Life goes on
the Palestine paradigm shift; a thrilling chase for my stolen phone; being grateful
My last couple posts were and remain free for all to read, since they contain links to important reporting and analysis about Palestine. This week I’m including the latest Palestine news above the paywall and a return to more personal stuff below it. If you’re interested in supporting my work, now is a fabulous time to become a paid subscriber for just $5/month. Thank you so, so much for reading.
I feel more like a human being today than I have in weeks. Earlier this month Lynette and I both got slammed with either a very bad cold, or the flu, or another round of Covid. I was negative when I tested last week, but who the hell knows anymore.
This means I’ve spent most of October tucked up in bed, watching the atrocities in Palestine unfold in real time. It felt good to march in Manchester, among an extremely diverse crowd, adding our bodies and voices to the protests against ethnic cleansing and mass death happening in crowds of hundreds of thousands around the world. I remain disgusted and anguished at both the US and UK responses to this genocidal campaign, as well as the reports of everyone in both my home and adopted country who’s lost jobs or opportunities for sharing even the mildest condemnations of Israel’s actions on social media. Shit is fucked up, and I will not be quiet about it.
If you haven’t been following along as obsessively as I have: the healthcare system in Gaza is completely out of service and in full collapse. At least least 6,546 people in the besieged strip have been killed in Israeli attacks. Gazans are forced to drink dirty, salty water, because Israel’s insistence that no fuel be allowed onto the strip with the (so far) pathetic trickle of humanitarian aid means that drinking water can’t be desalinated for safe consumption. Over two million people are without food, water, shelter, safety. This past weekend Israel increased its indiscriminate bombing campaign of both the north and south of Gaza, even after urging hundreds of thousands of people in the north to move south for their own safety. But there is nowhere safe in Gaza.
And the rest of Israel is also increasingly unsafe for its Arab citizens, where more than 90 people are reported to have been killed and 1,200 arrested by Israeli forces in the West Bank since Hamas attacked on October 7th. If you’ve previously supported Israel’s actions because they seek to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, I implore you not to look away from the occupied West Bank, where there’s no Hamas to get rid of—only the Israeli army and encroaching Israeli settlers who’ve been armed by the state to terrorize Palestinians out of their homes.
“The entire territory – home to 3 million Palestinians, and about 500,000 Israelis – feels like it is on the verge of an explosion,” Bethan McKernan and Sufian Taha reported for the Guardian yesterday, October 25th. One mother who lost her son told them: “I feel the pain of all mothers since Mahmoud was killed. I know the Israelis could come back any time and kill the rest of my children.”
But as Palestinians continue to fight for their lives and liberation, we cannot give up hope, or turn to the next disaster in the news cycle and away from the death and devastation wrought on a besieged people who deserve the same safety and peace we all do.
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is how fragmented our media ecosystem is, and dangerously plagued by mis/disinformation and propaganda. At the same time, social media also ensures that mainstream news outlets aren’t solely in charge of disseminating this crucial information, and younger generations in particular are seeing exactly what’s happening in Gaza, every hour, every day. If you’re someone who gets their news in mostly traditional formats, you probably haven’t seen nearly as many dead and mangled children as those of us on X/Twitter and TikTok have, or as many firsthand accounts from Palestinians on the ground. (And maybe you also haven’t seen Israeli influencers making fun of grieving Palestinian mothers.) Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with young Palestinians like Bisan, praying that whenever their accounts go dark for hours or days that Israel hasn’t killed them too.
We are looking at a very serious possibility of a larger war engulfing the region, and potentially the globe. War was the wrong choice after 9/11, when the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq led to the deaths of over a million people and failed to make any of us any safer. The only way we can tamper the bloodlust of our leaders is by demanding something different. I hope this week you’ll continue to call and email your representatives to demand, first and most immediately, a ceasefire, as well as restoration of Palestine’s water, fuel, electricity and internet, and an end to Israel’s illegal, immoral occupation.
Terribly, wonderfully, bizarrely, life elsewhere goes on. Life here goes on. The world keeps turning.
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