Posts Tagged ‘gaza’
collective trauma
Posted on: March 3, 2024
We all live in our own filter bubble curated by algorithms, resilient to any form of criticism that would shake our belief system. Some bubbles are admittedly less sealed and airtight than others, and some people are more open minded and willing to subject themselves to different beliefs than others, but overall, we are all shaped by this confirmation bias drive deeply embedded in our psychology and we all fall for the need to have our beliefs reinforced by other people. Solipsism meets tribalism in an attempt to save itself.
Every now and then something highly divisive surfaces the vast pool of ideas or events and makes people gather round and cluster together in antagonistic tribes. Slavery. Monarchy. Church Reform. Voting rights for women. White supremacy. Environmentalism. Gay rights. Gender equality. Jews. Guns control. Capitalism. Vietnam. Climate change. Trump. Freedom of speech. Abortion. Brexit. Systemic racism. Vaccines. Migration. And so on and so forth. Recently there’s another hot topic that polarizes our world into two factions who hate each other’s guts: Zionism and the creation of Israel as a colonial state in Palestine. One tribe cheers the creation of an ethnostate founded by definition on the exclusion and destruction of the native population. The other tribe decries the violence contained in such a colonial project. I belong to the later. While I think the concept of a safe haven state for Jews was legitimate, the founding principle as a colonial state was not. Every instance of injustice and hardship suffered by the Palestinians that took place after 1948, no matter how big or small (every dead Palestinian, maimed child, every forced eviction, deportation, harassment, house demolished, discrimination, bullying, abuse, illegal settlement, unlawful imprisonment etc) can be traced back to this notion of ethnocracy and colonialism, that is part of Israel’s founding narrative.
After the horrible event of October 7, I find myself, once again, tethered to a bubble where I watch in horror, day in, day out, unfolding in plain sight, one of the greatest crimes of our age, played out in real time and broadcast live on our TVs and phones. What happened on the 7th of October was brutal. Death of civilians as a political means is never justified. But what’s been happening since that day to the Palestinian civilians is not only thousands of times more brutal but the narrative that surrounds all the killings is surreal. The horrifying atrocities perpetrated by Israel are mirrored by a conspiracy of silence and deceit of the western governments and western media. The brazen lies, the gaslighting, the smearing, the shameless denials, the complicity etc turns everything you know on its head. It’s like witnessing a mass hypnosis, where half of the world is under a spell and lost any trace of humanity and reason. It’s like living in a Kafkaesque topsy-turvy reality, where lying through your teeth reigns and the rules of reality disappear. Truth, sense, logic are completely butchered in an attempt to exonerate Israel’s unimaginable war crimes. The impunity granted to Israel has created a monster that can no longer be contained. History repeats itself like in a grotesque farce. The dehumanized is now the dehumanizer. The only thing that is missing is the gas chambers. Everything else is right there. The dehumanization, the concentration camp, the deportation, the ethnic cleansing, the incarceration, the mass killing, the starvation, the genocidal intent to erase their cultural footprint (universities, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques), the white supremacy etc. Shaun is perfectly right in his video essay: suffering doesn’t make you a better person, it just makes you suffer.
Like I said, I live in a bubble where the supply of depictions of what’s been done to the Palestinian people seems to have no end. At times I ration the content or even turn my back on it for a while out of desperation. Nothing of this sort in the other bubble, the pro-Israel one, where the killings are cheered on with enthusiasm or justified with a shrug. There’s only so much one can take. The tribe I follow is beaten, in shock, emotionally drained, given in to despair, destitute of words. I notice, more and more often, in their voices and on their faces a sense of a collective trauma, born out of this strange condition where you are made to witness horrific crimes against a group of people without being able to put an end to it. And where, to make it even worse, everyone else seem to be part of a conspiracy supporting or denying what’s happening. It’s bound to induce depression, helplessness, despair and even madness. More than 15.000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza. Not 200, not 460, not 870, not 1400, not 3200, not 5600. More than 50.000 children have been wounded, maimed, disfigured, scarred for life and rendered orphaned. Not being able to prevent any of these horrors can take an immense personal toll on you. And being vilified for wanting the slaughter to stop is one of the most depressing and bizarre things one can experience in their life.
shalloWEST
Posted on: November 9, 2023
The little faith I had in humanity is now completely shattered. There wasn’t much faith left to begin with, but I did believe our civilization had outgrown mass murder. I was wrong. It seems humankind will always find a way to justify murder and accommodate genocide. The remorse will invariably come, I’ll give them that, but so the relapse into mass murder. We are nothing but a genocidal species, a murderous junkie unable to escape the cycle of murder – remorse – relapse. The truth of the matter is that genocide can happen to anyone. You may live in places where is less likely to happen, but nobody is fully protected and there’s no guarantee against it anywhere in the world. Ten thousand civilians have been killed in just one month before our very eyes and you won’t find a single major western leader to raise his voice against it and say: ”ENOUGH”. Not a single one. Joe Biden. Emmanuel Macron. Rishi Sunak. Olaf Scholz. Georgia Meloni. Keir Starmer. Victor Orban. Bernie Sanders. Nancy Pelosi. Ursula von der Leyen. etc They have all equated Israel’s right to defence to mass murder. The blood of thousands innocent children is on their hands. They are all complicit in the slaughter of thousands of civilians with their unlimited and unconditional support for Israel. At this rate every 10 mins a child is murdered in Gaza. Even now there are hundreds of civilians and children still alive under the rubble who will suffer a slow horrifying death. Buried alive under debris and our indifference. Now that much of Gaza has been carpet-bombed and flattened by 10.000 bombs the most one can hear from our glorious Judeo-Christianity is a call for a humanitarian … pause. In other words, give them some water and then kill them again. Give them a loaf of bread and then you can carry on destroying their homes, schools, hospitals. Let them take a breather before their death. We are not barbarians like them animals, right? Bombing the crap out of somebody on an empty stomach is not kosher after all.
