War
Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal
Eyewitnesses to the October 7 hostage standoff in Kibbutz Be’eri have exposed Israel for misleading the world about the killings of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni, her family and her neighbors. Update: A video transcript of Yasmin Porat’s testimony translated by David Sheen for Electronic Intifada follows this article. In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7. “This […]
The post Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal appeared first on The Grayzone.
Never Stop Being Shocked By The Depravity Of The Empire
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/a24d3cd8b4ee42d9420179fbec6afaa6/href
A friend of mine shared my article about how the Biden administration is worried the pause in fighting will allow journalists into Gaza to show Israel’s crimes to the world, saying he knows he shouldn’t be surprised by how evil these freaks are but somehow he still is.
I told him I actually consciously cultivate the ability to stay surprised by such things. If you stop being surprised when you see the world’s most powerful people always finding new and innovative ways to make the world a worse place for ordinary human beings, it means it’s become normalized in your system in some way. It means that on top of all the other horrible evils they’ve inflicted upon our world, they’ve also managed to steal an important part of your humanity.
No longer being shocked by the murderousness of the empire is a counterintuitive sign that something unhealthy is happening to you, like when the body stops shivering as it sinks into the later stages of hypothermia, or when the hunger pangs go away in the later stages of starvation. It’s a sign that your system is no longer forcefully rejecting conditions it ought to reject, and has instead shifted into giving up and trying to conserve energy.
I spend all day every day staring into the ugliest parts of the imperial machine, but I refuse to let it desensitize me. These monsters have taken so very, very much from the world, and I refuse to let them take that too. I refuse to let them rob me of my humanity like that.
I see it as a sacred duty to keep a flame lit in myself which knows what a healthy world looks like, which knows what sanity looks like, which knows how things ought to be, and which naturally finds it jarring when the sickness of this civilization reveals itself.
I refuse to accept this as normal. I refuse to let the abuses of the empire turn me into a callused, jaded husk of a human who can only respond to each new monstrosity with a deep world-weary sigh. I make sure it still brings up a white hot rage in me. I make sure it still brings white hot tears to my eyes.
You can’t let them take that from you. You can’t let them harden your heart and darken your eyes. We’ve got to keep the flame burning for a sane and healthy world, if not for ourselves then for our children, and for future generations who we will never meet.
If you’re still finding yourself shocked and shaken by the actions of our rulers, that’s a very healthy sign. It means they haven’t got you yet. It means they haven’t succeeded in snuffing out your flame.
We’ve got to protect our sensitivity at all costs. We’ve got to maintain that visceral rejection of madness, because that’s what’s calling us home. That’s what’s calling us home to a healthy world. That’s what will guide our way as we fight our way there, one small, almost-insignificant victory at a time.
If they haven’t yet snuffed out your flame today, that’s one more small win for humanity. That’s one more tiny step toward health.
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A Response to “Principles of Solidarity. A Statement”
Solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict....
Physical Destruction in Whole or in Part
All these imaginary plans are premised on an Israeli victory. And what if Israel fails to dislodge Hamas but nevertheless runs out of energy and momentum for its campaign of genocidal violence? What if even the British and American governments feel at some point that the damage being inflicted on Gaza is causing too much harm to their own interests, their own domestic standing? What happens then?
Can You Tell Us Why This Is Happening?
That night alone we lost over 400 people. The rockets that were fired and the bombs that were thrown were strong enough to destroy whole residential buildings. Families were wiped out of existence completely. Every morning we would try to get an internet connection to reach our loved ones and confirm they were alive, and every morning we would get news that we lost one more person. Every day. That is the situation we are living in.
A Tradition of Defiance
No atrocity is decisive, though the quantity of atrocities may be. What is decisive is the context in which atrocities are committed. Context is of course what mainstream commentators rule out of bounds when they begin history on October 7. But what happened before October 7 does count. What I’m talking about here is Israel’s longstanding campaign to drive out the Palestinians and take over their land.
No Human Being Can Exist
What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.
The Café and the Colony
One of the basic truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict is that there are no acts within it that can accord with universal human rights: the conflict itself is the trespass. Let me be clearer: the colonization, itself, is the trespass. It is the original sin against human rights. It is the disease.
Have We Learned Nothing?
There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11.
How They Tried to Kill Me
I didn’t want to write this for a long time. I feel disgusted, afraid, ashamed. I can’t write about everything I know because I have to protect the people who’ve saved my life. On February 24, 2022, my country attacked Ukraine. On February 24, I went to Ukraine on assignment from Novaya Gazeta, where I […]