Helping hand: Over 100 injured Palestinians and their families arriving in Malaysia from Gaza in need of medical treatment. — Photos: Bernama

“NO one is free until everyone is free” is a quote from a speech by the American civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.

In Malaysia, some people seem to think that everyone is free until they land on our shores. Then they should either go back to where they came from, or they should be locked up in circumstances not dissimilar to what they left.

I think it would be safe to say that no Malaysian under the age of 80 knows what it’s like to live under the constant threat of being vaporised by 2,000lb bombs. Nor do we have any experience of having our homes, hospitals, schools, and indeed almost every single building, reduced to rubble. Or to have to constantly pack up our belongings to move to a so-called safe zone only to discover that it’s not safe at all.

We have never been reduced to having to eat animal feed or been forced to drink unclean water and then suffer the diarrhoea that inevitably comes with it, without having proper toilets to go to. None of us, I hope, have ever had multiple members of our families wiped out in one fell swoop. Those of us who are carers have never had to look after that new category of children, the WCNSF or Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.

This is the situation that the people of Gaza have endured, with remarkable strength and resilience, for 10 months, with no signs of it ending. Yet in our safety and privilege, there are those who would begrudge the small effort we have made to bring some injured Palestinians here to provide them with medical treatment.

Some have asked why they should be placed at a new, apparently underutilised hospital when Malaysians have to wait hours at other public hospitals. I’m not sure where we should place them otherwise since, surely, we should not take up bed space at already crowded hospitals. Private hospitals are not an option for people who have come from a place where there are no hospitals, no medicines, where doctors and other healthcare personnel have been killed.

A local NGO’s intention to provide some familiar food to these patients and their families have also been painted as a scam. This is quite rich from a people who often cannot travel without packing sambal and instant noodles in their luggage. No one seems to have considered that a war, especially one with stated genocidal intent, is a traumatic experience. Any source of normality, including familiar food, would be comforting.

So too would simple empathy and kindness. In this Internet-connected world, we don’t have to be in a war zone ourselves to witness what it is like, thanks to the courage of Palestinian journalists and photographers on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank. How many of us can bear to watch these videos without feeling at least a fraction of the pain these people go through? Who would not have wept watching the grief of the father who lost his wife, mother-in-law, and newborn twins to an Israeli missile strike on their apartment? How did he stay sane?

This attitude towards refugees that some Malaysians have recently shown has been revealing. We sympathise with the plight of people in conflict zones only if they are far away. The minute they come here, whether by air, rickety boat, or on foot, our compassion evaporates. Suddenly we think of them all as thieves and rapists, only here to take our jobs. I don’t know of any refugee who has become one of our GLC heads, do you?

If we look closely at ourselves, we might find that the way we talk about refugees is not much different from how Donald Trump or all those far-right rioters in the UK do. They feed off conspiracy theories and lies geared towards distracting them from the real problems affecting them, such as ineffectual governments and corruption. People in power often protect themselves with divide-and-rule tactics, by making those under them fight among themselves. As the independent MP for Coventry South Zaharah Sultana remarked, “The enemy of the working class travels by private jet, not migrant dinghy.”

It may be hypocritical, as some people have rightly pointed out, to help Palestinian refugees when our official policy towards all refugees is horrendous. We have not signed the UN Refugee Convention, which means that every refugee here is treated as an illegal migrant. They are constantly vulnerable to persecution, violence and abuse. Rather than being a refuge from war, our country treats them like criminals and throws them into detention centres. We should be ashamed of these centres; there are children in them, as well as Palestinians.

However, in the United Kingdom after the recent riots, there were big demonstrations in support of both migrant communities and refugees. They vastly outnumbered the thugs who had thrown rocks, burnt mosques and shelters, and attacked the police. For many of us watching this, it was an immense relief to know that not every Brit is a racist.

Could we ever expect any such shows of solidarity with refugees here, apart from statements from human rights groups and some concerned citizens?

This month we celebrate our freedom from colonial rule. It might be worth remembering the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, that we are never truly merdeka if there are still people around the world who are not. Nor are we free if we replicate the attitudes and practices of our former colonial masters by oppressing those different from us or whom we regard as inferior because of the colour of their skin or because they are poor.

Selamat Hari Merdeka, folks.

Marina Mahathir has stopped being surprised at the parallels she sees between attitudes towards refugees in the West and here. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.