To hell with our comfortable lives, Israel’s genocide must be stopped by whatever it takes.

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To hell with your deal. And to hell with our lives. Someone has to start telling the truth.

The genocide in Gaza continues. This blank screen stares accusingly at me.

What I can say that I haven’t already said about the horror, the suffering of innocents, the torture, the injustice, the complicity of the western empire, the moral bankruptcy of the western media and the attempts of social media platforms (especially Facebook) to suppress truth tellers from having a voice?

For a while now I think I have been ready to give up my life to stop the torment of the Palestinians in Gaza. If only the calculus were that simple, if only I could trade my life for the 2.2 million under ceaseless attack in Gaza, it would be an easy choice or it ought to be.

But the calculus isn’t that easy, my suicide will not stop a single bomb and I have people in life who need me. I will have to live through this live streamed holocaust, but how?

My suffering as a witness to these atrocities is minuscule compared to those who have to live it, but it is suffering nevertheless. The emotional bundle gets larger every day, feelings of helplessness, fury, grief, despair, depression, guilt, anxiety and dread. Every day I check Al Jazeera for the latest news and every day there are new atrocities, new depths of barbarism.

To be 100% clear, I am not one of those people who wring their hands about how terrible it all is while refusing to name the culprits or accept any moral responsibility for opposing it . The culprits are Israel and their political and media enablers in the West, the moral responsibility to oppose them falls on every human being alive today.

Our first responsibility is to keep bearing the suffering of being a witness. As M.Scott Peck said while defining community, we must continue to “rejoice together, mourn together,” and “make others’ conditions our own”. Even if the condition of others is unbearably painful we must bear it as our own nevertheless, for otherwise we will turn away and leave it someone else, as so many have done and continue to do.

I have lost friends because of my furious witness to events in Palestine, but our second responsibility is to not flinch when pointing out the truth and our clear moral responsibility to respond to it.

People don’t want to be woken up, discomforted and exhorted to share the anguish of others and I don’t like imposing myself, but I must. Some things cannot be allowed to to stand. If we tolerate this, then what claim can we have to a soul?

Our third responsibility is to try to be effective, despite all the odds stacked against us. It’s not good enough to simply ‘do your bit’ at a protest or a vigil. As the Bethlehem Pastor Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac rightly said:

If you are shaken to the core then all other priorities are rescinded, the cosy deals we have all struck with the contemporary sins of modern life are suspended. As the character of Ulana Khomyuk said in the Chernobyl mini-series:

Today I wake up to the news of another Israeli bombing of an UNWRA school, the IOF keeps ordering exhausted Palestinian refugees from one destroyed part of Gaza to another, like cattle in a shooting gallery.

This was the fourth attack on a school in as many days and came after Israel issued evacuation orders for Khan Younis and Gaza City.

UN human rights experts say Israel is imposing “targeted starvation” on Gaza’s population, resulting in the deaths of children from malnutrition and dehydration.

A letter in the Lancet says as many as 186,000 people may already be dead in Gaza, this being some 8% of the population, a rate of killing far worse than the Ukraine war and worse than the Khmer Rouge’s ‘year zero’ genocide in Cambodia.

What is come? Who will stop the Israelis from killing 18% or 58% or 88%? They have the weapons, the political and media cover and clearly do not regard Palestinians as human beings. For all of the mass protests in western cities the bulk of the populace remain hostile, indifferent, apathetic or silent.

What must people of good conscience do to effectively stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza and hold those responsible to account? Everything we have done so far has stopped nothing and all the butchers and their enablers have no faced no sanction whatsoever.

I have no glib or easy answer to this question, but perhaps we are now at the point of needing to risk arrest, imprisonment and even death, before allowing this utter savagery to continue.