As a young boy I once had to flee a toy store, hurriedly dragged along by my panicked but in hindsight admirably still functioning dad, through London’s eerily empty streets. The IRA had phoned in a bomb threat. From a sea of endless forgotten memories, I can tell you unequivocally that one will stay with me forever.
We all want to feel safe from terrorism. I know I do! That’s not a post-9/11 thing, that’s not a colonial supremacist thing, it’s just an innate, real, core human thing. Terrorism of the religious or non-denominational variety, it does not matter one iota, all of it sucks. Bombs, planes, anthrax, random acts of stabby, shooty violence against innocent civilians – sane, healthy, loved, empathetic people don’t enjoy this sort of thing. It is a scourge we’d all rather ridden from this world.
Settle down, Mr “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, we’ll get to that, and it’s slightly off topic. Go finish your degree at YouTube University and chug some more Monster energy drink.
Anyway, if anyone has a better long-term plan to stop terror attacks happening to Israel than giving everyone in the occupied and oppressed regions gallons of fuel for their own personal Liam Neeson style revenge tales, I’d genuinely love to hear it.
If anyone has a better plan to stop Hamas’ terrorism than massacring 12,300 Palestinian children over the course of 119 days, out with it, man.
I can’t see another way. I briefly – and foolishly! – entertained the idea of not creating the exact conditions in which terrorism thrives. But then I read every single newspaper and watched every news channel in the fucking country and settled again on the baby murder thing.
***
You’re right, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Unless.
Unless…
Unless it’s not really all about Hamas.
***
Last week, as the world’s eyes turned to Super Bowl LVIII’s staggeringly expensive commercials and its conjoined football match, the Israeli Defence Force moved its assault to the outskirts of the city of Rafah, Hell’s last refuge for 1.4 million displaced humans.
Gazans have fled south ahead of bullets and bombs for 119 days now. There is no more south to go. The world around them has turned to dust and misery. As of yesterday, 29,313 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF since October 27. More than 20,000 of those were women and children. Three Israeli hostages have been rescued by IDF soldiers.
Aid trucks containing food for a population starving to death have been targetted and destroyed, ambulances have been shot at with missiles and assault rifles, children have been turned to sinews streamed on social media, refugee camps have been bombed, and people waving metaphorical and extremely fucking literal white flags have been sniped at, killed, murdered, by Benjamin Netanyahu’s “most moral army in the world”.
The IDF, an army that circulates footage of the atrocities it commits in private Telegram and Instagram groups, typically captioned with gleeful, enthusiastic genocidal intent. It seems even bloodlusting soldiers need dopamine hits from social media approval from their peers! We have so much in common.
Peers who respond to videos of IDF brutality with comments like “Give him a bullet to the head, what are we waiting for?” and “how it should be, now burn this son of a b* alive”.
[That’s their own censorship in that last quote, not mine – I think being offended by swear words more than the wanton slaughter of helpless humans is literally fucking psychopathic.]
Homes, hospitals, schools, Mosques and cemeteries across the length of what was once the Gaza strip have been flattened, cleansed, preemptively erased from future memory. As all settler colonies discover, to control the future you need to erase the past. It is easier to seize land if you destroy evidence of the cultural links between a pesky population and their former home. We will remember, but will our children? And their children? These acts of desecration are to ensure the memory dies with us.
Because, since 1948, consistently, and with clearly stated intent – intent the Western world pretends it cannot hear or comprehend – “iT’s CoMpLiCaTeD”, we say, to self-soothe the truth away – Israel has swallowed Palestinian land and tormented the Palestinian people. The borders drawn up at the end of the Second World War have spread so far into what was once Palestinian territory, territory now shrunken, isolated, squeezed, flattened and besieged on all fronts, that you’d have to be pumped so full of Western propaganda that you fart IDF tweets to not notice the 75-year-long pattern.
That is not an opinion, these are material, historic facts – and to entertain debate on these material, historic facts is to assist with a genocide.
