COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
How is anyone still talking about October 7? What Israel has done since October 7 is many times worse than what happened on that day by any conceivable metric; the only way to feel otherwise is to believe Israeli lives are worth many times more than Palestinian lives.
How is Israeli suffering still being centered over vastly less significant acts of violence three months ago while exponentially worse violence and suffering is being inflicted by Israelis right this very moment?
If your nation is attacked, and you respond to that attack by immediately murdering thousands of children with incredible savagery, then you forfeit any right to expect anyone to give a shit that your nation was attacked.
- READ MORE: South Africa’s genocide case against Israel: How will the ICJ decide?
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Israel responded to the Hamas attack by doing something much, much worse than anything Hamas has ever done, and in so doing completely delegitimizing itself as a state and completely validating everything the Palestinian resistance has been saying about the state of Israel since day one.
Video: Visualising Palestine.
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This genocide is being live-streamed. We can’t say we didn’t know. For as long as we live we’ll never be able to say we didn’t know.
[Oral submissions on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel start in the International Court of Justice The Hague today.]
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Biden is everything people feared Trump would be. A genocidal monster facilitating racially motivated murder and ethnic cleansing while rapidly accelerating toward a nuclear-age world war. Nothing Trump did was as evil as what Biden has been doing. Biden is the real Trump.
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Israel is in a nonstop state of conflict largely because it is such an artificial creation. Most states emerge in a more organic way out of the geographical, political and cultural circumstances of the land and the people in their unique slice of spacetime. Israel emerged because some people who didn’t live anywhere near the land of Palestine got some narratives in their heads involving an ancient religion and its adherents, and dropped a newly created country on top of a civilization that already existed there which had emerged organically out of the circumstances of the region.
People came in from other nations all over the world, resurrected a dead language which had until then only remained used in religious rituals and called it their native tongue, and slapped together a 20th century nation and started LARPing that it was their native land. This caused massive shockwaves throughout the region because it didn’t happen in accordance with the organic geopolitical and cultural circumstances of the land and its people. It was an alien artificial construct from top to bottom, thrust upon a region for which it had no natural context or receptivity.
Because it was such an unnatural foreign imposition, the political circumstances of the middle east have ever since been rejecting it like a body rejecting an ill-matched organ transplant. This natural response is treated as unnatural unprovoked hostility from the people of the invading artificial construct, which invents more narratives to justify its violent actions against the inhabitants of the region.
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The West’s cultural obsession with World War II has made everyone dumber, because now everyone we want to fight is always Hitler and we’re always the Brave Good Guys who are fighting Hitler.
Nothing about Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza is comparable to the Allied offensive against Nazi Germany. They’re raining military explosives onto a trapped and besieged population in a giant concentration camp with the stated goal of eliminating a small militant group who poses exactly zero existential threat to the state of Israel, in response to an attack which was 100 percent provoked by the abuses of the apartheid Israeli regime.
Comparing the Gaza assault to the war against Hitler is like comparing a mass shooting to the war against Hitler, and saying the shooter is the Allied forces. It’s a completely foam-brained talking point that’s espoused solely by idiots and warmongers.
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It’s not too late to get involved in opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been talking about it until now. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t understood or paid attention to the Israel-Palestine issue before. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been supportive of Israel in the past, or if you’ve expressed opinions on this subject that you now know were misguided, or if you’ve never engaged in any kind of activism before.
If that’s the case for you, you need to understand that millions of people are on the exact same boat as you right now. Millions. The actions of the state of Israel over the last three months have caused huge numbers of people not previously aware of its depravity to open their eyes to what’s going on, do some research, and change their position.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with joining in with the opposition now. You can safely dismiss anything in you that feels self-conscious about not getting this until now, or feels like it would be inauthentic to join an activist cause after it has gained popularity. Changing your position and taking a stand now makes you more authentic, because it shows you are living a life guided by truth and compassion rather than sleepwalking through life guided by blind habit and partisan tribalism.
I guarantee you the people in Gaza would much rather have you than not have you, and losing your support over self-consciousness about joining in later than others did would be a very silly and unfortunate thing to happen.
Moreover, you would definitely not be the last to join in this cause; millions more will be joining in after you as the Israeli regime loses support around the world and everyone starts waking up to what’s happening in Gaza.
Please disregard anything in you that has been holding back from helping to facilitate that awakening in whatever small way you can, whether that might be due to shame for not getting involved sooner or due to any kind of cringe around activism and political engagement you may have had before.
This thing is so much more important than any of us, and it’s so much more important than any little feelings of self-consciousness we’d have about getting involved in ways we never would have imagined before. This matter is much too urgent for you to pay any attention to those misguided forces within you that are resistant to taking a stand here.
Take your stand. It will be welcomed, and you will be glad that you did for the rest of your life.
Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article from her Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix is republished with permission.
