UNICEF is currently trying to get Israel to pause in its ceaseless bombing of Gaza in order to deliver 1,000,000 Polio vaccines to men, women, and children.
Now, stop and think about that: they want to get Israel to pause operations. So what happens afterward? What is the point of all of this if a bomb is just going to obliterate that newly vaccinated child?
This feels so much like when lethal injection patients are about to be murdered, and the nurse giving the injection rubs alcohol on the injection site.
You know, to prevent infection.
During a lethal injection.
It is barbarity masking itself as civility, and as long as people are in this mixed ethical dreaming state (that’s what I call it), they don’t have to face up to their own contributions to the systemic condoning of mass death.
What is going on? Why is this allowed? Why does this continue to be allowed? Is there no one in higher office with the intestinal fortitude to actually halt a genocide? To recognize it for what it is and do something about it without equivocating away the lives of innocents in the name of political convenience?
Here, now, in the year 2024, who is there with the power of the state, with the power of the purse, to stand up and say no more? To end the genocide Netanyahu, his cabinet, and the Israeli Offensive Forces commit against millions of innocents?
Will this holocaust be seen for what it is, or will there somehow be mitigating circumstances to protect the fragile egos and self-worth of the people who have borne witness to these daily travesties while still backing their favorite leaders?
Has the majority of the people decided that Palestinian lives just aren’t worth much in the grand scheme of things, just like Joe Biden once said, back in 1993 during an interview, that Haitian lives just weren’t much in the grand scheme of things?
Because they don’t have a Hollywood? An Eiffel Tower? Other western landmarks seen as “civilized?”
What would it take to make them appear more human? Would their skin need to be lighter? Their lifestyles more ostentatious and self-serving? What is it that turns a backward, brown skinned people into actual human beings worthy of empathy and consideration?
We have heartbreak over beaten dogs, but we can’t spare anything for beaten Palestinian children? Palestinian babies with sniper bullets in their brains? Palestinian mothers and fathers who hold bags of their children’s remains? Palestinian grandmothers and grandfathers who have watched their entire family lines obliterated by Israeli tanks and Israeli bombs?
Do they not deserve compassion? Do you really believe an entire population of human beings deserves a genocide? Be honest with yourself, because if you’re coming up with an answer that is anything other than an unequivocal “NO” then yeah, on some level, you’re okay with genocide.
I would hope that wouldn’t sit well with you, and that maybe you’d want to do something about it, but I have learned that the more comfortable and the more “safe” people feel where they are, even in the heart of empire, the more willingly they’ll go along with the explanations of their leaders as to why this, let’s call it a “police action,” has to happen.
How much are you willing to forget or ignore to protect yourself? I don’t mean your physical self, I mean your ego? Your emotions? I’d ask how far you’d be willing to go, but I can safely say that in the United States, you just have to turn your head, you don’t even have to sacrifice anything except your soul, you can just look away, and the news media, your leaders, will cover for you. They will take your sin upon them, and they will comfort you so you don’t have to think about what you refuse to see every day.
They will comfort you not because they care about you, but because they are complicit. They are complicit in the genocide of human beings, and by comforting you, they also get to include you in that complicity. They didn’t do it, “we” did it, and just as the people of Nazi Germany took part in the holocaust of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Romani, and disabled people, so the people of the United States, and the people of the Western world who have chosen to remain silent, take part in the holocaust of Palestinians.
Don’t worry, there will be plenty of thinkers and prognosticators to tell you why it wasn’t a “true” holocaust, that it wasn’t a genocide, that it wasn’t apartheid. If you’ve been ignoring this evil up til now, you will still get to be a compassionate human being on the face of things, and in a society that judges by appearance, and rules by the aesthetic, why that’s almost as good as the real thing, I’d imagine.
.Red
