As I sit down to write this, I do not know what angle I am going to write from. What’s the use of listing, again, all the atrocities we are witnessing and will surely continue to witness as long as the occupation exists? By the time I finish listing them all countless others would doubtless have been committed. What’s the use of explaining, again, why these atrocities are wrong? Those who do not see us as human will not have their minds changed. The mere fact that they have the ability to dehumanize an entire population means they are already too far gone. There is no appealing to humanity. The humanity does not exist.
It is all an illusion. A delusion. International law, UN resolutions, democracy, diplomacy—these are all lies. When journalists are targeted and murdered and the murderer is granted total impunity, what else is there to be said? Is there any message clearer than the fact the occupation wants to literally silence those relaying the horrors they are perpetrating?
How is it that in 2023 we are collectively witnessing a holocaust, an entire people being exterminated, while global “superpowers” not only cheer on the executioner but heavily arm it?
With actual but also moral ammunition, manipulating the discourse as best benefits them, completely flipping the rhetoric to demonize the souls who are being ruthlessly murdered by the demons themselves?
How is it that in 2023 we are collectively witnessing a holocaust, an entire people being exterminated, while global “superpowers” not only cheer on the executioner but heavily arm it?
I can only write from a place of emotion. They have left us nothing else. Rage, disbelief, fury, indignation, despair, desolation, heartache, grief. Nothing else exists in our minds but a searing solidarity with our brothers and sisters being so brutally oppressed in Palestine.
This all laced with a deep fear of the eventual, almost (?) certain spillover into Lebanon. A country already beyond broken, still reeling from years of economic hardship and internal division and institutional vacuum and the catastrophic 2020 port explosion. How to reconcile the fear and worry of being dragged into what may escalate into a regional war with the extreme empathy for the horrors in Gaza? How is it that we are so viscerally aware of the multitude of dimensions this crisis contains, of the lack of one clear answer but also of the validity of all the answers in the face of brutal occupation, but the opposite side insists on conflating everything into the single bite-sized, shallow, and completely untrue notion of anti-Semitism? Is the world really so blind as to be this reductive? Where does the hatred come from?
All I have is questions and more questions. This is what the evil of the West, of white colonial supremacist mania and hysteria has led to: incredulity.
