Conversation

If you've spent the last few days hand-wringing about "pro-Hamas leftists" or whatever, you can delete those posts and sound the alarms on the genocidal war crimes being carried out against Palestinian civilians. No one is going to make a fuss about you taking longer to focus on the issue at hand, just get fucking focused.

Every humanitarian organization of earth is warning us about the genocide being carried out. The Red Crescent Society has reported direct hits on marked ambulances and marked paramedics, and they've pledged not to evacuate from northern Gaza so that Palestinian civilians do not "have to face death alone", their words.

Half the populace of Gaza is children. Children who weren't even born when Hamas took over. There aren't shelters, there is no where civilians can flee, there is no escape from Gaza. The cutoff of power has destroyed the ability of hospitals in Gaza to function, the destruction of infrastructure has made it so that ambulances can't travel from one part of Gaza to another and paramedics are forced to go on foot. Drinking water was already so scarce that dehydration was a constant threat, and now there's no water coming into Gaza and the water infrastructure has been targeted. This is utterly indiscriminate, and these are actions that murder the most vulnerable first. The elderly, the infirm, and the very young are all most vulnerable to this kind of deprivation. Disease will follow from the breakdown of clean water infrastructure.

I remember what happened after 9/11, how genocidal madness took over people I knew to be good. How their worst impulses were fed, how they either hand-wrung or even outright supported "turning the Middle East to glass" and other such sentiments. How Islamophobia became a staple of everyday life and violent Islamophobia was condemned half-heartedly at best by the good nice liberals. It took years before people started to look back and wonder what spell had come over them, and they never admit that they were part of it, even if they now accept the horror done in the Middle East and the authoritarianism it built in Europe and the US. We need to not do this again, we have to wake up more quickly, we can't like genocidal sentiment become the unchallenged default of the body politic.

What's happening at this very moment is industrial ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate and unjustifiable death for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. It is beyond monstrous. We have to countenance this on it's face, because if we can't do a single other thing then we need to at least make sure it isn't whitewashed. Don't let yourself be someone who looks back in two decades and wonders what spell was cast over "all of us" while you silently refuse to admit that "us" was you.