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.
Send the text to your MP. I have sent it to Matt Turmaine (Labour)