Apocalypse October 2023
The Holy Land
Territorial claims thousands of years old. War for them is peace for us. We believe time is cyclical. The same peaks of evolution, the same values of dissolution. Can’t get away from the cumulative decisions of the past. And if you do change, that was also meant to come. Some form of maths, no point even getting worked up over this. The journey, the delays, then the voyage. The possibility of a reconciliation or the possibility of a deeper understanding. Observing something and injecting yourself into it, causing a disruption, changing the course of fate. The only offer on the table. Let fate lead you before it drags you. I have at least done that, that at least is something I have done.
There’s so much information, it’s hard to know what to know. Israel has the right to defend itself, that’s the line from Ursula von der Leyen among other officials. Get your message out, nail your colours to the mast. Baerbock says Hamas is trying to set a whole region ablaze — wants a conflagration where, until recently, cautious steps toward normalisation were also taken. Is this gaslighting? The narrative is topsy turvy. Liberation of Palestinian people blurs into support of Hamas’s attack against Israeli civilians. It is clear many people think all Gazans are complicit in the massacre. Horrific, brutal violence and aggression, but! But we do have to view it in context. But it was retaliation already. But that music festival for peace was held on a physical battlefield, parents of western hippy types given assurance that the border and the Iron Dome would protect their children.
Days later, the Israeli Defense Minister orders a full siege on Gaza. No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. Israel’s government announces they will cut off water to the Gaza Strip, following the cutting of electricity and gas supplies. Critical support. Humans can only survive without water for about three days. Gaza has run dry. Tame the beast. Death from above. Operation Iron Swords. This is the moment of heat. Netanyahu says Israel is just getting started, the response will change the Middle East. This is the mission of my life, in your name and the name of everybody. A spokesperson for the IDF says the rate of Israeli Air Force attacks on the Gaza Strip is five times that used against Hezbollah in the 2006 second Lebanon war. This is an extraordinary statistic — especially given that Gaza is a tiny blockaded enclave of stateless people, where Israel is the occupying power.
The mask slips. Antony Blinken says what separates Israel, the US and other democracies when it comes to difficult situations like this, is our respect for international law and the laws of war. They make rules so that when someone breaks them the rest of us can sternly shake our heads. But an editorial in Haaretz newspaper describes a government of annexation and dispossession, embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians. Be subjugated, or leave, or be killed. Luxury beliefs would reign supreme. Immense booty and riches. Relentless focus on extracting rewards from newly discovered lands. Just as criticism of the Netanyahu administration is interpreted as broad-stroke antisemitism. Oh that’s a dog whistle. So you can’t talk about it, and clearly the Israeli expansionist movement is leveraging that taboo sensitivity. And western speakers, platforms and institutions must be cautiously, performatively not antisemitic at all times, beyond question, unconditionally.
People, communities, apart from Hamas, downtrodden, abandoned, not acknowledged at all. Palestinian civilians are not responsible for the atrocities of Hamas terrorists. But they will suffer the consequences. Same goes for Israeli citizens. The people, that also live there and have claim to the same land, regarded as an inconvenience, need to be wiped out in the way of Israel’s manifest destiny. The issue with that is if that state was a democracy, Jews would have a minority, and thus their security would be at risk. Fair enough. My point was irrelevant and was washed away accordingly. Read it and you’ll see how you’re misled. Repost industry, cross post platforms. Justin Bieber posting praying for Israel using a picture of a destroyed Gaza. This happened. The Telegraph was unable to verify the image. The BBC gets 1,500 complaints over Israel-Hamas coverage, split 50–50 on each side. Killed in Israel, dead in Gaza. The whataboutism is a false equivalence. The UK government, France, Hungary, plan to make waving the Palestinian flag a criminal offence. Not allowed to dissent, but stand by the cheerleaders of an annexation in real time. Exodus. Genocide… by Hamas indirectly. Western leadership and press egging on war crimes. Palestinians did not ask for the British to install a foreign power in 1948 to cleanse the European conscience. I’m not going to pretend to be this white knight. Glorify the faith, save souls. The task now was to reinvent the past.
Palestine have got the backing of Iran, Iran have got the backing of Russia. And Israel have got America. Imagine it, the great global war, west vs. east. Fault lines long established. Iran and Hamas are counting on Israel to attack Gaza with such ferocity that the international sympathy toward Israel, even in the Arab world, evaporates quickly and is replaced by outrage at the suffering inflicted on the two million residents of Gaza. If Israel instead exercises restraint, however difficult doing so might be both politically and emotionally, it can thwart the goals of Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. Restraint would go a long way toward ensuring that the diplomatic opening with Saudi Arabia continues to move forward, dealing a major blow to local revisionist powers, such as Iran, and global ones, such as China and Russia, that wish to supplant a rules-based order with one based on Might makes right (1).
Hamas has called on Palestinians to stay in their homes after Israel issued sweeping evacuation orders. Displacement of over a million people. It is not possible to evacuate this many in a day without mass death. And if you leave you won’t ever be able to return. Forced migration at the threat of unspeakable violence. Many medics were refusing to evacuate hospitals and abandon patients. Instead, they called their colleagues to say goodbye. Shaheed — martyr, become witness. I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of pain. The UN has already deemed the order impossible without devastating humanitarian consequences. Israel calls on UN chief to resign, says Guterres must step down for saying it cannot justify collective punishment, as the death toll from Israeli airstrikes passes 5,700. Biden: I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth. I’m sure innocents have been killed and it is the price of waging war.
Communications blackout as Israel intensifies siege. Predawn darkness and the afterlight of sunset. Orange flashes of explosions, plays of shadow and light, civilians searching in the rubble of buildings for survivors. Unearthing dusty children with shell shock on their faces. So beyond beyond. Collateral murder. Fair game under army rules. Corruption of the military by war itself. How can you possibly go against a ceasefire? Doing these things is in the best interests of my own country. Fixated on prefabricated identities. Falling into something very slowly. Barbary, Civilisation. We don’t know how to be another way. The population of the Earth, every 50 or 100 years a completely different set of people, consistent no longer than an instant, carrying something forward and passing on. Mismatch of the modern human brain from our ancestral environment. Testosterone amplifies socially learned behaviours re. competing for status and defending challenges to status, not just aggression. Problem is we hand out so much social status for aggression. Where did that intent come from? One second before, a decade before, a thousand years before.
Mind you, you’re right. We can’t win. But we have to fight anyway. The mind is completely filled with pain. To acknowledge another’s immense pain requires empathy. A coalition of the willing. Tools of diplomacy. Weaponising grief. Competition of suffering. Terrible statement but it’s true. True but the religious fanaticism makes it impossible to reach a compromise. We need simple stories. Even though this is the case in most conflicts in the world, it’s hard for people to understand that you can be victim and perpetrator at the same time. It’s a very simple fact, impossible to accept for most people (2). Pain and despair and sadness, they are the same in Israelis and Palestinians, in Russians and Ukrainians. From individuals and families to the level of entire nations.
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(1) Hussein Ibish
(2) Yuval Noah Harari
