COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
Six months of this now. Half a year.
Half a year of genocide apologia.
Half a year of the most outrageous lies you can possibly imagine.
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Half a year of seeing children’s bodies ripped to pieces and starved to skeletons on our social media feeds.
Half a year of atrocities justified by something that happened way back in October, and didn’t even happen the way the news media tell us it happened.
Half a year of western government officials pretending obvious evidence of war crimes is just some ineffable mystery that we’ll hopefully have answers to someday.
Half a year of Israeli officials openly stating their genocidal intentions in Hebrew for their Israeli audience and paying lip service to human rights and compassion in English for their western liberal audience.
Half a year of seeing reports that the IDF did something unbelievably evil, thinking “That can’t be right, let me check it out,” and then going “Oh, nope, it’s actually even more evil than I thought.”
Half a year of the Western political-media class trying to frame the direct sponsorship of an active genocide as something other than what it is.
Half a year of passive-language “Palestinian child walks into bullet” headlines from the mainstream press.
Half a year of insulting our intelligence.
Half a year of insulting our humanity.
Half a year of unfathomable suffering.
Half a year of irreparable trauma.
Half a year of irreplaceable loss.
This fucking sucks, man. It sucks so bad. I’ve always enjoyed doing commentary on the crimes of the empire, but these last six months have been truly harrowing. It’s awful having to stare directly at hell on earth from day to day with compassion in your heart. The only thing keeping this project going is the fact that it needs to be done, and the knowledge that my own suffering isn’t the faintest shadow of what the Palestinians are going through right now.
This needs to end. It needs to end with desperate urgency. But we’re seeing no signs that it’s about to.
I don’t have anything wise or insightful to add to any of this right now. Some days all you can do is point to the nightmare and call it what it is, and we can all just be real about reality and feel our feelings about that.
I guess all I can really say is that at least we’re not alone in seeing what we’re seeing. The whole world is watching Israel commit a horrifying mass atrocity backed by the full might of the empire, and more and more eyes are opening to the reality of what this means for their society and everything they’ve been told to believe about it.
Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding Western consciousness like nothing ever before.
So at least there’s that. At least there’s the possibility that something good might one day grow out of this steaming pile of shit.
And that’s all I’ve got for you. That’s the best I can do right now.
Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian 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 was first published here and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
