Everything I feel about Israel’s heinous onslaught of Gaza is contained in this video (below article) from Owen Jones’ Youtube channel as he responds to the terrorist state’s latest atrocity, the bombing of a tent camp in Rafah full of women and children. But isn’t that the Zionist entity’s speciality? killing the most vulnerable , the most innocent, the most precious. It’s the modus operandi of psychopaths and exemplifies the darkest form of cowardice.
The attack on Rafah brought to my mind the reaction of the poet Shelley after the Peterloo massacre. Three weeks after the horrific event during which women and children were cut down with swords by mounted militia, he wrote to a friend: ‘the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins.’ That’s exactly how I feel right now. In fact, the veins of millions around the world have been boiling for seven long months now, their outrage and disgust at the mass murder of children and innocent civilians pouring out in mass protest.
Just when we thought Israel couldn’t descend any lower into the moral abyss they have pushed the boundaries of depravity once again, proving to the world with a sickening arrogance that they are the most vile and shameless nation on the face of the earth. Rogue doesn’t begin to cover the conduct of a country which starves and murders babies and children as a matter of publicly declared policy with the overwhelming support of its population. Psychopathy, which is usually, and thankfully, an aberration in any demographic, appears in Israel to be the appalling norm.
‘Such as these’ wrote Thoreau describing people who operate without a conscience, ‘are commonly esteemed good citizens’, and in this case it’s patently clear that ‘good Israeli citizens’ are those who display the least compassion, have the least empathy, and express the most vitriol towards the Palestinian people. Not since 1930’s Germany has such a blatant racist hostility flourished as a unifying national activity. They have elevated hatred to a lauded civic attribute which can be exhibited freely in the safe knowledge that it is deemed entirely acceptable, indeed, desirable.
I can’t believe that I live in a world such as this! Watching, day after day, little children suffering in the most extreme and horrific ways imaginable whilst Israelis celebrate the atrocities, whilst IDF soldiers post jubilant videos on social media laughing in glee at their war crimes, whilst desperately needed aid is destroyed with sickening zeal at the borders, while Zionist celebrities push the narrative of Israel as victim condemning themselves by their utter lack of empathy for starving, dying children, whilst non-Jewish right wing thugs wave the Israeli flag and shout obscenities at Palestine marchers because all they know is they hate Muslims, while the corporate media, drenched with Palestinian blood from years of biased reporting, still diminish the awful reality, while politicians disgrace themselves with their whorish mantra of ‘Israel’s right to self defence’ as if the whole world is blind and deaf to the heart-wrenching reality, is a soul-destroying nightmare.
Yet nothing that I, nor anyone else watching the Gaza genocide, is feeling comes close to what those poor people are going through. The least we can do is bear witness and hope that, somehow, the outpouring of love and compassion coming from the hearts of millions around the globe reaches them.
Shelley’s words were infused with such a visceral empathy we need not ask what he would be saying today if he were here. Empathy is what has been pouring out onto the streets, not ‘hate’ as the most venal of political and media figures have been disgracefully asserting. They know they are lying, of course. They are the monsters who will even sacrifice thousands upon thousands of innocent children on the alter of their warped ideology. Imagine being so utterly devoid of human feeling? It’s the very definition of psychopathy. To them, as openly stated by defence minister Yoav Gallant, Palestinians are simply ‘human animals’, a description so unutterably callous it makes me want to weep every time I think about it.
It is this bare-faced declaration of the deep-seated opinion of so many Israelis that has allowed the decades long mass torture of a people ignored and condemned by the ‘respectable, democratic’ West and its complicit news media.
How many years have we watched the Palestinians suffer? How many cold-blooded murders have we seen committed with casual cruelty day after day? How long have we looked on as the world’s ‘biggest concentration camp’ grinds down its residents with daily terrors and humiliations? I am soul-sick that my government is abetting this hell, and that the incoming opposition is led by, and is full of, just as many disgusting, integrity-free specimens who are on record doing verbal somersaults to avoid condemning what every person with a heart and a conscience can see is a scene of indescribable evil.
But be sure, history will condemn these people, though it will be far too late by then for the little children of Gaza. Never before has the black heart and rotten core of political expediency been so exposed. Shame on all who have supported these immense crimes; shame on those who have not used their influence to end the suffering; and shame on all those who have remained silent. History will condemn you all.