To prove a case of genocide under international law, genocidal actions and genocidal intent both need to be established. In the case of Israel, that last part is far less difficult than it should be. They love saying the quiet part out loud! A list of more than 500 unambiguously genocidal statements made by influential Zionist thinkers, politicians, including Prime Ministers and senior ministers, soldiers, journalists and random hate-filled fuckos with TikTok accounts, has been compiled by Law for Palestine to support South Africa’s case at the Hague. Feel free to have a scroll if you’re not angry enough yet. Meet the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s a random one from yesterday. “I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did,” said Minister of Social Equality & Women’s Advancement, May Golan, during a Knesset hearing. Consider it representative. Any number of other videos would have sufficed.
Minister of Social Equality & Women's Advancement, May Golan of the Likud, during a Knesset hearing about the motion to expel MK Ofer Cassif: "I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did" pic.twitter.com/dhwzqSS0mT
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) February 21, 2024
History does not move at a constant, consistent pace; it crawls and then lurches, doldrums and downpours. As far as local time in the Middle East is concerned, we are presently witnessing the most accelerated of these lurches since the original Nakba of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes so that the state of Israel could exist. Not only are we witnessing it, we are helping to fund and facilitate it. Sometimes it is hard to see longer patterns amongst the onslaught of daily occurrences, but that is not the case here. To not understand this is to reject reality for the manipulated globe painted by overwhelming, desensitising, dehumanising propaganda.
I get it. It IS easier to do that! Switch the television back on and fuck right off if that’s what you need to do to cope.
At halftime during the Empire’s big spectacle, the Super Bowl, Twitter became somehow even more unhinged: a mashup of football, TayTay, mutilated children and scorched homes. And pleading. Pleading from the shatteringly few Palestinians still able to tweet, pleading not for the world to help anymore – that’s clearly asking too much – but to at least not lose interest as we get closer to the end of a tragic 75 years for Palestine. To bear witness, honestly and openly.
If Rafah is to share the same fate as neighbouring Khan Younis and Gaza City, it will resemble a concrete moonscape before long. Its refugee camps and hospitals will become craters and rubble; its cemeteries and mosques will be disappeared. And so many of us will cheer this on.
If Israel’s allies, Team Settler Colony, the Western bloc comprising the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia, aren’t able to acknowledge the reality and horror of an apartheid religious ethnostate committing mass atrocities on a trapped, traumatised, and thoroughly fucked ethnic group – literally the world’s most wretched and downtrodden souls – then it will continue happening. America finances this, Australia provides material and political support.
And just in case the gross absurdity of the moment wasn’t apparent enough, a $7 million Superbowl commercial was purchased by the Israeli government. The reason why is simple: if the war is to be funded by America, American politicians will need Americans to support it. And in its 30-second spot for the biggest primetime there is, Israel has a pure win moment of distraction and propaganda in one neat lil’ package.
The ad itself is an emotive tribute to dads everywhere. Funny dads, kind dads, adventurous dads, any old dads, really. Dads rock! (Sometimes.) Even Americans that watch football and vote have dads that rock. Some of them are dads that rock! My own dad rocked when he got me out of those London streets with only a disturbing memory as a souvenir.
BREAKING:
⚡ 🇮🇱🇺🇲 Israeli government sponsored a Super Bowl ad, it will run today.
The Super Bowl is one of the most watched sport events in the United States, so now the Jewish lobby will once again try to do propaganda.https://t.co/BDF18qvsMS pic.twitter.com/qdCnosnXwI
— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) February 11, 2024
As it comes to its emotional conclusion, the ad reveals it is most specifically referring to the dozens of dads held captive by Hamas since their October 7th kidnapping. It is truly heartbreaking they still aren’t at home with their little legends and princesses and munchkins. It will leave scars on so many for so long.
But let’s be real: a commercial that fuels the machine that buys more bombs, that provides yet more cover for yet more ethnic cleansing, that justifies more atrocities at the hands of the IDF, is not going to help save those dads one little bit. And while we’re at it, let’s also note that the ad was fairly fucking ambiguous – it abstained, let’s say! – about its position on the dads of the 12,300 slaughtered Palestinian children since October.
The 12,300 Palestinian children taken from their funny dads, their kind dads, their adventurous dads, for the crime of being born in Gaza, to keep Israel safe from terrorism.