I was never naïve about our human nature or about politics. There will always be a level of corruption, self-interest, falsity that will erode our better selves and our political endeavours. There will always be a difference between what is said and what is done or between what is said publicly and what is said behind the scenes. I expected the usual routine with the West paying lip service to our humanity.: “Palestinian lives matter”, “Every loss of innocent civilians is unacceptable”, “We urge Israel to show restraint and protect non-combatant civilians” etc while looking the other way at some of Israel’s missteps. What I didn’t expect was for the West to openly embrace evil and unreason. To offer unrestricted support for Israel even when they went fully genocidal. One of the difficulties historians and politicians face when it comes to distinguishing between mass killing and genocide is to prove intent and motivation. Now the case for a genocide was made simple by Israel’s own admission of their intent and motivation (the president, the prime minister, high ranking officials, the IDF). They turned Gaza into a textbook case. The documents leaked pointed in the same direction. No building or place is off limits. The emphasis is on maximum damage, not precision. The indiscriminate carpet-bombing of everything in Gaza (houses, roads, hospitals, schools, shops, mosques, churches, markets, bakeries, refugee camps etc) makes it clear those statements weren’t just angry words, mere venting, but it meant business. There’s the plan and there’s its implementation.
The response of the West to all this? A complete surrender to Israel’s narrative. To their aggressive lobby. Blank check to do whatever they want, with no redlines and with complete impunity. Blatant denial of Israel killing civilians on purpose. Full unconditional support. Sending financial and military aid to Israel. And then descending into full dystopianism. Like banning pro-Palestinian protests. Smearing the marches who call for peace and for a ceasefire as … hate movements. Framing any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. Firing and cancelling any official who won’t fall in line. Rationalizing mass killing. Giving surreal statements that Israel makes everything they can and beyond to avoid civilian casualties. Mudding waters. Twisting words and logic to accommodate Israel’s narrative. The enlightened West, praising itself as the beacon of light, as the peak of civilization, went mask off revealing its hypocrisy and shallowness. As far as I am concerned, I am done with our Judeo-Christian supremacy. I don’t want to ever hear western democracies lecture the rest of the world on human rights ever again. Even when they are better on that front, they are no longer in the position to lecture others. If you scratch the surface, you will find the same self-centred barbarians as everywhere.
Even though I am deeply troubled and shaken by the loss of my hope and faith in humanity there is a strange sense of relief. As if I no longer have any skin in the game. As if there’s no bigger ideals to defend and fight for after all. For instance, the idea that Trump might get back for another four years term, with his toxicity and the regressiveness of his followers, was horrifying to me. Not anymore. Now I no longer care who runs the hypocritical charade. In fact, I want Biden to lose. He is obviously better than Trump, but still a monster. And a better monster is hardly reassuring. Yes, some political systems and individuals are better than others. But if none of them cannot make sure I am not killed with impunity in a mass killing then I won’t hold any in high regard. Better is not enough. Better doesn’t protect you from being evicted from your home, from being subjected to apartheid, from being oppressed and ultimately killed. Different does.
bad faith
Posted on: October 19, 2023
What do you do when words have lost their meaning? When someone speaks to you in bad faith? When someone abuses the language to such an extent that remaining engaged in a conversation is pointless? If you can, you leave and disengage. If you can’t, you resort to nonverbal forms of communication. One of them is violence. It’s wrong but arguing in bad faith, dishonesty is always one of the main culprits that takes people there. Dishonesty is violence and it breeds more violence.
western values
Posted on: October 18, 2023
To say it’s surreal is an understatement. Pro-Palestinian protests are banned and outlawed across the western world. In France. In Germany. In Austria. In Australia. In the UK they want to criminalize waving a Palestinian flag. What the fuck happened to this world? To its highly regarded western values? The flashback to the moral confusion and the complicity of the German population in the second world war, when they turned a blind eye to those atrocities, in the same way the Western world has been doing for decades with what’s happening to the Palestinians at the hands of Israelis, is unavoidable. I live once again on edge, in shock, tense like a coiled spring, overanxious and getting triggered by all these news that, time and time again, fall in line with the Israeli narrative (Palestine bad – Israel good, Hamas attack bad – Israeli war crime good). I spend half of the time, horror-struck, reading eagerly depictions of war crimes and genocidal rhetoric coming from Israel and its western allies, and half of the time, withdrawn, showing avoidance behaviour, trying to run away from any news coverage and avoid the exposure to that toxicity and insanity. Torn between the need to know and the need to keep myself sane. The framing of what’s happening in Gaza by the western media is horrific. BBC reported the peaceful pro-Palestinian protests in London as … pro-Hamas. Have they lost their mind? Any attempt to criticise the collective punishment of Palestinians, forbidden by the Geneva Convention and by Israel’s own laws, is shrugged off as irrelevant. The criticism of Israeli military actions, in total disregard to the Palestinian civilians, is framed as antisemitic. The killing of more than 724 Palestinian children by the Israeli military’s relentless bombardment is framed as legitimate self-defence. The calls for restraint coming from public figures who are sympathetic to the oppressed are framed in media as controversial. For the love of God can someone explain to me what is controversial, for instance, in what Eric Cantona said? If truth, common sense and call for freedom of an oppressed people is nowadays controversial in the western civilization then we are doomed. Western values my ass.
nolongerinbetween 