been as shocking to me as it is insidious. Starmer’s real Britain is “painting a fence”, “running the raffle” and “cutting the half-time orange”. For me, the real Britain is seeing my friends Victoria Rose and Nick Maynard leaving very successful and comfortable lives as surgeons in the National Health Service to go to Gaza repeatedly and put their lives on the line. They put their careers on the line back in the United Kingdom too, risking attack from organisations like UK Lawyers for Israel because it is the right thing to do.
Real Britain for me is union organisers who give up their time and their efforts to fight for the rights of others for a fair deal and fair wage. Real Britain for me is families taking their children to the demonstrations so that they teach them the importance of solidarity and seeing the humanity in those that you will most likely never meet, but are told to hate as a way of justifying their killing.
Unfortunately, real Britain is 30% of British children – 4.5 million people – who live in poverty and food insecurity. It is a fact that half of the people in poverty are either disabled or live in a household where there is a disabled family member. It is families with a disabled child who face significantly higher rates of poverty. Real Britain is the fact that 40% of Glasgow University students miss a meal because they cannot afford the rent.
The great Marxist historian and critical thinker Walter Rodney, who was a radical and a freedom fighter killed by the CIA in the early 80s, once asked a question: What happens when we stop dreaming? Gaza is what happens when we stop dreaming of an end to Western Imperialism in our lands. Gaza is what happens when we stop dreaming of a world where people hold the same value and where the body count in a morgue is about the number of people who have lost their lives, not about the bodies that count. Viscount Blair is what happens after the killing of one million Iraqis. A litany of one morally bankrupt and intellectually mediocre Prime Minister after another is what happens.
That is what happens to us when we stop dreaming that we are capable of a better world. So I will end with what started as a rallying call and really fully epitomised the life of Jimmy Reid but is unfortunately now a stark choice facing humanity: socialismo o muerte.