Prelude to the End of Humanity
"Death or deportation. [In Palestine] there are no other options." —Chris Hedges
IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. As I celebrate another year of life, of living in relative comfort and safety, I’m thinking of Gaza.
I don’t want to. Who does? We glimpse a headline which mentions that place and we avert our gaze. It’s only human to be repulsed by genocide.
And yet it’s happening. Right now.
As I type this children scream in the ruin of a shattered world, fleeing missiles that rain from sky black with smoke onto the corpses of hundreds of thousands of children and as many adults.
The end of the world is here. Palestine is where it starts.
“When I was in Gaza, I felt like it was the prelude to the end of humanity” —Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan
IF YOU EVER wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, you’re doing it now. That’s not an indictment. I’m not doing much either. I’m writing about it now. I wear a Free Palestine pin everywhere I go. I pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions as an author. But I don’t have one fiber of the fortitude of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old United States Air Force serviceman who self-immolated outside the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC, in protest.
I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Bushnell’s act was heroic. His sacrifice is Christ’s. Typing these words and flinging them into the gaping void of the Internet is, at best, self-indulgent.
But it’s something.
Lyle Jeremy Rubin writes about Bushnell in The Nation,
As an active-duty member of the United States Air Force… he was someone who had signed up to sacrifice himself for the greater good, only to discover… that he had signed up for the opposite: to become a willing accomplice to evil.
But you don’t have to wear the boots of imperialism to be an accomplice to evil. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal” —Aaron Bushnell
THERE’S LITTLE I can write about the genocide of Palestinians which has not been said more eloquently by others, many of whom witnessed it firsthand. Such as Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric ICU doctor who battled to save the lives of children in Gaza and delivered an eyewitness statement to the United Nations.
Palestinians are being intentionally massacred, starved, and stripped of everything needed to sustain human life. There are no words that can adequately convey the pain and depravity of this aggression. Those who cannot be moved by the pictures of dismembered and charred corpses will not be moved by some words. What sort of world have we descended into?
Or
, one of the great journalists of our time, who also has spent time in Gaza.This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.
Or this guy.
Or even this Israeli newspaper.
This genocide is Israel’s but it was funded, enabled, encouraged, and sustained by the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and other nations that comprise the West, perhaps the most bloodthirsty and insidious power structure in history, one built on the brutality of capitalism, a system so exploitative, abusive, and inherently evil it requires war, colonization, and genocide to sustain itself, as well as regular recessions/depressions and the abysmal conditions it creates in society as waste products of its self-propagation: poverty and homelessness and addiction and mental illness and forever chemicals and microplastics, oh, and the potential end of civilization as soon as 2050.
The least we can do for the Palestinians—the literal least—is bear witness to what has been done to them by Israel and the West. Because, despite cases in the International Criminal Court, despite the endless photographic evidence of the most-documented genocide in history, the truth is being suppressed.
It doesn’t help that Israel has murdered approaching 250 journalists since October 2023, making this the deadliest period for journalists on record, and arrested many others.
And it doesn’t help that Western nations are busy prosecuting journalists for telling the truth. But it’s worse than that. Google, Meta, X, and mainstream media and the major newspapers and the gatekeepers of culture and virtually every powerful institution in Western society have aligned with the Zionist regime. It is no coincidence that these same institutions appear ready, if not eager, to sell out the last vestige of our pale imitations of democracy.
The ruling class has rigged society against us. They control the levers of power and the means of production and the weapons and the bombs and the wealth. And yet every day in Palestine courageous souls stand up to the might of Israel and the American Empire with little more than their words and their indestructible, compassionate hearts.
At minimum, then, our duty is to honor them by learning about this genocide, talking about this genocide, and passing the truth on for the pages of history.
“Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options.” —Chris Hedges
IN PROPAGANDHI’S FIRST new song in eight years, Chris Hannah cries,
Prostrate yourself to the killing machine
To spare yourself from its wheels
“Better them than me”
Rolls so seductively off your tongue
Your reckoning has begun
How I wish I could believe him.
If there is a reckoning I fear it’s not for monsters who know only hate and rage and lust but for those with tender hearts who heard the screams and turned away.
Never again, humanity swore after the Second World War. And we, those who think of ourselves as good, as righteous, we failed to prevent a genocide.
We failed the children of Palestine.
Quite probably, we failed to save our souls.
If you made it this far, go a little further and read a deeply moving letter by the great journalist and writer
to the children of Gaza.We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again.
Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.
