7 October: On This Particular Day

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On This Day in Particular

On this day in particular,

I would like to express my deepest sympathies

for the victims of Israeli murderousness

over the past year.

On this day in particular,

I would like to mourn

the thousands upon thousands

of children who have been killed

by western-supplied bullets and bombs

in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon

over the last twelve months.

On this day in particular

I would like to express my sincerest condolences

to the Palestinian parents

who have had to bury their children,

or pieces of their children,

or bags of shapeless carnage

they’ve been told were their children —

if those parents are still alive themselves.

On this day in particular

I would like to lift up my heart

to the people

who are being ethnically cleansed

from northern Gaza right at this very moment,

and the people in southern Lebanon

who are being subjected to daily Israeli massacres.

I wish I could bring myself

to express sympathy

for other groups on this particular day,

like the Israelis who were killed

in the Hamas attack one year ago.

But I think there’s been enough of that.

I really do.

Sympathy for Israel has been used

over this past year to manufacture consent

for the slaughter of mountains

of human beings

in advancement of land grabs

and military agendas that were planned

long before the seventh of October 2023.

The sympathy which Israel received

after the Hamas attack

was immediately weaponized

in advancement of those agendas,

and has been weaponized

every single day since.

When someone is using a weapon

to hurt people,

a good person will take their weapon away,

and won’t give them any more weapons.

This is true of actual, physical weapons

like the ones the western empire

has been pouring into the Israeli war machine,

and it is true of the weaponized sympathy

that Israel apologists have been using

to justify its genocidal atrocities.

Expressing sympathy for Israel

on this particular day

would be like expressing sympathy

for a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy 

who is poisoning her children

in order to garner sympathy

and attention from her community.

That sympathy — which would normally

be a very healthy response

to the deaths and trauma of others —

is in this case the actual problem.

And even if this were not the case,

Israel has received

more than enough sympathy already.

It is an extensively documented fact 

that the western press have been

vastly more sympathetic toward the Israeli victims

of the Hamas attack

than they have been to Israel’s victims in Gaza,

despite the victims of Israeli atrocities

being orders of magnitude greater in number.

This discrepancy in sympathy

is so extensive

that it can only be called journalistic malpractice,

which is only made possible

by the fact that Arabs are not recognized

as fully human under the rules of the western empire.

So,

on this day in particular

I will be expressing sympathy

for the populations upon whom

Israel has inflicted many,

many times more death

and trauma than it received one year ago —

and for those populations only.

The Hamas attack

was a response from a desperate

colonized people

against a tyrannical occupying oppressor,

and many of the Israelis

who were killed on that day

are known to have been killed

by the Israeli military 

and its barbaric “Hannibal directive”

of murdering its own people

to prevent their being taken hostage.

Not another word of sympathy

needs to be expressed toward Israel for this,

here or anywhere else.

So,

on this day in particular

I do not express sympathy toward Israel —

in fact, I condemn it.

I condemn Israel’s bombing of hospitals.

I condemn Israel’s assassination of journalists.

I condemn Israel’s deliberate targeting 

of civilian buildings

known to be packed full of children.

I condemn Israel’s deliberate

killing of humanitarian aid workers.

I condemn Israel’s use of starvation 

as a weapon of war and extermination.

I condemn Israel’s systematic rape 

and torture of Palestinian prisoners.

I condemn Israel’s practice of murdering children 

and other non-combatants with snipers.

I condemn Israel’s ethnic cleansing 

of Palestinian territories.

I condemn Israel for bombing an orphanage 

in Gaza City last week.

I condemn Israel for killing

five year-old Hind Rajab and her family,

and killing medical workers

who tried to come to her rescue.

I condemn Israel for knowingly

targeting a World Kitchen convoy 

and killing seven aid workers.

I condemn Israel for assassinating Refaat Alareer.

I condemn Israel for bulldozing a dead man 

into the dirt like a piece of garbage,

unknown and unaccounted for,

like God knows how many others.

I condemn Israel for the birth

of the acronym WCNSF

(Wounded Child, No Surviving Family) 

in Gaza’s medical facilities.

I condemn Israel for making me learn

what the insides of a dead child look like,

and reminding me every motherfucking day

for the last year.

I condemn Israel for all the tortured,

thirsty,

lonely,

drawn-out

deaths

of all the countless people

buried alive under the rubble of Gaza.

On this day in particular

I stand in solidarity

with the victims of Israeli atrocities,

which are being facilitated

by the globe-spanning western empire

under which I live.

I extend my deepest sympathy to those victims,

and my sincerest apologies

for failing to do more

to stop this nightmare.

Caitlin Johnstone t.co/W3o6lpnLgI