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…and so the genocide grinds on. Scores of brutal attacks on Gaza overnight. Israel has bombed a school, residential areas, refugee camps.What haven’t they bombed? There are no red lines for Israel, they are free to do as they please.
Millions are starving. Cholera and many other diseases are set to sweep across the destroyed city hellscape. The healthcare system is utterly shattered. What was a concentration camp become an extermination camp long ago.
Palestinian hostages emerge from Israeli detention brutalised, sexually assaulted, tortured – those that don’t emerge or even make it into detention are found in mass graves, some of them with organs missing.
Save The Children says that at least an additional 21,000 children are unaccounted for, feared dead under the the 37 million tons of rubble of Gaza. There is much breezy talk amongst the Western chattering classes about Israel’s post-‘war’ plan for Gaza and the fabled two-state solution, but it would take 15 years just to clear the rubble and Israel has a final solution for Gaza by way of industrial extermination and total ethnic cleansing.
No pen picture of this ongoing holocaust can paint the true horror of it. Every day Israel presses on with fascist atrocities that ought to force the entire world into action – instead the focus remains on October 7th and Hamas. A singular terrorist event on one day used to hide nearly nine months of genocide, a rag-tag group of fighters used to hide the brutal war crimes of the most powerful army in the Middle East backed up by a global military superpower and all its allies.
The world is not taking action against Israel, quite the reverse, what we see is business as usual. Trade with Israel continues briskly, even in a nation like Ireland where protests against the genocide in Gaza happen almost daily, the right wing coalition maintains trade with Israel as normal and Shannon Airport helps the U.S. to supply Israel with weapons.
The UK is directly complicit as a partner in these heinous crimes, using its Akrotiri air base to supply arms and run surveillance missions for Israel. The ongoing UK general election ‘coverage’ by the MSM barely mentions Gaza, the major parties are at pains to avoid all talk of Israel’s genocide and most UK politicians are captured defenders of Israel or cowed careerists anyway.
Every red line that Biden supposedly drew for Israel’s behaviour has been crossed, but Washington just sends more money and more weapons. With each new Israeli massacre we are told to do nothing and await an investigation by those who committed it, but there is now barely time between one massacre and the next.
The plan of the western political and media class is clear, they simply hope to wait the people who protest this genocide out. Every day they seek to muddy the waters about the number of deaths and about what constitutes genocide and famine. What they can’t reframe they simply don’t report, if it wasn’t for Al Jazeera and a handful of other outlets I would have no idea of what is happening in Gaza.
The attention of western audiences is drawn towards the trivia of football, celebrity gossip, royalty, empty political ‘debates’ and immigrant bashing. As Gaza echoes to the screams of dying children, British and American kitchens dwellers chirp as usual about resorts, recipes and renovations. Thousands walk blankly past the protests I attend every week and that in and of itself is crushingly depressing.
But we cannot give up nor allow ourselves to become tired and jaundiced, for that is what the usual suspects are counting on. If the joy over Assange’s release tells us anything, it is that sustained protests work and that the unthinkable can become reality very quickly.
So we must continue, in the battle to save the Palestinians and the collective soul of humanity. This is such a sharp time to be alive, for the masks are off and those that choose to, can now see the evil we must face down and defeat. It all hangs in the balance, every voice raised in protest matters. Keep going.
Change has more often come from the bottom. That is why we must not stop protesting for Gaza & a free Palestine. Shame on complicit governments.