There are moments in human history just as there are in every individual life when the confluence of events is such as to make all choices contingent upon what happens in this time. We can look back at these moments and wonder how they were allowed to come to pass, how they became part of a collective stain on the human conscience. The passage of the Nuremberg Laws, the genocide of the Hutus in Rwanda and today the vicious bloodletting being carried out by the occupation government and military against the people of Gaza.
It would be one thing if this latest round of bloodlust and extremist violence was an exception, but the occupation of Palestinian territory in a state of martial law has led to thousands of deaths, injuries and other depredations against the Palestinian people in the last 78 year. It has destroyed the lives and families of millions of Palestinians through unwarranted arrests, administrative detentions, torture, and daily violence against the body of the Palestinian people by illegal settlers and the occupation state.
Despite this bitter and bloodthirsty violence, the soul of the Palestinian people remains intact and they resist with such tools as are available to them: words, songs, politics, diplomacy, sticks, stones, pipe bombs, and their very lives. Yet their legitimate resistance against a brutal foreign occupation is always only met with unimaginable and cruel force.
There is no question that the occupation government has expressed its desire, indeed has called it a long held dream, to eliminate the Palestinian nation and their very memory from the face of the earth. This is the definition of genocide and the occupation has acclimatised the majority of its citizens to view the Palestinian people as a subhuman collective and propagandised them to remain in a state of perpetual war until its strategic objectives are met.
These include the removal, murder, or virtual enslavement of every Palestinian currently in the occupied territories and the reoccupation and destruction of the Al Aqsa complex in compliance with messianic, religious apocrypha that constitutes the extreme fundamentalist end of Jewish religious thought.
This is expressed by them publicly, repeatedly, in no uncertain terms and the bloodthirst on demonstration in Gaza now should serve as more than an example. it is a clear sign of the danger that this radical lunatic fringe of humanity represents not only to the Palestinian people but to the world at large. Yet it is the brave Palestinians who are in the way of fulfilment of their homicidal prophecies and who are paying with their lives for an eschatological conclusion to a dogma deeply held by Jewish supremacist fanatics and their white nationalist allies.
Can we really in this modern era allow such barbarism to continue, allow its perpetrators to go unpunished, allow its victims to be buried in mass graves with no recourse to justice, to human feeling or emotion, or even to the bare minimum of a decent burial? Are we so inured to violence, so utterly beholden to political process that we allow the bloodthirsty ambitions of the few to drag an entire people through the very depths of hell on earth?
The cynical hypocrisy that allows this situation to continue, that has allowed it to persist, for so many decades is now adding fuel to the fire consuming the region. The wars spreading across west Asia find their innate spark in the ruins of Gaza. Without a just resolution of the issue, the fire may for a time subside but could at any moment flare again into an all consuming conflagration that will sweep across the world. It will end one way or another. Either war will consume everything or some sense of humanity and justice will prevail. We can only hope for the better outcome.
